How France Defines Terrorism
MensNewsDaily
March 21, 2004
by Bruce Walker
Dominique de Villepin, Foreign Minister of Vichy French, after
President Bush reminded the world that Iraq was much happier without
Saddam Hussein, sniped that there was more terrorism in Iraq now than
before the war of liberation.
The problem, of course, is how Villepin and the government of Vichy
France defines “terrorism.”
Nations, according to the Vichy mentality, cannot break laws or commit
terrorism. This thinking allowed Vichy France to collaborate without
remorse in the Holocaust. Hitler had a regime that was scrupulously
legalistic in many ways.
As one example, in the first election after the Enabling Act, the
National Socialist German Workers Party did not win a majority of
seats in the Reichstag.
Nazis did terrible deeds which violated established international law
or German criminal law but the truly ghastly crimes of Nazism were
committed in violation of moral law, not specific prohibitions of
national or international law.
Indeed, perhaps the most grim fact to concede in prosecutions made for
the Holocaust was that no similar prosecutions were made for the
identical crime of the Armenian Holocaust twenty-five years earlier.
France, pointedly, was the greatest land power in Europe after the
Great War.
It had the military power to punish Turkey for the systematic
extermination of 1.5 million Armenian Christians in the First
Holocaust. The legalistic statism of Vichy thinking refused to condemn
the torture, murder and outraging of the Armenians.
When Arnold Wegner, who from Christian conscience recorded in
photographs the First Holocaust, begged Hitler not to do to Jews what
Turks had done to Armenians, Hitler’s famous response was “Who, today,
thinks of the Armenians?” The official predecessors of Villepin did
not think of the Armenians in 1919.
There were no Nuremberg Trials for the First Holocaust.
If we consider democidal campaigns of monsters who lead governments,
then what sort of terrorism has occurred by these heads of political
parties, governments or ideologies? Evil governments unmolested by
external champions of goodness have been the primary terrorists of the
Twentieth Century.
Communism in peacetime – not in war or in civil war – murdered almost
100 million people who lived within its noxious realm in the last
century. That exceeds all the victims of wars and of other holocausts
and democides combined.
About 20 million people were murdered by odious regimes like Hitler
and Hussein.
This compares with 29 million people murdered in wars, excluding civil
wars.
Almost 6 million people, the equivalent of the Holocaust’s Jewish
victims, died in civil wars which, by definition, is a war to
determine who is the government of a region.
When murder by a government against its subjects is considered
“terrorism” then does Iraq have more terrorism or less terrorism after
Operation Iraqi Freedom? There is much less terrorism, if we reject
the Vichy French notionthat families gassed at Auschwitz are not
victims of terrorism while German soldiers strafed by P-47
Thunderbolts in the campaign to liberate France were victims of
terrorism.
Saddam Hussein killed in so many different ways that it is difficult
to fully grasp the extent of his murders. Some mass graves contain
tens of thousands of dead men, women and children. Some of these Babi
Yar sites – referring to one of the most infamous field exterminations
of innocent Jews by Nazis in the Soviet Union – were known to us
beforehand and some were not.
The gassing of Kurds, the wholesale destruction of Shia, and the
decimation of the Baathist Party itself produce mind-boggling
numbers. Based upon whatwe know now but did not know before Operation
Iraqi Freedom, a very conservative estimate would be that the
terrorism of Saddam Hussein and his Baathist butchers murdered at
least five hundred people each day.
That excludes factors that might well be considered simple murder. The
aggressive war against Iran claimed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi
lives asdid the invasion of Kuwait. The misuse of the “Oil for Food”
program appears likelyto have claimed another hundred thousand or so
Iraqi children. But let us forget this dead and consider only those
who are victims of the Baathist Holocaust.
More people were murdered each day by the Baathist Party in Bagdad
than on the worst day of killing since Operation Iraqi Freedom began,
and that includes the combat deaths of Baathist Party supporters and
of innocent Iraqis. The terrorism of monstrous governments like the
Baathist Party, the Communist Party and the Nazi Party are modern
terrorism.
Organized democide, whether at Tikrit, Trezibond or Treblinka, dwarfs
what pikers like bin Ladin can accomplish. Perhaps Vichy Foreign
Minister Villepin cannot see this because he comes from the nation
whose revolutionary government gave humanity “The Terror” and which
inspired Lenin, Hitler and Mao to match the French bloodbath of
terrorist government. This worst sort of terrorism is precisely what
collaborators like Villepin never see – and never wish to see.
Bruce Walker
Bruce Walker writes regular, orginal, weekly columns for Enter Stage
Right and Conservative Truth. His articles have also appeared in a
variety of print and electronic periodicals, including Christian
Science Monitor, Oklahoma Bar Journal, Law and Order, Legal Secretary
Today, and The Docket. Bruce also wrote a regular column for several
years entitled “Law and You” for The Single Parent, the national
journal of Parents Without Partners. His professional career includes
five years as Executive Director of the Oklahoma District Attorneys
Association, three years as Administrator of the Oklahoma Child
Support Enforcement Program, and six years as Managing Attorney of the
Tulsa Child Support Office.