The Stalin school of falsification - Marxists Internet Archive

Stalin School of Falsification - Chapter 3
Thus the book as a whole comprises a collection of historical documents. But from the recent past, which
it encompasses, there run living threads to the present. In that sense the book is not at all a volume for the
archives; it is rather a weapon in the political struggle for the theory of Marx, for the policies of Lenin -against
the epigones.
Leon Trotsky
KADIKOI,September 13, 1931.
NOTES:
1. The Panama scandal occurred in France towards the end of the last century. Having plundered the
savings of countless small investors, the Society for the Building of the Panama Canal sought permission
for a lottery loan from the Chamber of Deputies in order to save itself from bankruptcy. Permission was
granted, but only after the bribing of cabinet ministers and some 150 deputies. After numerous
beginnings at an investigation which never went through due to the bribing of the judges, the scandal was
finally disclosed- involving the reactionary followers of General Boulanger, who were the Society's
directors, as well as their political opponents, the bourgeois republicans in government office. -- Alfred
Dreyfus, Lieutenant of the General Staff, was the victim of a frame-up which made French history. In
1894, he was tried, condemned, and banished to Devil's Island on the charge of espionage for Germany.
The perpetrators of the frame-up were the military clique and the reactionary politicians, who made
Dreyfus the symbol of the Jewish financial interests and on that basis, conducted a violent anti-Semitic
and anti- democratic campaign. The revelation of the frame-up by the "revisionists" (those for "revising"
the Dreyfus trial), among them Emile Zola, made public the depravity of wide sections of the French
ruling class. -- The Oustric affair became public at the end of 1930, when the banks of the
swindler-financier of that name collapsed. Resulting investigations revealed the intimate connection
between Oustric and leading statesmen and government officials of the day, who had secretly and
handsomely profited from his swindles. The cabinet of André Tardieu, who had been connected with
Oustric, as had numerous associates, fell on December 4, 1930, as a result of the scandal. -- Le Temps,
roughly the equivalent of the New York or London Times, is a leading reactionary of Paris, and almost
always the semi official voice of the government. It is owned by the Comité des Forges (the steel trust of
France) and associated interests. Its lofty moral probity may be judged from such facts as that its founder,
Senator Adrien Hebrard, received 1,769,415 francs in blackmail money for his silence about the Panama
Scandal, and that it was secretly and lavishly subsidized (together with most of the other "reputable"
French periodicals) with vast sums by the Czarist Government, through its agent, Raffalovich, secret
counselor of the Russian Ministry of Finances at Paris, for years before the war. [BACK TO TEXT]
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