Bourgeois media slanders the communist left

On June 8th the French paper Le Monde, one of the most respected and prestigious bourgeois publications, not only in France but throughout the world, published an article entitled “The debate on revisionism rebounds on the ultra left”. It was a pernicious attack, part of the bourgeois propaganda against the communist left[1], the current that laid the basis for the contemporary proletarian political milieu. It was an attempt to discredit the communist left by amalgamating it with the ultra left (a melange without any historical origins) and by inventing convergences it is amalgamated with the extreme right. Blowing the trumpet of antifascism, the Le Monde article also attacked the positions of the communist left, by suggesting that all those who denounce antifascism are, by definition, supporters of fascism.

Now it is the turn of Liberation to take up the baton of this revolting campaign with an article on 21st August entitled “The lingering revisionist insinuation” which takes quotations from here and there, from revisionists, former revisionists converted to antifascism, fascists, supporting the idea that the denunciation of capitalist democracy leads to fascism, as illustrated by the following passage: “How does a known revisionist, such as Robert Faurisson, flirting with the neo-Nazis, find himself on the same wave length as the ultra-leftists? The conjunctions are multiple (...) Firstly anti-capitalism, then anti-fascism.”

Nothing could be more despicable. The denunciation of the two camps in existence at the time of the Second World War, that of fascism and that of anti-fascism, is an expression of the same proletarian internationalism that animated millions of workers in struggle at the time of the first world-wide revolutionary wave, rising against the horrors and suffering of the war from 1914 and which obliged the bourgeoisie to put an end to the war.

The authors of the article use the vilest method of using numerous quotations to make others say what they have been paid to say. But they have gone much further than that. Our would-be enemies of fascism, our ‘writers for Liberation’ are no less than adepts of the methods of the chief Nazi propagandist during the Second World War, Goebbels, for whom “a great lie repeated 100 times becomes a truth”. So, following Le Monde, they repeat the lie according to which those who deny the holocaust should find their antecedents in the left communist current, in particular through the person of Bordiga, author of the pamphlet “Auschwitz or the great alibi”. Of Bordiga the article says that he was excluded from the CP, without giving the reasons, in the context of the article leaving the door open to the interpretation that it was because of a leaning towards the extreme right. It is true that the brilliant demonstration by Liberation would at the very least be weakened if the reader had been informed that Bordiga was renowned inside the International for his participation in the combat against the degeneration of the CPs, that he had first developed within the International a marxist analysis of fascism and that he was excluded in 1930 from the Italian CP by the central committee (in particular for having opposed the decision by the Russian Communist Party to exclude Trotsky) of which he was a member, even when he was condemned to house arrest in the islands in the south of Italy through the good offices of Mussolini.

The same black-out is applied to the pamphlet itself. The article does not let the slightest indication seep through that would allow the reader to glimpse that Bordiga’s intention was to illustrate and denounce the barbarity of capitalism, as a system, in particular through the mass slaughter of the Jewish population by the Nazis[2]. But that was not the most disturbing thing for our falsifiers. In fact the pamphlet unmasks the hypocrisy and cynicism of the democratic camp which declined the Nazis’ offers to exchange a million Jews, first for lorries, then for nothing. The reality is that when no country wanted to be burdened with them, they were massively exterminated where they were, in the Nazi camps in Germany.

The fact that both the revisionists and the antirevisionists (supposedly in opposition to each other) call on a text, which reduces the basis of their respective propaganda to nothing, is only possible because of their manipulations of the sort we have brought to light. It can only be explained by their stupidity or by their duplicity and servility to the established order.

ICC, August 1997.

---

[1] This attack targeted on the communist left is not only to be found in the French press. In Belgium universities have given themselves up to a more sophisticated enterprise of distortion by presenting one of the major components of the communist left during the Second World War, the Italian Left, as being ... “anti-fascist in practice” (see Internationalisme, no 217, organ of the ICC in Belgium).

[2] The horrors committed by the two sides during this war were not limited to the genocide of the Jews by the fascist camp. See our article “The massacres and crimes of the ‘great democracies’” in International Review no 66.