[Marxism] Re: unintelligent design on al-jazeera

[Sudhir Devadas <sudhirdin@xxxxxxxxx>]

 the party also nods. acknowledging injustices done to individuals, is
a course of self-criticism, even though these victims may have passed
into a state of  'serenity'.
sudhir

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Georges Guingouin

 A Communist maquisard, decorated by de Gaulle, who fell foul of a
postwar backlash

Julian Jackson
Saturday December 3, 2005
The Guardian


Georges Guingouin, who has died aged 92, was a legendary figure of the
French Resistance who was awarded the title of Compagnon de la
Liberation by General de Gaulle in 1944. Of 1,053 recipients of this
coveted honour, Guingouin was one of only 12 Communists. In the 1950s,
however, he became the object of a vilification campaign and even an
assassination attempt. His career is therefore not only a story of
individual bravery, but also exemplifies the ambivalent place of the
Resistance in French history and memory.

Born in a village near Limoges, Guingouin never knew his father who
was killed at war in 1914. His mother was a primary school teacher. In
this period, teachers were the mouthpiece of militantly secular
republican values, and nowhere more than in the leftwing Limousin
area. Thus, it was natural that Guingouin should himself become an
instituteur and join the Communist party (PCF) in the 1930s.

>From 1940, however, Guingouin began to display the nonconformity that
would characterise his career. Because Hitler and Stalin had signed a
non-aggression pact, the PCF refused to take sides in the
"imperialist" war. After the fall of France in 1940, this meant that
the party did not directly condemn the German occupation. Guingouin
rejected this policy and drafted a manifesto in August 1940,
denouncing the occupation. It was not until June 1941 that the PCF
officially adopted a similar line.

In September 1940, Guingouin was sacked from his teaching post by the
Vichy regime during a purge of leftwing public servants. He began to
organise small-scale resistance activities and went into hiding in
February 1941.

For the next three years, he lived in hiding as an outlaw in the
Limousin countryside. At this stage, most resistance in France was
urban. Only in 1943 did it move to the countryside with the
development of the Maquis - hence Guingouin's boast that he was the
"first maquisard in France".

Guingouin and his handful of partisans descended on villages,
distributing tracts and raiding mairies to seize ration cards. They
also sabotaged agricultural machinery to prevent peasants delivering
produce to the Germans. In 1943, the introduction of labour service
conscription that required men to work in Germany swelled the
Resistance ranks. Guingouin's activities became more ambitious -
sabotaging a railway between Limoges and Ussel, blowing up a rubber
factory near Limoges. He also began to impose his own
counter-authority against the Vichy regime, fixing agricultural prices
and banning the black market in the area he controlled. Approved
prices were posted in villages and signed "Prefect of the Maquis" in
Guingouin's own handwriting - which many recognised since he had been
a local teacher.

After D-Day, Guingouin was again in conflict with the PCF leadership,
which had instructed its resistance groups to launch a national
insurrection so as to maximise PCF influence in post-liberation
France. Guingouin, however, refused the order to attack Limoges,
seeing this as a suicidal policy. His caution was vindicated by events
in nearby Tulle, seized by the Resistance on June 7 1944 but
immediately retaken by the SS Das Reich division which exacted
terrible reprisals, hanging 99 civilians from balconies - a precursor
to their massacre of 642 civilians at Oradour-sur-Glane on June 10.

Despite Guingouin's insubordination, the PCF had to accept that the
individual once ridiculed as "the madman of the woods" was the most
powerful resistance fighter in the area, and in July 1944 he was
appointed head of all Resistance forces (about 20,000) in the Haute
Vienne department. Immediately, he found himself fighting German
forces on the slopes of Mont Gargan. The Resistance usually tried to
avoid pitched battles of this kind because they could only lose them,
but at Mount Gargan Guingouin's forces emerged with 92 casualties to
340 on the German side.

As the Germans were pushed back in Normandy and began to retreat in
the south-west, Guingouin's forces closed on Limoges, and the city's
German commander surrendered on August 21 1944. Limoges was liberated
without a shot being fired, but the Resistance had contributed
significantly to weakening German morale in the region. Guingouin,
greeted as a hero, was rewarded by being elected mayor of Limoges in
1945.

Guingouin's exploits had not endeared him to those Communists with
less glorious Resistance careers (PCF leader Maurice Thorez, for
example, spent the war in Moscow). So when, at the height of its
Stalinist frenzy, the PCF launched a purge to enforce discipline,
Guingouin was an obvious victim. He was excluded for allegedly
"Titoist" sympathies - named after the Yugoslav Communist leader who
had quarrelled with Stalin - and the full panoply of Stalinist
invective was unleashed against him in a publication entitled
Documents on the Actions of the Renegade Guingouin. He was expelled
from the party in November 1952.

His troubles were only beginning. With the cold war raging, opinion in
France was turning against former resisters. A 1953 law offered an
amnesty to most former collaborators, and Vichy supporters
rehabilitated themselves by alleging there had been a Communist
bloodbath in France at the liberation.

Guingouin, no longer enjoying the protection of the PCF, was an easy
target for those with scores to settle. In December 1953, he was
arrested for crimes allegedly committed at the liberation. In reality,
although at the liberation of Limoges he had sat on a military
tribunal which ordered the execution of about 40 suspected
collaborators, this level of retribution was comparable to many other
localities, and occurred while the fighting continued on French soil.
In February 1954, Guingouin survived an attempt to murder him in
prison. Although he was released in June, the "Guingouin affair"
rumbled on.

Former resisters rallied to his cause, and the young lawyer Roland
Dumas (later a minister of Francois Mitterrand in 1981) was among his
most effective defenders. He was finally absolved of blame in 1959 and
resumed his teaching career. In 1998, the PCF leader Robert Hue
publicly repented for the party's treatment of Guingouin. The latter
commented: "It is a problem for the party and no longer concerns me. I
have reached the age of serenity."

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