Latest Patreon Talk: History of French Fascism–Cartels, La Cagoule, Vichy, Postwar Fascist International

In the lat­est Patre­on talk, record­ed on French Elec­tion Day, 4/24/2022, we explore the his­to­ry of French fas­cism from the transna­tion­al cor­po­rate links of the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry to the rise of the Front Nation­al. Par­tic­u­lar empha­sis is on the con­ti­nu­ity from the Pre-WWII Cagoule, through the SS-aligned Vichy fas­cist milieu to the oper­a­tions of the post-WWII fas­cist inter­na­tion­al. The talk high­lights some of the French fas­cists in Dal­las, Texas, 11/22/1963. Ukrain­ian tele­vi­sion anchor quotes Adolf Eich­mann ver­ba­tim in this video from UKRAINE 24. WFMU-FM is pod­cast­ing For The Record–You can sub­scribe to the pod­cast HERE. Mr. Emory emphat­i­cal­ly rec­om­mends that listeners/readers get the 32GB flash dri­ve con­tain­ing all of Mr. Emory’s 43 years on the air, plus a library of old anti-fas­cist books on easy-to-down­load PDF files.

FTR#‘S 1222 and 1223: French Fascists and the JFK Assassination, Parts 1 and 2

An impor­tant book about the JFK assas­si­na­tion has been pub­lished. The late Hank Albarel­li, Jr. has authored a lengthy tome, which draws togeth­er var­i­ous, dis­parate ele­ments involved in the Dal­las coup in an impor­tant, time­ly man­ner.

Inte­grat­ing oper­a­tional ele­ments of the domes­tic fas­cist polit­i­cal milieu, active and retired mil­i­tary pro­fes­sion­als, the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty (CIA in par­tic­u­lar), the defense indus­try, the Texas and inter­na­tion­al petro­le­um com­pa­nies, as well as dom­i­nant polit­i­cal orga­ni­za­tions with the forces of inter­na­tion­al fas­cism, Albarel­li and his assis­tants have opened a win­dow onto what Mr. Emory believes are in the forces destroy­ing our civ­i­liza­tion.

Para­mount, here, is the deci­sive role and posi­tion of inter­na­tion­al fas­cism in the events of 11/22/1963.

Fas­cism is gen­er­al­ly rep­re­sent­ed as some­thing of an antiq­ui­ty and an aberration–an out­lier in the devel­op­ment of our civ­i­liza­tion.

Noth­ing could be fur­ther from the truth.

Con­tem­po­rary pre­sen­ta­tions of fas­cism are atten­u­at­ed and super­fi­cial, cov­er­ing nei­ther the evo­lu­tion of fas­cist net­works through the decades, nor those net­works’ inex­tri­ca­ble rela­tion­ships with past and present intel­li­gence agen­cies and dom­i­nant cor­po­rate and allied polit­i­cal inter­ests around the world.

In the first of these pro­grams, we explore the account in the book of the role of French fas­cists in the assas­si­na­tion of JFK. 

In the sec­ond, we chron­i­cle the deep polit­i­cal con­nec­tions of the French steel and iron mak­ers, and their coun­ter­parts in the Ger­man steel and coal com­bines. Unit­ed in their cor­po­ratist strat­e­gy, they saw anti-labor and anti-com­mu­nist ide­ol­o­gy as sur­mount­ing  any nation­al­ist con­sid­er­a­tions.

For many years, we have set forth the pow­er­ful French fas­cist orga­ni­za­tions that attempt­ed to over­throw the French gov­ern­ment of Leon Blum and, final­ly, act­ed in con­cert with like-mind­ed mil­i­tary offi­cers, aris­to­crats and cor­po­rate indi­vid­u­als and insti­tu­tions to sub­vert resis­tance to the Nazi inva­sion.

With the estab­lish­ment of the Vichy col­lab­o­ra­tionist regime, ele­ments such as La Cagoule con­tributed sig­nif­i­cant­ly to the gov­ern­ing and enforc­ing appa­ra­tus of the fas­cist admin­is­tra­tion.

We have cov­ered La Cagoule for many years, includ­ing an in-depth explo­ration of the method­ol­o­gy and his­to­ry of La Cagoule and relat­ed groups in Mis­cel­la­neous Archive Show 61 (record­ed in Sep­tem­ber of 1994.) Rel­e­vant sides of this lengthy pro­gram are: Side “c”; Side “d”; Side “e”. (These seg­ments, in turn, draw on doc­u­men­ta­tion pre­sent­ed in Armies of Spies by Joseph Gol­lomb and Tri­umph of Trea­son by Pierre Cot. For fur­ther dis­cus­sion of these top­ics and books, use the search func­tion on this web­site.)

Fur­ther­more, fig­ures such as Mon­sieurs Fil­li­ol and Pierre Lafitte also served with the Nazis SS, the most promi­nent French ele­ment of which was the Charle­magne Divi­sion.

(In addi­tion to Lafit­te’s Nazi/SS/fascist col­lab­o­ra­tion, this “Man of a Thou­sand Faces” worked for a myr­i­ad of orga­ni­za­tions: intel­li­gence agen­cies, law enforce­ment agen­cies, and crim­i­nal net­works, often over­lap­ping those activ­i­ties. The authors of Coup in Dal­las posit that Lafitte may very well have been the “man­ag­er” for the JFK assas­si­na­tion oper­a­tion in the U.S.)

Net­work­ing with, among oth­ers, Otto Sko­rzeny dur­ing the war, French fas­cists sought and found refuge and con­tin­ued post­war employ­ment in Spain under the fas­cist gov­ern­ment of dic­ta­tor Fran­cis­co Fran­co. Their rela­tion­ship with Sko­rzeny con­tin­ued after the war, and Sko­rzeny may well have been the “exec­u­tive” plan­ner of the assas­si­na­tion under whom Lafitte oper­at­ed.

“. . . . And per­haps equal­ly sig­nif­i­cant is Filliol’s his­to­ry with Nazi SS Sturm­ban­n­fuhrer Otto Sko­rzeny. . . We now know that Sko­rzeny played the cru­cial role of logis­ti­cal mas­ter­mind of the hit in Dealey Plaza. . . .”

(We have detailed Skorzeny’s vital­ly impor­tant role in post­war inter­na­tion­al fas­cism in numer­ous broad­casts, includ­ing AFA#22.)

Albarel­li devel­ops infor­ma­tion about Sko­rzeny and Lafitte as cen­tral to the plan­ning of the JFK assas­si­na­tion, and mas­ter assas­sin Fil­li­ol as being present in Dal­las on 11/22/1963.

Man­i­fest­ing grasp of both the “sweep” of fas­cism and its insti­tu­tion­al con­nec­tions, Albarel­li high­lights the fas­cist gen­e­sis of the French cos­met­ic giant L’O­re­al, employ­er of Jean Fil­li­ol in Spain and his fel­low French fas­cist Jacques Cor­reze in both Spain and the U.S. 

” . . . Once in Spain, Fil­li­ol soon estab­lished con­tact with Nazi Otto Sko­rzeny, who had been ‘reset­tled’ for the ben­e­fit of U.S. intel­li­gence inter­ests in the nation’s capi­tol. . . .

“. . . . There, Fil­li­ol quick­ly land­ed a secure and well-paid exec­u­tive job with the inter­na­tion­al divi­sion of L’Oreal, a cos­met­ic and beau­ty prod­ucts com­pa­ny. Today a very well-known com­pa­ny, L’Oreal was found­ed and oper­at­ed by Eugene Schueller, a pas­sion­ate anti-Semi­te and ultra­right-winger. Schueller, dur­ing the 1930’s and the war years, finan­cial­ly sup­port­ed La Cagoule . . . .”

 “. . . . While in Spain, nat­u­ral­ly, Cor­reze became friends with Otto Sko­rzeny after being intro­duced to his fel­low SS offi­cer by for­mer La Cagoule assas­sin Jean Fil­li­ol, by now the vice pres­i­dent of inter­na­tion­al mar­ket­ing for L’Oreal. . . .”

When the Jus­tice Depart­men­t’s Office of Spe­cial Inves­ti­ga­tions began look­ing into Cor­reze’s fas­cist and Nazi his­to­ry, the probe quick­ly unearthed sub­stan­tive alle­ga­tions about Cor­reze’s rela­tion­ship to Fil­li­ol and his fel­low fas­cist Ger­ard Litt and the lat­ter pair’s pres­ence in Dal­las at the time of the JFK assas­si­na­tion.

“. . . . Accord­ing to two for­mer employ­ees of the department’s Office of Spe­cial inves­ti­ga­tions, both of whom declined to be iden­ti­fied in this book, the exam­i­na­tion of Correze’s past quick­ly unearthed unex­pect­ed details about his links to Jean Fil­li­ol, Ger­ard Litt, and Otto Sko­rzeny, inclu­sive of detailed sus­pi­cions about Filliol’s and Litt’s pres­ence in Dal­las, Texas, at the time of the JFK assas­si­na­tion. . . .”

(We note in pass­ing that John Lof­tus, the hero­ic author of The Belarus Secret, Amer­i­ca’s Nazi Secret, Unholy Trin­i­ty and The Secret War Against the Jews worked for the Office of Spe­cial Inves­ti­ga­tions.)

The broad­er con­text of the Cagoulard ele­ments in Dal­las con­cerns the OAS attempts on the life of Charles De Gaulle, which over­lap the JFK assas­si­na­tion. (We dis­cussed those areas of over­lap in, among oth­er broad­casts, FTR#1162.)

One of the appar­ent areas of over­lap between the OAS attempts to kill De Gaulle (with assis­tance from ele­ments of CIA) and the Dal­las coup is Jean Sou­e­tre, a skilled OAS assas­sin who, like Fil­li­ol and Lafitte, was net­worked with Otto Sko­rzeny.

” . . . . Skorzeny’s aide explained to Her­bert that his supe­ri­or was absent because he had ‘oth­er things going on.’ The arrange­ments that were made for [Army Ranger offi­cer Antho­ny] Her­bert to meet with Sko­rzeny con­firm Capt. Souetre’s com­man­dos were ful­ly aware of the nature of Skorzeny’s train­ing schools, which they also attend­ed. . . .”

Sou­e­tre was in Dal­las on 11/22/1063 and was expelled from the coun­try.

One of the impor­tant strengths of the Albarel­li text is the inte­gra­tion of many of the strate­gic and oper­a­tional ele­ments involved with the JFK hit.

Numer­ous writ­ers have set forth the role in the Dal­las coup of ele­ments of what Tex­ans refer to as “The Ahl Bid­ness.”

In addi­tion to despis­ing JFK for his advo­ca­cy of Alger­ian inde­pen­dence from colo­nial mas­ter France, explorato­ry infor­ma­tion indi­cat­ed to Texas-con­nect­ed petro­le­um inter­ests that Alge­ria con­tained sig­nif­i­cant petro­le­um reserves on its ter­ri­to­ry and beneath its ter­ri­to­r­i­al waters.

Rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the fas­cist con­nec­tions in the JFK assas­si­na­tion high­light­ed in this book is the fact that Robert Schacht–a blood rel­a­tive of Hjal­mar  Horace Gree­ley Schacht, Hitler’s finance min­is­ter who was deeply involved with Clay Shaw and Permindex–was the admis­sions direc­tor for Albert Schweitzer Col­lege, the first des­ti­na­tion of Lee Har­vey Oswald when he “defect­ed” to the Sovi­et Union.

We also include a pas­sage from Jim DiEu­ge­nio’s clas­sic work on the Gar­ri­son investigation–Destiny Betrayed.

This pas­sage places the Schacht fam­i­ly con­nec­tion in greater depth.

Per­min­dex was involved with, among oth­er things, attempts on the life of French pres­i­dent Charles De Gaulle in con­junc­tion with ele­ments of CIA and the OAS. (We will dis­cuss more about this in future pro­grams.

Much of the sec­ond pro­gram dis­cuss­es the actions of the Fifth Col­umn in France pri­or to, and dur­ing, World War II. (For more about this Fifth Col­umn, see Mis­cel­la­neous Archive Show M61.) It is impor­tant to note in this con­text, that Mr. Emory stress­es that the anal­o­gy between the Fifth Col­umn in France and its coun­ter­part in the Unit­ed States is not an exact one. There are sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ences between the sit­u­a­tion in France before World War II and that in the U.S. today. Nonethe­less there are sim­i­lar­i­ties worth exam­in­ing.

One should note that France was gov­erned by a demo­c­ra­t­ic coali­tion gov­ern­ment under Leon Blum (the Social Front or Pop­u­lar Front), which includ­ed the French com­mu­nist par­ty. Under the social pres­sures brought about by the Great Depres­sion and the inabil­i­ty of lib­er­al demo­c­ra­t­ic gov­ern­ments to deal ade­quate­ly with the social fall­out from it, many coun­tries expe­ri­enced pow­er­ful fas­cist move­ments. Such was the case in France. Indus­tri­al­ists, financiers, aris­to­crats and mem­bers of the armed forces were among the fas­cist plot­ters that saw the elim­i­na­tion of the Blum gov­ern­ment as a neces­si­ty. After ini­tial fail­ure in the plot by the fas­cist Cagoulards in 1938, many of the fas­cists acced­ed to pow­er in the Vichy gov­ern­ment after the Ger­man con­quest.

FTR#1202 The Narco-Fascism of Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang, Part 9

Con­tin­u­ing our series on the regime of Chi­ang Kai-shek–all but beat­i­fied dur­ing the Cold War–we draw still more on a mag­nif­i­cent book–The Soong Dynasty by Ster­ling Sea­grave. Although sad­ly out of print, the book is still avail­able through used book ser­vices, and we emphat­i­cal­ly encour­age lis­ten­ers to take advan­tage of those and obtain it.

(Mr. Emory gets no mon­ey from said pur­chas­es of the book.)

Tack­ling Amer­i­can ide­o­log­i­cal delu­sion vis a vis Chi­ang Kai-shek and the Kuom­intang, the broad­cast resumes analy­sis of the embrace of Chi­ang by the State Depart­ment and the allied U.S. press and the schism with the War Depart­ment (lat­er the Depart­ment of Defense.)

Chi­ang’s anti-Com­mu­nism endeared him to ele­ments of State, even–as we have seen–his obses­sion with fight­ing the CCP instead of the invad­ing Japan­ese was cor­rect­ly fore­cast by T.V. Soong, among oth­ers as dri­ving the Chi­nese peo­ple into the arms of the com­mu­nists.

” . . . . Washington–not as rep­re­sent­ed by Chief-of-Staff George C. Mar­shall but as typ­i­fied by FDR’s advi­sor Har­ry Hopkins–increasingly shared Chi­ang’s fix­a­tion with the post­war threat of Com­mu­nism. To please the Gen­er­alis­si­mo and his sup­port­ers in Amer­i­ca, the Wash­ing­ton of Hop­kins and the Depart­ment of State was pre­pared to sac­ri­fice any num­ber of its own peo­ple. . . .”

Fur­ther devel­op­ing the cir­cum­stances lead­ing to the replace­ment of the skilled, hero­ic Amer­i­can Gen­er­al Joseph Stil­well and the polit­i­cal defen­es­tra­tion of the State Depart­men­t’s best “Chi­na Watch­ers,” we note the role of the con­sum­mate­ly pow­er­ful Soong fam­i­ly in shap­ing U.S. ide­o­log­i­cal delu­sion con­cern­ing Chi­ang Kai-shek.

It is a con­sum­mate irony that the dog­mat­ic anti-Com­mu­nists allied with Chi­ang and the Soongs were the ones who “Lost Chi­na,” as the McCarthyites and the Chi­na Lob­by put it. (Of course Chi­ang and the KMT them­selves were the prin­ci­pal agen­cies involved in said loss.)

The War Depart­ment as embod­ied by Chief-of-Staff Gen­er­al George C. Mar­shall did not share the infat­u­a­tion with Chi­ang, and sided with Chi­ang’s neme­sis, Gen­er­al Joseph Stilwell–the top U.S. mil­i­tary offi­cer in the China/Burma the­ater.

” . . . . Amer­i­ca failed to under­stand the trap it was falling into because the State Depart­ment was not lis­ten­ing to its Chi­na Watch­ers. Very few of their secret reports actu­al­ly reached the Sec­re­tary of State, because the rest were being inter­cept­ed by par­ti­sans inside the depart­ment hier­ar­chy. . . . Accord­ing to infor­ma­tion gath­ered by the FBI at the time, some­one high in the depart­ment was pass­ing this secret infor­ma­tion straight over to Chi­na Defense Sup­plies, to be read by T V. Soong and to be act­ed upon as he saw fit. So the Amer­i­cans sent to Chi­na to watch Chi­ang’s regime were report­ing to the Soong fam­i­ly, not to Pres­i­dent Roo­sevelt. . . . At the War Depart­ment, the sit­u­a­tion was quite dif­fer­ent. Gen­er­al Mar­shall was sus­pi­cious of Chi­ang, and lis­tened to Stil­well’s warn­ings. . . .” 

Key ele­ments of analy­sis and dis­cus­sion include: Joseph Alsop’s role as a Chiang/Soong par­ti­san; Alsop’s World War II role as the Chungk­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tive of Lend-Lease pro­gram; Intro­duc­to­ry dis­cus­sion of T.L. Soong (younger broth­er of T.V.) and his role as first, admin­is­tra­tor of U.S. Lend-Lease in Chi­na and, lat­er, admin­is­tra­tor of Lend-Lease in the U.S. (this will be dealt with at greater length lat­er in the series); Alsop’s post­war career as a not­ed jour­nal­ist, close­ly linked to the CIA; Gen­er­al Claire Chen­nault’s hatred of Stil­well; review of Chen­nault’s role as leader of the Fly­ing Tigers (the Amer­i­can Vol­un­teer Group); Chennault’s asser­tion to FDR that his Four­teenth Air Force could use for­ward bases to dec­i­mate Japan­ese ship­ping; Stilwell’s cor­rect counter-asser­tion that the Japan­ese would sim­ply destroy the for­ward air bases upon which Chen­nault based his asser­tions; the 1944 Japan­ese offen­sive known as Oper­a­tion Ichi­go; the resound­ing suc­cess of the Japan­ese offen­sive; review (from our pre­vi­ous pro­gram) of KMT Gen­er­al T’ang En-po’s dis­as­trous com­mand of the Chi­nese forces oppos­ing the Japan­ese Ichi­go offen­sive; the view of the State Department’s Chi­na watch­ers and Vice-Pres­i­dent Hen­ry Wal­lace that Chi­ang Kai-shek could not suc­cess­ful­ly rule post­war Chi­na; the War Department’s tem­po­rary ele­va­tion of Gen­er­al Stil­well to com­mand the KMT armies in Chi­na; Chiang’s fierce and suc­cess­ful resis­tance of Chi­ang to Stilwell’s ele­va­tion; Chiang’s insis­tence on a quid-pro-quo for agree­ing to allow U.S. observers into the Com­mu­nist-con­trolled areas of China—an agree­ment that fea­tured the replace­ment of Stil­well with Major Gen­er­al Albert C. Wede­mey­er; Chiang’s insis­tence on the replace­ment of Ambas­sador Clarence Gauss; the deci­sive appoint­ment of Major Gen­er­al Patrick J. Hur­ley as Roosevelt’s per­son­al rep­re­sen­ta­tive to Chiang—an appoint­ment which led to Stilwell’s replace­ment with Wede­mey­er.

Stilwell’s replace­ment by Gen­er­al Wede­mey­er was noteworthy—particularly in light of the back­ground and behav­ior of Wede­mey­er.

The pro­gram recaps infor­ma­tion pre­sent­ed in AFA#11.

In addi­tion to being part of a polit­i­cal and mil­i­tary milieu that infused iso­la­tion­ist ori­en­ta­tion toward involve­ment in World War II with pro-fas­cist sen­ti­ment, Wede­mey­er was a chief sus­pect in an act of con­sum­mate treason—the leak of the Rain­bow Five Amer­i­can mobi­liza­tion plan for World War II to anti-FDR pub­lish­er Robert J. McCormick (of the Chica­go Tri­bune.) (As cel­e­brat­ed anti-fas­cist jour­nal­ist and researcher George Seldes has doc­u­ment­ed, the “iso­la­tion­ist” Amer­i­ca First orga­ni­za­tion received financ­ing from the Abwehr [Ger­man intel­li­gence dur­ing the Third Reich.])

Key points of dis­cus­sion and analy­sis include:

1.–Wedemeyer’s back­ground: “ . . . . he him­self had been edu­cat­ed in part at the Ger­man War Col­lege, in Berlin. He rent­ed his apart­ment from a mem­ber of the Nazi Par­ty, Ger­hard Ross­bach, and dur­ing his sojourn became a great friend of Gen­er­al Lud­wig Beck, chief of the Ger­man Gen­er­al Staff. . . . (Ross­bach was, in fact, the num­ber two man in the SA behind Ernst Rolm. As dis­cussed in AFA#11, Ross­bach went to work for the CIA after the war.–D.E.) . . . .Right­ly or wrong­ly, he was regard­ed by the Ger­man embasssy in Wash­ing­ton as part of the pro-Ger­man mil­i­tary clique in teh War Depart­ment. . . .”
2.–Wedemeyer’s asso­ci­a­tion with key per­son­nel on the Ger­man Gen­er­al staff: ” . . . . His intro­duc­tions to Beck were arranged by Lieu­tenant Gen­er­al Friedrich von Boet­tich­er, Ger­man mil­i­tary attache in Wash­ing­ton. He cor­re­spond­ed reg­u­lar­ly withy his Ger­man con­tacts until the advent of World War II in Europe. . . .” 
3.–The Third Reich’s devel­op­ment of a Fifth Col­umn with­in its Amer­i­can coun­ter­part: ” . . . . The numer­ous mem­o­ran­da of Hans Thom­sen and Boet­tich­er to Berlin at the time indi­cate that a series of con­tacts had been estab­lished in this group held meet­ings at the home of for­mer Amer­i­can mil­i­tary attache in Berlin Colonel Tru­man Smith. Although pro-Ger­man and a sym­pa­thiz­er of Amer­i­ca First, Smith had the ear of Gen­er­al Mar­shall. . . .”
4.–The theft of the Rain­bow Five man­u­script by a U.S. mil­i­tary offi­cer. ” . . . . On the night of Decem­ber 3, 1941, an office attached to the War Plans Divi­sion decid­ed on his own account to con­sult some of the doc­u­ments at home. It was a sim­ple mat­ter to unlock the steel cab­i­net and remove the large expand­ing fold­er of sev­er­al hun­dred pages. That he was not autho­rized to do so is indi­cat­ed by the fact that he found it nec­es­sary to wrap the file in heavy brown paper, to make it look like a par­cel for mail­ing. . . .”
5.–The fact that Wede­mey­er under­lined the same pas­sages in his copy of the man­u­script as even­tu­al­ly found their way into the Chica­go Tri­bune piece: ” . . . . . Back in his office, Wede­mey­er faced a very unpleas­ant sit­u­a­tion. [J. Edgar] Hoover had dis­patched his num­ber-one man, Edward Tamm, to the office, and Tamm was stand­ing by an open fil­ing cab­i­net while Wede­mey­er’s sec­re­tary was sob­bing into her hands. One of Tam­m’s men was hold­ing a copy of the Vic­to­ry Pro­gram. The same pas­sages were under­lined in red by Wede­mey­er as appeared in the news­pa­pers . . . .”

The pro­gram con­cludes with a look at the fate of the Third Force or Third Option formed by Mme. Sun Yat-sen (nee Ching-ling Soong) and Teng Yen-ta, a per­sis­tent crit­ic of Chi­ang Kai-shek.

Dis­il­lu­sioned with Com­mu­nism after a sojourn in Moscow, Mme. Sun Yat-sen part­nered with Teng Yen-ta, who rec­og­nized Chi­ang’s fas­cism and, yet, felt that the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty (at that point in time) was over­ly loy­al to Moscow and was­n’t doing enough for the Chi­nese peas­antry.

Both Ching-ling and Teng Yen-ta sought an alter­na­tive to both Kuom­intang fas­cism and the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty.

Find­ing the demo­c­ra­t­ic social­ism pro­posed by Ching-ling and Teng Yen-ta unac­cept­able, Chi­ang had the British and Amer­i­can police author­i­ties arrest him in the Inter­na­tion­al Con­ces­sion in Shang­hai, after which he was tor­tured for many months.

Ching-ling was report­ed to have vis­it­ed Chi­ang to plead for Teng Yen-ta’s release. Chi­ang had  already dealt with him in char­ac­ter­is­tic fash­ion: “ . . . . Days ear­li­er, on Novem­ber 29, 1931, near­ly a year after his arrest, Ten Yen-ta had been tak­en from his cell at Chiang’s com­mand and was slow­ly stran­gled with a wire. The exe­cu­tion­er was said to be famous for keep­ing vic­tims alive for half an hour while he tight­ened his grip. In his office, Chi­ang had remained silent while Ching-ling plead­ed for a man already dead, enjoy­ing the spec­ta­cle of her momen­tary vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty. . . .”

Repost: The REAL Memorial Day

Due to the shel­ter-in-place restric­tions, it is not pos­si­ble for Mr. Emory to do his annu­al Memo­r­i­al Day marathon pro­gram­ming about the deci­sive con­nec­tions between Amer­i­can indus­try and finance and the Axis pow­ers of World War II. How­ev­er, we re-post the descrip­tion and pro­gram links from last year’s spe­cial for view­ing and use of the listening–and reading–audience: “In the decades since the end of the Sec­ond World War, much has been writ­ten about the war and fas­cism, the dri­ving force behind the aggres­sion that pre­cip­i­tat­ed that con­flict. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, much of what has been said and writ­ten has failed to iden­ti­fy and ana­lyze the caus­es, nature and method­ol­o­gy of fascism—German Nation­al Social­ism or “Nazism” in par­tic­u­lar. A deep­er, more accu­rate analy­sis was pre­sent­ed in pub­lished lit­er­a­ture, par­tic­u­lar­ly vol­umes pub­lished dur­ing, or in the imme­di­ate after­math of, the Sec­ond World War. . . . . Fas­cism (Nazism in par­tic­u­lar) was an out­growth of glob­al­iza­tion and the con­struc­tion of inter­na­tion­al monop­o­lies (car­tels). Key to under­stand­ing this phe­nom­e­non is analy­sis of the Webb-Pomerene act, leg­is­lat­ed near the end of the First World War. A loop­hole in the Anti-trust leg­is­la­tion of 1914, it effec­tive­ly legal­ized the for­ma­tion of cartels—international monopolies—for firms that were barred from domes­tic monop­o­lis­tic prac­tices. Decry­ing what they viewed as exces­sive and restric­tive “reg­u­la­tion” here in the Unit­ed States, U.S.-based transna­tion­al cor­po­ra­tions invest­ed their prof­its from the indus­tri­al boom of the 1920’s abroad, pri­mar­i­ly in Japan and Ger­many. This process might well be viewed as the real begin­ning of what is now known as “glob­al­iza­tion.” This rein­vest­ment of the prof­its of the Amer­i­can indus­tri­al boom of the 1920’s in Japan­ese and Ger­man strate­gic heavy indus­try was the cap­i­tal that drove the engines of con­quest that sub­dued both Europe and Asia dur­ing World War II. On Sun­day, we will high­light the Amer­i­can-Ger­man indus­tri­al axis and its var­i­ous man­i­fes­ta­tions. On Mon­day, we will explore the Amer­i­can-Japan­ese indus­tri­al axis.”

Strategy of Tension in France? “Third Position” Manifestations? Macron Institutes Broad Crackdown

In FTR #957, we not­ed that “Gold­en Boy” Emmanuel Macron was Ger­many’s choice to lead France. Wide­ly hailed as a her­ald of polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic enlight­en­ment, Macron has assumed Napoleon­ic-like pow­er, imple­ment­ing poli­cies that are deeply inim­i­cal to French democ­ra­cy. Amnesty Inter­na­tion­al recent­ly con­demned the government’s abuse of anti-ter­ror­ist emer­gency pow­ers that restrict free­dom of move­ment and rights to peace­ful assem­bly. “Under the cov­er of the state of emer­gency, rights to protest have been stripped away with hun­dreds of activists, envi­ron­men­tal­ists, and labor rights cam­paign­ers unjus­ti­fi­ably banned from par­tic­i­pat­ing in protests,” said Mar­co Per­oli­ni, Amnesty International’s researcher on France. In the name of pre­vent­ing “threats to pub­lic order,” the gov­ern­ment over a peri­od of 18 months issued 155 decrees ban­ning protests, and 574 mea­sures pro­hibit­ing spe­cif­ic indi­vid­u­als from tak­ing part in protests against pro­posed labor law changes. The lat­ter sta­tis­tic is par­tic­u­lar­ly notable because Macron plans to issue sweep­ing decrees to lim­it the pow­er of unions over work­ing con­di­tions and com­pa­ny fir­ing poli­cies. Such pro­pos­als have trig­gered mass demon­stra­tions and vio­lent clash­es with police, in recent months. Macron has been using anti-ter­ror mea­sures tak­en in response to France’s bloody ter­ror attacks of the last cou­ple of years. It turns out that some of the weapon­ry used by the ter­ror­ists was pro­vid­ed by Claude Her­mant (above, right), an appar­ent agent for the French secu­ri­ty forces and a for­mer body­guard for the fas­cist Nation­al Front, whose defeat at the hands of Macron was bruit­ed about as a “tri­umph” for enlight­en­ment, democ­ra­cy, etc. All of the con­tents of this web­site as of 12/19/2014–Dave Emory’s 37+ years of research and broadcasting–as well as hours of video­taped lec­tures are avail­able on a 32GB flash dri­ve. Dave offers his pro­grams and arti­cles for free–your sup­port is very much appre­ci­at­ed.

FTR #957 The National Front and Deep Politics in France, Part 2

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.

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: In the pre-World War II era and post­war era as well; In the right-left polit­i­cal divide in French pol­i­tics; 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: ” . . . . 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.

FTR #956 The National Front and French Deep Politics, Part 1

With the French elec­tions head­ed toward a sec­ond round, there is renewed scruti­ny on the Nation­al Front and its tit­u­lar head Marine Le Pen, who fin­ished sec­ond in the race. 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.

Key ele­ments of dis­cus­sion include:

1. The promi­nent role of Nazi col­lab­o­ra­tors and French SS in the for­ma­tion of the Nation­al Front: “. . . . Ex-wartime Nazi col­lab­o­ra­tors were promi­nent in the ear­ly lead­er­ship of the Nation­al Front in the 1970s–including mem­bers of the French SS and col­lab­o­ra­tionist Mil­ice, and even a lead­ing offi­cial of the French wartime anti-Jew­ish agency, a minor cog in the Holo­caust. . . .”

2. In the con­text of Le Pen’s kind words from “Team Trump,” we not­ed that, in FTR #951 Trump con­fi­dant and advi­sor Steve Ban­non has been influ­enced by Charles Mau­r­ras, part of the French fas­cist Fifth Col­umn that sub­vert­ed French resis­tance to the Third Reich’s armies.

3. Ms. Le Pen denied French com­plic­i­ty in the Vel D’Hiv roundup, direct­ed by Rene Bous­quet. ” . . . . . . . . On 2 July 1942, Bous­quet and [SS] Carl Oberg [in charge of the French Police] pre­pared the arrests known as the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup (Rafle du Vel’ d’Hiv). Bous­quet per­son­al­ly can­celed orders pro­tect­ing some cat­e­gories of peo­ple from arrests, notably chil­dren under 18 and par­ents with chil­dren under 5. After the arrests, some bish­ops and car­di­nals protest­ed; Bous­quet threat­ened to can­cel tax priv­i­leges for Catholic schools. . . .”

4. Bous­quet was held in high regard by Hein­rich Himm­ler: ” . . . . In April 1943, Bous­quet met with Hein­rich Himm­ler. Himm­ler declared him­self ‘impressed by Bous­quet’s per­son­al­i­ty’, men­tion­ing him as a ‘pre­cious col­lab­o­ra­tor in the frame­work of police col­lab­o­ra­tion’. . . .”

5. Aides of Ms. Le Pen man­i­fest affin­i­ty for the Third Reich. “. . . . ‘They [Le Pen aides Fred­er­ic Chatil­lon, and Axel Lous­tau] have remained Nation­al Social­ist,’ said Aymer­ic Chauprade, once Ms. Le Pen’s prin­ci­pal advis­er on for­eign affairs. . . . ‘The only debat­able point, in the use of the term ‘neo-Nazi,’ is the wrong­ful qual­i­fi­er ‘neo,’ the affi­davit states. . . . . . . . French tele­vi­sion recent­ly broad­cast video from the 1990s of Mr. Lous­tau vis­it­ing an aging promi­nent for­mer SS mem­ber, Léon Degrelle, a dec­o­rat­ed war­rior for Hitler and the founder of the Bel­gian Rex par­ty, a pre­war fas­cist move­ment. Oth­er video showed Mr. Chatil­lon speak­ing warm­ly of his own vis­it with Mr. Degrelle, who was a patron saint of Europe’s far-right youths until his death in 1994. . . .”

6. Of con­sid­er­able impor­tance in the con­text of the cov­er­age of the Nazi influ­ences of the Nation­al Front is the fact that the post-war per­pet­u­a­tion of French fas­cism extends far beyond the Le Pen milieu. Main­stream, even “social­ist” French politi­cians such as Fran­cois Mit­terand are bound­ed by defin­i­tive links with fig­ures from the Vichy col­lab­o­ra­tionist gov­ern­ment. “. . . . An exam­ple is his mem­ber­ship of the Volon­taires Nationaux (Nation­al Vol­un­teers), an orga­ni­za­tion relat­ed to François de la Roc­que’s far-right league, the Croix de Feu, for one to three years, depend­ing on the source.[2] On 1 Feb­ru­ary 1935, Mit­ter­rand joined the Action française march, more com­mon­ly known as ‘l’in­va­sion métèque’, to demon­strate against for­eign doc­tors set­ting up in France with cries of ‘La France aux Français’. [This is sim­i­lar to the theme of the Nation­al Front!–D.E.] There are two pho­tos that show Mit­ter­rand fac­ing a police line,[3] pub­lished in Les Camelots du Roi by Mau­rice Pujo.[4] . . . .”

7. Mit­terand’s fas­cist activ­i­ties extend­ed to oppo­si­tion to sup­port­ers of Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, who resist­ed Mus­solin­i’s takeover of his coun­try: ” . . . . Dur­ing the win­ter of 1936, François Mit­ter­rand took part in action against Gas­ton Jèze. Between Jan­u­ary and March 1936, the nation­al­ist right and the Action française, cam­paigned for Jèze’s resignation.because he act­ed as a coun­sel­lor for Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia, after he was dri­ven from Addis Aba­ba by Mus­solin­i’s troops dur­ing the Sec­ond Ita­lo-Abyssin­ian War. . . .”

8. Per­haps most impor­tant for our pur­pos­es con­cerns Mit­terand’s post­war rela­tion­ship with Bous­quet, who financed Mit­terand’s polit­i­cal career and did so for oth­er left-wing French politi­cians. “. . . 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] . . . . 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. . . .”

Pro­gram High­lights Include: Review of the French fas­cist Fifth Col­umn that sub­vert­ed the French mil­i­tary resis­tance to Hitler; dis­cus­sion of the Cagoulard plot to over­throw the social front of Leon Blum; not­ing the con­cen­tra­tion of eco­nom­ic own­er­ship in pre­war France and how that gen­er­at­ed sup­port for the Social Front of Leon Blum.

FTR #951 Fascism: 2017 World Tour

The events over­tak­ing the Unit­ed States are echoes of events occur­ring world­wide. This “2017 World Tour” exam­ines aspects of ascen­dant glob­al fas­cism, includ­ing his­tor­i­cal and ide­o­log­i­cal trends stretch­ing back to the World War II peri­od.

Yet anoth­er of the fascist/Nazi/racist influ­ences on Steve Ban­non is French writer Charles Mau­r­ras. A doc­tri­naire anti-Semi­te, he was sen­tenced to life impris­on­ment for col­lab­o­rat­ing with the Third Reich.

Set­ting Mau­r­ras’s activ­i­ties in an his­tor­i­cal con­text, we recap an excerpt from FTR #372 (August of 2002) detail­ing the French Fifth Col­umn that sub­vert­ed the French mil­i­tary resis­tance to the armies of the Third Reich. Mau­r­ras’s L’Ac­tion Fran­caise was among the jour­nals influ­enc­ing French fas­cists, who saw the Ger­man inva­sion as a vehi­cle for elim­i­nat­ing democ­ra­cy and, at the same time, blam­ing the defeat on gov­ern­ment of Leon Blum, whose mur­der was advo­cat­ed by Mau­r­ras.

In Italy, Bepe Gril­lo’s Five Star Move­ment is lead­ing in the polls, and may come out ahead in the 2018 elec­tions. Observers have seen the par­ty as an heir to Mus­solin­i’s black­shirts. We note, in pass­ing, that the pop­ulist ide­al­ism offi­cial­ly endorsed by Five Star is sim­i­lar to aspects of many left-pop­ulist agen­das, while incor­po­rat­ing fea­tures of con­tem­po­rary fas­cist pol­i­tics.

Trav­el­ing north­ward, we observe the resus­ci­ta­tion of Slo­va­kian fas­cism and the cel­e­bra­tion of Nazi quis­ling Josef Tiso’s World War II col­lab­o­ra­tionist gov­ern­ment. Social media/Facebook are a key ele­ment of the suc­cess of the “neo-Tiso’s.”

An American/Swedish axis, of sorts, man­i­fests as a col­lab­o­ra­tive effort between Trumpenkampfver­bande sup­port­er Richard B. Spencer and Daniel Friberg, a key fig­ure in the Swedish fas­cist milieu of Carl Lund­strom.

Trav­el­ing to Asia, we note the re-emer­gence of Japan­ese fas­cism, insti­tut­ed in the Abe gov­ern­ment by orga­ni­za­tions like Nip­pon Kai­gi. In addi­tion to insti­tut­ing revi­sion­ist teach­ing in the Japan­ese edu­ca­tion­al sys­tem, the Abe gov­ern­ment is cur­tail­ing that coun­try’s free press.

Sev­er­al of Abe’s cab­i­net min­is­ters are sup­port­ive of Hitler’s elec­toral strat­e­gy, see­ing it as a blue­print for the imple­men­ta­tion of Japan­ese reaction–among them Tomo­mi Ina­da, the new defense min­is­ter.

The pro­gram con­cludes with a look at Naren­dra Mod­i’s Hin­du nationalist/fascist gov­ern­ment and it selec­tion of a hard-line anti-Mus­lim big­ot to gov­ern the state of Uttar Pradesh.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: review of Mod­i’s BJP as a cat’s paw for the Hin­du nationalist/fascist RSS; dis­cus­sion of the eco­nom­ic links between Ger­man and French indus­tri­al­ists that under­lay the devel­op­ment of the French Fifth Col­umn inspired, in part, by Charles Mau­r­ras; review of the links between Carl Lund­strom, Wik­iLeaks and Assange aide Joran Jer­mas, a doc­tri­naire Holo­caust denier; review of the “Naz­i­fied AI” at the heart of Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca’s data manip­u­la­tion engine.

FTR #929 The Trumpenkampfverbande, Part 8: The Trumpen Kreis

The title of the pro­gram derives from “the Himm­ler Kreis”–Himmler’s cir­cle of friends, the indus­tri­al­ists who financed the day-to-day work­ings of the Nazi SS and, in turn, received slave labor from Himm­ler’s inven­to­ry of incar­cer­at­ed work­ers. We bor­row on the Third Reich term to char­ac­ter­ize the Friends of Trump–the Trumpen Kreis.

Begin­ning with review of UK Inde­pen­dence Par­ty leader Nigel Farage, we note the “Brex­it” archi­tec­t’s sup­port for Don­ald Trump. In addi­tion, we note that Farage has a Ger­man wife. Under oth­er cir­cum­stances this would be unre­mark­able. In the con­text of covert operations/clandestine pol­i­tics, a romantic/sexual partner/spouse might also be a case offi­cer and/or pay­mas­ter.

We bring this up because the “Brex­it” engi­neered by Farage and com­pa­ny removed a major obsta­cle to the cre­ation of a Ger­man-dom­i­nat­ed EU mil­i­tary force. ” . . . . With Britain, which had always adamant­ly opposed an inte­grat­ed EU mil­i­tary pol­i­cy, leav­ing the EU, Berlin sees an oppor­tu­ni­ty for reviv­ing its efforts at restruc­tur­ing the EU’s mil­i­tary and mobi­liz­ing as many mem­ber coun­tries as pos­si­ble for the EU’s future wars. . . .”

Inter­est­ing­ly, and per­haps sig­nif­i­cant­ly, Don­ald Trump has drawn sup­port from Hin­du nation­al­ists of the Modi stripe. There is an impor­tant ele­ment of net­work­ing here: Trump cam­paign man­ag­er and “Alt-right” media fig­ure Stephen K. Ban­non is a sup­port­er of Mod­i’s move­ment, as well as that of Nigel Farage. ” . . . . Mr. Trump may be large­ly indif­fer­ent to the rea­sons behind his Hin­du loy­al­ists’ fer­vor, but his most senior advis­ers are not. The campaign’s chief exec­u­tive, Stephen K. Ban­non, is a stu­dent of nation­al­ist move­ments. Mr. Ban­non is close to Nigel Farage, a cen­tral fig­ure in Britain’s move­ment to leave the Euro­pean Union, and he is an admir­er of India’s prime min­is­ter, Naren­dra Modi, a Hin­du nation­al­ist Mr. Ban­non has called ‘the Rea­gan of India.’ It may be pure coin­ci­dence that some of Mr. Trump’s words chan­nel the nation­al­is­tic and, some argue, anti-Mus­lim sen­ti­ments that Mr. Modi stoked as he rose to pow­er. But it is cer­tain­ly not coin­ci­den­tal that many of Mr. Trump’s biggest Hin­du sup­port­ers are also some of Mr. Modi’s most ardent back­ers. . . .”

Trump has also received the sup­port of the mer­cu­r­ial, bom­bas­tic Russ­ian fas­cist Vladimir Zhiri­novsky, whose polit­i­cal career was launched with the assis­tance of Ger­hard Frey, a promi­nent Ger­man Nazi. Trump and Zhiri­novsky have over­lap­ping polit­i­cal styles: ” . . . . His com­bat­ive style, rem­i­nis­cent of Trump’s, ensures him plen­ty of tele­vi­sion air time and mil­lions of votes in Russ­ian elec­tions, often from the kind of blue-col­lar work­ers who are the bedrock of the U.S. Repub­li­can can­di­date’s sup­port. Zhiri­novsky once pro­posed block­ing off most­ly Mus­lim south­ern Rus­sia with a barbed wire fence, echo­ing Trump’s call for a wall along the U.S. bor­der with Mex­i­co. Zhiri­novsky, who said he met Trump in New York in 2002, rev­els in his sim­i­lar­i­ties with the Amer­i­can busi­ness­man — they are the same age, favor coarse, some­times misog­y­nis­tic lan­guage and boast about putting their own coun­try first. . . .”

In FTR #921, we not­ed that Trump kept a book of Hitler’s speech­es by his bed and read it to gain tips on the use of rhetoric. He appears to have bor­rowed a play from Der Fuhrer’s rhetor­i­cal play­book when address­ing the Val­ues Vot­ers Sum­mit: ” . . . He regaled the crowd of Chris­t­ian vot­ers in his usu­al bom­bas­tic way, but near the end of the speech, Trump seemed to play into the hands of his accusers who claim that not only does Trump remind peo­ple of infa­mous dic­ta­tors like Ital­ian fas­cist Ben­i­to Mus­soli­ni and Ger­man Nazi leader Adolf Hitler with his jin­go­ism, bla­tant nativist nation­al­ism, and over-the-top fact-twist­ing scape­goat­ing, but he sounds like them as well. He para­phrased the infa­mous Nazi Par­ty slo­gan, ‘Ein volk, ein reich, ein Fuhrer!’ . . . If one saw the speech, or watch­es it in replay, Trump begins rais­ing his voice on the first use of the word ‘one,’emphasizing each part of the ver­bal trip­tych. Not only does he invoke the tra­di­tion­al lines from the Pledge of Alle­giance, he pro­gress­es from, just as the Nazi Par­ty slo­gan does, ‘one peo­ple’ (‘ein volk’) to ‘under one god’ (an implied uni­fied Chris­t­ian nation or ‘ein reich’) to ‘one flag’ (‘ein Fuhrer,’ the sym­bol of a uni­fied nation). . . .”

Trump is also bor­row­ing a rhetor­i­cal page from the Nazi play­book in his attacks on the press: ” . . . . On Sat­ur­day night, a new and for­eign accu­sa­tion came to the fore: ‘Lügen­presse!’ The term, which means ‘lying press’ in Ger­man, has a his­to­ry dat­ing back to the mid-1800s and was used by the Nazis to dis­cred­it the media. In recent years, it has been revived by Ger­man far-right anti-immi­grant groups. And on Sat­ur­day, it made an appear­ance at a Trump ral­ly in Cleve­land, Ohio. . . Bre­it­bart News [edit­ed by Trump cam­paign man­ag­er Stephen K. Ban­non] report­ed favor­ably on the term in an inter­view ear­li­er this year with the leader of the Ger­man far-right group PEGIDA, writ­ing, ‘It will come as no sur­prise to many that the main­stream media would lash out against a word that high­lights their own, inten­tion­al fail­ings. But [Lutz] Bachmann’s PEGIDA has pop­u­lar­ized the term to the point where it has become a pil­lar — even a ral­ly­ing cry — for the nation­al­ist, pop­ulist move­ments across the con­ti­nent.’ . . . Mean­while, the hatred toward the press among the larg­er pop­u­la­tion of Trump sup­port­ers grows increas­ing­ly pro­nounced near­ly every day. In these final weeks of the cam­paign, at near­ly every ral­ly, Trump riles up his audi­ence against the press as reporters sit in the media pen, easy tar­gets for vit­ri­ol. Reporters dis­em­bark­ing the press bus at Trump’s ral­ly in Naples, Flori­da, on Sun­day, the day after the ‘lügen­presse’ inci­dent, were imme­di­ate­ly greet­ed by boos and shouts of ‘Tell the truth!’ . . . ”

Con­clud­ing the broad­cast, we note that David French, a con­ser­v­a­tive vet­er­an of the Iraq war, has been vicious­ly trolled by Trump’s Alt-Right fol­low­ers because of his adop­tion of an Ethiopi­an orphan: ” . . . . In par­tic­u­lar, the alt-right made a point to attack French’s youngest daugh­ter, whom his fam­i­ly had adopt­ed from Ethiopia. You see, alt-righters view bring­ing in chil­dren of col­or to Amer­i­ca as the ulti­mate betray­al of the white race, which is why they had par­tic­u­lar scorn for French. ‘I saw images of my daughter’s face in gas cham­bers, with a smil­ing Trump in a Nazi uni­form prepar­ing to press a but­ton and kill her,’ he writes. ‘I saw her face pho­to-shopped into images of slaves. She was called a ‘niglet’ and a ‘din­du.’ The alt-right unleashed on my wife, Nan­cy, claim­ing that she had slept with black men while I was deployed to Iraq, and that I loved to watch while she had sex with ‘black bucks.’ Peo­ple sent her porno­graph­ic images of black men hav­ing sex with white women, with some­one pho­to­shopped to look like me, watch­ing. . . There is noth­ing at all reward­ing, enjoy­able, or sat­is­fy­ing about see­ing man after man after man brag in graph­ic terms that he has slept with your wife. It’s unset­tling to have a phone call inter­rupt­ed, watch images of mur­der flick­er across your screen, and read threat­en­ing e‑mails. It’s sober­ing to take your teenage kids out to the farm to make sure they’re both pro­fi­cient with hand­guns in case an intrud­er comes when they’re home alone.”

Pro­gram High­lights Include: Review of Trump’s links with the Steuben Soci­ety; review of the Steuben Soci­ety’s posi­tion in the Nazi under­ground in this coun­try, before, dur­ing and after World War II; review of the polit­i­cal resume of Ger­hard Frey; dis­cus­sion of Blacks for Trump sup­port­er “Michael the Black man” and his back­ground in a mur­der­ous, anti-Semit­ic cult.

FTR #928 The Trumpenkampfverbande, Part 7: Locker Room Eclipse, Part 2

Con­tin­u­ing analy­sis of aspects of Don­ald Trump’s can­di­da­cy that have been eclipsed by his boor­ish atti­tude and behav­ior toward women, we note Trump’s use of thin­ly-veiled anti-Semit­ic rhetoric inti­mat­ing that Hillary Clin­ton is in bed with an inter­na­tion­al Jew­ish cabal. ” . . . . The speech was hinged to the orig­i­nal pur­pose of his cam­paign: to trade on the resent­ments of a restive rem­nant of white America—angry white men and the women who love them—and set the stage for may­hem in the wake of his like­ly elec­toral defeat. This was not your stan­dard, off-the-cuff Trump rant. This was a script­ed speech, deliv­ered with a teleprompter. It was craft­ed. It fea­tured the key words of right-wing com­plaints: “sov­er­eign,” “glob­al bankers” and “slan­der.” Real­ly, it came right out of a Nazi pro­pa­gan­da play­book. And when one con­sid­ers the themes com­mon between Nazi pro­pa­gan­da films and the films made by top Trump cam­paign staffers Stephen K. Ban­non and David Bossie (as ana­lyzed by Alter­Net), we should hard­ly be sur­prised. . . . The agen­da of the “media estab­lish­ment,” Trump said, was to elect “crooked” Hillary Clin­ton, in the ser­vice of “spe­cial glob­al inter­ests rig­ging the sys­tem.” There are a lot of ways in the land of Wingnut­tia to tele­graph that your tar­get is Jews, and these are two of them. Remem­ber them: You’ll be hear­ing a lot in com­ing days about the “media estab­lish­ment,” “glob­al spe­cial inter­ests,” oh, and “bankers.” . . . .”

Trump is also rhetor­i­cal­ly invok­ing the prospect of turn­ing to vio­lence to right the wrongs of the “rigged” elec­tion he has bruit­ed about. “ . . . . I watched his speech Thurs­day, and if I closed my eyes, I could smell the camp­fire smoke at the Mal­heur refuge and feel the Ore­gon win­ter wind on my face. Here were the con­spir­a­cies, the ref­er­ences to the shad­owy inter­na­tion­al cabals, the whis­pers about the ille­git­i­ma­cy of the Depart­ment of Jus­tice and the Tri­lat­er­al­ist coopt­ing of the FBI. It was like lis­ten­ing to an immod­est Ammon Bundy. We have to pro­tect our­selves from not just the gov­ern­ment (because it is only a pawn) but from the peo­ple who real­ly run it. We should be watch­ful, resilient, ready—and though he is reluc­tant, he will sac­ri­fice him­self, for he is the only one who can save us from the ter­ror. Don­ald Trump shout­ed out every fevered dystopi­an fan­ta­sy I heard on the refuge . . . . I was out­raged by Trump before. But now I am wor­ried. . . . Thurs­day, Don­ald Trump trav­eled a step fur­ther down the path of mil­i­tant right-wing rev­o­lu­tion. It wasn’t a call to arms, exact­ly. But it was far past the point of com­fort. . . .”

A major point of dis­cus­sion con­cerns Trump’s deputy cam­paign man­ag­er, David Bossie. Even as Trump accus­es Hillary of being a tool of the “elites,” Trump is uti­liz­ing Bossie, who is the head of Cit­i­zens Unit­ed. It was a law­suit by Bossie’s orga­ni­za­tion that opened the flood­gates to vir­tu­al­ly unlim­it­ed cam­paign fund­ing by the ultra rich, when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Cit­i­zens Unit­ed. Bossie and Steven K. Ban­non, Trump’s cam­paign man­ag­er, have uti­lized pro­pa­gan­da tech­niques pio­neered by Hitler, Goebbels and com­pa­ny. ” . . . . The late Andrew Bre­it­bart, founder of the web­site Ban­non went on to lead, called Ban­non the “Leni Riefen­stahl of the Tea Par­ty movement”—a ref­er­ence to the infa­mous cre­ator of Nazi pro­pa­gan­da films. While insist­ing to a Wall Street Jour­nal reporter in 2011 that his work isn’t pro­pa­gan­da, Ban­non went on to cite Riefen­stahl among his main influ­ences. . . . Ivana Trump, the candidate’s first wife, told Van­i­ty Fair in 1990 that her hus­band kept a copy of Adolf Hitler’s My New Order, a col­lec­tion of speech­es that dis­play the Nazi dictator’s excep­tion­al abil­i­ty to manip­u­late real­i­ty, in a cab­i­net near his bed. . . . . The Nazi regime pro­duced a mas­sive amount of pro­pa­gan­da; it had an entire Min­istry of Pub­lic Enlight­en­ment and Pro­pa­gan­da, head­ed by Joseph Goebbels. A cen­tral tech­nique of Nazi pro­pa­gan­dists, accord­ing to the U.S. Holo­caust Memo­r­i­al Muse­um, was to cast Jews as out­siders and dan­ger­ous ene­mies of the Reich, ‘‘sub­hu­man’ crea­tures infil­trat­ing Aryan soci­ety.’ . . . In her analy­sis of Riefenstahl’s ‘Tri­umph of the Will,’ Price not­ed that ‘per­haps most crit­i­cal­ly, Germany’s come­back is por­trayed as well under­way; the view­er need only jump aboard. What is being said implic­it­ly is that there is no alter­na­tive.’ In ‘Bat­tle for Amer­i­ca,’ Ban­non and Bossie fol­low the same for­mu­la, posit­ing the Tea Par­ty move­ment as the band­wag­on to jump on. But the for­mu­la isn’t the only thing about the film that car­ries echoes of Goebbels: a researcher and coun­sel for the film was white nation­al­ist Robert Van­der­voort. . . .”

Pro­gram High­lights Include: The arrest of mili­tia mem­bers in Kansas for plot­ting an attack on Soma­li refugees, sched­uled for the day after Elec­tion Day; dis­cus­sion of UK Inde­pen­dence Par­ty leader Nigel Farage’s sup­port for Trump; the sup­port Trump has received from Russ­ian fas­cist Vladimir Zhiri­novsky; Zhiri­novsky’s fund­ing by Ger­man Nazi Ger­hard Frey; Frey’s dis­sem­i­na­tion of the dis­in­for­ma­tion that Lee Har­vey Oswald fired at Gen­er­al Edwin Walk­er; Frey’s close asso­ci­a­tion with Rein­hard Gehlen; Trump’s close rela­tion­ship with the Steuben Soci­ety.