Re: [Marxism] Holocaust Reconciliation Echoes U.S. Civil War Reconciliation

[Jim Farmelant <farmelantj@xxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 13 Feb 2005 01:07:26 -0500 Brian Shannon
<Brian_Shannon@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> "This context was as indispensable to the birth and eventual


>
> "The same sort of dynamic is evident in France, where President
> Francois Mitterand ostentatiously conducted a wreath-laying ceremony
> at
> the grave of Marshal Philippe Petain, head of the collaborationist
> World War 11 Vichy government which, among many other offenses--he
> was
> convicted of treason by a French court in 1945-assisted the nazis in
>
> rounding up Jews for deportation and extermination.

Well, in the case of Mitterand and Petain, it should be noted
that Mitterand came out of an extreme right-wing family background;
that during WW II, the young Mitterand, then an avowed admirer
of Petain, was a civil servant for the Vichy regime, where he
befriended a number of high level officials of that regime,
and that he continued to remain on good
terms with many of them not only later in the war, when he had
joined the Resistance, but even long after the war.  Indeed, he
went out of his way to help shield former officials of the Vichy regime
from prosecution (including the notorious prefect of the police in
Paris, Rene Bousquet)  many years later, when he was president of
France.


>
> "Mitterand's symbolic but official forgiveness of Petain's
> criminality
> is reflected far more concretely in an across-the-board refusal of
> French lower courts to accept indictments of former Vichy officials
> charged with complicity and/or direct participation in all manner of
>
> wartime German atrocities. To date, despite an abundant record in
> this
> regard, no French citizen has ever been tried, much less convicted
> or
> punished, for perpetrating crimes against humanity."
>
> Assaults on Truth and Memory: Holocaust Denial in Context, by Ward
> Churchill
> ___________________


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