Parti communiste français

Statement

An anti-Communist Memorandum
presented to the Council of Europe

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe will be presented with a draft resolution aiming at officially establishing equality between communism and Nazism. Regretting that, to date, there has not been any “Nuremberg of Communism”, this draft wants to banish communism from the universal democratic consciousness. It affirms that, in countries where communism was in power, mass crime was not the fruit of circumstances but a long time pre-meditated policy, the result of the class struggle and the communist ideal itself. It demands that, in this basis, school history books be revised in each State. Using the pretext that certain communist parties “have not distanced themselves from the crimes committed in the past by totalitarian communist regimes”, it forecasts the possibility of future bans and legal condemnations. Apart from the ignominy that is constituted by the proclaimed identification of the Nazis with those who fought them even to the sacrifice of their lives, this project aims at making a crime of opinions and beliefs.

For us in the French Communist Party, Stalinism was a terrible perversion of the communist ideal, which cannot separate equality and freedom, social justice and the unalienable rights of the individual. Thus the FCP did not wait for the collapse of the Soviet system to condemn the violations of freedom that, for too long a time, had flouted (and sometimes continue to flout) the humanist and democratic principles that lie at the heart of the communist project of society. It is the name of communism itself, of it's yearning for freedom, that it made a point of its unconditional rejection of the atrocities committed in too many countries, over too long a period. Nothing, in the eyes of the French communists, can erase the indelible stains and the irreparable damage that have hit millions of victims and their families. But nothing, in their eyes, can justify revisionist assimilation with Nazism. It was not the communist idea but its distortion that produced the crimes. By identifying Nazism with communism this draft aims at denying the place held by communists, precisely because of their values, in the unremitting struggle against fascism. It thus further contributes to the banalisation of the genocide of Jews.

Thus the French Communist Party calls on all democrats to foil this liberticidal plan. What will Europe, indeed, gain by promoting such an official caricature of history that most historians reject? The history of the 20th Century and of the regimes that claimed to be communists must be written with the greatest rigour, without glossing over their areas of light and darkness, in an exacting confrontation of different points of view. The French CP has nothing to fear from such a confrontation. For its part, it has decided to encourage this by making its own archives available to research workers. In doing this, it remains faithful to its democratic roots, from 1789 to the Resistance; it is consistent with its own democratic project for society of overcoming capitalism and all forms of domination.

Meanwhile, the French Communists will do everything to rebuff a decision that would impose a serious threat to public life on our continent. Europe, that continent of popular struggles, of the Enlightenment and of anti-fascism, cannot accept such a shameful travesty.

Paris, 12 January 2006
The French Communist Party
2, Place du Colonel-Fabien 75167 Paris Cedex 19

Tel: 01.40.40.12.12 – 01.40.40.13.56 –