AUSCHWITZ: PLAIN FACTS - Holocaust Handbooks

58 Germar Rudolf (ed.), Auschwitz: Plain FactsPressac is happy to talk to Le Monde. An amateur, he can easily dismissthe intellectual establishment:“The researchers have kept quiet in order to hold onto their preciouspositions. There has been cowardice in the universities, and the revisionistshave taken advantage of this for denial. Personally, I am doing the basicwork. Anyone with common sense could do it.”I love it.He is more careful with the false “eyewitness” testimonies:“We shouldn’t say they lied. We must take into account a factor of personalemotionalism.”This is outrageous. Pressac knew full well that there have been deliberate,organized, profitable lies, which have nothing to do with “factors of personalemotionalism” (which may exist, surely, as in every testimony of whatever nature).Lanzmann is right. Without Faurisson, there would be no Pressac. Pressacis 90 percent Faurisson, with the rest coming from easily identifiable and discreditedsources. The media simply falls into line. One wonders who’s morehypocritical: Pressac, who half saws away, in his notes from Höss and theKalendarium, the branch on which he’s sitting, or the journalists, who acceptwith joy and recognition from Pressac everything they rejected when it camefrom Faurisson?There is, perhaps, a way out of this tangle. It is indicated in a remark byBédarida (in L’Express). He says that Pressac was first attracted to revisionismbut later refused to follow this group “on the road of denial.” On the otherhand, the Italian writer Umberto Eco said to Le Monde that revisionism is allright, that it’s natural; it is possible to calmly discuss the documents, but onemustn’t fall into “denial,” which, he says, consists of denying that anythingbad was done to the Jews during the Second World War.I wonder if a new line is being drawn here. It makes a distinction between,on the one hand, revisionism, once again beautiful and good, exemplified byPressac and his patrons and followers, who are obliged to adopt the revisionistmethod because it is the normal method of historical research, and, on theother hand, “denial,” banished to the outer limits of taboo, including thosewho doubt the gas chambers, as well as (non-existent) deniers of the concentrationcamps, the rail deportations, and so forth. The consequence of this newview would be that revisionism, recognized at last, would demonstrate (in thestyle of Pressac, that is, with the help of “bavures” = blunders, bloopers) theexistence of homicidal gas chambers, but in a way that they would lose theirdiabolical character. The death figures could be dropped much lower withoutinfringing the nature of the Shoah. Faurisson and his associates would lose theuse of their rational armament, captured by their enemies, and would be banishedto the void by the Gayssot law. This might offer the best opportunity forthe restored squids to pursue and enhance their brilliant careers.