Scholarly French Journal Strives for ‘Exactitude’

Akribeia, the Greek word for “exactitude,” is also the name of an impressive scholarly French-language revisionist journal. Skilfully edited by Jean Plantin, the twice-yearly periodical of some 235-240 pages explores “history, rumors and legends.” Each book-length issue proclaims (quoting French scholar and publisher Pierre Guillaume) that history writing must be revisionist, or it is not real historiography.

The premiere issue of October 1997 includes a lengthy essay by French writer Albert Dauzat on false rumors and legends of the First World War, and a detailed essay by Italian scholar Carlo Mattogno on Germany’s “Final Solution” as seen by neutral and Allied countries in 1941-1942.

The second, March 1998 issue features two lengthy essays by Spanish scholar Enrique Aynat, “Considerations on the deportations of Jews from France and Belgium to eastern Europe in 1942,” and “The reports of the Polish resistance on the Auschwitz gas chambers, 1941-1944.” This issue also contains Theodore O’Keefe’s essay on former Auschwitz inmate Mel Mermelstein, translated from the July-August 1997 Journal of Historical Review, and a detailed article by Mark Weber on the Stutthof concentration camp, translated from the Sept.-Oct. 1997 Journal. Also here is a 14-page “Revisionist Chronology” that summarizes noteworthy events for revisionism in the year 1997.

Almost the entirety of the third issue of October 1998 is devoted to an analysis by Enrique Aynat of the often-cited 1944 “Auschwitz Protocols.”

A valuable and routine feature of the journal is a “Notes de lecture” section, 37 to 41 pages in length, in which dozens of recent books and periodicals, both revisionist and anti-revisionist, are carefully noted, reviewed and summarized.

Carrying on a tradition of solid revisionist scholarship in France, Akribeia fills a major gap left by the demise of Annales d’histoire révisionniste (1987-1990), Revue d’histoire révisionniste (1990-1992), and Revue d’histoire non conformiste (1993-1994).

“Éditions Akribeia” also publishes books, including a French translation of Falsehood in Wartime, Arthur Ponsonby’s important study of First World War propaganda lies (with an introduction by Plantin), and a new edition of the 1950 preface by Albert Paraz to Paul Rassinier’s Le Mensonge d’Ulysse (with a foreword by Robert Faurisson).

For further information, including subscription rates and prices for books and single journal issues, write to: Akribeia, 45/3 route de Vourles, 69230 Saint-Genis-Laval, France. [It is not known whether that address is still valid; Akribeia has since been replaced by periodicals with other titles; ed.]

Double Standards

“The [1940] massacre of Polish officers in the Katyn forest may have been condemned at Nuremberg as a crime against humanity, yet the man who signed the order, NKVD official Petr Soprunenko, is living peacefully in Moscow as an old-age pensioner. So are Dmitri Kopylansky, Raul Wallenberg’s MGB interrogator, and General Pavel Sudoplatov, Trotsky’s murderer, to name just a few. Are we to forgive them all, without even a court hearing? Are we to accept what the world firmly rejected 45 years ago?

“This is what I call “morally appalling”: the double standards we seem to accept so easily. Why, may I ask, is murdering in the name of National Socialism a crime against humanity while murdering in the name of International Socialism is not? Why did Rudolf Hess die in Spandau prison, whereas Boris Ponomarev can live out his last years in a comfortable Moscow apartment? Is there no limit to our hypocrisy? No sooner is some bloody monster like the former East Germany’s Erich Honecker put on trial than many of the same people who applaud hunting down elderly Nazi war criminals are up in arms pleading in the name of humanity his old age and poor health. If those are our moral standards, why are we so shocked by the atrocities committed in Bosnia? What else did we expect from the former Communist leaders of the former Yugoslavia?”
— Vladimir Bukovsky, author, writing in Commentary, October 1993, p. 12.

Absurd

“The notion that a modern society must also be prepared to establish itself as a multicultural society, with as many cultural groups as possible, is one that I regard as mistaken. One cannot belatedly transform Germany, with its thousand-year-old history since Otto I, into a melting pot … To turn Germany into a immigration country is absurd. That could lead to us being swamped.”
— Helmut Schmidt, former German Chancellor, in the Frankfurter Rundschau, Feb. 12, 1992. Quoted in Nation u. Europa (Coburg), Jan. 1999, p. 32.