American GIs liberated Paris 65 years ago last week. But pay no attention to the French troops strutting at the fore of the liberation parades on newsreels. Sure, some fought, mainly Foreign Legionnaires. But Ike allowed their strutting because Ike was "politically correct" before political correctness was cool.
The free world rejoiced at the time and the celebrations in Paris surpassed even New Orleans' Mardi Gras. But not everyone in France was keen on forgiving and forgetting. According to the Harper Collins Atlas of the Second World War, Nazi repression caused 172,260 French civilian deaths during the occupation. Liberation also meant payback time. The heavy hand of retribution fell mostly on native collaborators, and the term "collaboration" proved very sweeping. Usually the phrase "guilt by association" is a pejorative to condemn an obvious injustice. In liberated France it became the dominant legal axiom. Historian and National Review editor David Pryce-Jones estimates 105,000 summary executions of French collaborators in the months after the liberation.
Merely writing favorably about the occupiers was sufficient for a death sentence. The French writer Robert Brasillach was an example, and De Gaulle himself minced few words rationalizing the verdict. "In literature as in everything, talent confers responsibility." And that was that. On February 6, 1945, Brasillach crumpled in front of a firing squad.
Imagine this legal principle of "intellectual crimes" applied after Cuba's liberation to Castro's literary and journalistic collaborators, and with transnational enforcement. The mind reels!!!
Half the staffs of every publication from the New York Times to Le Monde would be dangling from nooses. Every publisher save Regnery and Encounter would be sending flowers in loving memory of half of their authors. The door of every faculty office of every liberal arts professor from Harvard to Georgetown and from Berkeley to Oxford would sport an RIP note. Every TV network save Fox would find half its anchors marched to the gallows.
You readers are aghast, right? This fantasy is more proof that I'm a "vengeance-seeking Cuban-exile crackpot"!
For the record, I advocate nothing of the sort for liberated Cuba, and neither has any Cuban-American.. Here's a better analogy for the current news cycle: If Hitler had died in 1944, should the Free French have embraced a Nazi regime headed by Goering, Ribbentrop and Himmler? Would enlightened opinion universally denounce the French who balked at such an accommodation as "hardliners" and "crackpots"?
According to the Cuba Archive Project, headed by scholars Maria Werlau and the late Dr. Armando Lago, the Castro regime-- with firing squads, forced-labor camps and drownings at sea-- has caused an estimated 102,000 Cuban deaths. Cuba was a nation of 6.5 million people in 1960. France was nation of 42 million in 1940 -- and as mentioned, 172,260 of these died from Nazi policies.
Raul Castro, Che Guevara's primary rival as the Cuban regime's chief executioner
My calculator reveals that Castroites caused an enormously higher percentage of deaths among the people they "liberated" and lavished with free and exquisite health care than the Nazis caused among the French they enslaved and tortured with the SS and Gestapo.
The Free French, having lost a much smaller percentage of their compatriots to the Nazis than Cubans lost to the Castroites, demanded the heads of every Nazi, every Nazi collaborator and every person who ever uttered anything nice about a Nazi. At Nuremberg the French helped sentence Goering and Ribbentrop to death. In 1987 they found Lyon Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie in Bolivia, had him extradited, and sentenced him to life in prison. All of this was hailed as justice.
Bucking the Obama administration's policies, most Cuban-Americans merely decline to legitimize the rule of Cuba's Goerings, Ribbentrops, Himmlers and Barbies -- which is to say, a regime that killed (proportionately) five times as many of their Cuban compatriots as the Nazis killed French.
Yet everywhere from the New York Times, to the Boston Globe to the Orlando Sentinel to the Wall Street Journal, Cuban-Americans are portrayed as insufferable, revanchist blockheads, and the Republicans they elect as craven and unprincipled hacks. All this for refusing to cuddle up to a Cuba run by Raul Castro, Che Guevara's primary rival as the Cuban regime's chief executioner.
