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The Necessity of Historical Revisionism Courtesy of AHRS
Historiography and Society Annals appear in four quarterly deliveries each year Directeur de publication: Pierre GUILLAUME B.P. 98, 75224 PARIS cedex 05 Annales d'histoire révisionniste
PRELIMINARY
The title of this review comprises a paradoxical tautology. In its modern design, history is "revisionist" or, it is not history.
The historian thus revises. The controversy, the debate, the talk and the discussion of contradictory theses, the permanent criticism of the received historical accounts, the checking of the sources and the documents are the daily bread of the trade of the historian, the substance and fuel of his work. Under these conditions, how to conceive of a revisionist history, and thus a history which is not revisionist?
Why "Revisionist"?
The word "revisionist" is of recent creation. Le Petit Robert, the abridged French dictionary published by Paul Robert in 1967, indicates the phrase originated in 1872 and gives this definition: A partisan of the revision of fixed doctrines. It was especially used to stigmatize, inside the labour movement, those who deviated more or less from well-instituted "Marxism" in spite of Marxism fixed in intangible doctrines. The term is pejorative, and was thus especially employed by the orthodox believers. The substantive was also used within the framework of the Dreyfus Affair. The partisans of Dreyfus, in favour of a revision of the judgment, called themselves revisionists, and were called revisionists by their adversaries. Political Zionism, whose doctrines had been elaborated at the beginning of the century by Theodore Herzl, also knew revisionists. The fascist ultra-nationalism asserted by Karl Jabotinsky, which preached terrorism as a necessary tool, and from which came many current leaders of the State of Israel, proclaimed itself Revisionist Zionism.
The term "revisionist" is thus linked to concepts of orthodoxy, dogma, and taboo; and to an authority which enforces doctrines.
Historical revisionism.
Historical revisionism thus simply claims to normally achieve the normal work of the historian and exists as a separate "school" only because of the dogmas and the taboos surrounding certain historical periods, which unchain passions and repression, and prevents the normal work of history.
One can compare the origins of the revisionist school to the history of the American Civil War. Some American historians become aware of the fact that academic history too often endorses the propaganda of war and the myths of the winner. They affirmed the need to deeply revise what had been held up as history. In doing so, they ran up not only against the general hostility of the historians in place and the academic authorities, but especially they became victims of heinous political campaigns. Insofar as their work led them to relativize the finer, humane feelings of the winner and to reconsider some of the atrocities allotted to the vanquished, they were marked with blacker intentions, as desiring to justify slavery, if not to wanting to restore it!
But it is around the history of the First World War that comes the true birth of historical revisionism. Not of a historical school which would intend to promote particular interpretations, or would want to define a specific methodology, but a whole body of historians who become aware of a common situation which they experienced and of the difficulty in achieving their task in the face of the prejudices that their research turned upside down.
It is difficult to render comprehensible the nature of the difficulties encountered by some nonconformist historians to impose, little by little, the revision of the dogmas of the time, when you consider how revisionist historiography on the First World War is now universally allowed, does not shock anybody anymore, and that on the contrary, it is difficult to imagine how the truth, sometimes so obvious, could encounter such resistance.
The culpability and the unilateral responsibility for Germany for starting the war, and the specific atrocities made by the German armies were not only the general conviction of public opinion in the victorious states, they had been registered in the treaty signed by the vanquished and constituted the ideological base of the new European command established by the Treaty of Versailles. The work of the historian thus encountered powerful interests. But certain circumstances were favorable for him. In spite of the propaganda efforts of the victorious States, the great mass of ex-serviceman drew from the immense butchery which they had lived the idea that the war itself was an abomination, worse than the evils that each camp had claimed against the other to make it necessary, and the ideology of a crusade of good against evil had not managed to become popular. Moreover, the young Bolsheviks had published all the documents of the tsarist files on the origins of the war, and the new German Social Democrat Government had done the same with the files of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs at Wilhelmstrasse. Contrary to the Second World War, where the unconditional surrender of Germany had delivered all the files at the discretion of the winners, the immediately accessible documents imposed an agonizing reappraisal of the myths of war.
It will, however, take approximately ten years of fighting to bring recognition to the legitimacy, the relevance and the historiographic value of the revisionist work to which Harry Elmer Barnes, George Demartial, Gustave Dupin, Fernand Gouttenoire de Toury and Jean Norton Cru attached their names. Among them, only the American, Harry Elmer Barnes, was a university professor, and a historian by profession.
To understand the nature of the resistance, which these nonconformist and keen researchers had to overcome, one will read, from the same Demartial in 1939: The Hatred of the Truth, with Rieder. The various forms of resistance are analyzed as an exacerbation of the mechanisms that work in any debate and any controversy: initially the total refusal to consider innovative and disconcerting research, a refusal justified by all kinds of process of intention; then, little by little, the proper historiographic contents (documentation, established facts) are gradually integrated and become part of the pool of knowledge on the past, in common with all the honest historians, from which the infinite pallet of interpretations is spread. However, the useful and innovative character of initial revisionist research is forgotten, overlooked, and sometimes denied.
Although the battle largely proceeded on the ground of the facts and the documents, as a whole a common spiritual inspiration emerges from the revisionists writings of the First World War: horror of the war and the enrollment of the conscience that it generates, the refusal of nationalism, etc. While exhuming repressed documents, the revisionist authors intended to sap the interpretations of warmongers and those patriotic to the war by showing that these interpretations rested on blocking out a part of reality and on a selective and incomplete historiography.
Among the revisionist authors a very particular mention must be made of Jean Norton Cru who published in 1929 his monumental Witnesses: Test of Analysis and Criticism of the Memories of Combatants Published in France from 1915 to 1928. This meticulous and scrupulous study of testimonies, by revealing to an unequalled depth the abyss which separates reality from "memory", will constitute a methodological headlight for the future revisionists. In addition, this book had deeply impressed a revisionist of the First World War, Paul Rassinier, who was going to become a victim of the Nazi concentration camp system during the Second World War. And this book, like those of Victor Serge, another scrupulous witness and revisionist of the war and the Russian revolution, was going to provide to Rassinier the reference and the framework of thought which will give his testimony such an exceptional quality. But let us not anticipate!
The Second World War.
At the end of the second, greater butchery of history, the situation, for the historian, arose in a completely different way. On a purely technical level, the unconditional surrender of Germany had put at the discretion of the winners the totality of their files. And these files, to which accessibility was going to be carefully filtered, were especially to be exploited in a unilateral way, and initially within the framework of trials against the vanquished, whose prototype was the Trial of Nuremberg. This trial was exactly what the Attorney General of the United States said it would be to the audience of July 26, 1946: "As a military tribunal, this court represents a continuation of the war effort of the allied nations."
On a more general level, the contrast is even more striking. The First World War had ended with a generalized social, political and ideological crisis. The Russian revolution, then the German revolution expressed deep fractures and the dominant ideology managed neither to unify nor to impose itself completely. On the contrary, the Second World War is completed, after the successive triumphs of the Social Democrat counter-revolution (in Germany), Stalinist (in Russia), National Socialist (in Germany again), and by the triumph, without division, of the allied counter-revolutions, Stalinist and capitalist-imperialist American.
In front of the immense accumulation of ruins and the universal moral disaster, the ideology of the winners is rebuilt around a Manichaean representation: the war had initially been a crusade, the crusade of good against evil, humanity against the horror. It was necessary, according to this representation, that Nazism become the incarnation of absolute evil. This assisted, with the thread of time, in the birth of a true demonology. And the subject which lent themselves to it best, the concentration camps and the atrocities, were placed to the front of the scene and acquired a central position in the historiography of the war, as much by the quantity of works which were devoted to them as by the importance which was allotted to them; but especially by the fact that the representation of the atrocities structured the representation and the interpretation of the group. The process is then completed in the course of the Sixties inside the question of the atrocities and the camps, the specific fate of the Jews becoming the symbol par excellence of evil around which the direction of all the events is restructured.
However the critical spirit, therefore revisionism, therefore the history, do not lose their rights completely. Whole parts of the official vision which is worked out are disputed. And initially by historians who fall under the tradition founded by the revisionism of the First World War, like Harry Elmer Barnes himself, and in Switzerland, Aldo Dami, professor of history and geography at the University of Geneva. The case of these two academics demands that we stop here. They are both deeply antifascist. They enjoy a great intellectual reputation. Their various works are published in reviews by prestigious editors. In addition, they completely call into question the winner's myths of war and the dominant historiography. A total silence is organized on their opinions. All revisionist work of Harry Elmer Barnes will be privately printed and their diffusion will remain for a long time confidential. Aldo Dami will manage to publish, only in 1960, Last of The Gibelins: Heterodox Reflections on Politics, (Editions Connaître, Geneva, probably on account of author), republished in 1973, altered and increased, under the title Repairing History (the Universal Thought, Paris, therefore on account of the author). These two books, with very little distribution, are now untraceable.
Still, these two authors do not initially question the reality of the policy of extermination of the Jews by National Socialism, and do not even suspect that this "fact" can be disputed. With regard to Barnes, although he had very early doubts, and he detected exaggeration and propaganda, it is only after having discovered the work of the deportee Paul Rassinier, and at the end of a long correspondence with him during the Sixties, that he will conclude, with certainty, that the gas chambers and the genocide also constitute myths. In the case of Dami, here is what he wrote:
The ignominy of the Hitlerian massacres, of the camps of slow death, the gas chambers and the crematoriums, if anything is not attenuated by the fact that, extremely fortunately, the figure articulated for their victims, already technically impossible, was knowingly and considerably exaggerated, in any case doubled1, since in 1944 Germany, at bay, was itself famished; that at least an equal number of Germans disappeared in the East in 1945, and double that number were deported from the annexed provinces. In one case as in the other, the number does not do anything to justify the second affair, the martyrdom of only one innocent is enough for us.
It is Paul Rassinier, a militant of the revolutionary labor movement, a resister, deported to Buchenwald and Dora, who first raised the question of the reality of the gas chambers in the German concentration camps. He initially published Crossing The Line (Borough in Bresse, 1948), a testimony where he brings back the horror of the deportation while contradicting the myths and legends built around the reality. His book will be distributed by the sections of the Socialist Party (SFIO) of which he was member, and an appointed deputy with the first Constituent of the Territory of Belfort. Leon Blum acknowledged receipt of this book on a paperboard with the heading of the French National Assembly: "with the moved thanks of Leon Blum". In 1950, Rassinier publishes The Lie of Ulysses whose subtitle is: A Glance At The Concentration Camp Literature, where he reveals certain realities of the social reports and of the political confrontations inside the camps; the role of the Häftlingsführung (direction of the camp by the prisoners themselves) is harshly analyzed, and questions are raised for the first time in a solid and supported way about the reality of the gas chambers. But he advances his conclusions only with one extreme prudence; he holds his conclusions on the camps of Poland, and continues a scrupulous work of historical research and finishes his final conclusion only in the course of the Sixties.
Paul Rassinier is arraigned in front of the courts by the FNDIRP. Acquitted in the first authority, he is condemned in appeal, while at the same time the public prosecutor had asked the confirmation of the first judgment, with 100,000 francs of fine and 800,000 francs of damages. The former deportee, invalided to 105 % by the effects of his deportation and the tortures inflicted by the Gestapo at the time of his arrest, is condemned to prison (sentence deferred) and his book ordered destroyed (!) by a court whose president had served with Marshal Petain with zeal.
The Supreme Court of Appeals will end his arrest and will restore the rights of free expression. The court of reference will definitively dismiss the FNDIRP judgment, but the heinous press campaign, orchestrated by LICRA, had done its work and had dissuaded the majority of the potential readers from personally taking note of a book that was becoming difficult to find. It was only the first act of an abominable persecution which was going to come down, on an international scale, on the revisionist authors and which the general public was completely unaware of.
Revisionism becomes clandestine. The researchers are unaware of themselves or anything between them. The perverse practice of hiding revisionist opinions spreads through many personalities in politics, arts and the letters, for fear of having to face the venom of the leagues of virtue and seeing positions dearly acquired in other fields sink. The only resisters are some untamable individuals to whom the chance of circumstance has given the means of a relative autonomy, but on the condition of agreeing to be completely marginalized. In fact, they will be completely marginalized.
However, revisionism survived. There exists even today on an international scale an impressive revisionist historiography with width, and quality, and these Annals are given the task to make them known and to subject them to confrontation and the proof of debate.
History is a relationship that the present maintains with the past. There are fitted totalitarian visions that claim to impose a unilateral and intangible representation of the past. If the past is a known quantity which it is a question of knowing, to discover, to explore according to tested critical methods, then history also depends on the questions which the present raises on the past, and consequently from the point of view and the prospects for the historian. History is essentially pluralist. Its dignity is not neutrality but objectivity. Its point of honor is the truth, or rather exactitude. Because the word truth is ambiguous. It introduces a metaphysical dimension. Even more so when it is applied to an account. Any account, so objective it be, comprises an element of interpretation without which it would be unintelligible. Any account is meaning. It has a direction, at the very least direction, and this direction exceeds the material truth of the facts. Consequently, to evoke the truth of an account is to evoke at the same time and the same movement the truth of the direction and the truth of the facts. From which does the direction come? And from which do the facts come? How are they articulated? These are the central questions that it will be advisable to support. Limit us for the moment to note that the historical account has the character of a private individual, which differentiates it from the mythological account or the apologetic parabola, in that the direction which is there has the claim to be bound by the facts.
Historical revisionism is neither of the right nor the left, it tries to put the historical account in agreement with the verifiable facts. It does not claim to state the truth of a fact or of an event, it claims to check the exactitude of it. Consequently it does not intend to propose the truth OF history but intends to be limited to the truth IN history.
The task of Annals of Revisionist History is to create the minimal conditions which make history possible: the freedom of thought and expression for all; and to think of the social causes of a scandal which their very existence constitutes: the fact that there is no other where revisionism can be expressed and history can be done.
The title of this review is paradoxical only because the current situation is paradoxical with history in a country which is believed to be democratic and liberal.
But the war is finished! --------------------------------------------- Translated from the French original by Mr. Ken Morgan May, 2006
Note 1.
“The Jews, who are far from being the only victims of the Nazi regime, numbered fourteen million or more in the world in 1939. So if about half had disappeared, they would not be, even taking into account their natural increase, thirteen million today (two million in Israel, three million in the USSR, six million in the United States including three million in New York City alone, and two million in the rest of the world).”
“Eichmann himself is "praised", and this "subtraction" is besides false: it neglects the thousands of Jews who, between 1933 and 1940, had already found asylum in North and South America, in South Africa and New Zealand or Australia…I speak about it with full knowledge of the facts, and I then to ask for the permission here to be frank. I am not suspect, I believe, of an unspecified sympathy to the Nazis, but think well of Germany as such and the German race. I am a quarter Jew, I married Jewish, my children are not “Aryan ones”. I had parents by marriage deported and even gassed. It was here at home, finally, that were copied or translated the first reports that arrived into Switzerland, by escaped prisoners, on the crematoriums, and at a time when we could give them their due neither in speaking, nor especially in writing: Switzerland was encircled and lived under threat. On the crimes of the regime, we all agree. As for the causes of anti-semitism, that will be questioned further ("the German burden"). [The Last of the Gibelins, p. 44-45.]
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