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This broad­cast was record­ed in one, 60-minute seg­ment.

Intro­duc­tion: With the loom­ing deci­sive sec­ond round in the French elec­tions, there is renewed scruti­ny on the Nation­al Front and its tit­u­lar head Marine Le Pen. Net­worked with var­i­ous fig­ures rang­ing from the milieu of Don­ald Trump to that of Turk­ish pres­i­dent Erdo­gan, the Nation­al Front and the Le Pens (father Jean-Marie and daugh­ter Marine) are car­ry­ing on the fas­cist tra­di­tion in France.

The sec­ond of two shows, this pro­gram con­tin­ues our exam­i­na­tion of French deep pol­i­tics, scru­ti­niz­ing pow­er­ful eco­nom­ic and finan­cial arrange­ments that deter­mined the Fran­co-Ger­man polit­i­cal dynam­ic through­out most of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry and, thus far, through the twen­ty-first as well. (We note, in pass­ing, that a sim­i­lar rela­tion­ship between key Ger­man eco­nom­ic play­ers and their Amer­i­can coun­ter­parts is front and cen­ter in clan­des­tine Amer­i­can pow­er pol­i­tics. The his­to­ry of fas­cism, in turn, is inex­tri­ca­bly linked with the true his­to­ry of glob­al­iza­tion.)

Crit­i­cal to our under­stand­ing is the dynam­ic of occu­py­ing the high ground on both sides of a polit­i­cal divide. This pro­gram under­scores how this has placed Ger­many in a key strate­gic posi­tion on both sides of key polit­i­cal strug­gles:

1. In the pre-World War II era and post­war era as well.
2. In the right-left polit­i­cal divide in French pol­i­tics.
3. In the strug­gle between anti-immi­grant/an­ti-Mus­lim advo­cates such as the Nation­al Front and Mus­lim-Broth­er­hood linked ele­ments in the Islamist com­mu­ni­ty.

Key ele­ments of dis­cus­sion include:

1. Review of Steve Ban­non’s ide­o­log­i­cal fond­ness for French anti-Semi­te and Vichy col­lab­o­ra­tionist Charles Mau­r­ras. Mau­r­ras’ Action Fran­caise is a direct antecedent of the Nation­al Front. ”  . . . . One of the pri­ma­ry prog­en­i­tors of the par­ty was the Action Française, found­ed at the end of the 19th cen­tu­ry. . . .”
2. Review of the rela­tion­ship between for­mer pres­i­dent Fran­cois Mit­terand (a social­ist) and French Holo­caust imple­menter and Vichy police offi­cial Rene Bous­quet, who was close to Mit­terand and helped to finance his cam­paign and those of oth­er left-wing French politi­cians. With finan­cial influ­ence in left-wing par­ties, Ger­many can help moti­vate the French left to band togeth­er to defeat the French Nation­al Front and its anti-EU, anti-NATO ide­ol­o­gy. Poten­tial left­ists can also be chan­nelled into an anti-immi­grant/an­ti-Mus­lim posi­tion along that of the Nation­al Front. ” . . . . . . . The most damn­ing of all charges against Mit­ter­rand and his right wing con­nec­tions is prob­a­bly his long last­ing friend­ship with René Bous­quet, ex secré­taire général of the Vichy police. . . . In 1974, René Bous­quet gave finan­cial help to François Mit­ter­rand for his pres­i­den­tial cam­paign against Valéry Gis­card d’Es­taing. In an inter­view with Pierre Favier et Michel Mar­tin-Roland Mit­ter­rand claimed that he was not the only left wing politi­cian to ben­e­fit from Bous­quet’s mon­ey, as René Bous­quet helped finance all the prin­ci­pal left wing politi­cians from the 1950s to the begin­ning of the 1970s, includ­ing Pierre Mendès France. . . .”
3. Dis­cus­sion of Fran­cois Mit­terand’s pri­ma­ry role in estab­lish­ing the Euro, as a pre­req­ui­site for Ger­man reuni­fi­ca­tion (his alleged “fear” of a reuni­fied Ger­many should be tak­en with a grain of salt in light of his col­lab­o­ra­tionist back­ground and rela­tion­ship with Rene Bous­quet. The Euro­pean Mon­e­tary Union, in turn, is the real­iza­tion of a long-stand­ing Ger­man plan for eco­nom­ic and con­se­quent­ly polit­i­cal dom­i­na­tion of Europe and the World: ” . . . . He [Robert Zoel­lick] explained his under­stand­ing of how Europe got its com­mon cur­ren­cy. . . .  it was very clear that Euro­pean mon­e­tary union result­ed from French-Ger­man ten­sions before uni­fi­ca­tion and was meant to calm Mitterrand’s fears of an all-too-pow­er­ful Ger­many. Accord­ing to Zoel­lick, the euro cur­ren­cy is a by-prod­uct of Ger­man uni­fi­ca­tion. . . . in strate­gic terms, Germany’s influ­ence has nev­er been greater. As the con­ti­nent wants to bank on Germany’s AAA rat­ing, Berlin can now effec­tive­ly dic­tate fis­cal pol­i­cy to Athens, Lis­bon and Rome – per­haps in the future to Paris, too. . .”
   
4. More about the Euro (launched with the crit­i­cal­ly impor­tant assis­tance of Fran­cois Mit­terand: “. . . . It [the euro] has turned the Ger­mans into the new rulers of Europe. And it has con­signed France to be the weak­er part­ner in the Fran­co-Ger­man rela­tion­ship. . . .”
5. Analy­sis of the deci­sive rela­tion­ship between French steel­mak­ers belong­ing to the Comite des Forges and their Ger­man coun­ter­parts and Ruhr coal pro­duc­ers, one of the foun­da­tion­al ele­ments of the Fifth Col­umn that is antecedent to the Nation­al Front: ” . . . . The strug­gle of the inter­war peri­od was not sim­ply a clash between French inter­ests on the one side and Ger­man inter­ests on the oth­er. Dur­ing the devel­op­ment of the Ruhr-Lor­raine indus­tri­al com­plex, like-mind­ed indus­tri­al­ists in France and Ger­many had become direc­tors of joint­ly owned and joint­ly con­trolled finan­cial, indus­tri­al, and dis­trib­ut­ing enter­pris­es. In many cas­es com­mon views on ques­tions of eco­nom­ic orga­ni­za­tion, labor pol­i­cy, social leg­is­la­tion, and atti­tude toward gov­ern­ment had been far more impor­tant to the indus­tri­al­ists than dif­fer­ences of nation­al­i­ty or cit­i­zen­ship. . . . ”
6. The eco­nom­ic col­lab­o­ra­tion between French and Ger­man oli­garchs worked to the advan­tage of Ger­many: ” . . . .It is curi­ous to note that only the French appeared to have this con­flict between pub­lic pol­i­cy and pri­vate activ­i­ties. On the Ger­man side, com­plete co-ordi­na­tion seems to have been pre­served between nation­al and pri­vate inter­ests; between offi­cials of the Ger­man Repub­lic and the lead­ers of Ger­man indus­try and finance. . . .”
7. Exem­pli­fy­ing the oper­a­tion of the pro-Ger­man Fifth Col­umn in the Ruhr-Lor­raine indus­tri­al com­plex is the rela­tion­ship between the De Wen­del and Rochling inter­ests: ” . . . . Dur­ing World War I the De Wen­dels, the influ­en­tial French-Ger­man bank­ing and indus­tri­al fam­i­ly which head­ed the French wing of the Inter­na­tion­al Steel Car­tel through their Comite des Forges and whose mem­bers had sat in the par­lia­ments of both France and Ger­many, were able to keep the French army from destroy­ing indus­tri­al plants belong­ing to the Ger­man enter­pris­es of the Rochling fam­i­ly. . . . . . . . The Rochling fam­i­ly, with their pow­er­ful com­plex of coal, iron, steel and bank­ing enter­pris­es in Ger­many, has for gen­er­a­tions played in close har­mo­ny with the de Wen­del fam­i­ly. . . .”
8. The De Wendel/Rochling links were so pro­found that the Rochlings were called upon to help build the French defen­sive Mag­inot Line: ” . . . . On the oth­er hand, as far as the French steel mak­ers’ asso­ci­a­tion, the Comite des Forges, and in par­tic­u­lar the de Wen­dels who head­ed the Comite, were con­cerned, it was busi­ness as usu­al-or in this case, busi­ness as unusu­al-that pre­vailed. . . . When it came time for France to build its impreg­nable Mag­inot Line, who should be called in to sup­ply steel and tech­ni­cal assis­tance but the Ger­man firm of the broth­ers Rochling. . . .”
9. After the French capit­u­la­tion, the Vichy government–to no one’s sur­prise–exon­er­at­ed the Rochlings: ” . . . . Now comes the out­break of World War II. The French army march­ing into the Saar dur­ing the ‘pho­ny war’ peri­od in 1939, received orders not to fire on or dam­age the plants of the ‘war crim­i­nals,’ the broth­ers Rochling. In 1940 came the blitz and the fall of France. The Vichy gov­ern­ment passed a decree exon­er­at­ing the Rochlings and can­cel­ing their forty-year prison sen­tences. . . .”
10. The Fran­co-Ger­man steel car­tel, in turn, belonged to an inter­na­tion­al steel car­tel fea­tur­ing the Thyssen firm Vere­inigte Stahlw­erke (lat­er Thyssen A.G.). The Thyssen inter­ests are inex­tri­ca­bly linked with the Bor­mann cap­i­tal net­work. The Thyssens’ prin­ci­pal Amer­i­can con­tacts were the Bush fam­i­ly. ” . . . . They marked the for­ma­tion of the Unit­ed Steel Works in Ger­many, as a com­bi­na­tion of the four biggest steel pro­duc­ers Ernst Poens­gen, Fritz Thyssen, Otto Wolff, and the oth­ers who drew this com­bine togeth­er had man­aged to get over a hun­dred mil­lion dol­lars from pri­vate investors in the Unit­ed States. Dil­lon Read & Com­pa­ny, the New York invest­ment house which brought Clarence Dil­lon, James V. For­re­stal, William H. Drap­er, Jr., and oth­ers into promi­nence, float­ed the Unit­ed Steel Works bonds in the Unit­ed States . . . . ”
11. Dur­ing the occu­pa­tion of France, the Fran­co-Ger­man cor­po­rate con­nec­tion yield­ed fur­ther Ger­man cap­i­tal dom­i­na­tion of French firms: ” . . . The Third Repub­lic’s busi­ness elite was vir­tu­al­ly unchanged after 1940. . . . They regard­ed the war and Hitler as an unfor­tu­nate diver­sion from their chief mis­sion of pre­vent­ing a com­mu­nist rev­o­lu­tion in France. Anti­bol­she­vism was a com­mon denom­i­na­tor link­ing these French­men to Ger­mans. . . . The upper-class men who had been superbly trained in finance and admin­is­tra­tion at one of the two grand corps schools were referred to as France’s per­ma­nent ‘wall of mon­ey,’ and as pro­fes­sion­als they came into their own in 1940. They agreed to the estab­lish­ment of Ger­man sub­sidiary firms in France and per­mit­ted a gen­er­al buy-in to French com­pa­nies. . . .
12. The Fran­co-Ger­man cor­po­rate links and the dom­i­na­tion of that rela­tion­ship by cor­po­rate Ger­many and the Bor­mann net­work con­tin­ued into the post­war peri­od: ” . . . . Soci­ety’s nat­ur­al sur­vivors, French ver­sion, who had served the Third Reich as an exten­sion of Ger­man indus­try, would con­tin­ue to do so in the peri­od of post­war tri­als, just as they had sur­vived the war, occu­pa­tion, and lib­er­a­tion. These were many of the French elite, the well-born, the prop­er­tied, the titled, the experts, indus­tri­al­ists, busi­ness­men, bureau­crats, bankers. . . . Eco­nom­ic col­lab­o­ra­tion in France with the Ger­mans had been so wide­spread (on all lev­els of soci­ety) that there had to be a real­iza­tion that an entire nation could not be brought to tri­al. . .  .”
13. Cor­po­rate German/Bormann con­trol of French com­merce and finance is the deter­min­ing fac­tor in con­tem­po­rary French affairs: ” . . . . The under­stand­ings arrived at in the pow­er struc­ture of France reach back to pre­war days, were con­tin­ued dur­ing the occu­pa­tion, and have car­ried over to the present time. [New York Times reporter Flo­ra] Lewis, in her report from Paris, com­ment­ed fur­ther: ‘This hid­den con­trol of gov­ern­ment and cor­po­ra­tions has pro­duced a gen­er­al unease in Paris.’ Along with the unease, the fact that France has lin­ger­ing and seri­ous social and polit­i­cal ail­ments is a residue of World War II and of an eco­nom­ic occu­pa­tion that was nev­er real­ly ter­mi­nat­ed with the with­draw­al of Ger­man troops beyond the Rhine. . . .”
14. The Fran­co-Ger­man cor­po­rate Axis facil­i­tat­ed the De Wen­del fam­i­ly’s post­war assis­tance of Friedrich Flick, anoth­er of Hitler’s top indus­tri­al­ists.: ” . . . . The under­stand­ings arrived at in the pow­er struc­ture of France reach back to pre­war days, were con­tin­ued dur­ing the occu­pa­tion, and have car­ried over to the present time. Lewis, in her report from Paris, com­ment­ed fur­ther: ‘This hid­den con­trol of gov­ern­ment and cor­po­ra­tions has pro­duced a gen­er­al unease in Paris.’ Along with the unease, the fact that France has lin­ger­ing and seri­ous social and polit­i­cal ail­ments is a residue of World War II and of an eco­nom­ic occu­pa­tion that was nev­er real­ly ter­mi­nat­ed with the with­draw­al of Ger­man troops beyond the Rhine. . . .”
15. The seam­less incor­po­ra­tion of the Fran­co-Ger­man cor­po­rate axis into the Ger­man-dom­i­nat­ed EU and EMU has yield­ed the abil­i­ty of the Fed­er­al Repub­lic to inter­fere in the French polit­i­cal process: ” . . . . Like Fil­lon, Macron is con­sid­ered ‘Ger­many-com­pat­i­ble’ by a Ger­man think tank, where­as all oth­er can­di­dates are viewed as unsuit­able for ‘con­struc­tive coop­er­a­tion’ because of their crit­i­cism of the EU and/or of NATO. Recent­ly, Ger­many’s Finance Min­is­ter Wolf­gang Schäu­ble osten­ta­tious­ly rec­om­mend­ed vot­ing for Macron. Berlin’s inter­fer­ence on behalf of Macron shows once again that Ger­man dom­i­na­tion of the EU does not stop at nation­al bor­ders, and — accord­ing to a well-known EU observ­er — sur­pass­es by far Rus­si­a’s fee­ble med­dling in France. . . .”

The pro­gram con­cludes with rumi­na­tion about the role of anti-Mus­lim sen­ti­ment in the French and U.S. polit­i­cal process and the pres­ence of Under­ground Reich-linked ele­ments on both the “anti-immi­grant” side and the Islamist/Muslim Broth­er­hood side.

Pro­gram High­lights Include:

1. Review of the Islamist/Muslim Broth­er­hood Turk­ish Refah Par­ty (the direct antecedent of Erdo­gan’s AKP) and its rela­tion­ship to Ahmed Huber of the Bank Al-Taqwa.
2. Review of the role of Ahmed Huber (lat­er of the Bank Al-Taqwa) in intro­duc­ing Turk­ish Mus­lim Broth­er­hood’s Necmet­tin Erbakan with Marine Le Pen’s father: ” . . . . . . . . A sec­ond pho­to­graph, in which Hitler is talk­ing with Himm­ler, hangs next to those of Necmet­tin Erbakan and Jean-Marie Le Pen [leader of the fas­cist Nation­al Front]. Erbakan, head of the Turk­ish Islamist par­ty, Refah, turned to Achmed Huber for an intro­duc­tion to the chief of the French par­ty of the far right. Exit­ing from the meet­ing  . . . .   Huber’s two friends sup­pos­ed­ly stat­ed that they ‘share the same view of the world’ and expressed ‘their com­mon desire to work togeth­er to remove the last racist obsta­cles that still pre­vent the union of the Islamist move­ment with the nation­al right of Europe.’. . .”
3. Review of The Camp of the Saints, a racist, anti-immi­grant book val­ued both by French Nation­al Front types and Trump advi­sor Steve Ban­non.

1. It isn’t just the Nation­al Front that has roots in the Fifth Column/Vichy. Social­ist Fran­cois Mit­terand was part of the French Fifth Col­umn milieu and was very close to Rene Bous­quet, who helped finance his polit­i­cal career and those of oth­er left-wing French politi­cians.

“Mit­terand and the Far Right”; Wikipedia.

. . . The most damming of all charges against Mit­ter­rand and his right wing con­nec­tions is prob­a­bly his long last­ing friend­ship with René Bous­quet, ex secré­taire général of the Vichy police. Charles de Gaulle said of Mit­ter­rand and Bous­quet “they are ghosts who come from the deep­est depths of the collaboration.”[24] Georges-Marc Ben­amou quotes Mit­ter­rand as say­ing of Bous­quet “his career shat­tered at the age of 35, it was dread­ful. . . . In 1974, René Bous­quet gave finan­cial help to François Mit­ter­rand for his pres­i­den­tial cam­paign against Valéry Gis­card d’Es­taing. In an inter­view with Pierre Favier et Michel Mar­tin-Roland Mit­ter­rand claimed that he was not the only left wing politi­cian to ben­e­fit from Bous­quet’s mon­ey, as René Bous­quet helped finance all the prin­ci­pal left wing politi­cians from the 1950s to the begin­ning of the 1970s, includ­ing Pierre Mendès France. Worse still after Mit­ter­rand’s 1981 win René Bous­quet was received at the Élysée palace “to talk pol­i­tics”. In an inter­view with Pas­cale Fro­ment (René Bous­quet’s biog­ra­ph­er) Mit­ter­rand declared “I lis­tened to him as a polit­i­cal com­men­ta­tor. He saw me as a con­tin­u­a­tion of his halt­ed career.”[26] Only in 1986, when media crit­i­cism of Bous­quet began to gain in vol­ume, did Mit­ter­rand stop see­ing him and he did not com­ment on the mat­ter until the 1994 inter­view with Jean-Pierre Elkabach.[27] Lionel Jospin com­ment­ed that he was lit­tle impressed by the Pres­i­den­t’s expla­na­tion say­ing “One would have liked a sim­pler and more trans­par­ent rise to pow­er for the leader of the French left dur­ing the 70s and 80s. What I can’t under­stand is the con­tin­u­ing rela­tion­ship into the 80’s with the likes of Bous­quet who orga­nized the mass arrests of Jews”[28] and Charles Fiter­man also felt let down: “these rev­e­la­tions leave the uncom­fort­able impres­sion of hav­ing been deceived by the man. 50 years lat­er we see no trace of regret nor crit­i­cal analy­sis, but a con­tin­u­a­tion of a com­pro­mis­ing rela­tion­ship which casts new light on events such as putting flow­ers on Pétain’s tomb. This seems to show a con­ti­nu­ity in the choic­es of a leader call­ing in favors from a net­work of friends.”[29] Pierre Moscovi­ci, com­ment­ing on Pierre Péan’s book said ” What shocked me is his rub­bing shoul­ders with some­one who was instru­men­tal in state anti­semitism and the ‘final solu­tion’. We can’t tol­er­ate such tol­er­ance of evil, and for me René Bous­quet was absolute evil”[30] and the his­to­ri­an Pierre Miquel com­ment­ing on the TV inter­view said “the com­ments... of the Pres­i­dent of the Repub­lic are part of a dis­course from the right... on the sub­ject of the occupation”[31] . . .

2. In the con­text of Mit­terand’s past, we will also high­light the endeav­ors of Robert Zoel­lick in the con­text of Ger­man reuni­fi­ca­tion. Zoel­lick recent­ly con­firmed that Mit­terand insist­ed on the estab­lish­ment of a com­mon cur­ren­cy as pre-con­di­tion for Ger­man  reuni­fi­ca­tion. Zoel­lick was a prin­ci­pal archi­tect of that reuni­fi­ca­tion, as well as a prob­a­ble oper­a­tive on behalf of the Under­ground Reich.

“A Euro Pow­er Play that Back­fired” by Oliv­er Mark Hartwich; Busi­ness Spec­ta­tor; 8/17/2011.

To ful­ly appre­ci­ate the sub­tle ironies of the euro cri­sis it takes a sense for his­to­ry. Europe’s com­mon cur­ren­cy has prac­ti­cal­ly achieved the very oppo­site of what its cre­ators orig­i­nal­ly intend­ed. Instead of fram­ing the Ger­mans in Europe, the cri­sis has ele­vat­ed Ger­many to the continent’s new, albeit reluc­tant, hege­mon. For­mer French Pres­i­dent François Mit­ter­rand must be spin­ning in his grave.

Last Sun­day, the Asia Soci­ety host­ed a din­ner for World Bank Pres­i­dent Robert Zoel­lick in Syd­ney. His warn­ings about a fur­ther esca­la­tion of the debt cri­sis were wide­ly report­ed, and the high-cal­i­bre audi­ence cer­tain­ly appre­ci­at­ed his views on the state of emerg­ing mar­kets. How­ev­er, Zoel­lick also gave a fas­ci­nat­ing insight into the ear­ly his­to­ry of Euro­pean mon­e­tary union.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in Novem­ber 1989, Zoel­lick was the lead US offi­cial in the ‘two-plus-four’ nego­ti­a­tions that pre­pared Germany’s re-uni­fi­ca­tion in Octo­ber 1990 (so named after the two Ger­man states and the four allied forces – Britain, France, the Sovi­et Union and the US). He was thus inti­mate­ly involved in the diplo­mat­ic bal­anc­ing act of uni­fy­ing Ger­many while reas­sur­ing the British and the French that they had noth­ing to fear from this new and big­ger coun­try in the heart of Europe. For his achieve­ments, Zoel­lick was even made a Knight Com­man­der of the Ger­man order of mer­it, a very high award for a for­eign nation­al. [Ital­ics are mine–D.E.]

British Prime Min­is­ter Mar­garet Thatch­er was hor­ri­fied about the prospect of a unit­ed Ger­many. “We beat the Ger­mans twice, and now they’re back,” she alleged­ly told a meet­ing of Euro­pean lead­ers at the time. Thatch­er even invit­ed his­to­ri­ans to a sem­i­nar at Che­quers to dis­cuss the ques­tion of how dan­ger­ous the Ger­mans real­ly were. Her trade min­is­ter, Nicholas Rid­ley, was forced to resign after he had com­pared Ger­man chan­cel­lor Hel­mut Kohl to Adolf Hitler in an inter­view with The Spec­ta­tor. . . .

. . . .  Almost in pass­ing, and as if it was the most obvi­ous thing in the world, he explained his under­stand­ing of how Europe got its com­mon cur­ren­cy. And his account con­firmed the rumours that it had a lot to do with Ger­man uni­fi­ca­tion.

As Zoel­lick told his audi­ence (that was prob­a­bly unaware of how con­tro­ver­sial these issues still are in Europe) it was very clear that Euro­pean mon­e­tary union result­ed from French-Ger­man ten­sions before uni­fi­ca­tion and was meant to calm Mitterrand’s fears of an all-too-pow­er­ful Ger­many. Accord­ing to Zoel­lick, the euro cur­ren­cy is a by-prod­uct of Ger­man uni­fi­ca­tion. As one of the key insid­ers in the two-plus-four nego­ti­a­tions, trust­ed and high­ly dec­o­rat­ed by the Ger­mans, nobody would be bet­ter qual­i­fied to know the real sto­ry behind Euro­pean Mon­e­tary Union. Despite all offi­cial denials com­ing from the Ger­man gov­ern­ment until the present day, there are no good rea­sons not to believe Zoellick’s account of the events.

The great his­tor­i­cal irony of this sto­ry is, of course, that if the French had real­ly planned to weak­en the pow­ers of new­ly reunit­ed Ger­many through mon­e­tary union, this attempt has now com­plete­ly back­fired. Sure, the Ger­mans will pay mas­sive­ly for the sake of keep­ing the euro project alive (if they don’t pull out of mon­e­tary union once they realise this). But in strate­gic terms, Germany’s influ­ence has nev­er been greater. As the con­ti­nent wants to bank on Germany’s AAA rat­ing, Berlin can now effec­tive­ly dic­tate fis­cal pol­i­cy to Athens, Lis­bon and Rome – per­haps in the future to Paris, too. . .

. . . As it turns out, the euro is not only an unwork­able cur­ren­cy. It actu­al­ly start­ed as a French insur­ance pol­i­cy against Ger­man pow­er. But even as an insur­ance pol­i­cy it has failed. Against their will, it has turned the Ger­mans into the new rulers of Europe. And it has con­signed France to be the weak­er part­ner in the Fran­co-Ger­man rela­tion­ship.

If Mit­ter­rand had known all this in advance, he would have insist­ed on Ger­many keep­ing the Deutschmark as the price for Ger­man uni­fi­ca­tion. . . .

3a. In order to grasp the foun­da­tion of the deep pol­i­tics that deter­mine the Franco/German dynam­ic in Europe, we review the rela­tion­ship between the De Wen­dels and the Rochlings (as well as oth­er Ger­man indus­tri­al­ists). This mate­r­i­al is excerpt­ed from FTR #372, record­ed in August of 2002.  [The Ruhr is a tra­di­tion­al coal-pro­duc­ing region, with strong eco­nom­ic links to the French steel pro­duc­ers of the Lor­raine dis­trict.] This rela­tion­ship tran­scend­ed French nation­al inter­ests, and worked to sub­vert them at times. The De Wen­del fam­i­ly in France had strong con­nec­tions with, among oth­ers, the Rochlings in Ger­many. This result­ed in French pro­tec­tion for Ger­man steel pro­duc­ing ele­ments in the Briey Basin dur­ing World War I, the pro­tec­tion of the Rochlings from French crim­i­nal charges between the wars, and the award­ing of key con­tracts for con­struc­tion of the Mag­inot Line to the Rochlings pri­or to World War II.

All Hon­or­able Men; James Stew­art Mar­tin; Copy­right 1950 [HC]; Lit­tle, Brown & Co.; pp. 34–36.

. . . . . The hor­i­zon­tal sep­a­ra­tion of pri­vate inter­ests from gov­ern­ment poli­cies went even fur­ther. The strug­gle of the inter­war peri­od was not sim­ply a clash between French inter­ests on the one side and Ger­man inter­ests on the oth­er. Dur­ing the devel­op­ment of the Ruhr-Lor­raine indus­tri­al com­plex, like-mind­ed indus­tri­al­ists in France and Ger­many had become direc­tors of joint­ly owned and joint­ly con­trolled finan­cial, indus­tri­al, and dis­trib­ut­ing enter­pris­es. In many cas­es com­mon views on ques­tions of eco­nom­ic orga­ni­za­tion, labor pol­i­cy, social leg­is­la­tion, and atti­tude toward gov­ern­ment had been far more impor­tant to the indus­tri­al­ists than dif­fer­ences of nation­al­i­ty or cit­i­zen­ship. After 1870 the inter­de­pen­dence of the French and Ger­man iron and steel indus­tries led the own­ers to work togeth­er despite nation­al dif­fer­ences, although the pri­vate activ­i­ties of the French own­ers were, in many instances, in direct oppo­si­tion to French pub­lic pol­i­cy. It is curi­ous to note that only the French appeared to have this con­flict between pub­lic pol­i­cy and pri­vate activ­i­ties. On the Ger­man side, com­plete co-ordi­na­tion seems to have been pre­served between nation­al and pri­vate inter­ests; between offi­cials of the Ger­man Repub­lic and the lead­ers of Ger­man indus­try and finance. . . .

. . . . Dur­ing World War I the De Wen­dels, the influ­en­tial French-Ger­man bank­ing and indus­tri­al fam­i­ly which head­ed the French wing of the Inter­na­tion­al Steel Car­tel through their Comite des Forges and whose mem­bers had sat in the par­lia­ments of both France and Ger­many, were able to keep the French army from destroy­ing indus­tri­al plants belong­ing to the Ger­man enter­pris­es of the Rochling fam­i­ly. These plants were locat­ed in the Briey Basin, a Lor­raine ore field then in Ger­man con­trol. . . .

. . . . The Rochling fam­i­ly, with their pow­er­ful com­plex of coal, iron, steel and bank­ing enter­pris­es in Ger­many, has for gen­er­a­tions played in close har­mo­ny with the de Wen­del fam­i­ly. For a cen­tu­ry, the descen­dants of Chris­t­ian Rochling have dom­i­nat­ed the indus­try and com­merce of the Saar Basin. It was Her­mann Rochling who arranged the return of the Saar to Ger­many in the plebiscite of Jan­u­ary 1935 by orga­niz­ing the Deutsche Front, which deliv­ered 90 per­cent of the votes to the Nazis. Though sev­en­ty-two mem­bers of the Rochling fam­i­ly have sur­vived two world wars and are still active in the busi­ness of the Saar today, two oth­er mem­bers of the fam­i­ly, Her­mann and his broth­er Robert, a major, had been put in charge of pro­duc­tion in the Briey Basin. After the war, when the broth­ers Rochling moved out of the areas which had to be ced­ed to France under the Treaty, the two of them car­ried away bod­i­ly a cou­ple of large steel plants. . . .

. . . . Con­ceiv­ing this grand lar­ce­ny to be some­thing in the nature of a war crime, the French gov­ern­ment tried the broth­ers Rochling in absen­tia and sen­tenced them to forty years in prison. But the Ger­man gov­ern­ment nev­er would give up the Rochlings to the French. For the next twen­ty-two years the broth­ers were under this cloud as far as the French gov­ern­ment was con­cerned. On the oth­er hand, as far as the French steel mak­ers’ asso­ci­a­tion, the Comite des Forges, and in par­tic­u­lar the de Wen­dels who head­ed the Comite, were con­cerned, it was busi­ness as usu­al-or in this case, busi­ness as unusu­al-that pre­vailed. In the end even the French gov­ern­ment weak­ened for busi­ness pur­pos­es, though the war-crime sen­tence remained. When it came time for France to build its impreg­nable Mag­inot Line, who should be called in to sup­ply steel and tech­ni­cal assis­tance but the Ger­man firm of the broth­ers Rochling. If the French behaved in this as did the Amer­i­cans dur­ing World War II in the case of insur­ance cov­er­age on war plants, they doubt­less placed plen­ty of guards to pro­tect the secu­ri­ty and secre­cy of the Mag­inot Line con­struc­tion from the pry­ing eyes of the gen­er­al pub­lic while the blue­prints rest­ed safe­ly in the hands of the only peo­ple to whom they mat­tered: to wit, the ene­my. . . .

. . . . Now comes the out­break of World War II. The French army march­ing into the Saar dur­ing the ‘pho­ny war’ peri­od in 1939, received orders not to fire on or dam­age the plants of the ‘war crim­i­nals,’ the broth­ers Rochling. In 1940 came the blitz and the fall of France. The Vichy gov­ern­ment passed a decree exon­er­at­ing the Rochlings and can­cel­ing their forty-year prison sen­tences. . . .

3b. The Fran­co-Ger­man steel car­tel, in turn, was part of an inter­na­tion­al steel car­tel fea­tur­ing the Thyssen firm Vere­inigte Stahlw­erke (lat­er Thyssen A.G.). The Thyssen inter­ests are inex­tri­ca­bly linked with the Bor­mann cap­i­tal net­work. The Thyssens’ prin­ci­pal Amer­i­can con­tacts were the Bush fam­i­ly.

All Hon­or­able Men; James Stew­art Mar­tin; Copy­right 1950 [HC]; Lit­tle, Brown & Co.; pp. 41–42.

. . . . The mid-twen­ties were remark­able for Ger­man indus­tri­al com­bi­na­tion. They marked the for­ma­tion of the Unit­ed Steel Works in Ger­many, as a com­bi­na­tion of the four biggest steel pro­duc­ers Ernst Poens­gen, Fritz Thyssen, Otto Wolff, and the oth­ers who drew this com­bine togeth­er had man­aged to get over a hun­dred mil­lion dol­lars from pri­vate investors in the Unit­ed States. Dil­lon Read & Com­pa­ny, the New York invest­ment house which brought Clarence Dil­lon, James V. For­re­stal, William H. Drap­er, Jr., and oth­ers into promi­nence, float­ed the Unit­ed Steel Works bonds in the Unit­ed States behind a glow­ing prospec­tus which declared that the Unit­ed Steel Works Cor­po­ra­tion (Vere­inigte Stahlw­erke) ‘will be the largest indus­tri­al unit in Europe and one of the largest man­u­fac­tur­ers of iron and steel in the world, rank­ing in pro­duc­tive capac­i­ty sec­ond only to the Unit­ed States Steel Cor­po­ra­tion.’ The for­ma­tion of Unit­ed Steel gave its man­age­ment tremen­dous pow­er in Ger­many: enough to car­ry through with­out delay the orga­ni­za­tion of the Ger­man domes­tic steel car­tel, and to guar­an­tee the ‘good behav­ior’ of all Ger­man steel com­pa­nies in their agree­ments with for­eign firms. . . .

4a.  French finan­cial insti­tu­tions were cen­tral to the Bor­mann flight cap­i­tal plan.

Mar­tin Bor­mann: Nazi in Exile; Paul Man­ning; Copy­right 1981 [HC]; Lyle Stu­art Inc.; ISBN 0–8184-0309–8; p. 140.

. . . . Before D‑day four Paris banks, Worms et Cie., Banque de Paris et de Pays-Bas, Banque de l’In­do­chine (now with ‘et de Suez’ added to its name), and Banque Nationale pour le Com­merce et l’In­dus­trie (now Banque Nationale de Paris), were used by Bor­mann to siphon NSDAP and oth­er Ger­man mon­ey in France to their bank branch­es in the colonies, where it was safe­guard­ed and invest­ed for its Ger­man own­er­ship. . . .

4b. As dis­cussed above, there were strong con­nec­tions between French indus­tri­al­ists and their Ger­man coun­ter­parts, a struc­tur­al rela­tion­ship that con­tributed to and facil­i­tat­ed polit­i­cal coop­er­a­tion dur­ing the Occu­pa­tion.

Mar­tin Bor­mann: Nazi in Exile; Paul Man­ning; Copy­right 1981 [HC]; Lyle Stu­art Inc.; ISBN 0–8184-0309–8; pp. 70–71.

. . . . In the years before the war, the Ger­man busi­ness­men, indus­tri­al­ists, and bankers had estab­lished close ties with their coun­ter­parts in France. After the blitzkrieg and inva­sion, the same French­men in many cas­es went on work­ing with their Ger­man peers. They did­n’t have much choice, to be sure, and the occu­pa­tion being insti­tut­ed, very few in the high ech­e­lons of com­merce and finance failed to col­lab­o­rate. The Third Repub­lic’s busi­ness elite was vir­tu­al­ly unchanged after 1940 . . . They regard­ed the war and Hitler as an unfor­tu­nate diver­sion from their chief mis­sion of pre­vent­ing a com­mu­nist rev­o­lu­tion in France. Anti­bol­she­vism was a com­mon denom­i­na­tor link­ing these French­men to Ger­mans, and it account­ed for a vol­un­teer French divi­sion on the East­ern Front. . .The upper-class men who had been superbly trained in finance and admin­is­tra­tion at one of the two grand corps schools were referred to as France’s per­ma­nent ‘wall of mon­ey,’ and as pro­fes­sion­als they came into their own in 1940. They agreed to the estab­lish­ment of Ger­man sub­sidiary firms in France and per­mit­ted a gen­er­al buy-in to French com­pa­nies. . . .

4c. The Ger­man eco­nom­ic con­trol of the French econ­o­my pro­ceed­ed smooth­ly into the post­war peri­od.

Mar­tin Bor­mann: Nazi in Exile; Paul Man­ning; Copy­right 1981 [HC]; Lyle Stu­art Inc.; ISBN 0–8184-0309–8; p. 30.

. . . . Soci­ety’s nat­ur­al sur­vivors, French ver­sion, who had served the Third Reich as an exten­sion of Ger­man indus­try, would con­tin­ue to do so in the peri­od of post­war tri­als, just as they had sur­vived the war, occu­pa­tion, and lib­er­a­tion. These were many of the French elite, the well-born, the prop­er­tied, the titled, the experts, indus­tri­al­ists, busi­ness­men, bureau­crats, bankers. . . . Eco­nom­ic col­lab­o­ra­tion in France with the Ger­mans had been so wide­spread (on all lev­els of soci­ety) that there had to be a real­iza­tion that an entire nation could not be brought to tri­al. Only a few years before, there had been many a sin­cere and well-mean­ing Frenchman—as in Bel­gium, Eng­land, and through­out Europe — who believed Nation­al Social­ism to be the wave of the future, indeed, the only hope for cur­ing the many des­per­ate social, polit­i­cal, and eco­nom­ic ills of the time. France, along with oth­er occu­pied coun­tries, did con­tribute vol­un­teers for the fight against Rus­sia. Then there were many oth­er French­men, the major­i­ty, who resigned­ly felt there was no way the Ger­mans could be pushed back across the Rhine. . . .

4d. Long after the war, the Bor­mann orga­ni­za­tion con­tin­ued to wield effec­tive con­trol of the French econ­o­my, uti­liz­ing the cor­po­rate rela­tion­ships devel­oped before and dur­ing the occu­pa­tion. Note, again, the role of the De Wen­del fam­i­ly in the post­war resus­ci­ta­tion of the Ger­man steel firm of Friedrich Flick.

Mar­tin Bor­mann: Nazi in Exile; Paul Man­ning; Copy­right 1981 [HC]; Lyle Stu­art Inc.; ISBN 0–8184-0309–8; pp. 271–272.

. . . . The char­ac­ter­is­tic secre­cy sur­round­ing the actions of Ger­man indus­tri­al­ists and bankers dur­ing the final nine months of the war, when Bor­man­n’s flight cap­i­tal pro­gram held their com­plete atten­tion, was also car­ried over into the post­war years, when they began pulling back the skeins of eco­nom­ic wealth and pow­er that stretched out to neu­tral nations of the world and to for­mer­ly occu­pied lands. There was a sug­ges­tion of this in France. Flo­ra Lewis, writ­ing from Paris in The New York Times of August 28, 1972, told of her con­ver­sa­tion with a French pub­lish­er: ‘It would not be pos­si­ble to trace own­er­ship of cor­po­ra­tions and the pow­er struc­ture as in the Unit­ed States. ‘They’ would not per­mit it. ‘They’ would find a way to hound and tor­ture any­one who tried,’ com­ment­ed the pub­lish­er. ‘They’ seem to be a fair­ly small group of peo­ple who know each oth­er, but many are not at all known to the pub­lic. ‘They’ move in and out of gov­ern­ment jobs, but pub­lic ser­vice appar­ent­ly serves to win pri­vate pro­mo­tion rather than the oth­er way around. The Gov­ern­ment ‘con­trol’ that prac­ti­cal­ly every­one men­tions can­not be traced through stock hold­ings, reg­u­la­to­ry agen­cies, pub­lic deci­sions. It seems to func­tion through a maze of per­son­al con­tacts and tac­it under­stand­ings.’

The under­stand­ings arrived at in the pow­er struc­ture of France reach back to pre­war days, were con­tin­ued dur­ing the occu­pa­tion, and have car­ried over to the present time. Lewis, in her report from Paris, com­ment­ed fur­ther: ‘This hid­den con­trol of gov­ern­ment and cor­po­ra­tions has pro­duced a gen­er­al unease in Paris.’ Along with the unease, the fact that France has lin­ger­ing and seri­ous social and polit­i­cal ail­ments is a residue of World War II and of an eco­nom­ic occu­pa­tion that was nev­er real­ly ter­mi­nat­ed with the with­draw­al of Ger­man troops beyond the Rhine. It was this spe­cial eco­nom­ic rela­tion­ship between Ger­man and French indus­tri­al­ists that made it pos­si­ble for Friedrich Flick to arrange with the De-Wen­del steel firm in France for pur­chase of his shares in his Ruhr coal com­bine for $45 mil­lion, which was to start him once more on the road back to wealth and pow­er, after years in prison fol­low­ing his con­vic­tion at Nurem­berg.

West Ger­many’s eco­nom­ic pow­er struc­ture is fueled by a two-tier sys­tem: the cor­po­ra­tions and indi­vid­u­als who pub­licly rep­re­sent the prod­ucts that are com­mon house­hold names around the world, and the secre­tive groups oper­at­ing in the back­ground as hold­ing com­pa­nies and who pull the threads of pow­er in over­seas cor­po­ra­tions estab­lished dur­ing the Bor­mann tenure in the Third Reich. As explained to me, ‘These threads are like the strands of a spi­der’s web and no one knows where they lead — except the inner cir­cle of the Bor­mann orga­ni­za­tion in South Amer­i­ca.’ . . .

6. In the recent elec­tion, Ger­many weighed in on behalf of first, Fran­cois Fil­lon and then Emmanuel Macron. Although this might appear sur­pris­ing at first glance, Ms. Le Pen is anti-EU.

We note, in pass­ing, that the Ger­man word for pow­er is “macht,” derived from Machi­avel­lian. To seek real pow­er, it is ide­al to be strong­ly on both sides of a polit­i­cal strug­gle. Get­ting into the knick­ers of both play­ers is a blue­print for vic­to­ry.

The post­war financ­ing of the French left, through Holo­caust imple­menter and SS col­lab­o­ra­tor Rene Bous­quet can be seen in this con­text.

“France’s Elec­tions;” Ger­man For­eign Pol­i­cy; 4/24/2017.

Berlin’s favorite can­di­date took the lead in the first round in Sun­day’s French pres­i­den­tial elec­tions. Accord­ing to the lat­est pre­dic­tions, Emmanuel Macron won with 23.4 per­cent of the votes, fol­lowed by Marine Le Pen of the Front Nation­al with 22.6. Macron is expect­ed to win the May 7 runoffs. Ini­tial­ly, the Ger­man gov­ern­ment had banked on and open­ly pro­mot­ed the con­ser­v­a­tive can­di­date François Fil­lon. How­ev­er, after his approval rat­ings sig­nif­i­cant­ly dropped in the polls, due to the scan­dal over high pay­ments to his wife as his par­lia­men­tary assis­tant, Berlin was forced to turn to Macron. Like Fil­lon, Macron is con­sid­ered “Ger­many-com­pat­i­ble” by a Ger­man think tank, where­as all oth­er can­di­dates are viewed as unsuit­able for “con­struc­tive coop­er­a­tion” because of their crit­i­cism of the EU and/or of NATO. Recent­ly, Ger­many’s Finance Min­is­ter Wolf­gang Schäu­ble osten­ta­tious­ly rec­om­mend­ed vot­ing for Macron. Berlin’s inter­fer­ence on behalf of Macron shows once again that Ger­man dom­i­na­tion of the EU does not stop at nation­al bor­ders, and — accord­ing to a well-known EU observ­er — sur­pass­es by far Rus­si­a’s fee­ble med­dling in France.

“Ger­many-Com­pat­i­ble”

In a brief analy­sis, pub­lished short­ly before the first round of France’s pres­i­den­tial elec­tions, the Ger­man Coun­cil on For­eign Rela­tions (DGAP) exam­ined the extent to which the pre­sumed pol­i­cy of the five most promis­ing can­di­dates would com­ply with Ger­man inter­ests. “Only two of them are real­ly Ger­many-com­pat­i­ble,” the DGAP declared, “Emmanuel Macron und François Fillon.”[1] “Impor­tant aspects” of their posi­tions “coin­cide with those of the Ger­man gov­ern­ment,” the think tank analy­ses. Both announced “ambi­tious reform pro­grams,” whose imple­men­ta­tion would be “the pre­req­ui­site for joint ini­tia­tives in the frame­work of the eco­nom­ic and mon­e­tary union.” Even though the exis­tence of “dis­agree­ments” can­not be denied, “com­pro­mis­es are quite real­is­tic.” Con­cern­ing the social­ist can­di­date Benoît Hamon, the DGAP crit­i­cized that he would like to “rescind the Maas­tricht cri­te­ria and the relat­ed sta­bil­i­ty course.” Jean-Luc Mélen­chon (Par­ti de Gauche) and Marine Le Pen (Front Nation­al) even reject major ele­ments of today’s EU and France’s inte­gra­tion into NATO. A “con­struc­tive coop­er­a­tion” with them is thus “dif­fi­cult to imag­ine.

First Choice

Already since the begin­ning of this year, Berlin has been open­ly inter­fer­ing in its neigh­bor­ing coun­try’s elec­tion cam­paign by sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly sup­port­ing first Fil­lon and then Macron. In Berlin, objec­tions had been ini­tial­ly raised against Fil­lon because he was seek­ing a cer­tain align­ment with Rus­sia. But even French experts assumed that Fil­lon would not be able to pur­sue such a pol­i­cy against Berlin’s will. (german-foreign-policy.com reported.[2]) Berlin, how­ev­er, approved Fil­lon’s plans to scrap the 35-hour work week once and for all, raise the retire­ment age to 65, dereg­u­late the labor mar­ket, raise the val­ue added tax by two per­cent, and cut 500,000 French civ­il ser­vice jobs. This would amount to a com­plete align­ment with the Ger­man aus­ter­i­ty pol­i­cy. Already in Novem­ber 2016, the French busi­ness press report­ed that Ger­man Finance Min­is­ter Wolf­gang Schäu­ble explic­it­ly praised Fil­lon’s elec­toral platform.[3] On Jan­u­ary 23, 2017, Schäu­ble, Defense Min­is­ter Ursu­la von der Leyen and Chan­cel­lor Angela Merkel held talks with Fil­lon in Berlin, there­by offer­ing him the chance to present him­self to the French pub­lic as the wel­comed can­di­date of the EU’s hege­mon. At his sub­se­quent meet­ing in the Berlin head­quar­ters of the CDU-affil­i­at­ed Kon­rad Ade­nauer Foun­da­tion, Peter Alt­maier, Head of the Fed­er­al Chan­cellery, told Fil­lon, “we hope that you will return as Pres­i­dent as soon as possible.”[4]

Sec­ond Choice

Soon after that, the Ger­man gov­ern­ment was oblig­ed to change course because Fil­lon’s approval rat­ings sig­nif­i­cant­ly dropped in the polls due to his scan­dal sur­round­ing high pay­ments to his wife and chil­dren as par­lia­men­tary assis­tants. Berlin then began back­ing Macron. On March 16, Chan­cel­lor Merkel grant­ed him an audi­ence and, togeth­er with For­eign Min­is­ter Sig­mar Gabriel, he appeared before the press in the Ger­man For­eign Min­istry. On the evening of March 16, a pub­lic pan­el dis­cus­sion on the “Future for Europe” was orga­nized with Macron and the Ger­man philoso­pher Jür­gen Haber­mas [5] in the Ger­man cap­i­tal to enhance the French can­di­date’s pres­tige, which was also wide­ly report­ed in the French media. Macron has not only shown his com­plete com­mit­ment to coop­er­a­tion with Berlin in a Ger­many-dom­i­nat­ed EU. He is also well remem­bered by the Ger­man gov­ern­ment because, dur­ing his term as France’s Min­is­ter of the Econ­o­my (August 2014 to August 2016), he had tack­led the com­pre­hen­sive dereg­u­la­tion of the labor market.[6] Just recent­ly, Ger­man Finance Min­is­ter Schäu­ble open­ly pro­mot­ed Macron. The man has “a lot of charm,” Schäu­ble declared, “I would prob­a­bly vote for Macron.”[7] When this mas­sive Ger­man inter­fer­ence on his behalf began to become coun­ter­pro­duc­tive — par­tic­u­lar­ly Schäu­ble is not exact­ly pop­u­lar in many EU coun­tries — Macron saw him­self oblig­ed to ver­bal­ly dis­tance him­self. Last week, the can­di­date declared that Ger­many’s trade sur­plus and “its eco­nom­ic strength in its present form” are “unacceptable.”[8] This state­ment, how­ev­er, is gen­er­al­ly per­ceived as being moti­vat­ed by the elec­tions and as a mean­ing­less dis­so­ci­a­tion.

Mod­el CDU

The Ger­man inter­fer­ence — crowned on April 15, by Ger­man Pres­i­dent Frank-Wal­ter Stein­meier’s demand, in the French dai­ly “Ouest-France,” that the vot­ers ignore the “siren song” of the non-EU-ori­ent­ed par­ties [9] — is not unique. The Ger­man gov­ern­ment had already mas­sive­ly inter­vened into the 2012 pres­i­den­tial elec­tions in favor of Nico­las Sarkozy. In the fall of 2011, Sarkozy’s UMP par­ty even for­mu­lat­ed its elec­tion plat­form in close coop­er­a­tion with the CDU-affil­i­at­ed Kon­rad Ade­nauer Foun­da­tion. The Ger­man press remarked with irony that the UMP had “even close­ly inspect­ed the CDU’s head­quar­ters near Berlin’s Tier­garten” to “bet­ter plan their own new par­ty headquarters.”[10] The DGAP not­ed that “Sarkozy, the Amer­i­can,” — as he pre­ferred to call him­self at the begin­ning of his term because of his tem­po­rary ori­en­ta­tion on Wash­ing­ton — had become “Sarkozy, the German.”[11]

Putin, Trump and Merkel

The inter­fer­ence into the French pres­i­den­tial elec­tion cam­paign demon­strates that Ger­man dom­i­na­tion of the EU hard­ly knows bor­ders. It also high­lights that the threat of unprece­dent­ed inter­fer­ence ema­nat­ing only from Rus­sia is a pro­pa­gan­dis­tic claim. On the week­end, the Brus­sels-based jour­nal­ist, Eric Bonse, a keen observ­er of the EU, not­ed that even though Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin had received the far-right can­di­date Marine Le Pen (Front Nation­al) for exclu­sive talks in Moscow, Le Pen’s most obvi­ous back­ing, how­ev­er, was giv­en by US Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump, when he praised her “most deter­mined stand” oppos­ing jihadist terror.[12] In addi­tion, already in Jan­u­ary, Le Pen had met with one of Trump’s con­tact per­sons in New York. The mem­bers of the US Con­gress, Steve King and Dana Rohrabach­er, had trav­eled to Paris to meet with Le Pen in February.[13] In view of the inten­sive Ger­man sup­port for Macron, Bonse, who can­not be sus­pect­ed of affin­i­ty either to Rus­sia or to the Trump admin­is­tra­tion, con­clud­ed, that all this is “noth­ing com­pared to Ger­many’s interference.”[14]
[1] Claire Demes­may (Hg.): Frankre­ichs Präsi­dentschaftswahl 2017: Was die fünf wichtig­sten Kan­di­dat­en für Deutsch­land bedeuten. DGAP­kom­pakt Nr. 4, April 2017.
[2] See No Chance.
[3] Wolf­gang Schäu­ble loue le pro­gramme de François Fil­lon. www.lesechos.fr 29.11.2016.
[4] Thomas Han­ke: CDU empfängt Fil­lon wie den neuen Präsi­den­ten. www.handelsblatt.com 24.01.2017.
[5] Zu Haber­mas’ Europakonzep­tion: Hans-Rüdi­ger Minow: Zwei Wege — Eine Katas­tro­phe. Flugschrift No. 1. Aachen 2016. german-foreign-policy.com/bestellung_flugschrift/ .
[6] See The Price of Dereg­u­la­tion.
[7] “Wahrschein­lich würde ich Macron wählen”. www.spiegel.de 11.04.2017.
[8] Hol­lande warnt vor Pop­ulis­ten. Frank­furter All­ge­meine Zeitung 18.04.2017.
[9] Inter­view mit der Funke-Medi­en­gruppe. www.bundespraesident.de 15.04.2017. Ouest-France ist die meistverkaufte Tageszeitung Frankre­ichs.
[10], [11] See Sarkozy, the Ger­man.
[12] Von Putin bis Merkel: Alle mis­chen sich ein. lostineu.eu 22.04.2017.
[13] Johannes Kuhn: Trump deutet Unter­stützung für Le Pen an. www.sueddeutsche.de 22.04.2017.
[14] Von Putin bis Merkel: Alle mis­chen sich ein. lostineu.eu 22.04.2017.

7. Note that the Nation­al Front has mint­ed valu­able polit­i­cal cur­ren­cy from Islamist ter­ror. In that regard, the pro­gram reviews Turk­ish Islamist Necmet­tin Erbakan’s rela­tion­ship with Ahmed Huber and the man­ner in which that rela­tion­ship pre­cip­i­tat­ed Huber’s ascen­sion to his posi­tion as a direc­tor of Al Taqwa.

Close­ly asso­ci­at­ed with the AK Par­ty’s pre­de­ces­sor Refah orga­ni­za­tion, Huber’s con­cept of “mod­er­a­tion” might be gleaned from the pho­tographs of some of the “mod­er­ates” he admires.

Note that Erbakan, men­tor to Tayyip Erdo­gan, net­worked with Jean-Marie Le Pen (father of Marine Le Pen), cour­tesy of Bank Al-Taqwa’s Achmed Huber.

Note, also, that they arrived at a polit­i­cal con­cen­sus, work­ing to coor­di­nate the Islam­ic fas­cism of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood with the Euro-fas­cism of the Nation­al Front, Swe­den Democ­rats and oth­ers.

Speak­ing of the décor of Huber’s res­i­dence:

Dol­lars for Ter­ror: The Unit­ed States and Islam; by Richard Labeviere; Copy­right 2000 [SC]; Algo­ra Pub­lish­ing; ISBN 1–892941-06–6; p. 142.

. . . . A sec­ond pho­to­graph, in which Hitler is talk­ing with Himm­ler, hangs next to those of Necmet­tin Erbakan and Jean-Marie Le Pen [leader of the fas­cist Nation­al Front]. Erbakan, head of the Turk­ish Islamist par­ty, Refah, turned to Achmed Huber for an intro­duc­tion to the chief of the French par­ty of the far right. Exit­ing from the meet­ing (which took place in Sep­tem­ber 1995) Huber’s two friends sup­pos­ed­ly stat­ed that they ‘share the same view of the world’ and expressed ‘their com­mon desire to work togeth­er to remove the last racist obsta­cles that still pre­vent the union of the Islamist move­ment with the nation­al right of Europe.’. . .

. . . . Last­ly, above the desk is dis­played a poster of the imam Khome­i­ni; the meet­ing ‘changed my life,’ Huber says, with stars in his eyes. For years, after the Fed­er­al Palace in Bern, Ahmed Huber pub­lished a Euro­pean press review for the Iran­ian lead­ers, then for the Turk­ish Refah. Since the for­mer lacked finan­cial means, Huber chose to put his efforts to the ser­vice of the lat­ter. An out­post of the Turk­ish Mus­lim Broth­ers, Refah thus became Huber’s prin­ci­pal employ­er; and it was through the inter­me­di­ary of the Turk­ish Islamist par­ty that this for­mer par­lia­men­tary cor­re­spon­dent became a share­hold­er in the bank Al Taqwa. . . .

8a. Steve Ban­non is very favor­ably dis­posed toward a French nov­el that res­onates with anti-Mus­lim, anti-immi­grant dem­a­gogues on both sides of the Atlantic. The anti-immi­grant, anti-Mus­lim ide­ol­o­gy is cen­tral to the Nation­al Fron­t’s appeal.

“. . . . The Camp of the Saints — which draws its title from Rev­e­la­tion 20:9 — is noth­ing less than a call to arms for the white Chris­t­ian West, to revive the spir­it of the Cru­sades and steel itself for bloody con­flict against the poor black and brown world with­out and the trai­tors with­in. The novel’s last line links past humil­i­a­tions tight­ly to its own grim para­ble about mod­ern migra­tion. ‘The Fall of Con­stan­tino­ple,’ Raspail’s unnamed nar­ra­tor says, ‘is a per­son­al mis­for­tune that hap­pened to all of us only last week.’ . . . . ”

“This Stun­ning­ly Racist French Nov­el Is How Steve Ban­non Explains The World” by Paul Blu­men­thal and JM Rieger; The Huff­in­g­ton Post; 3/04/2017.

“The Camp of the Saints” tells a grotesque tale about a migrant inva­sion to destroy West­ern civ­i­liza­tion.

Stephen Ban­non, Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s chief strate­gist and the dri­ving force behind the administration’s con­tro­ver­sial ban on trav­el­ers, has a favorite metaphor he uses to describe the largest refugee cri­sis in human his­to­ry.

“It’s been almost a Camp of the Saints-type inva­sion into Cen­tral and then West­ern and North­ern Europe,” he said in Octo­ber 2015.

“The whole thing in Europe is all about immi­gra­tion,” he said in Jan­u­ary 2016. “It’s a glob­al issue today — this kind of glob­al Camp of the Saints.”

“It’s not a migra­tion,” he said lat­er that Jan­u­ary. “It’s real­ly an inva­sion. I call it the Camp of the Saints.”

“When we first start­ed talk­ing about this a year ago,” he said in April 2016, “we called it the Camp of the Saints. … I mean, this is Camp of the Saints, isn’t it?”

Ban­non has agi­tat­ed for a host of anti-immi­grant mea­sures. In his pre­vi­ous role as exec­u­tive chair­man of the right-wing news site Bre­it­bart — which he called a “plat­form for the alt-right,” the online move­ment of white nation­al­ists — he made anti-immi­grant and anti-Mus­lim news a focus.

But the top Trump aide’s repeat­ed ref­er­ences to The Camp of the Saints, an obscure 1973 nov­el by French author Jean Ras­pail, reveal even more about how he under­stands the world. The book is a cult favorite on the far right, yet it’s nev­er found a wider audi­ence. There’s a good rea­son for that: It’s breath­tak­ing­ly racist.

“[This book is] racist in the lit­er­al sense of the term. It uses race as the main char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of char­ac­ters,” said Cécile Alduy, pro­fes­sor of French at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty and an expert on the con­tem­po­rary French far right. “It describes the takeover of Europe by waves of immi­grants that wash ashore like the plague.”

The book, she said, “reframes every­thing as the fight to death between races.”

Upon the novel’s release in the Unit­ed States in 1975, the influ­en­tial book review mag­a­zine Kirkus Reviews pulled no punch­es: “The pub­lish­ers are pre­sent­ing The Camp of the Saints as a major event, and it prob­a­bly is, in much the same sense that Mein Kampf was a major event.”

Lin­da Chavez, a Repub­li­can com­men­ta­tor who has worked for GOP pres­i­dents from Ronald Rea­gan to George W. Bush but opposed Trump’s elec­tion, also reviewed the book back then. Forty years lat­er, she hasn’t for­got­ten it.

“It is real­ly shock­ing­ly racist,” Chavez told The Huff­in­g­ton Post, “and to have the coun­selor to the pres­i­dent see this as one of his touch­stones, I think, says vol­umes about his atti­tude.”

The plot of The Camp of the Saints fol­lows a poor Indi­an dem­a­gogue, named “the turd-eater” because he lit­er­al­ly eats shit, and the deformed, appar­ent­ly psy­chic child who sits on his shoul­ders. Togeth­er, they lead an “arma­da” of 800,000 impov­er­ished Indi­ans sail­ing to France. Dither­ing Euro­pean politi­cians, bureau­crats and reli­gious lead­ers, includ­ing a lib­er­al pope from Latin Amer­i­ca, debate whether to let the ships land and accept the Indi­ans or to do the right thing — in the book’s vision — by rec­og­niz­ing the threat the migrants pose and killing them all.

The non-white peo­ple of Earth, mean­while, wait silent­ly for the Indi­ans to reach shore. The land­ing will be the sig­nal for them to rise up every­where and over­throw white West­ern soci­ety.

The French gov­ern­ment even­tu­al­ly gives the order to repel the arma­da by force, but by then the mil­i­tary has lost the will to fight. Troops bat­tle among them­selves as the Indi­ans stream on shore, tram­pling to death the left-wing rad­i­cals who came to wel­come them. Poor black and brown peo­ple lit­er­al­ly over­run West­ern civ­i­liza­tion. Chi­nese peo­ple pour into Rus­sia; the queen of Eng­land is forced to mar­ry her son to a Pak­istani woman; the may­or of New York must house an African-Amer­i­can fam­i­ly at Gra­cie Man­sion. Raspail’s rogue heroes, the defend­ers of white Chris­t­ian suprema­cy, attempt to defend their civ­i­liza­tion with guns blaz­ing but are killed in the process.

Calgues, the obvi­ous Ras­pail stand-in, is one of those tak­ing up arms against the migrants and their cul­tur­al­ly “cuck­old­ed” white sup­port­ers. Just before killing a rad­i­cal hip­pie, Calgues com­pares his own actions to past hero­ic, some­times myth­i­cal defens­es of Euro­pean Chris­ten­dom. He harkens back to famous bat­tles that fit the clash-of-civ­i­liza­tions nar­ra­tive — the defense of Rhodes against the Ottoman Empire, the fall of Con­stan­tino­ple to the same — and glo­ri­fies colo­nial wars of con­quest and the for­ma­tion of the Ku Klux Klan.

Only white Euro­peans like Calgues are por­trayed as tru­ly human in The Camp of the Saints. The Indi­an arma­da brings “thou­sands of wretched crea­tures” whose very bod­ies arouse dis­gust: “Scrag­gy branch­es, brown and black … All bare, those flesh­less Gand­hi-arms.” Poor brown chil­dren are spoiled fruit “start­ing to rot, all wormy inside, or turned so you can’t see the mold.”

The ship’s inhab­i­tants are also sex­u­al deviants who turn the voy­age into a grotesque orgy. “Every­where, rivers of sperm,” Ras­pail writes. “Stream­ing over bod­ies, ooz­ing between breasts, and but­tocks, and thighs, and lips, and fin­gers.”

The white Chris­t­ian world is on the brink of destruc­tion, the nov­el sug­gests, because these black and brown peo­ple are more fer­tile and more numer­ous, while the West has lost that nec­es­sary belief in its own cul­tur­al and racial supe­ri­or­i­ty. As he talks to the hip­pie he will soon kill, Calgues explains how the youth went so wrong: “That scorn of a peo­ple for oth­er races, the knowl­edge that one’s own is best, the tri­umphant joy at feel­ing one­self to be part of humanity’s finest — none of that had ever filled these young­sters’ addled brains.”

The Camp of the Saints — which draws its title from Rev­e­la­tion 20:9 — is noth­ing less than a call to arms for the white Chris­t­ian West, to revive the spir­it of the Cru­sades and steel itself for bloody con­flict against the poor black and brown world with­out and the trai­tors with­in. The novel’s last line links past humil­i­a­tions tight­ly to its own grim para­ble about mod­ern migra­tion. “The Fall of Con­stan­tino­ple,” Raspail’s unnamed nar­ra­tor says, “is a per­son­al mis­for­tune that hap­pened to all of us only last week.”

Ras­pail wrote The Camp of the Saints in 1972 and 1973, after a stay at his aunt’s house near Cannes on the south­ern coast of France. Look­ing out across the Mediter­ranean, he had an epiphany: “And what if they came?” he thought to him­self. “This ‘they’ was not clear­ly defined at first,” he told the con­ser­v­a­tive pub­li­ca­tion Le Point in 2015. “Then I imag­ined that the Third World would rush into this blessed coun­try that is France.”

Raspail’s nov­el has been pub­lished in the U.S. sev­er­al times, each time with the back­ing of the anti-immi­gra­tion move­ment.

The U.S. pub­lish­ing house Scrib­n­er was the first to trans­late the book into Eng­lish in 1975, but it failed to reach a wide audi­ence amid with­er­ing reviews by crit­ics. A rare favor­able take appeared in Nation­al Review. “Ras­pail brings his read­er to the sur­pris­ing con­clu­sion that killing a mil­lion or so starv­ing refugees from India would be a supreme act of indi­vid­ual san­i­ty and cul­tur­al health,” then-Dart­mouth pro­fes­sor Jef­frey Hart wrote in 1975. “Ras­pail is to geno­cide what [D.H. Lawrence] was to sex.” Hart added that “a great fuss” was being made over “Raspail’s sup­posed racism,” but that the “lib­er­al rote anath­e­ma on ‘racism’ is in effect a poi­so­nous assault upon West­ern self-pref­er­ence.”

The book received a sec­ond life in 1983 when Cordelia Scaife May, heiress to the Mel­lon for­tune and sis­ter to right-wing bene­fac­tor Richard Mel­lon Scaife, fund­ed its repub­li­ca­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion. This time it gained a cult fol­low­ing among immi­gra­tion oppo­nents.

May’s mon­ey has also been instru­men­tal in fund­ing the efforts of John Tan­ton, the god­fa­ther of the anti-immi­gra­tion move­ment in the U.S. Tan­ton, who began as an envi­ron­men­tal­ist and pop­u­la­tion con­trol pro­po­nent, found­ed a host of groups focused on restrict­ing immi­gra­tion, includ­ing the Fed­er­a­tion of Amer­i­can Immi­gra­tion Reform, the Cen­ter for Immi­gra­tion Stud­ies, Num­ber­sUSA and U.S. Eng­lish. May’s for­tune has fueled these groups with tens of mil­lions of dol­lars in con­tri­bu­tions over the years.

Lin­da Chavez was recruit­ed in 1987 to head U.S. Eng­lish, which advo­cates for Eng­lish to be des­ig­nat­ed the country’s offi­cial lan­guage. But then a series of dis­turb­ing sto­ries paint­ed Tanton’s motives in a racial light. Among oth­er issues, Chavez said she learned that his fund­ing came from the pro-eugen­ics Pio­neer Fund and from May, who Chavez knew had helped pub­lish The Camp of the Saints. Chavez recalled see­ing Tanton’s staffers car­ry­ing the book around their offices. She quit the group.

Tan­ton, who insists his oppo­si­tion to immi­gra­tion is not con­nect­ed to race at all, told The Wash­ing­ton Post in 2006 that his mind “became focused” on the issue after read­ing The Camp of the Saints. In 1995, his small pub­lish­ing house, Social Con­tract Press, brought the book back into print for a third time in the U.S., again with fund­ing from May. His­to­ri­ans Paul Kennedy and Matt Con­nel­ly tied the book to then-cur­rent con­cerns about glob­al demo­graph­ic trends in a cov­er sto­ry for The Atlantic.

“Over the years the Amer­i­can pub­lic has absorbed a great num­ber of books, arti­cles, poems and films which exalt the immi­grant expe­ri­ence,” Tan­ton wrote in 1994. “It is easy for the feel­ings evoked by Ellis Island and the Stat­ue of Lib­er­ty to obscure the fact that we are cur­rent­ly receiv­ing too many immi­grants (and receiv­ing them too fast) for the health of our envi­ron­ment and of our com­mon cul­ture. Ras­pail evokes dif­fer­ent feel­ings and that may help to pave the way for pol­i­cy changes.”

In 2001, the book was repub­lished one more time, again by Tan­ton, and again gained a cult fol­low­ing among oppo­nents of immi­gra­tion like the bor­der-patrolling Min­ute­men and even­tu­al­ly the online “alt-right.”

Bannon’s alt-right-lov­ing Bre­it­bart has run mul­ti­ple arti­cles over the past three years ref­er­enc­ing the nov­el. When Pope Fran­cis told a joint ses­sion of Con­gress that the U.S. should open its arms to refugees in Sep­tem­ber 2015, Breitbart’s Julia Hahn, now an aide to Ban­non in the White House, com­pared his admo­ni­tion to Raspail’s lib­er­al Latin Amer­i­can pon­tiff. And the novel’s the­sis that migra­tion is inva­sion in dis­guise is often reflect­ed in Bannon’s pub­lic com­ments.

The refugee cri­sis “didn’t just hap­pen by hap­pen­stance,” Ban­non said in an April 2016 radio inter­view with Sebas­t­ian Gor­ka, who now works for the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil. “These are not war refugees. It’s some­thing much more insid­i­ous going on.”

Ban­non has also echoed the novel’s the­o­ry that sec­u­lar lib­er­als who favor immi­gra­tion and diver­si­ty weak­en the West.

…

Now Ban­non sits at the right hand of the U.S. pres­i­dent, work­ing to beat back what Ban­non calls “this Mus­lim inva­sion.” And Trump is all in on the project. Dur­ing the cam­paign, he called for a ban on all Mus­lims enter­ing the coun­try. His Jan. 28 exec­u­tive order, since blocked in the courts, turned this cam­paign idea into exec­u­tive pol­i­cy.

Trump has con­tin­ued to defend the exec­u­tive order as a life-or-death nation­al secu­ri­ty issue. “We can­not allow a beach­head of ter­ror­ism to form inside Amer­i­ca,” he said in his first speech to a joint ses­sion of Con­gress on Tues­day.

Five days ear­li­er, Trump had called his immi­gra­tion enforce­ment efforts a “mil­i­tary oper­a­tion.”

Although Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty offi­cials walked back that state­ment, the president’s con­fla­tion of immi­gra­tion with war­fare did not go unno­ticed.

“They see this as a war,” Chavez said.

Chavez, who sup­ports some of Trump’s eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy pro­pos­als, called the direc­tion the White House is tak­ing on immi­gra­tion and race “extreme­ly dan­ger­ous.” She said Trump’s immi­gra­tion moves are “a kind of purg­ing of Amer­i­ca of any­thing but our North­ern Euro­pean roots.” Ban­non, she added, “wants to make Amer­i­ca white again.”

8b.

“Nation­al Front (France)”; wikipedia.com

 . . . . One of the pri­ma­ry prog­en­i­tors of the par­ty was the Action Française, found­ed at the end of the 19th cen­tu­ry. . . .