Within the past fortnight, the cause of historical truth and justice has lost two of its greatest champions.
Bishop Richard Williamson died yesterday (29th January), after suffering a cerebral haemorrhage last Friday. He would have been 85 in March. The Swiss philologist and historian Jürgen Graf died from cancer on 14th January aged 73.
Both of these men were erudite scholars who refused to surrender to prevailing orthodoxy – which meant that by the twisted standards of modern Europe, each was treated as a criminal.
Jürgen Graf was a teacher and translator in his native Switzerland, where he studied philosophy at the University of Basel, until becoming politically conscious in the late 1980s – first of the threat posed by non-European immigration, then of the lies that had systematically disfigured 20th century history.
Jürgen was given a 15 month prison sentence and a heavy fine by a Swiss court which in 1998 criminalised his first two revisionist books. Realising that if he remained in Switzerland he would be unable to carry out honest historical research and publication without being jailed repeatedly, Jürgen fled the country and went into exile for many years.
As his fellow revisionist Germar Rudolf explains in his obituary of Jürgen, he had been in touch with the revisionist pioneer Robert Faurisson since 1991, and after meeting Germar for the first time in 1994 they joined forces. Jürgen and the Italian historian Carlo Mattogno went on numerous trips to Eastern European and Russian archives which were then opening up to researchers. (Regrettably, Moscow turned decisively against revisionism once Putin came to power and such archives have been effectively closed again for the past twenty years or more.)
While on a research trip to Moscow during the 1990s, Jürgen met a Belarussian archivist named Olga who became his wife and devoted partner through more than a quarter-century of vicissitudes.
Having started his career as a teacher, Jürgen later earned his living as a professional translator, but was also the author of several important revisionist books of his own, including The Giant with Feet of Clay – an expert demolition of the ‘Pope’ of mainstream ‘Holocaust’ history, Raul Hilberg.
This book ends with the following quotation from Prof. Robert Faurisson:
“R. Hilberg’s huge work is reminiscent of the erudite undertakings of bygone eras, when Christian, Jewish and Byzantine scholars competed with each other in the production of all kinds of literary or historical forgeries. Their knowledge excited admiration, but what they lacked was conscience. There is a striking similarity between R. Hilberg with his ‘remarkable cabalistic mentality’ – to borrow a phrase from A.R. Butz – and those Jews of Alexandria, who, Bernard Lazare tells us, ‘expended an extraordinary amount of labor to forge the very texts which they used to support themselves in their fight for their cause.”
Jürgen Graf’s lacked neither conscience nor energy in his decades of work dedicated to exposing such forgeries.
Unfortunately Jürgen suffered repeated ill-health in later years, and last summer received his final cancer diagnosis. His work will live on as a tribute both to his fine scholarship and his pungent turn of phrase.
Bishop Richard Williamson – like Jürgen Graf – had an elite education, in his case at the English public school Winchester, followed by a degree in English literature at Clare College, Cambridge. As with Jürgen Graf, the young Williamson became a teacher, and they both spent a short time teaching overseas – Graf in Taiwan, Williamson in Ghana.
The future bishop was converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism in 1971, but was soon drawn to the traditional Catholic faith, as championed by the French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who rejected the liberal perversions introduced by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.
As Bishop Williamson explained in the final edition of his newsletter Eleison Comments, published ten days before his death, the Roman Catholic Church was hollowed out during the 1950s by an approach that amounted to “‘Pay, pray and obey,’ or, keeping up the appearances of the Faith while emptying out its substance”.
This prepared the way for the disasters of the 1960s. As Bishop Williamson put it: “appearances without the substance meant the collapse of both appearances and substance, and that was the Church of the 1960s. Vatican II naturally followed on Fiftiesism.”
The young Richard Williamson went on to study at the Swiss seminary established by Archbishop Lefebvre and his traditionalist Society of St Pius X. He was ordained priest in 1976.
The decisive split with Rome came in 1988 when Archbishop Lefebvre decided (in defiance of orders from the Vatican) to consecrate four SSPX priests, including Williamson, as bishops.
The Archbishop and all four Bishops were excommunicated. SSPX continued to operate as a ‘schismatic’ rival to what it called the ‘conciliar church’ of Rome.
In 2009 Pope Benedict XVI lifted these excommunications, in what was seen as a possible move towards church unity, but at this point Bishop Williamson became the centre of an international media ‘scandal’.
While visiting Germany in November 2008, Bishop Williamson was interviewed by Swedish television for what he believed would be a discussion of church matters. The journalists ambushed him with a transcript of an earlier sermon in which he had described mainstream ‘Holocaust’ history as “lies”.
Though he was on German soil during this interview, and was therefore aware that his words would be criminalised, Bishop Williamson refused to recant. He told the interviewers that on the basis of reading the work of revisionists including David Irving and Fred Leuchter: “I believe that the historical evidence is strongly against, is hugely against six million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler.”
Pressed further by the interviewers, Bishop Williamson continued: “I think that 200,000 to 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps, but none of them in gas chambers.”
International Jewish organisations and their media allies called for the Bishop’s prosecution and for the Vatican either to reaffirm the excommunication of SSPX leaders, or for SSPX to renounce Bishop Williamson.
In February 2009 H&D‘s assistant editor Peter Rushton was among allies of the Bishop present at Heathrow Airport as the Bishop flew in from Argentina. The airport’s press officer told Peter that the ensuing scrum of journalists was the largest press turnout he had ever seen at Heathrow.
Having taught for the previous quarter century, first at St Thomas Aquinas seminary in Minnesota, USA, and then at the Seminary of Our Lady Co-Redemptrix, at La Reja, Argentina, Bishop Williamson took up residence at an SSPX headquarters in Wimbledon, South London.
He continued teaching and preaching, but was increasingly marginalised and ultimately betrayed by the SSPX leadership.
As our assistant editor has explained in an article at the Real History blog, this betrayal was assisted by the German lawyer Maximilian Krah, who later became an MEP for the German nationalist party Alternative für Deutschland.
Krah’s loyalties were (and remain) exceedingly dubious.
Eventually Bishop Williamson and fellow traditionalists felt they had no choice but to leave the increasingly wobbly SSPX and form a new organisation true to Archbishop Lefebvre’s founding principles. This became the St Marcel Initiative or ‘SSPX Resistance’
Bishop Williamson left Wimbledon and lived for the rest of his life in Broadstairs, Kent, where he continued to write, teach, and celebrate Mass. He also travelled to many countries to ordain priests and maintain the traditional faith.
Until the onset of his fatal illness last Friday, Bishop Williamson remained an active defender of what he would call Truth with a capital T (i.e. the truth of Catholic doctrine) as well as historical truth.
Catholics and non-Catholic revisionists alike will salute his memory, as well as the memory of Jürgen Graf. Their legacy will continue to inspire Europeans as we fight for the renaissance of our peoples.
