Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Napoleon Hitler

From the U.K. Daily Mail:

Until recently, the French would have been incensed by any comparison between Napoleon and Hitler.

But to their rage and shame, new research has shown that France's greatest hero presided over mass atrocities which bear comparison with some of Hitler's worst crimes against humanity.

These reassessments of Napoleon have caused anguish in France. Top politicians backed out of official ceremonies to mark what was possibly Napoleon's greatest victory, the battle of Austerlitz, when Napoleon's Grande Armee defeated the combined armies of Austria and Russia in just six hours, killing 19,000 of their adversaries.
A street in Paris named Rue Richepanse (after Antoine Richepanse, a general responsible for atrocities in the Caribbean) has recently had its name changed to Rue Solitude.
During his reign as Emperor, concentration camps were set up and gas was used to massacre large groups of people.

There were hit squads and mass deportations. And all this happened 140 years before Hitler and the Holocaust. 
Claude Ribbe, a respected historian and philosopher and member of the French government's human rights commission, has been researching Napoleon's bloodcurdling record for some years...
'Like those working in the Nazi system, the French carrying out Napoleon's killing did so with little thought to morality,' Claude Ribbe says today. 'There was no sense of good or evil: it was just a matter of getting a difficult job done. In the end, the killing methods had to be efficient and cheap.'
I have long thought that Napoleon was unjustly lionized. He was a military and administrative genius, but he was a megalomaniacal killer on a massive scale. He caused millions of needless deaths to serve his ego and his lust for power.

He was a child, of course, of the French Revolution. The first modern genocide was perpetrated by the Revolutionary Reign of Terror against Catholic peasants who had risen up against the Atheist State in the Vendee, the costal region of west-central France. 170,000 peasants were exterminated by the secular Revolutionary government.

"There was in the Revolution a clearly stated programme to wipe out the Vendéean race," said Philippe de Villiers, European deputy and former presidential candidate for the right-wing traditionalist Movement for France (MPF) party. 
"Why did it take place? Because a people was chosen to be liquidated on account of their religious faith. Today we demand a law officially declaring it as a genocide; we demand a statement from the president; and recognition by the United Nations." 
Mr de Villiers – who opposes Turkish entry into the EU – was in Armenia last month, where he compared the Vendée of 1794 to the 1915 massacres of Armenians. In neither case, he said, "have the perpetrators admitted their fault or asked forgiveness of the victims". 
The bloody events of the Vendée were long absent from French history books, because of the evil light they shed on the Revolutionaries. However, they were well known in the Soviet bloc. Lenin himself had studied the war there and drew inspiration for his policies towards the peasantry. 
According to the historian Alain Gérard, of the Vendéean Centre for Historical Research, "In other parts of France the revolutionaries killed the nobles or the rich bourgeoisie. But in Vendée they killed the people.

The rise of State Atheism and militant secularism unleashed something uniquely wicked in the modern world. 

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