H&D Video Podcast #1
H&D has posted our first video podcast, recorded on 13th July.
Assistant editor Peter Rushton reflects on the extraordinary elections in the UK and France. Were these turning points for ‘nationalism’? In what ways can Farage’s and Le Pen’s parties be termed ‘nationalist’?
And where does our movement go from here?
H&D is of course primarily a print magazine and will remain so: we don’t intend to become frequent video streamers.
But we shall occasionally post video podcasts, in addition to articles on our website and social media posts – as part of our contribution to the essential reassessment and rebuilding of racial nationalist politics.
The new video podcast is also now available with Spanish subtitles.
No Le Pen government: what went wrong? And what could still go right?
On 7th July, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (Rassemblement National – RN) secured the greatest vote in its history, but paradoxically one which was immediately seen as a setback! And in this case, both the pessimists and the optimists have a point.
While populist anti-immigration parties in other countries (including Le Pen’s allies in Austria and the Netherlands) have already been part of several coalition governments, and while the RN has steadily become more ‘moderate’ in many policy areas to a point where some readers might no longer recognise it as having any ideological relationship to our cause, the remaining aura of Le Pen’s father Jean-Marie (founder of the RN’s predecessor Front National) and the national obsession with its Second World War history, combine to make French nationalism a special case.
The previous National Assembly elected in 2022 was deadlocked, with both the far-left and the RN refusing either to back President Emmanuel Macron’s ‘centrists’, or (needless to say) to work with each other. Macron called a snap general election, believing that he had nothing to lose, but the RN polled very well in the first round, leading to speculation that Le Pen’s party might just about achieve an Assembly majority, or come close enough that they were able to form a minority government. The RN’s president Jordan Bardella (who will be 29 in September) was to be the party’s candidate for Prime Minister.
In the event the RN and allies obtained 143 seats – up from 89 two years ago – after polling 37% of the second round with over ten million votes. But this left them far short of a majority, and they are not even the largest group in the new Assembly, as had been widely predicted. In fact they ended up in third place, behind the far-left ‘Popular Front’ on 182 seats, and Macron’s centrist bloc on 168 seats.
The remnants of the French centre-right – the Republican party – now total just 46 seats, with another 14 Assembly members being conservatives unaligned either to the Republicans or to Le Pen’s bloc.
Bardella’s first reaction was to denounce the RN’s opponents for their opportunistic and unprincipled alliance. So it was: but arguably Bardella and Le Pen had been equally inconsistent, spending the past few years ditching traditional nationalist attitudes and latterly making alliances with conservatives who favour shrinking the French state, whereas the RN seeks to expand it! (Seventeen of the Le Pen bloc’s 143 seats belong to these conservatives, led by the former leader of the Republican party Éric Ciotti, and one is an independent right-winger outside the party, but whom the RN backed.)
Moreover, the RN leadership is itself arguably to blame for organisational failures that became evident during the campaign. Most notably, despite having themselves called repeatedly for an early election, Le Pen and Bardella had failed to prepare a full list of candidates in advance. The RN was caught out by Macron’s snap election, and had to scramble to recruit last minute candidates, some of whom proved inadequate.
To some extent this reflected a long term problem with the Le Pen movement. Although French nationalism has a far stronger intellectual tradition than its British equivalent, it has been the case for years that a large part of this elite disliked the FN and RN. Many of the best and brightest of the movement stayed outside or broke away from Le Pen’s parties: this is a problem that the RN leader will hope to fix by reuniting nationalism in alliance with her niece. But arguably the ultimate logical outcome of the ‘de-demonisation’ process is for Marine Le Pen herself to fall on her sword, and for the movement to choose a leader from outside the Le Pen dynasty.
Yet although these problems have to be acknowledged, Le Pen is in other ways ideally placed to take advantage of what seems sure to be a period of chaos and confusion as the various leftist and ‘centrist’ factions attempt to find a common agenda for government. In her first comments on the results, Le Pen said she “sees the seeds of tomorrow’s victory in today’s result”.
Under the French constitution, there cannot be another parliamentary election during the next twelve months, so it will not be possible to resolve deadlock in the manner of the 1910 or 1974 elections in the UK, nor is it possible for Macron to repeat the threats deployed last year by Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez to hold a second election within months – threats which greatly strengthened his hand in coalition negotiations.
A year or two of chaos should be an ideal build-up to Le Pen’s next (and probably final) attempt to win the French Presidency in 2027.
However, it cannot be denied that the two-round system used for all French elections is likely to continue to be an obstacle. It has consistently worked against the RN/FN and was an important factor in Le Pen’s decision to ‘de-demonise’ her party. Candidates can be elected outright by polling more than 50% in the first round, but if no-one achieves this then the top two candidates in each constituency, plus any third-placed candidate supported by more than 12.5% of the electorate, goes into a second round.
In practice, especially this year, there has been a tendency for these third placed candidates to withdraw in favour of the main anti-Le Pen candidate, which makes it all the more difficult for RN to achieve a majority. This year 37 RN candidates (including Le Pen herself) were elected outright in the first round, plus one from the faction of the conservative Republican Party that supported the decision of its now ousted leader Ciotti to ally with Le Pen.
This Ciotti faction is close to Marion Maréchal, Marine Le Pen’s niece, who at the start of the election campaign broke away from the rival nationalist party Reconquête.
France is one of the few European countries that for a short time had not just one but two electorally credible ‘far right’ parties. In fact, until Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it had seemed likely that Reconquête would overtake the RN and that its founder, Jewish journalist and anti-Islam polemicist Éric Zemmour, rather than Le Pen would be the main dissident candidate for the presidency in 2027. However, while Le Pen swiftly condemned Putin, Zemmour found it much more difficult to escape the electoral consequences of his earlier Putinism, and his party swiftly declined. The precise timing of that decline makes it impossible even for those who might agree with Zemmour’s stance to deny that this policy area was the critical factor undermining him with French voters.
Maréchal was elected only a few weeks ago as a Reconquête MEP and in recent years has been effectively its deputy leader, working with Zemmour. However, after Macron called this year’s snap election, she repaired relations with her aunt and proposed negotiating an electoral pact. This led Zemmour to expel Maréchal and her supporters.
Zemmour was left with only one MEP rather than five: his surviving ally is his partner, Sarah Knafo. It’s a strange irony that the most ‘hardline’ French nationalist party (among those who contest elections) is led by Jews whose families came from Algeria and Morocco – while the vast majority of French Jews remained ‘loyal’ to parties of the centre and left, which are now in de facto alliance with the Corbyn-style anti-Zionist leftwinger, Jean-Luc Mélenchon!
Reconquête is/was both harder line than RN against immigration (especially against Islam) and more traditionally conservative (in an Anglo-American, quasi-Thatcherite sense) on economic matters, while Le Pen has taken her party onto quasi-socialist turf and has become the natural leader of French workers.
Due to being more conservative than her aunt where economic and welfare policies are concerned, Marion Maréchal was a natural emissary from Le Pen to affluent voters who share her anti-immigration stance but who also (unlike Le Pen) hope for tax cuts.
In the first round of the Assembly elections, Reconquête‘s decline was obvious: their 330 candidates polled a total of 238,934 votes (0.8%). It’s difficult to see how Zemmour can be politically relevant again, other than as an anti-Islam journalist and a mouthpiece for pro-Moscow views.
The stunning success of RN in both the European election and in the first round of the Assembly election led to exaggerated hopes that the ‘de-demonisation’ strategy had succeeded and that the French bourgeoisie would rally behind Le Pen (despite her pro-worker stance on tax and state spending), so as to be sure of excluding Mélenchon and the ultra-left from power.
In fact the second round demonstrated the strength of what some have called the ‘glass ceiling’ or ‘cordon sanitaire‘ excluding Le Pen’s party from power. Old-fashioned British psephologists would have called this a ‘plateau effect’: a party can make rapid growth, but then reaches a stage where further progress is near impossible without some seismic shock to the electorate – a serious split in a rival party, an economic catastrophe, or racial conflict verging on civil war.
This ‘glass ceiling’ is evident when one looks at the detailed results, where it is obvious that the RN had ‘maxed out’ its appeal to conservatives in the first round. It’s astounding to see the extent to which, time and again, the RN failed to increase its first round vote significantly – despite the fact that its opponents were ideological opposites whose votes should not easily have transferred to each other.
To give just a few examples (UK readers will note that French constituency names follow the soulless pattern of French and American revolutionaries, with each region being divided into numbered constituencies rather than traditional names like ‘Ribble Valley’ or ‘Chelsea & Fulham’):
- Ain, 4th constituency (in east-central France, near the Swiss border). This seat had already been won by the RN in 2022, and after their Assembly member Jérôme Buisson took 46% in the first round, his victory might have seemed a formality. But in the end he won the second round only very narrowly, 51-49, against a Macronist candidate who secured almost all the second choice votes of Greens, ultra-leftists, and conservatives.
- Aisne, 2nd constituency (based around the city of Saint-Quentin, a once prosperous textile producing area in northern France). In the first round it seemed that the Republican Assembly member Julien Dive, on 35.7%, was in grave danger of losing to the RN candidate who polled 47.1% – especially because a Reconquête candidate had stood and his 1.2% might have been assumed to go to RN. Yet in fact Dive (part of the Republican faction that had rejected their former leader Ciotti’s advice and opposed alliance with Le Pen), won second round backing from an odd assortment of far leftists with whom he has nothing in common, and defeated the RN, 50.6% to 49.4%.
- Allier, 1st constituency (based around the central French town of Moulins, most famous as the childhood home of French fashion legend Coco Chanel). This was another first round result where an incumbent – this time a Communist, Yannick Monnet, seemed in danger of losing to the RN. Monnet polled 28.8% in the first round, to the RN candidate’s 38.6%. However, in the second round an odd assortment of conservatives and centrists rallied behind the Communist, so he defeated the RN by 50.6% to 49.4%.
- Alpes-Maritimes, 7th constituency (includes the city of Antibes on the French Riviera, in the south-east corner of France). Incumbent Assembly member Éric Pauget was part of the Republican faction that rejected the advice of their leader Éric Ciotti, who represents a nearby constituency, and ousted Ciotti from the Republican leadership after he recommended alliance with Le Pen. In the first round it seemed that this stance had cost Pauget his seat: he polled 24.9% behind the RN candidate’s 36.3%. Note also that this is an area where Reconquête would once have expected to be strong, but collapsed to 1.4%. Yet in the second round various leftists and centrists rallied behind Pauget, and he defeated the RN by a very comfortable margin: 58.7% to 41.3%.
- Charente-Maritime, 3rd constituency (south of the city of La Rochelle, on the central west coast of France). The Macronist Assembly member Jean-Philippe Ardouin was decisively defeated in the first round, with an RN candidate in first place on 40.8%. But in a second round run-off against a Socialist allied to the far-left ‘Popular Front’, the RN candidate lost by just 63 votes, 50.1% to 49.9%.
- Paris, 2nd and 12th constituencies. These form the 7th arrondissement, long known as the most affluent area of the French capital, but the Ciotti faction of the Republicans failed to carry the haute bourgeoisie with them into their alliance with Le Pen. In the first round, an RN candidate polled 11% in the 2nd, and a pro-RN Republican candidate 14.4% in the 12th (where the old Republican vote split almost evenly between pro- and anti- Le Pen factions). The outcome was that the second round contests in this ultra-affluent district were between Macronist and leftist ‘Popular Front’ candidates – in the 12th the latter was a Communist (!) – with the Macronist of course winning in each case.
- Var, 1st constituency (based around the port and naval base of Toulon, on the Mediterranean coast). The Macronist Assembly member Yannick Chevenard seemed to be in trouble on the first round, polling 31.4%, behind the RN candidate’s 42.3%, with just 2.6% having gone to Reconquête. It seemed unlikely that Chevenard would have been able to rely on second preferences from the ultra-left Popular Front candidate from La France Insoumise (led by Macron’s fiercest enemy Jean-Luc Mélenchon), but in the event that’s what happened. With the help of the far left, the Macronist defeated Le Pen’s candidate, 52.9% to 47.1%.
There are some regions of France that have become undoubted strongholds for the RN. For example, they hold all six seats in the Gard department (in the southern region of Occitania); and ten of the twelve seats in the very different region Pas-de-Calais, where Marine Le Pen’s appeal to French workers has entrenched her support.
In the new Assembly, the first task for Marine Le Pen will be to maintain party discipline, as she waits for the inevitable splintering of the nascent leftist-centrist-Green coalition.
But the second task will be much harder. Should she maintain her pro-worker, traditionally French ‘big state’, stance while hardening her position on racial or semi-racial questions – in effect giving up hope of extending her appeal to affluent voters, and choosing instead to solidify the RN’s base and appeal to the disillusioned third of the French electorate who abstained in both rounds this year?
Or should she try to trim towards the middle class, toning down anti-immigration rhetoric still further, expelling the remaining traditional nationalists from her party, and becoming more like an Anglo-American conservative?
H&D readers will be unsurprised to learn that we would lean heavily towards the former option. We shall soon know which course Marine Le Pen has chosen.
Farage shows his true colours: a spiv and a traitor
During the past 48 hours Nigel Farage has shown why no true nationalist should support Reform UK.
Regular readers will know that we were already disgusted by Farage’s blatant betrayal of Traditional Unionist Voice, the party with which Farage’s Reform UK struck an electoral pact at the start of this year’s General Election campaign, only to see Farage unilaterally tear up the deal within weeks.
Reform UK went on to betray one candidate after another, throwing them under a bus at the slightest hint of anti-woke opinions, and in effect kneeling – BLM-style – in obeisance to ‘anti-racist’ lobby groups.
Yesterday one of the party’s major donors addressed Reform UK’s largest rally of the campaign. Zia Yusuf – a former executive director of Goldman Sachs, whose parents came to the UK from Sri Lanka in the 1980s – is the most public face of Farage’s multiracialism.
Another facet of Farage’s City spiv values – revealing that Reform UK is a true Goldman Sachs party, not a nationalist party – was his response this morning to the success of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (Rassemblement National – RN).
Now, let’s be absolutely clear. Le Pen’s movement is not racial nationalist. Even in its previous incarnation as the Front National, under Marine’s father Jean-Marie Le Pen, this was a multiracialist party. I twice attended the FN’s main rally in Paris, where Jean-Marie Le Pen was introduced by a half-African singer.
The entire tradition of French nationalism has always contained a stronger element of multiracialism than our equivalent traditions in the UK. The FN (and to a lesser extent the RN) were always ‘broad church’ parties: they combined Pétainists and Gaullists; racial nationalists and non-Whites; Catholics and pagans. That looks strange to a British nationalist, but that’s how they have always been.
Whereas many H&D readers would criticise Le Pen for not being sufficiently pro-White, Farage criticises her from the opposite angle! He showed his true colours long ago when he said that Le Pen’s movement’s “roots were deep in Vichy” and that “anti-semitism was embedded in its DNA”.
This morning he went further, choosing this moment to denounce Le Pen’s party and proclaim that he preferred the approach of her ‘centrist’ rival Emmanuel Macron.
Farage went so far as to say that a victory for Le Pen’s party would be a “disaster” for France. In effect Farage’s Goldman Sachs party is a natural ally of Macron’s Rothschild party.
The one difference is that Farage wobbles all over the place when he is asked about Ukraine and Russia.
As we have previously exposed, Farage has a long history of making some token reference to Putin being a dictator, but then effectively spreading softcore Putinist propaganda, before flipping back to ‘cover’ himself by making some meaningless anti-Putin statement.
He has continued this policy during the past fortnight. It’s difficult to say whether this reflects Farage’s lack of formal education – he went straight from school to become a City spiv – or whether there is a more sinister agenda at work.
The one certainty is that Farage’s response to Le Pen does not reflect any ‘responsible’ attitude on his part to fiscal matters. Reform UK’s manifesto is by far the most irresponsible document of the entire election campaign, making a string of impossible, uncosted pledges.
Farage’s underlying values, however, remain those of a City spiv. He has absolutely no interest in working people. While we can criticise Marine Le Pen for many things – multiracialism, Zionism, abandonment of some French nationalist traditions, betrayal of her comrades – we must admit that she has aligned the RN strongly with the interests of French workers who have consistently been betrayed by the political and financial ‘elite’.
Farage and Reform UK are the opposite. They stand for crony capitalism, not British workers – and this is the main reason why their immigration policy would simply continue the Great Replacement, which serves the interests of global capitalism.
H&D readers should avoid Reform UK like the plague.
This week’s election will signal the death of the Conservative Party, but Reform UK represents no improvement, and if anything serves to discredit the broader nationalist cause.
We are in a time of transition, but the positive development is that a small number of genuine patriots are fighting for a real anti-immigration policy. These are the candidates of the British Democrats and English Democrats, plus independent candidates in some constituencies such as Dr Andrew Emerson in Chichester and Joe Owens in Liverpool Wavertree.
Of course these are only ripples of resistance compared to the tidal wave that is crashing down on the French political establishment. But we have something to build on, in the new political era that will dawn on Friday.
The message is simple: reject Farage, and start building a radical alternative above the ruins of the old order.
French voters’ revolt against multiculturalism takes Le Pen’s party to brink of power
Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) has made huge gains in the first round of the French parliamentary elections.
While it is obvious that there has been a tremendous swing in favour of the RN (and against ‘centrist’ President Emmanuel Macron), the two-round system used in France means that anti-RN voters will again have the opportunity to strike deals in next Sunday’s decisive second round and block nationalist victories.
The ‘right-wing’ of the conservative Republicans (a party seemingly in terminal decline) had already struck a deal with Le Pen by which they were allowed a free run in more affluent areas, including parts of central Paris.
However, it’s difficult to imagine that these people would be reliable allies of an RN government, since their economic ideas are at the opposite pole to Le Pen’s. (It’s already clear that Le Pen herself will concentrate on campaigning to succeed Macron eventually as President: the Prime Minister of any potential RN government would be her young colleague and party chairman, Jordan Bardella.)
Complete results from the first round will not be available until tomorrow, but the two most reliable projections give the RN 33% or 33.5%; the broad left-wing ‘popular front’ 28.5%; Macron’s ‘centrists’ 22%; and the Republicans around 10%.
One of the few certainties is that Éric Zemmour’s party Reconquête, which until early 2022 seemed poised to overtake the RN as the main force in French anti-immigration / nationalist politics, has been destroyed, polling only about 0.5%.
Zemmour expelled the majority of his own MEPs (including Le Pen’s niece Marion Maréchal) in a row over whether to negotiate with the RN. His party now seems to consist only of himself, his girlfriend Sarah Knafo, and a tiny faction of Putinists and irreconcilable enemies of Le Pen.
H&D will examine the French results and the emerging transformation of European nationalism in further analyses on this website (once detailed results are available), and in the next edition of our magazine.
French authorities ban nationalist youth group GUD
Groupe Union Défense, a long-established nationalist organisation founded by students in 1968 and revived by a new generation in 2022, was banned yesterday by the French government, at the instigation of Gérald Darmanin, interior minister (French equivalent of the UK Home Secretary).
GUD is perhaps best known in recent years for its very well organised annual event in memory of the nationalist activist Sébastien Deyzieu, who was killed during a confrontation with police in 1994. It is one of several European nationalist groups who have been prominent in resisting the tide of Putinist propaganda and supporting Ukraine’s valiant resistance.
English readers will remember Darmanin for his disgraceful behaviour in 2022, when he was responsible for allowing gangs of non-European thieves to disrupt the Champions League final at the Stade de France. An inquiry by the French Senate condemned Darmanin in the strongest terms:
“It is unfair to have sought to blame supporters of the Liverpool team for the disturbances, as the interior minister has done, to deflect attention from the state’s inability to properly manage the crowd and suppress the action of several hundred violent and organised delinquents.”
Nominally from a conservative background, Darmanin has sold what is left of his soul to President Emmanuel Macron and his ‘centrist’ government led by the half-Jewish, homosexual Prime Minister Gabriel Attal.
After the banning order, GUD Paris issued the following statement:
The dissolution of GUD Paris was pronounced this morning in the Council of Ministers by Gérald Darmanin. Prisoner of an obsession bordering on neurosis, the Minister of the Interior continues his crazy policy of repressing the nationalist scene.
We shall not dwell on the fallacious reasons attempting to legitimise the dissolution of our movement: somehow, the servile officials of the Ministry of the Interior seek to justify the unjustifiable. However, they are fooling no one, and only highlight their instinctive recourse to lies and their formidable amateurism in matters of ‘intelligence’.
For 56 years, the Groupe Union Défense has been in every battle, at the forefront of political and student struggles, always on the front line. We, nationalist activists, having taken up the name of GUD Paris in 2022, are proud to have followed in the footsteps of the ‘black rats’ who preceded us, and hope to have proven ourselves worthy of them. [H&D note: The black rat is GUD’s cartoon symbol, invented by the movement’s co-founder Jack Marchal, whom our assistant editor met in Paris more than 25 years ago.]
Following the example of our elders and aware of what we must pass on to future militant generations, we will continue the nationalist and revolutionary struggle. Until we win, or until the sun dies.
French candidate suspended after his vile anti-Faurisson tweet is mistaken for ‘anti-semitism’!
The hysteria of Holocaustianity – otherwise known as ‘Shoah business’ – has claimed a new victim: and this time, with rich irony, it’s an ‘anti-fascist’ who has fallen victim to ‘friendly fire’.
Joseph Martin, a parliamentary candidate for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) in the current elections for the French National Assembly, was suspended by his party yesterday after a confected scandal over a supposedly satirical tweet.
Martin – who was born in Spain as José Martinez Lopez, but came to France as a child – was standing for the RN in an area of Brittany.
The communist newspaper Libération complained about a tweet that Martin posted in October 2018 that (when read out of contact) appeared to mock ‘Holocaust’ victims.
In fact Martin had intended his tweet (posted more than five and a half years ago and hurriedly deleted yesterday) as a vile ‘satirical’ attack on the revisionist scholar Robert Faurisson, who had just died at the instant of returning home from a conference in London organised by H&D‘s assistant editor Peter Rushton.
With their typical urgent insistence on genuflecting to the Jewish lobby, Marine Le Pen’s party has censured and expelled an ‘anti-fascist’ – when they thought they were censuring and expelling an ‘anti-semite’!
No doubt somewhere, the spirit of Robert Faurisson is enjoying this absurd spectacle.
Is Le Pen on verge of power?
It’s difficult to keep up with rapid developments in French politics this week.
After predictable success in last weekend’s Euro-election for Marine Le Pen’s anti-immigration party National Rally (RN), France’s ‘centrist’ president Emmanuel Macron called a snap parliamentary election.
British readers need to understand that the French constitution is halfway between ours and the American system. As in the USA, the President is elected separately from the Assembly, and it’s not uncommon for a President to have to ‘cohabit’ with a Prime Minister and a majority group in the Assembly who belong to a rival party or parties.
However, unlike a US President who has no choice but to cope with whatever Congress gets elected (aside from his right to veto legislation), a French President can (like a UK Prime Minister, though the latter theoretically requires the King’s permission) dissolve the Assembly and call fresh elections. Whatever happens, the President rather than the Prime Minister retains ultimate control over certain policy areas, such as defence and foreign policy, including control of nuclear weapons.
Macron was landed in 2022 with an Assembly that is unmanageable, due to large blocs from the ultra-left NUPES alliance as well as Le Pen’s RN.
His decision to dissolve the Assembly despite Le Pen’s recent successes and opinion poll leads, isn’t as crazy as it seems.
For one thing, Macron has little to lose. He couldn’t govern effectively via the old Assembly, so he might as well ‘go for broke’ and risk an Assembly dominated by the ‘far right’.
A further consideration is that the far left might now be fragmenting. For several years the pre-eminent leftist leader has been Jean-Luc Mélenchon, but a combination of the old socialist’s authoritarian leadership style and his Putinist foreign policy is leading rival leftists and greens to rebel against him.
Due to the two-round electoral system and the consequent pressure for horse-trading between factions, it’s not at all certain what type of left-wing slates will be agreed. However it’s already fairly obvious that there will be a shift on the left away from Mélenchon’s irreconcilable stance, towards people and policies that might conceivably favour coalition with pro-Macron forces.
Meanwhile the mainstream right has fallen apart. Éric Ciotti, leader of the ‘centre-right’ Republicans, has split from other leading figures in his own party by advocating a deal with Le Pen. As Macron was quick to point out, any such deal seems impractical where economic policy is concerned. The Republicans’ attitude to tax and government spending ought to be far closer to Macron than to Le Pen, because the RN has moved sharply to the ‘left’ in such areas and defends the old-fashioned French ‘big state’, whereas the Republicans in recent years have shifted away from the Gaullist legacy and become more like Anglo-American fiscal conservatives.
The question as ever is – how far will French middle-class voters be prepared to accept a hit to their bank balances (including the necessity to pay higher wages to French workers as well as funding the welfare state) in return for a sincere anti-immigration policy and a tougher stance on law and order?
Which brings us to Le Pen herself, and rival forces on the ‘far right’.
Many H&D readers will have been appalled by Le Pen’s multiracial approach. Yes, she favours much stricter immigration controls – but she is far from being a racial nationalist. We must recognise that the traditions of the French right are very different from ours. Even under the RN’s previous incarnation – the Front National led by Marine’s father Jean-Marie Le Pen – the party accepted non-White members, and in recent years the RN has gone down this route with added enthusiasm.
A further factor has been Marine Le Pen’s obsessive genuflection to Israel, which is shared by most of today’s mainstream European ‘far right’.
Nevertheless, we have to recognise that a government headed by Le Pen’s young ally Jordan Bardella (the RN’s nominee for Prime Minister) would in some ways be a giant step forward, bringing anti-immigration politics not only into the mainstream but into government.
It would raise expectations among French voters and among their fellow Europeans, and (if radical movements organise themselves seriously) can be a first step towards a more genuinely racial nationalist approach: a Europe for Europeans.
Moreover, Le Pen has in recent weeks taken one very important step to clean up European nationalism. She has taken a firm stand against the Putinist corruption that infests nationalist circles throughout the West. By expelling her German counterparts AfD from the Identity and Democracy group that her party dominates in the European Parliament, she has drawn a clear line indicating that Putinism is intrinsically anti-European and unacceptable.
Within days of the Assembly election being called, the Putinist wing of French nationalism – the Reconquête party led by Jewish journalist Éric Zemmour – collapsed. Zemmour’s effective deputy Marion Maréchal (who happens to be Marine Le Pen’s niece but has long been at odds with her aunt) was open to the idea of an electoral pact between the RN and Reconquête to maximise the right’s chances of entering government.
Zemmour was horrified. He swiftly expelled Ms Maréchal from his party, calling her a traitor. This extreme reaction perhaps owed something to Zemmour’s partner Sarah Knafo (also Jewish), who like Ms Maréchal is a newly elected MEP and who undoubtedly exerts great influence over the party leader.
With the election campaign only a few days old we have seen two parties collapse: Reconquête and the centre-right Republicans. For equal and opposite reasons both Macron and Marine Le Pen will be satisfied with the way things have gone so far.
It promises to be one of the most interesting elections in European history, and perhaps a turning point for our movement (broadly defined).
The latest state repression against Vincent Reynouard
The heroic revisionist scholar Vincent Reynouard, who as regular readers of H&D and the Real History blog will know, was imprisoned in Edinburgh from November 2022 until his deportation to France in February 2024, is facing further efforts by the Parisian courts to silence him.
Vincent’s ‘crime’ is to have raised serious questions about the orthodox history of the Second World War, in particular the alleged homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz, and (in his most recent work) the legend of Oradour-sur-Glâne, where the Waffen-SS is accused of having killed 643 civilians.
In an article at his blog, Vincent has described the latest stages of the French state’s repressive efforts against him. Here is an English translation of his article (click here for a German translation).
On April 17 at the Paris High Court (tribunal de grand instance), I appeared before a sentencing enforcement judge (JAP). Why had he summoned me? Because France has begun an “extension of surrender” process against me. This means that after having obtained my extradition from Scotland, the French courts will ask the Scottish authorities for their consent so that two sentences and one further court order issued against me in France between 2017 and 2021, while I was in England, can be made enforceable.
A desire to silence me as quickly as possible
Reduced expectations
Article 695-18 of the Code of Criminal Procedure makes clear:
When the public prosecutor who issued the European arrest warrant has obtained the surrender of the person sought, the person cannot be prosecuted, convicted or detained with a view to serving a custodial sentence for any act whatsoever, prior to the extradition and other than that which motivated this process.
However, the French authorities obtained my extradition specifically over seven videos that I published on the internet between September 2019 and April 2020. They did not invoke the two sentences and the additional French court order, because although, taken together, they inflict on me fifteen months of incarceration, taken separately, each one sentences me to less than a year in prison, which makes an extradition request impossible.
Consequently, when, on February 2nd 2024, I was handed over, handcuffed, to the French authorities, an investigating judge indicted me and placed me under judicial supervision for the seven videos mentioned in the arrest warrant.
I am accused of “public denial, minimisation or relativisation of a war crime”, “publicly disputing the existence of a crime against humanity committed during the Second World War” and “public incitement to hatred or violence due to [racial or religious] origin…”. As preventive detention does not exist – or not yet – for these so-called “publishing” offences, that same evening, I walked free from the court.
I still won’t shut up
For my opponents, this was a great disappointment, because some had already assumed I would be incarcerated. When, on October 12, 2023, the Scottish justice in the first hearing authorised my extradition, the president of the National Association of the Families of the Martyrs of Oradour-sur-Glane, Benoît Sadry, proclaimed : “We can rejoice that he is coming back to be imprisoned!“
Others probably thought that after fifteen months in prison in Scotland, an extradition and an immediate indictment involving judicial supervision, I would henceforth keep silent, wishing to avoid making my case worse.
They were wrong. The very evening of my arrival in France, I gave a video interview to Jérôme Bourbon and Florian Rouanet. Then came those carried out by Égalité & Réconciliation and Nereus Osa. The apotheosis was my participation in the show Deep Geopolitics, presented by Mike Borowski, in the company of Alain Soral and Alexandre Juving-Brunet.
There are also weekly conferences, organised throughout France. I have already traveled to Nantes, Chartres, Quimper, Rouen, Montauban, Perpignan, Le-Puy-en-Velay and Lyon. Other meetings are planned, from Vannes to Strasbourg and from Dunkirk to Savoie.
Finally, I write articles published in the columns of Rivarol, on my blog with its Newsletter as well as on my GAB page.
Using the most extraordinary exceptions to the Penal Code
In June 2023, the director of the Jean Jaurès Foundation’s Political Radicalism Monitoring Centre, Jean-Yves Camus, declared: “faced with an ideologue like Reynouard, unfortunately, imprisonment is the only way to silence his propaganda.” Since February 2, 2024, my opponents have followed this advice.
Hence this “extension” approach initiated against me. It is based on article 695-18 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. As we have seen, this prevents France using the two judgments and court order (issued against me while I was in exile in Britain) as grounds for throwing me into prison.
But it also provides for exceptions. The French authorities cannot enforce these court decisions, except “when the judicial authority of the executing Member State, which surrendered the person, expressly consents”. Paris will therefore ask Edinburgh for its consent.
In my presence and in front of my lawyer, the sentencing enforcement judge admitted that this was a fairly unusual step, and that in relation to any UK court, it was a first for publishing offences.
He also underlined that the actions criminalised in the two sentences and in the court order were “old ”: these involve three publications (two videos and a book I believe) dating from 2014, 2017 and 2019, i.e. actions going back five, seven and ten years.
Let’s press on!
But no matter: my adversaries absolutely aim to gag me; after having moved heaven and earth to obtain my extradition, they will do everything to proceed against me as quickly as possible.
The “extension of surrender” provides for a hearing to be held in Edinburgh. At the end of the debates, the Scottish court will rule on whether or not to authorise France to make the three legal decisions taken against me enforceable.
My lawyer assumed that, given bureaucratic tardiness, the case would not be decided for another year. But the judge said France hoped for a Paris hearing within a week, and a hearing in Edinburgh before the summer. Yes, really, they aim to incarcerate me as quickly as possible…
Looking for a brave Scottish lawyer
We are already preparing for the hearing in Scotland. A Scottish lawyer will be contacted.
A lawyer exhausted by the revisionist fight
I will dismiss the one who defended me when I was imprisoned in Edinburgh, because I gained the distinct impression that over the months he became timid.
In November 2022, he was enthusiastic about defending me. He warmly assured me: “If we condemn revisionism and throw people in prison for this reason, then we can also restore slavery. Human rights are indivisible.”
But later he confided to me: “I received calls from many newspapers, including Israeli ones. I defend you on the basis of Law; I refuse to be your spokesperson. I want to die peacefully, in my bed.”
As the weeks went by, I noticed that together with his colleague, he adopted a minimal defense. In particular, he did not want me to speak in front of the judges. During the hearings, I was there, sitting like a fool. My destiny was at stake, but the judges ignored me and my lawyer refused to allow me to speak.
I still hear the prosecutor claiming that my videos conveyed “frightening levels of anti-Semitism”. However, my colleague had transmitted to the Defence a file which included everything I had said on the Jewish problem since 2018. It demonstrated beyond any possible dispute that I was “Judeo-indifferent”, not by strategy but by conviction.
It was time for my lawyer to produce it. He did nothing, simply responding that my videos should be judged in their entirety, not on a few extracts presented out of context. He was right.
However, instead of analysing them and quoting passages to emphasise that they developed rational arguments, without any “hatred”, he opted to engage in legal debate over whether the nature of my comments was “offensive” or “grossly offensive”. Unsurprisingly, the prosecutor called them “grossly offensive.”
Defend full freedom of expression
To give my lawyer the opportunity to respond, I sent him the judgment in Handyside v. United Kingdom (December 7th, 1976). The European Court of Human Rights declared:
Freedom of expression […] is applicable not only to “information” or “ideas” that are favourably received or regarded as inoffensive or as a matter of indifference, but also to those that offend, shock or disturb the State or any sector of the population. Such are the demands of that pluralism, tolerance and broadmindedness without which there is no “democratic society”.
I had also brought to the attention of my lawyer the preface to Robert Faurisson’s Mémoire en Défense. Written by the Jewish author Noam Chomsky, who emphasised:
even if Faurisson were to be a rabid anti-Semite and fanatic pro-Nazi […] this would have no bearing whatsoever on the legitimacy of the defence of his civil rights. On the contrary, it would make it all the more imperative to defend them since, once again, it has been a truism for years, indeed centuries, that it is precisely in the case of horrendous ideas that the right of free expression must be most vigorously defended; it is easy enough to defend free expression for those who require no such defence.
Arguments on legal technicalities are of no use in a trial for revisionism
I hoped that my lawyer would produce this material to assert my right to present, calmly and rationally, my historical and political theses, without their character being judged as “offensive” or “grossly offensive”, but even when he asserted that the use of the law sanctioning “grossly offensive” remarks was being abused in the present case, he failed to back this by citing the Handyside judgment and Noam Chomsky’s preface.
Responding to the prosecutor’s allegations, he responded timidly: “I consider that my client’s comments could be seen as offensive without being grossly so.”
At that moment, I knew that the game was lost, because instead of fighting on the ground of reason and invoking the very clear opinions expressed by people above all suspicion, the Defence had been drawn onto the ground of a subjective choice between “offensive” or “grossly offensive”? It was talking about the sex of angels… The not-so-courageous judges would quite naturally claim that my publications were “grossly offensive”.
The consequences of an uncompromising fight for the truth
Today, I am convinced that my lawyer received calls and messages that, rightly or wrongly, intimidated him. I don’t blame him, because by asserting my National Socialism, I am largely responsible for it. Of course, I explain that National Socialism is not Hitlerism: Hitlerism is one manifestation of it at a given time, in a given country, to resolve given problems. It involved numerous contingencies, such as euthanasia of the mentally-handicapped, experiments on human guinea pigs, radical anti-Judaism or the opening of concentration camps.
You can be a National Socialist without wanting to imitate everything that was done under the Third Reich. But very few people listen to my explanations. For the vast majority, a “Nazi” is a madman who wants to massacre Jews, “sub-races” and the mentally-handicapped, while he locks up opponents in concentration camps and fanaticises the young, destroys culture and reduces women to the rank of progenitors. Therefore, the simple fact of saying to a lawyer: “Are you defending a Nazi?” is often enough to intimidate him.
Hold Scottish justice accountable for its responsibilities
So I hope to find a Scottish defence counsel who will show more courage. We will inform him of the hysterical repression raging in France.
Our goal is for him to hold his country’s justice system accountable by saying: “Violating British tradition which requires offering the right of asylum to politically persecuted people, you have handed over a French citizen whose only ‘crime’ is to express historical and political opinions that displease the powerful. Are you going to commit another ignominy by authorising France to incarcerate him, following court decisions rendered in the name of a repressive law which does not exist here?”
Will we find a lawyer brave enough to adopt this strategy? And if so, will the judges back down from committing a new ignominy? Hopes are slim, even illusory. But no matter: even without hope of victory, we must fight and denounce the scandal.
Faced with the importance of the issue, I will not remain silent
Should we deduce from this that before the summer or at the start of the next school year, I will return to prison? No, because if Scotland accedes to the wishes of the French authorities, then I will oppose the two judgments and will lodge an appeal (in cassation) against the judgment. The first two cases will start from scratch and the third will be examined after several months.
During these several months, I intend to give as many conferences as possible and write as many articles as possible. I have dedicated my life to revisionism: blows and threats will neither keep me silent nor force me to recant.
Some will criticise my stubbornness. “You have already sacrificed your family in a fight that does not interest the French. People worry about the future which is played out in the present, not the past.” It is true that according to a recent survey, the French are above all concerned about crime, inflation, the environment, social inequalities and the economic situation of the country.
But if, truly, the past were irrelevant, then the authorities would leave me alone. However, as we have seen, they are struggling to silence me as quickly as possible.
This is all the more revealing since I have no support in the major media, no complicity in the academic world or any appreciable financial assistance: for thirty years, I have published my works myself and I have earned my living as a private tutor. The repression that is launched against me as a revisionist historian of the Second World War demonstrates that this period weighs on the present, and therefore on the future.
To those who doubt this, I would remind you that a brochure published by the Education Ministry warns:
the Shoah does not belong to the past. From 1945, the resurgence of liberated nations after the most absolute dehumanization that the world has ever had to endure, gave rise to new institutions.
Among these institutions is the United Nations. On September 26, 2018, their Secretary General, António Guterres, proclaimed: “The origins of the United Nations themselves are rooted in the need to learn the lessons of the Holocaust.”
Youth, first target of the guardians of Memory
Engraving the Shoah in the soul of humanity
Hence the propaganda targeting young people. At a time when the last of the wartime deportees are dying, some pass on the “Memory” to young people so that they can internalise it and pass it on in their turn. Addressing young Belgians heading to Auschwitz, the director of the War Heritage Museum, Michel Jaupart, declared:
Today, you will encounter history, and become memory-bearers […] You will be able to relate this journey to your parents, to your friends, and later to your children.
Elsewhere, a young Frenchman who became one of these “memory-bearers” confirms that he understood his mission:
Talking about the Shoah, in class and outside, raises our awareness. No one remains indifferent when I tell what I learn, and I intend to continue to bear witness, so that later my future children will in turn become ambassadors of this memory.
The journalist who reports these remarks concludes: “Holocaust survivors need not worry: young people are taking over“. This is the objective of the authorities: to perpetuate the memory from generation to generation.
In 2006, commemorating the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Israeli President Moshe Katsav stated:
Now that the stain of the Holocaust is etched into the soul of mankind forever, Yad Vashem is the faithful guardian of the path of memory for the Jewish people and all of humanity, for all time.
Technology to perpetuate memory
In order to achieve this objective, “Memory” is disseminated everywhere, partly thanks to new technologies. In Eure, a history professor announces:
We want a plaque for Jewish deportees from Eure to be placed in 2025 in Évreux. Next year, we would like to do podcasts, and we have the idea of creating a route around the city using QR codes.
The use of new technologies will make it possible to create “memory 2.0”. The Shoah Memorial explains this as follows:.
The Shoah Memorial, a participant in the field of education, wishes to initiate a debate on the issues of transmission 2.0
Writers, actors, influencers, historians, YouTubers, today have a vital role to play as transmitters of memory and spokespersons […]
By mobilizing influencer ambassadors of the young generation, through a unique 100% digital “infotainment” format, the Shoah Memorial confirms its ambition dynamically to move the lines, so as better to raise awareness among young and adolescent audiences.
Already, survivors have been filmed and reproduced in the form of holograms: not only can they repeat their testimony endlessly, but artificial intelligence coupled with voice recognition software allows people to ask questions and have them answered by these virtual people. Former deportees who have been dead for ages will therefore be able to continue transmitting “Memory”.
Memory: a propaganda weapon in the service of globalism
A teaching that is in no way neutral
But the authorities’ objective goes beyond the transmission of memories of the past. It is also — and above all — political: the authorities seek first and foremost to combat anti-Judaism. The author of an article entitled “Teaching the Shoah in a civic education approach” concludes:
This teaching, even very incomplete, of the Shoah within the framework of the civic education course […] goes beyond the issues of memory, the empowerment of future generations in the face of any new avatar of anti-Semitism being the main objective.
It is so obvious that the young recruits are aware of it. After hearing the testimony of Ginette Kolinka and visiting Auschwitz, a student from the Saint-Avold high school, Lother, declared:
She always encourages students to be the guardians of this memory which must never disappear. This is why we are committed to this project so that this memory never disappears and that Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism never take over .
Anti-Judaism is not the only target, however. The brochure Memory and history of the Shoah at school explains:
vigilance against the possible return of barbarism cannot be reduced to this corpus of knowledge and patiently built critical consciousness, which we call culture; we must also think differently about ‘otherness’, and understand cultural diversity as the very essence of humanity. An education open to the world, to outsiders and ‘otherness’ is one of the best defences against prejudice and racism.
Engaging young people under the banner of anti-racism
The final objective is therefore to use “Memory” to encourage anti-racism. The evidence abounds.
For the years 2023-2026, the “National Plan to combat racism, anti-Semitism and discrimination linked to origin” established by the DILCRAH (France’s Interministerial Delegation to Combat Racism, Anti-Semitism and Anti-LGBT Hate) provides for fifteen “flagship measures”. The first is the following:
Organise a historical or memorial visit linked to racism, anti-Semitism or anti-Gypsyism for each student during their schooling .
Beyond, therefore, the fight against anti-Judaism, “Memory” serves to recruit young people under the banner of anti-racism.
In this context, Auschwitz and Oradour are equally important. At the end of August 2020, after a revisionist inscription was painted on the Oradour Memory Center, the head of CRIF (the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions), Francis Kalifat, reacted by announcing:
There is no difference between a Holocaust denier and a denier of Oradour-sur-Glâne or a denier of another genocide. These are the same people who fuel Holocaust denial and who are entering this field today, which is a new development […] These same deniers are now attacking the very memory that constitutes the identity of France.
Train good anti-fascist democrats
Six years earlier, participating in the commemorations of the seventieth anniversary of the Oradour-sur-Glâne tragedy, Manuel Valls (then French Prime Minister) had declared:
Oradour represents a Europe that was to be destroyed to the finish, it is humanity that was to be murdered to the finish. And in this tomb of ruins that we have just visited, in this silence, the walls do not speak. They shout ! […] And behind these cries, those of the six hundred and forty-two victims, rise other cries, those of the millions of dead in the camps .
And Valls added:
Oradour is also a warning to keep fighting and never let ideologies of death flourish. We know it well, […] they have not disappeared […] Fanaticism, radicalism always have their leaders, their doctrines sowing the seeds of terror, to have no consideration for human life or civilian populations – and it is up to us, democracy, it is up to France to concede nothing, to leave no breach and to act with the greatest determination. Here and everywhere in Europe, in the entire world.
It is clear: from Oradour to Auschwitz, memories merge to give rise to anti-fascism and, beyond that, anti-racism. All this in the name of democracy. The authorities do not hide it. France’s Official Bulletin of National Education explains:
As part of its historical dimension, the teaching of the Shoah has a civic purpose and responds to a moral obligation. It is not just a question of transmitting memory and knowledge: we must give all students the elements of culture and reflection enabling them to reject all forms of racism and discrimination and to understand that, contravening the Declaration of human and citizen rights, they make democracy impossible.
Memory is therefore a tool intended to format young people in order to transform them into good democrats.
Building a morality of non-discrimination
Therefore, we will not be surprised to hear Amel, 16 years old, a young “memory-bearer”, declare on his return from Auschwitz:
It enriched me in terms of general culture, and also in a human sense, because it makes us understand the present; it’s the same as all other forms of racism, such as homophobia.
For its part, the Canopé network offers teachers educational materials to maintain “Memory” in order to fight against discrimination. They presents it as follows:
Implementing a memory project within your class or your school, building a collective memory, opening dialogue and getting students to reflect on republican values contributes preventing and fighting against discrimination.
Among the documents offered is a work entitled: Lessons of the Shoah. Its author, Gérard Rabinovitch, writes:
The purpose of this work is to attempt to outline – supported by facts exhumed, explored, recorded – how the Shoah, in its indelible lesson, calls for thoughtful perspective, alert syntheses, ethical warnings. It is not just a question of “duty to remember”, it is a question of taking stock of the fact that “Nazism constituted for the West a historical milestone and a transformative episode to which contemporary societies remain dependent”, as highlighted by the jurist and psychoanalyst Pierre Legendre.
The terrors of the 20th century, this “permanent liquidation machine” as the writer Imre Kertész calls it, mobilise historians as vigilantes of the facts; call upon political philosophy to rethink its founding questions. What is a good life? What is a good society? What is good collective action? They call for a non-soothing anthropology, demystified by evidence, and lucid by necessity.
We see that the Memory of the Shoah serves to build a morality, that of non-discrimination.
Hence the “gas chamber” placed at the centre of History. In a work intended to combat Marine Le Pen, we read:
as they indelibly mark the memory and consciousness of all humanity […] the gas chambers are at the centre of the History of the Second World War and at the centre of History.
In other words: the “gas chamber” is a heritage that all of humanity must embrace in the present, because it contributes to shaping consciences.
A repression which requires, on the other hand, mutual assistance
In such a context, the revisionists are quite naturally ranked among the main enemies to be fought. Gérard Rabinovitch writes:
Teaching the history of the Shoah, restoring the entirety of its facts, against the falsifiers, the deniers or the rhetorical boasts, is to do an educational work as well as a civic one.
But against revisionism, teaching remains insufficient; judicial repression must complete it. Under the title “Denying the Holocaust is a racist crime”, the vice-president of the Advisory Center for Jewish and Israeli Relations (CIJA), Richard Marceau, and his collaborator Emmanuelle Amar state:
Denying the Shoah is an indicator, yes, of hatred of the Jew. But it is also a troubling marker of radicalisation, for which society as a whole will one day inevitably pay the price. What begins with the Jews never ends with the Jews.
Hence the need, they conclude, to criminalise revisionism in order to protect all of society.
In Europe, this criminalisation is well advanced: many countries have adopted so-called anti-revisionist laws. The UK is among the exceptions. But by accepting my extradition, she sent a clear message: the island will not become a refuge for hunted revisionists. The relentless persecution endured by free researchers demonstrates the capital importance of the past.
I am living proof: compared to the means available to the guardians of “Memory”, I am destitute. Faced by their vocal pronouncements, I can only whisper. But this whisper is still too much. My opponents want to silence me as quickly as possible. If, truly, the past had no importance and if the official story offered all the guarantees of solidity, then such relentlessness would not exist.
Our adversaries fear revisionism because it endangers their weapons of political propaganda. By dedicating my life to the revisionist fight, I have certainly sacrificed a lot, including my family, but I fight for all the children of France and Europe, so that we stop instilling in them a false memory from which arises a morality favouring the poison of globalism. Thank you to those who support me in this mission.
30 years on – French nationalist tribute to Sébastien Deyzieu
On Saturday, thirty years after the death of their comrade Sébastien Deyzieu – killed when Parisian police attacked a nationalist demonstration – his successors paid a fine tribute on the streets of the French capital.
Deyzieu was part of a demonstration that sought to highlight disastrous consequences of the Allied invasion of Europe and the post-1945 political settlement – Soviet Russian domination of Eastern Europe and American global capitalist domination of Western Europe.
Parisian authorities banned this May 1994 event, organised by the nationalist student group Groupe Union Défense (GUD), and Deyzieu was killed during an ensuing confrontation with police.
Every year since then, GUD has been part of a cross-party ‘9th May Committee’ that organises a memorial event.
As happened last year, the traitors’ who rule French politics attempted to prevent this memorial march from taking place, but once again the 9th May Committee succeeded in defeating the ban. 1,200 comrades marched through the streets of Paris. A magnificent tribute to Sébastien Deyzieu ensured that his sacrifice was not in vain and his spirit continues to inspire the hearts and minds of new generations of Europeans.
Backdoor criminalisation of revisionism confirmed by Scotland’s most senior judge
This afternoon in Edinburgh the President of the Court of Session, Lord Carloway, rejected the appeal against extradition to France of Vincent Reynouard, the exiled scholar whom Parisian courts seek to jail for his research questioning orthodox history of the ‘Holocaust’ and the ‘massacre at Oradour’.
Regular readers of H&D and the Real History blog will be familiar with the background to the case. Vincent was arrested in the Scottish fishing village of Anstruther in November 2023 and has been held in Edinburgh jail for the past fourteen months, despite not being charged (let alone convicted) of any crime under UK law.
France is one of many European countries which criminalise any historical and scientific research questioning the orthodox version of the ‘Holocaust’: the alleged murder of six million Jews in presumed homicidal gas chambers during the Second World War. But Parliament has deliberately avoided passing any such law in the UK. Instead, UK courts – including now Lord Carloway, Scotland’s most senior judge – are engaged in a cowardly criminalisation of revisionism via abuse of other laws such as the Communications Act, and via abuse of the extradition process.
This conveniently avoids any parliamentary debate on the merits of the revisionist case. Though the historicity of the ‘Holocaust’ was not a legal point at issue during the trial, and though he has not indicated any competence of his own on historical matters, Lord Carloway assumes the right to declaim on “the patent falsehood” of Vincent’s work. Lord Carloway makes statements about the Auschwitz death toll and about the notorious ‘confession’ of camp commandant Rudolf Höss, though no expert witness testimony was adduced at any stage of Vincent’s extradition process about these matters.
Lord Carloway does not himself claim personal expertise in 20th century history and does not indicate that he has carried out even a single hour of documentary research on such topics. Notably he relies on the Höss ‘confession’. In what other case would Lord Carloway be happy for a Scottish court to rely on a ‘confession’ obtained by torture and blackmail, or on submissions concerning the scene of the crime that were provided by the Kremlin’s military and intelligence services?
The version of history laid down by the Nuremberg trial – instituted by the victors of the Second World War, and largely based on ‘evidence’ by a Kremlin-controlled ‘commission’ – is protected in France by the ‘Gayssot Law’ enacted in 1990, appropriately enough on the initiative of a French Communist MP allied to a millionaire Jewish socialist.
This ‘Gayssot Law’ was designed to criminalise the work of the pioneering revisionist scholar Professor Robert Faurisson, who though born in Shepperton, West London, to a Scottish mother and French father, lived and taught in France throughout his adult life, latterly as Professor of French Literature at the University of Lyon.
From the mid-1970s until the day before his death in 2018, Professor Faurisson wrote and published detailed research into the alleged ‘gas chambers’, summarising his conclusions in a famous sentence:
“The alleged Hitlerite gas chambers and the alleged genocide of the Jews form one and the same historical lie, which has permitted a gigantic political and financial swindle whose main beneficiaries are the State of Israel and international Zionism and whose main victims are the German people – but not their leaders – and the Palestinian people in their entirety.”
It is a curious coincidence that the Court of Session judgment rejecting Vincent Reynouard’s appeal was delivered one day after Professor Faurisson’s birthday, and a few hours before what has in recent years become a worldwide festival of historical ‘remembrance’ – Holocaust Memorial Day. In 1995 Faurisson directly addressed “Auschwitz: the facts and the legend” in an essay now available online at the Robert Faurisson website.
Vincent Reynouard spoke at the conference in October 2018 – organised by H&D in Shepperton, the Professor’s birthplace – at which Robert Faurisson gave his final speech, a day before his death. Vincent (who was awarded the Robert Faurisson International Prize in 2020) is today’s leading representative of the Faurissonian tradition of scholarly re-examination of the ‘Holocaust”s evidential basis, while the courts (both in Paris and now sadly in Edinburgh) have abandoned scrutiny of evidence and now prefer to genuflect in submission to ‘Holocaustianity’.
Most of the Western world has moved away from organised religion, but ‘Holocaust’ memorialisation has become a pseudo-religion, with Auschwitz-Birkenau as its Calvary and anti-revisionist legislation as the new blasphemy laws.
Though the UK has no such laws, Lord Carloway affirms in his judgment that Vincent’s online publications are extraditable offences because they can be deemed “grossly offensive” under s.127 of the Communications Act 2007. This is an updating for the internet age of a law originally designed to criminalise obscene telephone calls.
In this instance, the law has been stretched to cover offending “members of the Jewish and other communities whose members perished at Auschwitz and Birkenau. The same applies to those living with the memory of Oradour. It is not necessary to be a member of the relevant communities to be grossly offended by such statements; any reasonable person would be.”
Lord Carloway makes the dire implications clear: “Although it is not an offence to hold these views and, in certain contexts, to express them, it is a breach of section 127 of the 2007 Act to communicate them to the public on the internet.”
By Lord Carloway’s implication, online revisionism is to be deemed criminal in the UK, even when expressed in scholarly terms, and even without a specific parliamentary statute.
This is a blatant attack on fundamental human rights: an attack on the basic principles not only of UK law but of European civilisation’s accepted intellectual standards.
We shall report soon on the next stage in the fight for Vincent Reynouard’s freedom and the fight for real history.
