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 #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.