Frenchy, would you like to know what the French themselves say about your idiotic 'little black book'? Below is an article from "Le Monde Diplomatique" that I found on the Web. I translated parts of it below, the article was a bit long. I left out the French version so that Frenchy couldn't pick out flaws in my translation. Here goes.PS: Isn't it funny how whenever you hear someone mention Fascism and Communism as being remotely comparable, they often turns out to be, themselves, a fascist, Nazi, aristocrat, or other Right-winger?
"The Falsifications of a black book"
by Gilles Perrault
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 evident 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.
The case has
been 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 hunger 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 [evidence] 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 exile 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?
