A Fearful Symmetry

Concluding the tenth chapter of his novel Moravagine, the French poet, Blaise Cendrars, describes the social ferment that pervaded Tsarist Russia on the eve of revolution:

“Everything was thrown out of kilter: institutions, family traditions, the notion of honor. A frantic loosening of all ties, which was mistaken for mysticism, was at work in every level of society.”

The poet then catalogues, in intimate detail, the strange and wild Asiatic superstitions which “manifested themselves in the form of monstrous and repugnant practices,” that, when coupled with a feverish and relentless hedonism rampant in all classes of Tsarist society, turned the nation into a kind of lunatic asylum without walls, adrift in a sea of anomie.

The passage reads like a weirdly contemporary clinical report on the state of Western civilization, where the upside is down and the inside is out; a world in which bystanders on the sidelines may observe the fearful symmetry of “Jewish Nazis” and “anti-Nazi Holocaust revisionists” now vying against one another in the same socio-political landscape.

The fallout from a recent book by French philosopher Roger Garaudy is a case in point. The work in question, The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics, generated much bitter controversy because of its reliance, however unacknowledged, on the scholarly work of Robert Faurisson, Europe's premier Holocaust revisionist. Nor have all its critics been strictly intellectual detractors; some exasperated souls have even muscled into the ongoing debate with jackbooted arguments…

On the morning of July 16 [1996], a mob of Betar militants—prototypes of what Israel Shahak dubs the “Jewish Nazis”—invaded a charming Parisian bookstore run by philosopher Georges Danesco, a Rumanian expatriate, who was known to stockpile copies of the new Garaudy book and, with complete impunity, proceeded to pummel the bookseller into unconsciousness.

What stands out over all this, notwithstanding Roger Garaudy's own impressive record of anti-Nazi resistance during the Second World War and his strenuous efforts to remind the media and others of it last April and May when the brewing scandal peaked, is how easily and casually Garaudy's sterling anti-Nazi credentials should have been swept aside as being of no moment or consequence. It was probably this that likely prompted the Abbé Pierre to enter the fray.

Like Garaudy, Abbé Pierre had also been a recipient of the Croix de Guerre and Medaille de la Resistance, prestigious military decorations for his heroic service in the French Army and the French Resistance during the Second World War. However, it availed him little, that or the fact that he was loved and admired by his countrymen as a latter-day Francis of Assisi, as the very personification of Christian charity.

By standing up for his old comrade, Abbé Pierre, too, was soon relegated to the status of an outcast and a heretic; it was as if he'd kissed Garaudy, the revisionist leper, on the lips; thereby seeming to implicitly endorse the supreme heresy of our time—Holocaust revisionism; this, moreover, ironically enough, at a time when age-old taboos are being jettisoned left and right like so much moldering junk mail.

For the once-venerable Abbé Pierre, the end to the “Garaudy affair” was to be the obscurity of an exile to a Benedictine monastery near Padua, Italy, while Garaudy himself faced the prospect of a criminal trial for both hatemongering and racial defamation on charges brought against him by two survivors' associations.

What also stands out here is the increasing reliance by the Establishment, in order to conceal its moral and intellectual bankruptcy, on pitbulls such as the Betar to do its dirty work and act as the enforcers of “conventional wisdom” and political correctness relative to the orthodox version of the Holocaust story and other such sensitive “no-go” areas of inquiry.

A word of caution to the Powers-That-Be: such furtive reliance on the Betar pitbulls and other like-minded terrorist cells can easily backfire; it may in the process assemble the hatchery that incubates the murderous rage of a Baruch Goldstein or the implacable smirking fanaticism of a Yigal Amir.

It is reported that when members of the Anti-Racist Action cell vandalized the home of Heritage Front spokesman, Gary Schipper, in June 1993, they pelted the walls of the house with, among other things, human excrement. It was a telltale sign, suggestive of a fear and loathing that verged on the psychopathological. It was also an ominous sign of even uglier things to come: attempts in 1995 to outrightly murder Toronto publisher Ernst Zündel; first, by fire-bomb, and then later, after that attempt failed, by means of a mailed-in pipe-bomb.

The destructive psychopathology of a Goldstein, of an Amir, could already be foreseen in this stomach-churning anecdote related by Israel Shahak [Jewish History, Jewish Religion, p. 112]:

“…in the summer of 1980 – following an assassination attempt by Jewish terrorists in which Mayor Bassam Shak'a of Nablus lost both his legs and Mayor Karim Khalaf of Ramallah lost a foot – a group of Jewish Nazis gathered in the campus of Tel-Aviv University, roasted a few cats and offered their meat to passers-by as 'shish-kebab from the legs of Arab mayors'. Anyone who witnessed this macabre orgy – as I did – would have to admit that some horrors defy explanation in the present state of knowledge.”

By unleashing rather than muzzling the crazies such as the Anti-Racist Action cell with both municipal and provincial funding, the Canadian Establishment may one day have to answer for its reckless and irresponsible support. It may soon face a day of reckoning; perhaps much, much sooner than it supposes…