In France today, in the aftermath of the murders in a Kosher butcher shop and at the Charlie Hebdo publication, there is legitimate outrage and attempts by the French goverment to take police action against such atrocities.  But something else is happening, no where near as dramatic but in its own way as sinister.  A serious scholarly work, defending Soviet policy as directed the Stalin leadership of the USSR during WWII, a work that would not have been considered remarkable in France in the past  has been  been rejected for cataloguing by the Sorbonne, a leading European university.  As the petitioners state, the Sorbonne's library includes many fiercely anti-Soviet and anti-Communist polemical works, including the work of the German Historian, Ernst Nolte, who in recent years has emerged as a kind of apologist for Hitler fascism by define it as a reaction to the Soviet and Communist danger,minus of course the anti-Semitism of the Nazis.

In France today, there is a powerful neo-fascist party,the National Front, historically supporters of the collaborationist Vichy government during WWII and also rabidly anti-Communist and anti-Semitic, which has in recent years substituted anti-Muslim and anti-foreign worker bigotry for its traditional political anti-Semitism.  It has been gaining strength in France recently and this action by the Sorbonne, in the spirit of the old collaborators, will no doubt win its approval. If one set of opinions  and evaluations are omitted consciously, on these specious grounds, one has done the work of the Nazi book burners of yesterday and the "McCarthyites" in the U.S. who took various books, including those of W.E..B Dubois out of U.S. libraries in the 1950s.  I urge all of our readers to sign this petition and say to those who safely proclaim, "Je Suis Charlie Hebdo,"  "Je Suis Geoffrey Roberts, "Stalin's Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939-1953."  Please use the links to sign the petition and pass it on

Norman Markowitz

A user of the Sorbonne University's Pierre Mendès France Library recently proposed to a librarian that the library acquire the French edition of Stalin's Wars: From World War to Cold War 1939-1953 by Geoffrey Roberts, professor at the University of Cork in Ireland and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. The book was published in French in 2014 by Editions Delga, and originally published in English in 2006 by Yale University Press. The proposal received the following response:

 “The proposed work, although it was written by a university professor, does not in principle seem to us to display the historical and scientific neutrality required for it to be included on our shelves. Nor do the other books published by the same publishing house.”

It appears that, in the past, the library had accepted all our books concerning philosophy and marxism but has suddenly banned our books about USSR, including yours and a book of Henri Alleg.

In the sad context of fascisation in Europe, Annie Lacroix-Riz, Godefroy Clair and myself have launched a petition, that 1200 people have already signed.

Here is the site where you can find the petition :

http://www.historiographie.info/

Here is the text in english :

http://www.petitions24.net/petition_against_censorship_in_french_university_libraries

I hope to see you soon in Paris! Even in this context, it is still a nice place to be.

Yours truly, (Please Roger, could you inform Thomas Kenny? Thank you.)

Aymeric Monville (editor in chief, Editions Delga)