Emmaus

Emmaus Project in Oxford

Colin, who says he was once a resident at the first UK Emmaus community in Cambridge wanted to say hi ...

Dear Jean

Thank you v much for your update - good work - thank you v much - good luck with fundraising -

Colin

PS:

If you search on the web for material concerning the founder of Emmaus, Abbe Pierre, you find loads of stuff about his controversial writer friend Roger Garaudy. Eg:The Garaudy affair began in January 1996 and that of Abbe Pierre in April of the same year. The two episodes, taken together, occupied an important place in the media up until Abbe Pierre's retraction, announced on July 23. Their most positive consequence is contained in two articles by historian Jacques Baynac published on September 2 and 3 in Le Nouveau Quotidien (de Lausanne) [The New Daily, Lausanne, Switzerland].

It is regrettable that Roger Garaudy and Abbe Pierre did not manifest greater courage. From the time when the media tempest got underway against them in France, they began to beat a hasty retreat. Their financial means and the various support which they had enjoyed over the years in foreign lands allowed them, for a time, to take their leave of France, one for the Arab countries and the other for Italy and Switzerland. We shall not be too severe with them about this. It is important to understand how violent these storms are; even the most resilient person would take fright; all the more men of their advanced age. Up until that time, both men had known harsh trials in their lives. They knew what hate was, particularly as they themselves had practised hate against their enemies. R. Garaudy had, in effect, long considered anti-Communists, and even anti-Stalinists, as sub-humans, while Abbe Pierre had, in the course of his political activity, given proof of a remarkable lack of charity towards his adversaries. Yet, regardless, life had ended up pampering these two men. Then suddenly, in 1996, the sky fell on their heads. And, plainly, they were in the fullest sense of the word brought down to earth.




The First Edition of R. Garaudy's Book

In December 1995, Pierre Guillaume, director of the review La Vieille Taupe [The Old Mole], published R. Garaudy's Les Mythes fondateurs de la politique israélienne [The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics]. In order to avoid the fulminations of the Fabius-Gayssot law (or Lex Faurissonia), he did this with the utmost caution. The book was sold off the market as a "confidential tract reserved for Friends of La Vieille Taupe." While the entire revisionist part of the book was put together through borrowing in large measure from my own texts, my name was carefully avoided; it appeared but one time (page 119), and then only as that of a professor who had been a victim of anti-revisionist repression, but without any indication why: neither a book nor an article by this professor was cited.

The book contains roughly 230 pages. The religious and political considerations make up the greater part; they might possibly offend certain followers of the Jewish religion and most Zionists, yet the pages which unleashed the ire of Jewish organisations and the media, first in France and then in most of the western world, were the 75 or so pages of revisionist inspiration which constituted the heart of the work (pages 72-147). These touched upon "the myth of justice at Nuremberg," the "Final Solution," the "testimonies," the "trials," the "crime weapon" (which is to say, the Nazi gas chambers), and "the myth of the Holocaust." On the gas chambers, the author expressed his sincere doubts "and even [his] scepticism" regarding this, the very heart of the burning subject (page 135). These 75 pages were written hastily and composed of disparate elements. The presentation was rather desultory; oversights were rife. Notably in regard to David Irving, there were also errors. For example, the author should have known that D. Irving could not serve as a valid reference either on the "Holocaust" -- which D. Irving had not studied -- nor on The Diary of Anne Frank, since he had never analysed it in the least, being so lax as to take into consideration the rumour, founded on a gross misunderstanding, according to which the book had been written by a certain Meyer Levin!

Nevertheless, despite all its shortcomings, the book by R. Garaudy could not help upsetting the Jewish organisations, which already had too great a tendency to see revisionists coming out of the woodwork, and knew in him a man whose political opinions -- he had been one of the most orthodox Stalinist apparatchiks -- could in no way be qualified as "Fascist." Furthermore, R. Garaudy had also been a Protestant, then a Catholic before becoming a Moslem during the 1980s. Under all of these labels, he had shown himself a steadfast opponent of any form of racism.




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