SOURCE: "On Faurisson and Chomsky," in Assassins of Memory, translated by Jeffrey Mehlman, Columbia University Press, 1992, pp. 65-73.

In the following essay, Vidal-Naquet impugns the motives of Robert Faurisson and Noam Chomsky in defending the authors of Holocaust denial literature.

Pursuing his crusade—whose theme may be summarized as follows: the gas chambers did not exist because they can not have existed; they can not have existed because they should not have existed; or better still: they did not exist because they did not exist—Robert Faurisson has just published a new book [Memoire en défense].

This work is neither more nor less mendacious and dishonest than the preceding ones. I am not at the disposal of R. Faurisson, who, moreover, has not devoted a single line to attempting to respond to my dismantling of his lies in a text that he clearly is familiar with if...