Le Pen’s HARDtalk

Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 06 December 2005 00:33.

Thanks are due to the commenter mysteriously and, one would think, temporarily calling himself LePen for posting a video link to Jean-Marie Le Pen’s interview with the BBC’s Stephen Sackur. It was posted today on the thread to a piece I put up nearly three weeks ago. It is worth watching, lasts one hour and is part of the BBC’s HARDtalk series which goes out on BBC World. It was broadcast on 28th November.

There are two ways you could approach this interview. You can study Le Pen’s performance for signs of his suitability for the Presidency, if he stands. Or you can marvel at Sackur’s wildly excessive liberal posturing, right down to calling Nick Griffin a racist criminal and Le Pen himself a racist and anti-semite. The latter, given Sackur’s problems in Israel in the past, does seem slightly hypocritical.

But anyway the anti-semite jibe paid off because Le Pen wearily and correctly explained that he had never said the fateful words that all liberals in France attribute to him, to whit “the holocaust is a detail of history”. He was referring, he told Sackur, to the gas chambers - which, as it happens, go entirely unremarked in all the WW2 Allied leaders’ memoirs.

Be that as it may, the opportunity for the self-appointed guardians of our anti-racist purity to spontaneously combust was just too tempting.

“We are scandalized. It is unbelievable that the leaders of the Front National continue to declare that gas chambers are just a detail of history,” said Marilou Jampolsky, SOS Racisme spokesperson.

You could, of course, be wrong there, Marilou.

Anyway, she can console herself in the knowledge that she has lots of like-minded friends. The UEJF (French Union of Jewish Students), Licra (International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism) and MRAP (Movement against Racism and for Friendship) - all lovely, cosmopolitan, pro-semitic people and all, no doubt, peculiarly fond of banging on and on at us about bloody gas chambers - have joined her to launch legal action against Le Pen.

Knowing that he’s never short on ebullience, he probably thinks it’s all good publicity. Perhaps he’s right. Personally, I don’t see the point in a French nationalist and likely presidential candidate giving interviews to the hostile BBC.

Tags: European Nationalism

Comments:

Posted by Pitt the Elder on Tue, 06 Dec 2005 02:14 | #

“the opportunity for the self-appointed guardians of our anti-racist purity to spontaneously combust was just too tempting.”

Given the accusations againt Mr. Le Pen is it appropriate to use such verbs?

A bit incindiary wouldn’t you say.

Posted by Andrew on Tue, 06 Dec 2005 06:15 | #

Hurry , and be quick about it, shove a few more Viagra pills down his throat, so he becomes harder still. Talk harder that is.

Posted by friedrich braun on Tue, 06 Dec 2005 10:54 | #

World Famous Prof Questions The Holocaust

Richard Lynn
Professor Emeritus,
University of Ulster
12-5-5

I’ve checked out Churchill’s Second World War and the statement is quite correct - not a single mention of Nazi “gas chambers,” a “genocide” of the Jews, or of “six million” Jewish victims of the war.

This is astonishing. How can it be explained?

Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe is a book of 559 pages; the six volumes of Churchill’s Second World War total 4,448 pages; and de Gaulle’s three-volume Mémoires de guerre is 2,054 pages. In this mass of writing, which altogether totals 7,061 pages (not including the introductory parts), published from 1948 to 1959, one will find no mention either of Nazi “gas chambers,” a “genocide” of the Jews, or of “six million” Jewish victims of the war.

Richard Lynn
Professor Emeritus,
University of Ulster
http://www.rlynn.co.uk

http://www.rense.com/general69/porof.htm

...

The Detail
By Dr. Robert Faurisson
12-5-5

The Journal for Historical Review Date: March/April 1998 Issue: Volume 17, number 2, Page 19

Robert Faurisson is Europe’s leading Holocaust revisionist scholar. He was educated at the Paris Sorbonne, and served as a professor at the University of Lyon in France from 1974 until 1990. His writings on the Holocaust issue have appeared in two books and numerous scholarly articles. This essay, less the final section headed “Why Such Reticence?,” was published in the New Year’s Day, 1998, editions of the French periodicals Rivarol (“Avez-vous des textes?” p. 2), and, with some slight modifications, in National Hebdo (“Précisions sur le détail,” p. 15).

Start:

On the subject of the Nazi gas chambers, Jean-Marie Le Pen recently stated: “If you take a thousand-page book on the Second World War, the concentration camps occupy two pages and the gas chambers ten or fifteen lines, and that’s called a detail.”

He might have brought up some even harder hitting and more precise arguments, and referred to Eisenhower, Churchill, de Gaulle, Elie Wiesel, René Rémond, Daniel Goldhagen, and even the text of the Nuremberg Tribunal judgment.

Eisenhower, Churchill, de Gaulle

Three of the best known works on the Second World War are General Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe (New York: Doubleday [Country Life Press], 1948), Winston Churchill’s The Second World War (London: Cassell, 6 vols., 1948-1954), and the Mémoires de guerre of General de Gaulle (Paris: Plon, 3 vols., 1954-1959). In these three works not the least mention of Nazi gas chambers is to be found.

Elie Wiesel

The same goes for the autobiographical account, Night (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960), in which Elie Wiesel relates his experience of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Moreover, in the first volume of his memoirs, All Rivers Run to the Sea (New York: Random House/Knopf, 1995, p. 74), he writes, “Let the gas chambers remain closed to prying eyes, and to imagination.”

René Rémond

In the third volume of his Introduction à l’histoire de notre temps (“Introduction to the History of Our Times”), René Rémond, who was then president of the commission on the history of the deportation within the Comité d’histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale (Committee on the History of the Second World War), made no mention whatsoever of these gas chambers (Le XXe siècle de 1914 à nos jours [“The 20th Century from 1914 to the Present”], Le Seuil, 1974). Fourteen years later, when he had become president of the Institut d’histoire du temps présent (Institute of Contemporary History), once again he made no mention of them in a 1,013-page work entitled Notre Siècle de 1918 à 1988 (“Our Century from 1916 to 1988,” Paris: Fayard, 1988).

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

Since March 1996, the Jewish-American historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen has been treated as the darling of the media the world over, thanks to his book Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1996, xiv-634 pp.). While he does mention Nazi gas chambers, it is for little more than to note that “their efficiency has been greatly overstated” (p. 10), and that they have always been, and wrongly, “the overwhelming focus of popular and even scholarly attention” (p. 165). Goldhagen goes as far as to declare that “gassing was really epiphenomenal to the Germans’ slaughter of the Jews” (p. 533, n. 81) and that “the imbalance of attention devoted to the gas chambers needs to be corrected” (p. 535).

The Nuremberg Judgment

France’s Fabius-Gayssot law of 1990 specifically forbids the “challenging” or “contesting” of the portions of the judgment of the International Military Tribunal of Nuremberg (September 30 and October 1, 1946) relating to “crimes against humanity,” including the use of execution gas chambers. But it is noteworthy that, of the 84,000 words of the judgment’s text (in the French version), only 520, extremely vague, are devoted to gas chambers. This is 1/160th of the entire text, or 0.62 percent. In other words, 99.38 percent of the judgment does not deal with these gas chambers.

Why Such Reticence?

Why were Eisenhower, Churchill, de Gaulle, Elie Wiesel, René Rémond, Daniel Goldhagen, and the Nuremberg Tribunal so reserved on the subject of the Nazi gas chambers? Of course, revisionists have explanations for this reticence that, however, the Fabius-Gayssot law forbids us to make public in France.

My own explanations, which cannot be published in France without committing a crime, would include the following:

1. The Nazi extermination gas chambers never existed.

2. Eisenhower, Churchill, and de Gaulle knew or suspected that their own governments’ propaganda about gas chambers was not true. (Thus, on August 30, 1943, US Secretary of State Cordell Hull wrote to Standley, US Ambassador in Moscow: “... there is insufficient evidence to justify the statement regarding execution in gas chambers” [Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers 1943. US Government Printing Office, 1963, vol. 1, p. 416])

3. Elie Wiesel probably now regrets that he did not mention gas chambers in his autobiographical work, Night.

4. René Rémond revealed to me in November 1978 that he was “ready to follow [me] on the gas chamber matter.”

5. Goldhagen probably realizes that the gas chamber story is fishy, and, anyway, prefers to insist on killing methods that permit him to accuse millions of Germans of complicity in crimes, rather than emphasize a specific killing method that implies only a handful of German criminals.

6. The Nuremberg Tribunal judges had nothing substantive to say about the gas chambers because they understood that no investigation had been conducted as to the specifics of the “murder weapon,” and because neither the “witnesses” nor former Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss had been asked hard specific questions about the gas chambers.

http://www.rense.com/general69/detail.htm

Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 06 Dec 2005 12:47 | #

But the truth is, Friedrich, that the prosecution scare serves everybody’s interests. Le Pen gets himself some headlines - he has never been too fussy about damage to his image in the past. The posture-freaks get to bounce around expressing their indignation, in the belief that native Frenchmen are morally oppressed thereby. The BBC gets to continue dilluding itself that it is conducting tough but fair and professional journalism.

A perfect storm.

Posted by friedrich braun on Wed, 07 Dec 2005 12:29 | #

But the truth is, Friedrich, that the prosecution scare serves everybody’s interests.

I doubt Le Pen looks forward to getting prosecuted.

Posted by Calvin on Wed, 07 Dec 2005 14:48 | #

Le Pen’s best moment was his refusal to apologise for being white, for being French, “Do you want me to get down on my knees?”. Pure defiance!
Until that moment Le Pen seem to be eager to expain his position. An explanation is close to an apology. Apologies are a tacit admission of guilt. Defiance is resistance. Resistance suggests injustice.

Le Pen seemed vulnerable when questioned about third generation Arabs. He agreed that these people could not be expelled. This is nonsense. These people are the first who should be expelled. If immigrants can still describe themselves as Arabs, or Pakistanis for that matter, after three generations, they have proven by their very actions that they are incapable of assimilating. Arabs belong in Arab countries. A multi-generational rejection of European social mores and a refusal to inter-marry with the indigenous population invalidates any claim made by these people to be French. If you run with the fox, don’t expect to be allowed to hunt with the hounds.

Posted by friedrich braun on Wed, 07 Dec 2005 16:40 | #

He agreed that these people could not be expelled.

He never said that they couldn’t be expelled. At any rate, something are better left unsaid at this stage. Once you actually have power you can implement your ideas; and your ideas can evolve…or just surface…

Posted by Calvin on Wed, 07 Dec 2005 18:12 | #

That’s a fair point. What I mean though is that it is better to make it clear that if a group resolutely maintains a genetic distance from the indigenous population then that group are making ethnicity an issue, not the indigenous population.