SERGE THION A MATCHSTICK ON AN ICE FLOW AAARGH "A Matchstick on an Ice-flow" is the first chapter of Une Allumette sur la banquise – Ecrits de combat (1980-1992) published privately in 1993 by Le Temps Irréparable, in France, and displayed in full on the Aaargh's web site. "European history and the Arab World" is the fifth chapter of the same book. This text has been displayed on the Net as a tool for educational purpose, further research, on a non commercial and fair use basis, by the International Secretariat of the Association des Anciens Amateurs de Récits de Guerres et d'Holocaustes (Aaargh). The E-mail of the Secretariat is: [email protected]. Mail can be sent at PO Box 81475, Chicago, IL 60681-0475, USA. We see the act of displaying a written document on Internet as the equivalent to displaying it on the shelves of a public library. It costs us a modicum of labor and money. The only benefit accrues to the reader who, we surmise, thinks by himself. A reader looks for a document on the Web at his or her own risks. As for the author, there is no reason to suppose that he or she shares any responsibilty for other writings displayed on this Site. Because laws enforcing a specific censorship on some historical question apply in various countries (Germany, France, Israel, Switzerland, Canada, and others) we do not ask their permission from authors living in thoses places: they wouldn't have the freedom to consent. We believe we are protected by article 19 of the Human Rights Charter: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." (The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948, in Paris.) 2 A Matchstick on an Ice-flow The war ended in 1945. Rassinier wrote in the fifties and sixties. We are in the eighties. Perspectives have changed. Nobody thinks any longer that the world war was to give birth to universal peace. All the great powers are actively preparing for the next, which promises to be bloodier. While the image of Nazism became darker, the horror grew and proliferated in colonial wars, particularly ours, but also those of the British, the Portuguese, the Americans. We have seen Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Cyprus, Biafra, Rhodesia, Bangladesh, the Horn of Africa, Timor, the convoy of bloody dictatorships blessed on all continents, the flourishing of apartheid, Budapest and Poznan in 1956, the almost immediate halt of destalinization, the supposed cultural revolution in China, the massacres of Pol Pot, the famines of the Sahil and elsewhere, largely provoked by the extension of our modes of production and the irruption of wages in the most backward corners of the planet. We are a few who have not lived through the Spanish War and the resistance, and for a good reason, but we were to be sent to Algeria to do exactly what the Germans did in Europe: to occupy it. We refused. We had to know what was going on there and elsewhere. Like a few others, I wanted to stick my nose in some of these witches brew: From Panmunjon to Johannesburg, from Beirut to Phnom Penh, from Dacca to Mogadiscio, from Amman to Saigon, from Maputo to Borneo, from Algiers to Luang Prabang, passing, as one has to, through Moscow, Tokyo and Washington. Everywhere cops, torturers, concentration camps, official lies, psychological and heavy artillery wars, stifling bureaucracies and occasional massacres. A lot of horror and sadness. And life, survival, which ends up everywhere to be that of the stronger. Travel broadens the mind. We have been enlightened. There is nothing more to learn about human nature, about savagery in all its forms, including the state capitalism of bureaucracies called socialist. How can one put Nazism on one side, make it a phenomenon with no precedent or sequel without being restricted to a metaphysical view of politics? Such metaphysics may be anchored in a dogmatism such as Judaism, whose history is made out to be the relationship of the Jewish "people" with a terrible divinity who elects or punishes them. The line often drawn between all forms of tyranny and Nazism proceeds from the idea that the persecution of Jews is a completely specific and unique phenomenon. This specificity of the victim would thus be implicitly reflected on the executioner. This affirmation is refuted by the facts. On the one hand, many other categories of human beings were perceived and treated by the Nazis as inferior: Slavs, gypsies, blacks, Orientals, etc. There were Buddhist victims, too, at Auschwitz. On the other hand, the treatment of minorities (religious, cultural, linguistic) by totalitarian tyrannies varies but often leads to their more or less complete destruction as entities: Armenians, Kurds, Tatars of Crimea, 3 Germans of the Volga, Chams of Cambodia, not to mention innumerable small peoples who have disappeared during the last two or three centuries during the inauguration period of the modern states. They could be drawn up in a list that would occupy several pages and would send readers to their dictionaries, which they would doubtless find fairly incomplete, so much so that these peoples have disappeared from memory. See, for a single example, the article Guanche. The systematic extermination, by hand, of these Berber speaking natives of the Canary Islands, prelude to that of the Arawaks and the Caribs, inaugurates the era of grand navigations and colonial expansion (1). Who mourns today the tragic fate of the Guanche? Auschwitz is only a stage; not long ago, the Indonesian army "was methodically slaughtering the insurgent population of the former Portuguese colony of East Timor that it had invaded: half of the population, estimated at about 360,000 people, rotted in concentration camps. Since 1975, military operations caused over 100,000 deaths, almost all civilians." (2) The weapons are, of course, supplied to Indonesia by the Americans and, incidentally, with full knowledge of the facts, by France (heavy helicopters). I look in the press, I search the publications of the Jewish community, the dispatches from Israel: not a word on this genocide. A new shame for the West. Is it cruel to have to say to the massacred people of Timor that it is their fault not to have been Jewish? This is precisely what the specificity of Nazism is used for: closed eyes and deafened ears on the product of the same inhuman inspiration, of the same contempt for the other, because this voluntary silence and blindness bring the West political, diplomatic, economic, military and oil dividends. It is better to get thick with the junta in power in Jakarta, already responsible for at least 500,000 political assassinations in 1965-66 (communists . ), some anti-Chinese pogroms, thousands of deaths in its own ill- acquired province of New Guinea (Irian Barat), and an attempted genocide in Timor, because this pays. And the lukewarm Muslim Suharto does not give antisemitic speeches. Mr. Claude Cheysson, ambassador in Jakarta, covered in his 1969 dispatches the travesty of a referendum used by the Indonesians to take over Irian. I was going through there and I read them. I am telling you: a shame. I feel that I could write thousands of pages detailing the swindles, expropriations, massacres and tortures of all sorts of political regimes, and, in particular, of the French government (these pages are, in fact, already written, they can be read in existing books), and yet some people do not see what all this has to do with Nazism. Based on facts, I could spend hours showing them that religious or cultural minorities, more or less immigrant, more or less dealing in commerce, like the Chinese in South- East Asia, the Greek or the Lebanese in Africa, the Indians in the East or South of Africa, have at times been subjected to persecutions very similar to those that befell the Jewish communities of Europe during the 1930's and 1940's. They would say that it is not the same thing. I could then limit the problem, deal strictly with Nazi behavior in the occupied territories, mention that they detained and deported huge quantities of diverse peoples, political and religious opponents, military and civilians, Russians, Poles and Yugoslavs, that the Jews, as such, were doubtless a minority (but we are far from having precise figures); that the same holds for the Sonderkommandos, the commandos chasing partisans in Soviet territories. 4 They will dismiss everything, no comparison of the present, no matter how sinister, or of other victims of Nazism with the fate of the Jews. The dividing line is the gas chamber. This is the blind spot at the center of all evaluations, of all judgments. That is why it is absolutely inevitable that the question of the historical status of this homicidal device be investigated at some point in time. The history of the guillotine is known. I had a close up look at a model of it in a museum in Saigon. It is a legitimate subject of historical and philosophical reflection. Why would it not be the same for the gas chamber? The writing of Vérité historique ou vérité politique ? (Historical Truth or Political Truth?) was completed in 1979. The book was released at the end of April, 1980. During the winter, Nadine Fresco took advantage of my absence and, using a ploy, got a hold of a copy of the manuscript, and circulated it among the beacons of thought at Le Nouvel Observateur and Les Temps Modernes.