--- Dan Minette <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > May I make a suggestion that will probably be > ignored. I'm betting both > Nick and Gautam are accurately reflecting what they > were taught. I'm > guessing they were taught different things. I'd be > interested in either a > detailed examination of the proposition that the > Vichie government was > representative of the attitude of the French or that > the Dryfuss affair was > the work of a minority. > > Dan M.
Dan - that sounds fine. I think the argument is simple: 1. Other countries in Western Europe managed to save a far higher proportion of their Jews 2. Other countries in Europe managed to run far more effective partisan Resistance campaigns 3. The _French_ Resistance was, from a military standpoint, neglible (see John Keegan's The Second World War, and any number of other books on the subject), probably the least significant of that of any occupied country. 4. The Vichy government had considerably more independence from German control than the governments of other occupied nations - in part because the Vichy portion of France was not, in fact, occupied until much later in the war. 5. Despite this fact, Jews in this part of France were shipped off to their deaths, not just without any protests on the part of the Vichy government, but with its active connivance. 6. After the war, instead of dealing with the realities of the extent of collaboration, France engaged in a purposeful glorification of the Resistance and a cover-up of the extent of Vichy complicity in the murder of France's Jews. This to the extent that Francois Mitterand, an official in the Vichy government (who later claimed to have worked with the Resistance, a claim that has recently been cast into some doubt) was elected President of France. The extent of the collaboration, however, was barely dealt with at all - see Coco Chanel, for example (a good reason to never buy your girlfriend Chanel No. 5, I guess). As far as I know, no one contests any of these facts. If the people of France did not, at least, look the other way at the murder of their Jews, then how come they didn't do something about it? We know that it _was possible_, because Denmark (and Bulgaria, interestingly enough) succeeded in saving them. It wasn't the extent of German repression - German rule was arguably less repressive in France than in any other Occupied Country. After the war, why didn't they make a real effort to expose what happened? Why did it have to wait 50 years? _Germany_ (admittedly, at gun point) has done a far better job of dealing with its record in the Second World War than France has. To be fair, Austria has done a far worse job. I would submit the reason was that the murder of Jews wasn't something that France was going to get all that upset about. This doesn't make it _alone_ in European history - it makes it one of the crowd. With the exception of Denmark (again), was there _any_ country in Europe that cared very much? The relevance of all of this to current events is not, as far as I can tell, terribly clear, except for the fact that opponents of the war seem to make the argument that we should not fight because France does not want us to. Proponents of liberating Iraq argue, fairly imo, that if that was our criterion, either Nazis or Communists would currently be ruling Europe. So that's not a terribly good argument. Gautam __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Web Hosting - establish your business online http://webhosting.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
