Ghost of a flea

As the Barbie trial transformed into a battle for history, it defied what seemed like unbreakable political limits. By the trial's end, the far ends of the political spectrum, the radical Left and the extreme Right had not only blurred, but had, at times, switched. At stake for both ends of the political spectrum was the same thing, a fundamental change in the way society viewed itself, and when they saw that the Barbie trial could bring about that common interest, the two sides merged. Fundamental change would occur, they reasoned, if they could elevate all crimes of imperialism and Western economic exploitation to the same status of the Holocaust. If the crimes of capitalistic exploitation could be given as much weight as the Holocaust, then in order for the French to condemn Klaus Barbie, they would have to accept that their own society was built on similar crimes and therefore corrupt. When people of a nation view their society as corrupt, they become disillusioned and the beneficiaries of disillusionment are almost always the political extremists. Thus, before any judgment could be made on Barbie and the Holocaust, the political extremes wanted to make sure France would have to judge itself and everything it held holy. As a consequence of the extremists' heavy involvement with the trial, the issue of Barbie and the Holocaust would become intertwined with the legacies of imperialism and racism.

On the day before the verdict of Barbie's trial, Alain Finkielkraut, one of France's foremost moderate thinkers and the son of survivors of Auschwitz could be found outside the Palais de Justice and he was visibly upset by what he saw. "Imagine," he said with more than a hint of bitter irony in his voice, "that we're in 1945, at the end of the war, and someone says, 'you'll see, in twenty or thirty years when they accuse and condemn a Nazi torturer, it'll be the 'subhumans' who will defend him.' Everyone would have laughed."