Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism)

By Pierre Vidal-Naquet

Book Overview

Assassins of Memory is a passionate and painstaking look at one of the more curious realities of recent French cultural life: the prominence accorded to the phenomenon of revisionism. An attempt on... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0231074581
• ISBN13: 9780231074582
• Release Date: February 1993
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Length: 232 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.4" x 0.8" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

How does one refute a lie?

This is a commentary on our age as much as it is a series of essays about the people Vidal-Naquet calls assassins of memory. And a sad commentary it is. For it features some of our greatest minds and some of our most revered institutions.Here is Chomsky, proudly proclaiming that "It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies"... shortly before penning a preface to Robert Faurisson's book--a book that denied the Holocaust. (Chomsky later realized what he had done and frantically called the publisher to omit his preface).Here is an institute that finances revisionis activities offering $50,000 to anyone who could prove the existence of a gas chamber. A gentleman who had seen his entire family murdered accepted only to find that the conditions of "proof" were set so high that only a person who HAD been gassed could, in fact, prove the existence of a gas chamber.Here is Jean-Paul Sartre's report on genocide--a report which omits the Armenian genocide so as not to offend the Pakistani and Turkish authorities.Here is the origin of the book's title for those who would deny the Holocaust, "chose their target well: they are intent at striking a community in the thousand painful fibers that continue to link itself to its own past."Here is the French Court struggling with the concept of "crimes against humanity" on December 20, 1985.And here is the state of the French libraries. "Neither at the Sorbonne nor at the Bibliotheque Nationale can one find fundamental documentation concerning Auschwitz, which has to be consulted, for the most part, at the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaire, which itself is far from possessing all that it should." It seems Vidal-Naquet is amply justified in concluding "Will the truth have the last word? How one would like to be sure of it....."

Holocaust deniers, beware!

This book is an excellent summary of the holocaust and the controversies which have arisen around it in the past years. Everybody who has ever had any doubts about the holocaust should read this book to realize how dangerous is to deny a historical event for the collective memory of the people. Vidal-Naquet is brilliant in his sociological-discoursive method. A first-class historical treatise.

Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust

Great insights on the truth about the Holocaust