Roger Garaudy

The French thinker Roger Garaudy was born in Marseille in 1913. One of his parents was atheist and the other Catholic. At the age of 14, he embraced Protestantism. He studied philosophy and taught it at the universities of Clermont-Ferrand and Poitiers. During World War II, he participated in the resistance and was captured in Algeria. After liberation, he was honored with numerous distinctions, including the Resistance Medal, and served as a member of parliament, deputy speaker of the house, and senator. In May 1954, he earned the title of Doctor of Philosophical Sciences in Moscow with his dissertation "The Problem of Freedom and Necessity in the Light of Marxism." Just a year earlier, he had been awarded a doctorate at the Sorbonne for his treatise "The Materialist Theory of Knowledge." Inspired by Marxist principles, he soon presented his work on the problem of freedom and necessity to the French public with the publication of his book "La Liberté," which was translated into Greek by 1960. Meanwhile, in 1956, during the de-Stalinization period, he clashed with Louis Althusser, advocating for the revival of early Marxist humanism. As a member of the political bureau of the French Communist Party, he visited Athens in May 1965, invited by the First Week of Contemporary Thought organized by "Themelio" publications. His speech surprised the leftist audience with his heretical views and his approach to Catholicism, to the point where Stratis Tsirkas had to protect him from protestors. In 1970, Garaudy distanced himself from the French Communist Party, condemning its stance on the "Prague Spring" events. In 1982, he converted to Islam, taking the name Ragaa and subsequently adopting anti-Israeli positions. His book "The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics" ("Les mythes fondateurs de la politique israélienne," La Vieille Taupe, 1996) caused a stir in European and international public opinion, as it was perceived to question the Holocaust: "The Holocaust did not happen as we are told," he claimed. He was denounced by two anti-racist organizations and prosecuted under French law, which prohibits questioning the genocide of Jews by the Nazis during World War II. Conversely, Muslims hailed him as a philosopher-leader. He died "full of days" in Paris on June 13, 2012, at the age of 98. (Source: "To Vima" newspaper)