France’s Council of State is eager to forget the French government’s role in the deportation of at least 77,000 Jews to their deaths during World War II.
Since 2007, President Sarkozy has ordered acts of remembrance of the French role in the Holocaust, while firmly stating France should stop apologizing. The Council apparently agrees, stating that French authorities voluntarily carried out “arrests, internments and transports…of these people toward the camps in which most of them were exterminated,” yet “various measures taken, … by way of indemnities as well as symbolic, have repaired … all the wrongs suffered.”
The WWII Vichy government in France openly collaborated with the Nazi occupation. The French resistance, including communist forces, valiantly fought against the Nazi occupiers and their French collaborators.
Capitalist states put no expiration tag on the remembrance of episodes that help glorify their history, yet are eager to set aside their atrocities. Their self-serving distortions must be laid bare, and they must be held accountable for their crimes.
