Unfinished Business

Re two unfinished items from Smith's Report: Robert Faurisson has decided to not reply, for the time being in any event, to David Cole's elaborate response to Faurisson's brief letter regarding the necessity for further discussion of the Struthof “gas chamber,” both of which I ran in SR21.

At the same time, I was to have published in SR22 an open letter from Henri Roques questioning David Cole's account of what happened in October 1994 at Struthof, where it is agreed by all sides that David was robbed. Cole's party that day included Roques, Mrs. Roques, Tristan Mordrel and Pierre Guillaume. Roques remembers those events very differently than Cole does. I thought to run Roques' open letter here, along with Cole's reply, which Cole gave me to understand would be brief.

Yesterday, however, when I received Cole's reply to Roques, rather than the brief reply I expected, I held in my hand not merely a reply to the Roques open letter, but a 5,000-word blitzkrieg attack largely on Faurisson's scholarship and Faurisson himself. Cole says I can edit his letter any way I wish. I don't think I want to edit it. It's the kind of letter that only a bomb expert would feel secure in editing, or someone with a lot more time that I have at this particular juncture.

I feel some obligation to mark out my own territory in this Faurisson/Cole fire fight, but I'm going to avoid that temptation. If I were to state that I believe both Faurisson and Cole could have handled their disagreements in a more fruitful way, I would be forced to observe that I, too, could have handled many things more productively these last few years, including this one.

We may have a Multicultural problem here. Maybe things are done differently in France than in the United States.

Cole and I are both Americans, however, and we lend to say up front what we most want to say. Maybe academics handle these squabbles differently than non-academics, but neither Cole or myself are academics.

Meanwhile, I am giving Cole exactly the same space here I am giving Roques—one page. I am going to reprint page one of Cole's 8-page reply to Roques, which is largely an attack on Faurisson. If you want the full 8-page Cole reply to Roques, send me a couple bucks and I'll mail it to you. Cole's reply addresses Faurisson's behind-the-scenes attacks on Cole, Faurisson's writings on Auschwitz I, Faurisson's theory about why Cole “fabricated” his Struthof report to me, and observations on the Faurisson / Irving exchange over Goebbels' diary entry on 27 March 1942 about a “liquidation” of Jews.