Way behind on my e-mail, but in case someone has already pointed this out, there are more than a few war memorials dedicated to killed occupation fighters in France. The Germans described members of the Resistance as "terrorists".
Regards, Mike B)
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In the summer of 1941, when Hitler invaded Russia, the French Communist Party threw its full weight behind the Resistance. It faced a situation where the Germans took hostages and executed them in retaliation for acts of violence. The Communist slogan 'Chacun son boche' ('Let everybody kill a German') invited the assassination of individual German soldiers.
The Communists deliberately provoked Nazi repression, because this made it easier to encourage supporters to engage in armed struggle. They needed martyrs. The party exploited them both during the war and at the Liberation, when it styled itself the 'party of the executed'. The parallels with the suicide bombers of a later age are striking.
The German authorities responded by denouncing Resistance fighters as terrorists and common law criminals who did not deserve to be treated as prisoners of war, rather as the US treated its prisoners some 60 years later. http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=9099
****************************************************************** "All religions are cruel, all founded on blood; for all rest principally on the idea of sacrifice--that is, on the perpetual immolation of humanity to the insatiable vengence of divinity." --Bakunin http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal
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