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Picture: Faurisson with Fred Leuchter and (rear) Ernst Zündel

Black November for the Revisionists

Robert Faurisson reports from Vichy

AS of 1st November 2000, the historian and sociologist Serge Thion, aged 58 and father of three, was dismissed from the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), without salary or severance pay.

On 6 November, Jean Plantin, aged 35, saw the University of Lyon 2 begin a procedure aimed at invalidating his diplôme d'études approfondies (DEA, "advanced studies degree"), obtained in 1991: the final decision will depend on Socialist education minister Jack Lang. For their part, on 24 November, the teaching staff at the history department of the University of Lyon 3 let it be known that they were in favour of an identical course of action which , they hoped, would lead to stripping the same Jean Plantin of the master's degree conferred by their faculty in 1990.

On 17 November, Vincent Reynouard, a 31 year-old father of three small children, was removed from his post of mathematics and science teacher. Previously forced to leave a similar job at a state secondary school, he had just found this post in a Roman Catholic establishment run by a priest. Certain colleagues, who had heard the name V. Reynouard on the "France-Culture" radio network, were either alarmed or angered by his presence amongst them; they all demanded his sacking.

• On 20 November, the Paris tribunal de grande instance ("high court") ordered the director of the Internet firm Yahoo! to exercise henceforth a number of forms of censorship and, in particular, the removal from its search engines of links to websites dealing with historical revisionism.

Abroad as well, the repression carried out against revisionists steadily grows heavier. In Germany on May 23 of this year, the Münster university professor Werner Pfeifenberger was driven to suicide; today, also in Münster, Erhard Kemper, aged 73, is once again in prison. Having requested leave to go to the bedside of his wife, in the terminal phase of cancer and almost wholly immobilised, he saw leave refused, by a unanimous decision of the judges, on 24 November. In Austria, in Switzerland, in Australia, in New Zealand and in Canada, the hunt for revisionists is intensifying.

On 4 December, Jean-Louis Berger, a teacher of French and Latin at a secondary school near Metz (Lorraine), 55 years of age and the father of three, appeared before a disciplinary board; he is likely to be expelled from the teaching profession, without salary or severance pay.

In the mainstream media, not a single voice is raised in defence of the banished.

Last minute: the server that accommodated the revisionist websites "Radio-Islam" (receiving about 90,000 visits per day) and "aaargh" (with about 7,000 visits per day) has today definitively shut down the two sites. It will thus be some time before their new addresses are known.

Faurisson makes this appeal: "I cannot recommend strongly enough that those who have the means to do so come to the financial aid of these four latest French victims of anti-revisionist repression:

Jean-Louis Berger, 146, Rue de Leitzelthal, 57230 Philippsbourg, France;

Jean Plantin, 45/3, Route de Vourles, 69230 St Genis Laval, France;

Vincent Reynouard, 107, Chaussée de Vleurgatt, 1000 Brussels, Belgium;

Serge Thion, 1, Aubray, 91780 Chalo Saint Mars, France."