Roger Garaudy

Roger Garaudy (17 July 1913 – 13 June 2012) was a French philosopher, French resistance fighter and a communist author.

Garaudy joined the French Communist Party in 1933.

By mid 1940s, Garaudy was considered a leading polemicist within the party.

As of 1940s, Garaudy was critical of Jean-Paul Sartre's view of freedom, maintaining that it lacks any social, economic, political or historical context.

He criticized Being and Nothingness for what he deemed not going beyond the domain of metaphysical pathology, and Sartre's novels for "depicting only degenerates and human wrecks" and describing his existentialism as "a sickness".

He rose through the ranks and in 1945 he became a member of the party's leadership and its Central Executive Committee, where he occupied positions for 28 years.

Garaudy remained a Christian and eventually re-converted to Catholicism during his political career.

Eventually he converted to Islam.

He was befriended by one of France's most prominent clerics of the time, the Abbé Pierre, who in later years supported Garaudy, even regarding the latter's most controversial views.

He obtained a state doctorate in philosophy in 1953, with a dissertation discussing theory of knowledge and materialism, entitled La théorie matérialiste de la connaissance.

In May 1954, Garaudy defended another doctoral thesis, The Problem of Freedom and Necessity in the Light of Marxism, at the Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sciences.

He had, however, accepted the invasion of Hungary in 1956.

Garaudy's faith in communism was shaken in 1956, after Nikita Khrushchev made the Secret Speech at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Afterwards, he espoused an eclectic and humanist view on Marxism, strictly opposing the theoretical Marxism of Louis Althusser and advocating dialogue with other schools of thought.

Garaudy lectured in the faculty of arts department of the University of Clermont-Ferrand from 1962 to 1965.

Due to controversies between Garaudy and Michel Foucault, Garaudy left.

He later taught in Poitiers from 1969 to 1972.

His main research subject was foundations of revolutionary politics.

Garaudy was expelled from the Communist Party in 1970, because he had criticized the party's position on the student movement and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia.

His philosophical and political views were characterized as revisionist by Soviet commentators.

In 1974, Frederic Will described him as sympathetic towards Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Gabriel Marcel.

He held that the Western culture was something of a coalition between the idealistic philosophy and the elite class, which is devoted to turning man away from the material world.

The goal of socialism in his view was not simply economic or providing social justice, but also giving each individual their personal chances for creativity.

Around 1980, Garaudy read The Green Book by Muammar Gaddafi and became interested in Libya and Islam, meeting the country's leader on several occasions in the desert.

He converted formally at the Islamic Centre in Geneva, an organisation managed by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia at the time.

He converted to Islam in 1982.

In The Case of Israel: A Study of Political Zionism (1983), Garaudy portrays Zionism as an isolationist and segregationist ideology that is not only dependent on antisemitism to nourish, but also willfully encourages it to achieve its goals.

In 1996, Garaudy published, with his editor Pierre Guillaume, the work Les Mythes fondateurs de la politique israelienne (literally, The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics), later translated into English as The Founding Myths of Modern Israel.

In the book he wrote of "the myth of the six million" Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

In 1998, he was convicted and fined for Holocaust denial under French law for claiming that the death of six million Jews was a "myth".

Roger Garaudy was born in Marseille to working class Catholic parents.

At the age of 14, Garaudy converted to Protestantism.

He fought during World War II and received the Croix de Guerre.

After a period as a Vichy France prisoner of war in Algeria, Garaudy joined the French Resistance working for resistance radio and the newspaper Liberté.

Because of this breach of French law concerning Holocaust denial, the courts banned any further publication and on 27 February 1998 fined Garaudy 120,000 French francs.

He was sentenced to a suspended jail sentence of several years.

Garaudy appealed this decision to the European Court of Human Rights, stating that his book was a political work criticizing the policies of Israel that did not deny that the Nazis had committed crimes against humanity, and that his freedom of expression was interfered by the French courts.

At his hearing, Garaudy stated that his book in no way condoned National Socialist methods, and that book was an attack on the mythologizing and use of "the holocaust" by Israeli government as policy.

He argued that his book dealt with the Israeli government's use of "the holocaust" as a "justifying dogma" for its actions, mainly in Palestine and toward Palestinians.

His appeal was rejected as inadmissible.