Roger Garaudy

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Roger Garaudy (born July 17, 1913 in Marseille , † June 13, 2012 in Chennevières-sur-Marne , Département Val-de-Marne ) was a French politician ( Communist Party of France ), philosopher and university professor. From 1945 to 1951 and from 1956 to 1958 he was a member of the National Assembly and from 1956 to 1959 a member of the Senate . As a leading reform communist , he turned back to Christianity in the 1960s and was expelled from the party in 1970 because of his opposition to the crackdown on the Prague Spring . As a professor of art history and philosophy, he taught from 1962 to 1965 at the University of Clermont-Ferrand and from 1969 to 1972 at the University of Poitiers . In 1982, after having lived as a Protestant and Catholic, he converted to Islam and later instrumentalized the denial of the Holocaust for his anti-Zionist efforts , for which he was sentenced to a suspended sentence in 1998.

Life

Growing up as a Protestant , Garaudy became a student of the French Communist Party (PCF). During the Second World War he was drafted into the French army and, one year after the temporary defeat of France, was deported by the Vichy regime to an Algerian internment camp, where he was liberated in 1943 and then worked for a broadcaster for Free France . In 1953 he received his doctorate from the Sorbonne and taught as a professor of art history and philosophy from 1962 to 1965 at the University of Clermont-Ferrand and from 1969 to 1972 at the University of Poitiers . As a member of the Central Committee of the PCF, he was a member of the National Assembly from 1945 to 1951 and from 1956 to 1958, and a member of the Senate from 1956 to 1959 . From 1962 he headed the Center d'Études et de Recherches Marxistes . As the chief ideologist of his party, he developed reform communist ideas. In 1965 he became a critic of the Orthodox party line and later advocated a dialogue with Christianity, converting himself to Catholicism . His criticism of the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops in the ČSSR in 1968 led to a break with the PCF, which excluded him in 1970.

In the 1970s Garaudy advocated a dialogue between the world's religions from a socialist perspective. With support from left-wing alternative and ecological circles, he tried to run for the French presidential election in 1981, but was unable to get the 500 official signatures required.

After his marriage to a Palestinian woman, he converted to Islam in 1982 and increasingly became an anti-Zionist . He also turned against the politics of the USA , which he accused of lobbying for the State of Israel. In 1986 he received the King Faisal Prize for services to Islam.

For denial of the Holocaust , racist slander and incitement to racial hatred in his book Les Mythes fondateurs de la politique israélienne published in 1996 , Garaudy was sentenced by a French court in 1998 to a suspended sentence of nine months and payment of 160,000 francs. The judgment was upheld in 2003 by the European Court of Human Rights .

In 2002 Garaudy received, along with other authors, the " Al-Gaddafi International Prize for Human Rights " from the then Libyan head of state Muammar al-Gaddafi, endowed with US $ 250,000 .

Works

  • Karl Marx (1964), German translation by Gertrud Müller under the title The actuality of Marxian thought . With a foreword by Alfred Schmidt . Frankfurt: European Publishing House; Vienna: Europa-Verlag, 1969.
  • Dieu est mort (God is dead, 1965)
  • Marxisme du XXeme siècle (Marxism in the 20th century, 1966)
  • Le grand tournant du socialisme (The great turning point in socialism, 1969)
  • Parole d'homme (human word, 1975)
  • Appel aux vivants (Appeal to the Living, 1979)
  • L'Islam Habite Notre Avenir (1981)
  • Les Orateurs de la Révolution française (1991)
  • A Contre - Nuit (1992)
  • Avons-nous besoin de Dieu? (Do We Need God ?, 1993)
  • Promesses de l'Islam (promise of Islam), SKD Bavaria, Munich, 1994.
  • Les Mythes fondateurs de la politique israélienne (1996)
  • The Occidental Terrorism (2004)

literature

  • Götz Nordbruch : The Socio-historical Background of Holocaust Denial in Arab Countries . Reactions to Garaudy's “The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics” (= ACTA / Analysis of Current Trends in Anti-Semitism. No. 17). Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA), Jerusalem 2001 ( online ).
  • Michaël Prazan, Adrien Minard: Roger Garaudy. Itinéraire d'une négation. Calmann-Lévy, Paris 2007, ISBN 978-2-7021-3760-4 .
  • Juliane Wetzel : Antisemitism and Holocaust denial as thought patterns of radical Islamist groups . In: Federal Ministry of the Interior (Hrsg.): Extremism in Germany: manifestations and current inventory . 2004, p. 253–272 ( online ( memento of July 24, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) [PDF]).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biography Garaudy the French National Assembly
  2. ↑ [1] Der Spiegel : Garaudy - Everywhere the Church helps fascism, 1967
  3. ↑ [2] Süddeutsche Zeitung : Roger Garaudy is dead
  4. ↑ [3] Der Spiegel : Obituary Garaudy
  5. ^ [4] Official website of the King Faisal Prize
  6. ↑ Holocaust denier Garaudy sentenced to probation
  7. ↑ EGMR 65831/01, from June 24, 2003, quoted from Jörg Menzel et al. (Ed.): International jurisprudence: Selected decisions on international law in retrospective. Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2005, p. 238 ( online ).
  8. ^ [5] FAZ : Gaddafi's Prize for Human Rights.
  9. ↑ a short excerpt with the key sentences that led to his condemnation, as well as the Arab reactions to it in Rainer Zimmer-Winkel, Ed .: Die Araber und die Shoa. About the difficulties of this conjunction. Aphorisma, Trier 2000, ISSN  0935-8684 ISBN 978-3-86575-101-0 ISBN 3-932528-37-9 , Garaudy p. 39 with reference to the Leuchter Report , in German
personal data
SURNAME Garaudy, Roger
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French politician (Communist Party of France), philosopher and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH July 17, 1913
PLACE OF BIRTH Marseille
DATE OF DEATH June 13, 2012
Place of death Chennevières-sur-Marne , Val-de-Marne department