MAn, he's pulled out the Black Book. I think I'm gonna need to bow and scrape in fear.....NOT.You know what the French themselves say about your idiotic Black Book?
Read the following, by one Gilles PErrault, in 'Le Monde Diplomatique.' I translated sections of it below, teh article was a bit long. My language skills aren't that good, so it probably is a bit incoherent, but here goes....
"The Falsifications of a black book"
Long afterward, the figures stay approximate and furnish only an order of magnitude. For the repression of Setif, estimates go from 6,000 to 45,000 dead. In Madagascar in 1947, there were 80,000 victims. In Indochina, figures vary between 800,000 and 2 million dead. In Algeria, from 200,000 to a million. Even without counting Tunisia and Morocco…..if one adds up the number of her victims, France is among the highest rank of murder states in the second half of the century.
Repression carried out over two decades on two continents presents the character of a crime against humanity, defines as such by the French Penal Code. "Massive practice of systematic summary executions, kidnapping and 'disappearances',m torture and inhumanity…." The only political organization of importance. To address itself against such slavery as cruel as it was irrational was the Communist Party.
More, author of UTOPIA, martyred in 1535 by Henry VIII, does he not have a monument to his glory under the walls of the Kremlin? Rather than adding to the inventory of crimes, without comment, Stalin's deportation of the Volga germans in 1941, is it not more equitable to indicate thar evdient strategic considerations could give, at least initially, a justification at the time that the country fought for its survival? After all, the US interned without due process, during the duration of the war, thousands of Japanese immigrants often installed for a long time who did not present the same potential danger.
With 25 million dead [Ed. Note. Fascism killed far more than this] for [Nazism] and 100 million victims of [communism] (Ed. Note. Communism killed far less than this] the case can be made that the latter is 4 tiems as criminal as the former. Certainly, the victims are not comparable. Jews and Tsiganes (?) were assassinated for who they were. Citing the Bolshevik discourse…..Stephan Coutrois must admit that, when they desired the elimination of their bourgoeis and kulak enemies it was AS A CLASS> He introduces, then, the idea that class genocide is exactly an equivalent of race genocide. The intellectual arrogance is appaling in its audacity. In the eyes of the Nazis, a Jew was defined from conception to death by his Judaism. A bourgeois, stripped of his possessions, ceases to be a bourgeois [and an 'enemy'].
The French Revolution wished, and partially accomplished, the elimination of the aristorcacy as a class. But the nobles, strupped of their titles and priviledges were not automatically promised punishment, where theu were less numerous than workers and peasants. Courtois writes, 'Death of hunher by a Unkrainian kulak child deliberately caodnemned to famine by the stalinists is the same evil as the death of a Jewish child in the warsaw ghetto condemned to famien by the Nazis.' The comparison is worthless because the Ukrainian child surviving the circumstancial famine had all life ahead of him. The Jewish kid who happened to survive hunger had nothing to await him but the gas chamber at Treblinka.
If the Eastern bloc regimnes to which people were subjected can be reduced to a lugubrious successuion of bloody repression, how can we understand that communist ideas continue to have so many adherents there?
How can we explain that Poland…..elected most democratically a neocommunist president and parliament?
For the master of the work [Courtois] communism was ever and always a monolithic terror. However, J.L. Margolin
Shows the importanec of Confucianism in the Asian communist states, cambodia excepted, and underlines its role in their recent history, including the most tragic aspects. Fontaine has been able to recall, as pertaining to Cuba, the regional caudillo tradition which sheds light on Castro. By what logic can one encompass in the same condemnation the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, who pit their power to the mercy of democratic elections [and won, in 1984], and the furious madmen of the Sendero Luminoso?
Also absent, the human factor. Must we repeat yet again that communism, after all else, adhered to a universal liberating project? That the ideal may have nothing do do with the stalinists and their motivations? A Nazism acceptable to humanity, is, hwiever, a contradiction in terms.
Even the terrified victimes accumulated by the perversion of the communist ideal were not able to abolish hope ….To reduce international communsim to its black chapters is to caricature it. There is more truth in fellow-travelers who becaume disillusioned than in these pages…..
In the BLACK BOOK OF CAPITALISM, someday it will be written all the days of our eyes and our lives. Populations crushed under the dictatorship of financial markets, ravaging unemployment, tribal wars fomented cynically to take control of mineral resources, economic diktats imposed by [the World Bank] which drastically reduce public helath spending, making life hopeless; innumerable migrants condemned to ecxiel in order to escape their hopeless condition. And if each system was to be judged by the number of its innocent victim, on which side would weigh the 40,000 children who according to Unicef die every day from malrnutrition?
