Institute for Historical Review

A Note from the Editor

Placing his career and personal safety on the line, Dr. Robert Faurisson of France has pursued the forbidden facts whose time have come.

His research has been brought to light in the U.S., of course, via The Journal of Historical Review. In Europe, though, his views are gaining broader notoriety as a result of a series of recent court judgments aimed at stopping him, his work, and any other Frenchman who might become similarly curious about the "gas chambers," "six-million," and associated documentary incredibilities.

Professor Faurisson was "summoned to court" for uttering the unthinkable; where the careful, objective scrutiny of his facts -- the basis of his so-called "injurious views" -- was strictly prohibited.

Nor was the more fundamental issue of freedom of expression considered. just frenzy in the courtroom-lynch mentality.

His "crime" was to have revealed some answers, unconfrontable by an element which found it far easier to debase law in order to silence him. Thus similar now to Germany and inchoate elsewhere, criticism of exterminationist theory or related phenomena, in France, is compounded into the capital transgression of the age. justice and "Holocaust" would seem to make strange bedfellows, but that is precisely the size of it.

This issue is dedicated to a courageous Robert Faurisson who now has no choice but to fight to regain what have been plundered from him: his rights to observe and evaluate, to have a view, to speak and write over the views of others, and to act. His two articles herein contain much of the data with which he is so intimate, and to which his adversaries attached criminal significance, then hurled back at him with an almost unprecedented vengeance.

In pursuit of the responsibility to clarify the historical record- and for which we owe him an indescribable debt of gratitude-Dr. Faurisson has come up against a monomaniacal will-to-believe; that overwhelming compulsion to assign actuality to events which are only said to have happened during the last great war, as well as allegedly similarly down through the ages.

Who are the persecutors here? Indeed, do the tracks of history tell a far different story than the one so vehemently promoted and unqualifiedly received? In any case, there is reason to be concerned. For in the search and dissemination of what new discoveries can be made, the booby-trap in law is a mighty effective deterrent.