By Malkia Charlee NoCry
18 June 2012, 02:45

Some of the images below may be disturbing.

Roger (Ragaa) Garaudy, French Philosopher, Marxist, Muslim and Holocaust Denier has passed away of natural causes at the age of 98, in Paris, France on the 13th of June this year.

His death made a tiny ripple in news media, as his prosecution for Holocaust denial in 1997 and subsequent suspended jail sentence, fine and French ban of “The Founding Myths of Modern Israel” (original title: Les Mythes fondateurs de la politique israélienne) is the pathetic legacy for which he will be best remembered.

Aspects of the muslim world – principally countries professing solidarity with Palestine – exalted Garaudy’s “Founding Myths”- as some believed that fundamental to the myth of the Israeli State is the false ‘belief’ in the Holocaust.

I too am in solidarity with Palestine – but for reasons very different from the male philosopher’s need to deny human suffering, perhaps principally due to his theoretical influence based in theosophy – I fail to have the political need to discount history in order to make a vain point about the injustice and inhumanity of the Israeli State.

This need to second count dead bodies – to over-emphasise a conspiratorial Jewish minority of Nazi-collaborators – citing the Holocaust as a propagandist conspiracy to allow US invasion of Germany – and to deem the Nuremburg trial as unjust in premise is a soured and dismal way for Garaudy to be remembered.

Any truth that the “Founding Myths” could have held is dirtied and invalidated by such hateful rhetoric. And this too includes his communist writings prior to his conversion to Islam in the 1980s.

It is evident within the political sphere that powerful States are more than well equipped to create hysteria around their political interest without the need to create the conspiracy of mass racist killings. The manipulation of victims in order to justify invasion has been used since the times of Vietnam. As a political philosopher one would think that Garaudy would have considered this very obvious point, before writing as though Auschwitz and Vernichtungslager are figments of our imagination.

The African Holocaust, for which an estimated 17 million (and counting) Africans were killed in the chattel slavery system known as the Transatlantic Slave Trade (I love that term, as if humans can be traded commerce), stands as a Holocaust often denied. Yet, just recently, Diaspora Africans of French colonies have received a powerful victory – the French government recognising its participation in the African Holocaust as a Crime Against Humanity, the Law Taubira, in 2001.

During The African Holocaust, Africans were deemed sub-human, epidemiologists like Malthus pondered ways in which to diminish the number of “savages” in European colonies, scientists experimented on enslaved Africans (such as the so-called father of Gynaecology, torturing hundreds of women), and philosophers such as Kant theorised on Africans inherent inferiority – as Blacks have not demonstrated any “interest” nor “aptitude” in “art”, “culture” or “analytical thinking”.

For the Diaspora African, it is common place for scholars, historians, philosophers and even lay-persons to deny and even poke fun at the Holocaust experienced by West and Central Africans from the 1550s to 1888. And this Holocaust lasted even longer if you additionally count, as I do, the lynchings of business owners, young men and women during Reconstruction and the segregation-system as a means to control African economic growth and development up until the 1960s. A sizable push for recognition of the African Holocaust has come from Socialist politicians, such as Christiane Taubira and marxist philosophers and historians.

The biggest disappointment in Garaudy is how far he strayed from his beginning philosophies, as his participation within the communist party should have given him more insight into the industries that fuel Holocaust – as it is as commercial as it is ethnic based.

As the Native American Genocide was based on land; the African Holocaust was based in free-labour, colonialisation of Africa and subsequent draining of mineral resources. And too, the Jewish Holocaust was to create both slaves and to disempower Jewish economic growth. Integral to maintaining all these ill-gotten manifest gains by supremacist powers is the necessity to invent factors supposedly based in philosophical, scientific and historical precedent that prove the group you seek to exploit is inferior. The Bible helps a lot with this, but cultural and physical differences is what makes the greatest lasting impact and social buy-in. The Jews were victimised in this – created hysteria based on the murder of Jesus Christ, hysteria manufactured around their so-called diminished morals, love of money, divisive liberalism, lesser language (Yiddish), strange religion… The list goes on. And from there, they were beaten, slaved and melted down to bone and in a horrifying and painful procedure.

What is interesting, is that Garaudy often espoused the hopes and aspirations of the Renaissance, as a time of enlightenment, for scientific growth and man’s mastery of nature. But how can man master the secrets of the universe, if he continues to feign ignorance at the suffering of his fellow “masters”? Garaudy’s thinking was neither enlightened nor helpful to the Palestinian cause. And again, as one who has read his earlier communist works – I find the “Founding Myths” to be profoundly disappointing and ill-founded to say the very least.

Garaudy was a man who was a good thinker, an impassioned scholar and an inquisitive philosopher – once. He advocated the co-existence of religion with scientific socialism, a unique way of viewing marxist ideology.

But I will not applaud a philosopher that in later life became burdened in religiosity, spewing hateful rhetoric to prove his political ideology, to not only the detriment of his legacy and humanity – but also to the detriment of those he supposedly was attempting to help. 6 million Jews, 11 million Roma peoples, other ethnic minorities, Liberals, communists, and gays were worked then systematically exterminated (lessons learned from the proliferation of the Africans population during slavery). This is fact. The Israeli State, and the Jewish Holocaust are two mutually exclusive things.

A philosopher died.

And that is all I have to say.