{"id":178100,"date":"2018-10-23T14:42:34","date_gmt":"2018-10-23T14:42:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=178100"},"modified":"2018-10-26T05:10:21","modified_gmt":"2018-10-26T05:10:21","slug":"robert-faurisson-and-the-study-of-the-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=178100","title":{"rendered":"Robert Faurisson and the Study of the Past"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gilad Atzmon — gilad.co.uk Oct 23, 2018<\/strong><\/h1>\n
\"history\"<\/a><\/h5>\n
The history of ideas provides us with the names of those few men and women who challenged the boundaries of tolerance.\u00a0 Professor Robert Faurisson was one such man.\u00a0Faurisson, who died last Sunday at age 89, was a French academic who didn\u2019t believe in the validity of parts of the Holocaust narrative. He argued that gas chambers in Auschwitz were the \u201cbiggest lie of the 20th century,\u201d and contended that deported Jews had died of disease and malnutrition. Faurisson also questioned the authenticity of the Diary of Anne Frank many years before\u00a0 the Swiss foundation that holds the copyright to the famous diary \u201calerted\u00a0publishers that her father (Otto Frank) is not only the \u2018editor\u2019 but also legally the \u2018co-author\u2019 of the celebrated book\u201d (NY Times<\/a><\/span>).<\/h5>\n
In the France of the late 1960s-1970s Faurisson had\u00a0 reason to believe that his maverick attitude toward the past would receive a kosher pass. He was wrong. Faurisson may have failed to grasp the role of the Holocaust in contemporary Jewish politics and culture. And he did not grasp that Jewish power is literally the power to silence opposition to Jewish power.\u00a0<\/strong><\/h5>\n
In 1990 France made holocaust revisionism into the crime of\u00a0 history denial.\u00a0 Faurisson was repeatedly prosecuted, beaten and fined for his writings. He was dismissed from his academic post at Lyon University in 1991.<\/h5>\n
I am bothered by the question of why Jews and others\u00a0 attached to their politics are desperate to restrict the story of their past. This question extends far beyond the holocaust. Israel has enacted a law that bans discussion of the\u00a0Nakba<\/a><\/span>\u00a0\u2013 the racially motivated ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people that occurred a mere three years after the liberation of Auschwitz. Similarly, exploring the role of Jews in the slave trade will cost\u00a0your job<\/a><\/span>\u00a0or lead to your expulsion from the\u00a0labour party<\/a><\/span>. My attempt to analyse the true nature of the Yiddish Speaking International Brigade in the 1936 Spanish Civil War outraged some of my Jewish \u2018progressive\u2019 friends.<\/h5>\n
Jean-Fran\u00e7ois\u00a0Lyotard addressed this question.\u00a0 History may claim to relate what actually occurred, but what it does more often is operate to conceal our shame<\/strong>. The task of an authentic historian is, according to Lyotard, similar to that of the psychoanalyst. It is all about removing layers of shame, concealment and suppression to try to uncover the truth.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/h5>\n
It was the work of Faurisson that helped me to define the historical endeavour in philosophical terms.\u00a0 I define history as the attempt to narrate the past as we move along.<\/strong> To deal with history for real, is to continually re-visit and revise the past in light of our cultural, social and ideological changes. For instance, the 1948 Nakba came to be thought of in terms of ethnic cleansing in the early 2000s when the notion of \u2018ethnic cleansing\u2019 entered our vocabulary (and our way of understanding a conflict) following the crisis in Kosovo. The real historian reevaluates the past and embraces adjustments that place our understanding of that past in line with our contemporaneous reality and terminology.<\/h5>\n
Professor Faurisson and the controversy around his work illuminates the distinction between real history and religion. While history is a vibrant dynamic matter subject to constant \u2018revision,\u2019 the religious approach to the past is limited to the production of a rigid unchanging chronicle of events. Authentic history invokes ethical thinking to examine the past in light of the present and\u00a0vice versa<\/em>, religious history often operates by denying or rejecting increasing ethical insight \u2013 it judges actions and events according to set predefined parameters.\u00a0The question at stake is not what happened in the past but the freedom to research and evaluate the past without being threatened by \u2018history laws.\u2019 In the same manner I support \u2018progress\u2019 in cancer research, although I do not\u00a0 produce scholarly comments on related scientific findings, I support the past being continually re-examined although I offer no\u00a0 judgment of any kind regarding the validity of those historical findings. For history to be a valid and an ethical universal pursuit, history laws must be abolished.<\/h5>\n
In 2014 I met Robert Faurisson and discussed with him different questions about the meaning of history and what the past meant to him.<\/h5>\n