And what it can teach us about today’s fake genocides.
After selling the lie that Israel’s military campaign against Hamas after Oct 7 was genocide, leftists have pivoted to claiming that Cuba is the new Gaza and is also being genocided.
The Democratic Socialists of America recently issued a statement praising the murderous Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and accusing Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is of Cuban heritage, of waging a “genocidal war against the Cuban people” by maintaining the embargo.
The big lie of the Gaza ‘genocide’ had been based in part on falsely accusing Israel of starving the enemy population in the Hamas territory (in reality, the UN, which helped push the lie, had refused to deliver much of the food and admitted that 95% of its aid trucks were “intercepted”.)
After arguing that Israel had committed genocide by not sufficiently delivering food to Hamas, the DSA and some of the same players are arguing that America is committing genocide in Cuba by not allowing commercial dealings with the Communist dictatorship. Similar genocide smears had been hurled at the United States for imposing sanctions on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq whose regime, like that of Castro, had engaged in the actual mass murder of its own people.
America did not commit genocide in Cuba, but the Castro regime imprisoned 100,000 people in prisons and camps and killed between 15,000 and 17,000 people. The DSA cheers on these crimes today while falsely accusing America of genocide in order to bail out the Cuban regime.
But it’s certainly not the first time that America and its allies were falsely accused of genocide by leftist activists who were complicit in covering up actual genocide by their Communist allies.
While leftists have falsely accused America of committing genocide in every war from the Korean War (“the American forces are guilty of the crime of Genocide” – International Association of Democratic Lawyers) to the Iraq War (“an act of genocide” – Workers World), the high point of the genocide lie came during the Vietnam War where the ‘International War Crimes Tribunal’ was convened by intellectuals to convict America of the crime of genocide.
In 1951, the Civil Rights Congress, a Communist front group, and Paul Robeson, a Stalinist, who had defended a regime that murdered millions, had presented We Charge Genocide, a petition to the UN accusing America of genocide in Korea and domestically through racism. During this same period, there were an estimated 2.5 million prisoners in Stalin’s gulag camps.
The 1966 tribunal was a slicker arrangement fronted by Bertrand Russell, whose occasional liberal anti-Communism had veered towards anti-Americanism, but was funded by Ho Chi Minh and the tribunal was dominated by Communists, Marxists and their allies including a Cuban official, Kwame Ture of the Black Panther Party and French ‘philosopher’ Jean-Paul Sartre.
Sartre was appointed as the president of the International War Crimes Tribunal and did much of the work indicting America for genocide even while an actual genocide was being plotted in Viet Cong camps by Communist Cambodians who had been inspired by Sartre’s works during their time in exile in France to implement what would become the Cambodian genocide.
By 1966, the Khmer Rouge had secured the support of the Chinese Communist regime, which was far more genocidally murderous than Vietnam’s Communists, and a decade later began a Communist genocide that took the lives of over 2 million people even as American and European socialists, and some members of the tribunal, lied and tried to cover up their crimes.
Sartre had already been an enthusiastic apologist for the massacres of both Stalin and Mao.
“A revolutionary regime must rid itself of a certain number of individuals who threaten it, and I see no other way than death. One can always escape from prison,” Sartre had argued in a 1973 interview, suggesting that during the French Revolution, “the revolutionaries of 1793 probably didn’t kill enough and thus unconsciously facilitated a return to order, and then the Restoration.”
“It was not our duty to write about Soviet labor camps,” Sartre had argued about Soviet genocide back in 1950. “We were free to remain aloof from the quarrel over the nature of this system, provided no events of sociological significance had occurred.”
The deaths of 3 million people were not of sociological significance to Sartre: after all Lenin and Stalin had not made the same mistake as the French revolutionaries by not killing enough.
When Soviet tanks entered Budapest, Sartre criticised the scale of the massacres, but argued that the Hungarians had brought it on themselves by allying with “reactionary elements” so that
“the reappearance of conservative parties made the Russian presence (not brutal intervention) in Hungary practically necessary” and that really “the most enormous mistake was probably Khrushchev’s report” denouncing Stalin because, he argued, “the detailed exposition of all the crimes of a sacred figure, who represented the regime for so long, is madness”.
After visiting the USSR in 1954, Sartre claimed in an interview that there is a “complete freedom of criticism” in the USSR and “the Soviet citizen criticizes more and in a much more effective way” than Europeans do. His hosts plied him with so much food and drink that he became ill from boozing and claimed that by 1960, “the average standard of living in the USSR will be 30 to 40% higher than ours”. In reality, by the 1960s, there were food protests in the USSR resulting in more domestic repression including the Novocherkassk massacre in 1962.
Like many socialists, Sartre justified everything, including his lies and those of the regime, because he argued that, “Communism must be judged on its intentions and not solely on its actions.” He laid out his position with painful clarity when he used this to explain why Communist atrocities were understandable, but America must always be condemned.
“It is possible that there are a million deportees in certain countries occupied by the Russians. Fine. I am told this: we must protest strongly against this. On the other hand, I am told: it is very distressing that a black man was lynched in Alabama, for example. But he is a black man. We have one here and a million over there.” Sartre, however, contended that America, not the Soviet Union must be condemned because “if this deportation takes place, it is profoundly reprehensible, but it is a means to an end” while the lynching is “a mode of oppression.”
The killing of millions of people in the USSR, China (“nowhere have I ever witnessed such solidarity”), and in Cambodia was a means to an end and that end was socialism. Sartre glorified murderous dictatorships including the “spiritual revolution” in Iran because he agreed with their objectives while smearing America as genocidal because he disagreed with ours.
Sartre’s ‘conviction’ of the United States for committing genocide in Vietnam rested on his contention that all the Vietnamese (or all the ones he cared about) were Communists and thus “the only anti-guerrilla strategy which will be effective is the destruction of that people, in other words, the civilians, women and children.” American imperialists were committing genocide “as a warning to all humanity” (by humanity, Sartre once again meant Communists), and failing to fight with the Viet Cong against American capitalism also “amounts to genocide”.
Most revealingly, if the Americans were to defeat the Communists, they would “rebuild the DRV with mountains of dollars” and “this would mean that they would destroy, with their private investments or conditional loans, all the economic basis of socialism. That, too, is genocide.”
Genocide, to Sartre, was the defeat of socialism in general and Communism specifically.
Sartre, like many leftists, did not have a problem with the murder of millions of people. He did not use the term ‘genocide’ to describe the killing of millions under Communism, only to describe the defeat of Communism and everything that the socialists stood for. --->READ MORE HERE
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