In France: Growing Recognition of the Shoah Religion

Famous French sociologist Alain Besançon discovers “the religion of the Shoah”

by Robert Faurisson

When in the late 1970s, I struck the first heavy blow against them, the historians of “the Holocaust” (which today is often called the “Shoah”), exhibited their disarray. Whereas I had placed myself on scientific ground to demonstrate, in a way that admitted of no rebuttal, that their alleged homicidal gas chambers were technically inconceivable, they were reduced --abandoning reason for faith -- to replying with a pitiful formula: 

“It must not be asked how, technically, such a mass murder was possible; it was technically possible, since it happened.”  (“La politique hitlérienne d’extermination: une déclaration d’historiens,” Le Monde, 21 Febuary 1979, p. 23. For further details on that controversy of 1978-1979, see my book Mémoire en défense contre ceux qui m’accusent de falsifier l’histoire, [La Vieille Taupe, 1980, p. 69-101]).

Consequently, as early as May 3, 1980, in a letter to Jean Daniel [i.e. Jean-Daniel Bensaïd, founder and executive editor of the weekly Nouvel Observateur] I spoke of “the new religion” and “the upholders of the Holocaust religion,” and concluded: “No sudden change will arise when it becomes apparent that ‘the Holocaust’ is a historical lie. Besides, religions disappear only very slowly, to make way for other religions. As it happens, I myself prefer to go on from faith towards reason” (ibid., p. 261-263). 

I had perceived that, for want of any ability to resort to technical, scientific or historical argument, the other side was bound to seek a way out in religious-style mystification, along with reviving the modern equivalent witchcraft trials. The result is that these days, in 2009, the existence of a “Shoah religion” has become an obvious fact. 

Recently, an article in Le Monde by Gérard Courtois dealt with “the Shoah” being “built into a ‘State religion" by French President Nicolas Sarkozy” (April 4, 2009, p. 26). 

In a study on “Benedict XVI and the fundamentalists” (“Benoît XVI et les intégristes”, Commentaire n° 125, Spring 2009, p. 5-11), from the pen of the famed Roman Catholic sociologist Alain Besançon, the following remarks are to be found: 

"On the scale of sacred things, there is nothing today that can challenge the Shoah for first place" (p. 9 A). "At the top of scale, we have the Shoah. It may be assigned, going by external criteria, a near-religious rank" (p. 10 A). "Having become universal [this religion] maintains the Jewish people’s standing as chosen, with the choosing done by the diabolical will of Hitler and not by the benevolent decision of God. It offers them up to the sympathy, in the strongest sense, of the Christian world. Ensuing from all this are changes in the scale of dignity, in the list of objects that can be touched only with trembling hands, in the hierarchy of values and in the prestige of those who defend them. Thus, ranking first, undeniably, is the Shoah" (p. 10 B).

"One is tempted to state that the religion of the Shoah and the humanitarian religion, in their various combinations, form the civil religion of the Western democracies [...] The heroes of the Shoah religion, followed by those of the humanitarian religion [Abbé Pierre, sister Emmanuelle...] find themselves at the top of the scale" (p. 11 B).

In the last two pages of his study (pp. 10-11) Besançon uses the expression “religion of the Shoah” seven times.

Born in 1932, having belonged to the Communist Party from 1951 to 1956, Alain Besançon is a member of the prestigious Institut de France and director of studies both at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales and the Institut d’histoire sociale. Raymond Aron, who founded the journal Commentaire in 1978, was — he tells us — his “teacher.” On December 13, 2004, Besançon paid a vibrant tribute to the memory of the late Chief Rabbi Jacob Kaplan, at an exceptional gathering of the Académie des Sciences morales et politiques. Besançon is the author of a number of books and studies in which, in particular, he deals first with the “woe of the century,” caused — according to him — by Communism and Nazism, and then with “the uniqueness of the Shoah.” Condemning the "fantasies" of "Holocaust denial" ("négationnist"), he attacks “those who deny the Shoah and reject the overwhelming mass of positive evidence of its reality” (p. 6 A and 7 B).

But he does not bother to cite, by way of example, a single one of those alleged fantasies, or provide a single bit of "overwhelming" evidence. Not for an instant does he explain how and why, in such a short span of time, the Jewish version of Second World War history has become a religion and, more precisely, the religion of the whole of the Western world. He does not tell us how it is that in the 21st century the sensitive elements of that triumphant and domineering religion “can be touched only with trembling hands.”

Why did a sociologist of the calibre of Alain Besançon remain mute for so long concerning the existence of this extraordinary social phenomenon whose birth, in the late 1970s, he had been unable to discern at the time? And why does he persist, now in 2009, in holding back from explaining its prodigious growth in these past 30 years?

Jean-Marie Le Pen remarks, correctly, that today we have arrived at the point where the Second World War itself has, in a way, become merely a detail of “the Shoah.” Why and how did such an aberration come about? How is it possible that the zany, hair-raising stories of Father Patrick Desbois of “the Shoah by bullets” and “the Shoah by suffocation [under cushions]” become, in 2009, with the unction of Nicolas Sarkozy, Simone Veil and the Catholic bishops of France, material for catechism in our middle and secondary schools, both public and private? 

Any being endowed with reason can only blush on reading the phantasmagoria spouted by this devil of a prankster Rev. Father Desbois in his book The Holocaust by bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 million Jews (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008; 233 pages.). Martin Gray and his ghost writer, Max Gallo, authors of For Those I Loved, have been outdone.

On August 7, 2008, I composed an essay on the phenomenon of Shoah fraud and gullibility entitled “The secular religion of the Holocaust, a tainted product of consumer society." In it I suggested a rational explanation for the mounting success enjoyed, especially since 1980, by the new “Holocaust” or “Shoah” religion. 

Now that, in his turn, he is finally discovering this religion, will Alain Besançon decide to explain its "mystery" to us rationally? If he did so, he would discover that the revisionists, far from engaging in “fantasies,” have accumulated “an overwhelming mass of positive evidence” to support their findings. But in order to become aware of this he would at least have to start by reading their work. Having awoken in 1956 from the effects of the Communist opium, might Besançon also one day rise from the torpor into which the “Shoah religion” has sunk our thinking faculties -- this religion he is discovering now, nearly 30 years after the revisionists first exposed it?

“The religion of the Shoah” tolerates other religions, particularly the Roman Catholic religion, only insofar as they accept subordination to it. Benedict XVI knows this, as he prostrates and humiliates himself before it. Especially lie-ridden, the “Shoah religion” calls for hatred and crusades. In this respect, repeating the image used by Jean Jaurès regarding capitalism, it can be said of the new religion that it “bears war within it just as thick clouds bear a storm.”

[Editor's note: Dr. Faurisson (PhD. The Sorbonne) is a former Professor of Literature at the University of Lyon. He has been repeatedly physically assaulted, and prosecuted and fined in French courts. In Toronto in 1985 he was the chief consultant to the legal defense team during the show trial of publisher Ernst Zündel, against Norman Finkelstein's hero, the late "Holocaust" historian Prof. Raul Hilberg, who testified on behalf of the government prosecutor's attempt to imprison Zündel for fifteen months. Thanks to Faurisson, Hilberg was reduced to near incoherence, testifying at one point, "I'm at a loss" (cf. Hoffman, The Great Holocaust Trial [Torrance, Calif., 1985]).