Although I’ve long considered the former Bush-speechwriter and AEI and Fox-news fixture Marc Thiessen to be the ultimate GOP-establishmentarian, until this week I assumed he was a person of sound judgment. Most of what I’ve heard Thiessen express as a Washington Post-columnist and Fox-news contributor has seemed reasonable. Besides, unlike our verbally intemperate and ungrammatical chief executive, Thiessen frames his comments with an imperturbable precision. Even in the face of wild accusations from leftist sparring partners, he manages to smile (perhaps superciliously) and responds in measured phrases.
That’s why I found his latest column celebrating the discomfiture of Marine Le Pen, as an anti-Semite with fascist tendencies to be truly unsettling. One might expect such prose from the foaming Ralph Peters, who seems to lapse into rage syndrome every time he mentions a European (as opposed to Israeli) nationalist. But from Thiessen I expected better. Thiessen hammers Marine for asserting that the entire French nation should not be held guilty for a particular misdeed: In 1942 13,000 Paris Jews were rounded up at the Vélodrome d’Hiver and deported to concentration camps. Thiessen cites this as evidence that like her abrasive father, Jean-Marie, Marine is at least an implicit Holocaust-denier. But what Marine said which Thiessen finds outrageous happens to be true. The Resistance leader Charles de Gaulle, the Jewish chronicler of the French Resistance Robert Aron, and more recently, a Moroccan Jewish journalist Eric Zemmour have all made the same point as Marine, namely that it is wrong to accuse the French people generally for the crime committed by the German SS and their Vichy collaborators. Indeed the French saved almost all of the indigenous French Jewish population; the notorious roundup (rafle) that Thiessen mentions only affected foreign Jews, many of whom had fled to France in order to escape Nazi persecution. Zemmour points out that limiting the deportation to this mass of hapless Jews had been the result of a deal struck between the collaborationist Vichy government and the Nazi German occupiers of France. But there is no reason to assume that most of the French supported this deportation.
Indeed the inspiration for the dark view of the French that Thiessen regurgitates comes principally from two sources, the French Communist Party and their leftist successors and the American historian Robert Paxton. In Vichy France, Paxton sets out to incriminate the entire French nation for collaborating with the Nazi occupation. Those who did not actively participate in this regime are accused of “passive” collaboration, a charge that makes about as much sense as the current leftist assertion that all white Americans are complicit in ”systematic racism.” Zemmour observes that the French translation of Paxton’s work in 1973, plus its sequel Vichy and the Jews in 1981, created in France a replacement for the national history of “the Great Michelet.” Just as the nineteenth-century French historian Jules Michelet built his chronicle of the French nation around the Revolution, his antifascist successors have worked to instill in French youth a “new doxa.” This replacement dogma stresses national shame, for an evil deed that only a minority of the French were involved in, while their country was being occupied by a foreign invader.
This collective guilt, which Thiessen attacks Marine for denying, originated on the antinational French Left, more particularly in the French Communist Party. It has been trotted out periodically to justify a series of hate speech laws, starting in 1972 with the Loi Pleven and culminating in the Loi Gayssot in 1990, all of which have been heavily sponsored by the French Communist Party. The Loi Pleven punishes discriminatory speech and writing directed against religious, ethnic and in its expanded version, lifestyle minorities; the Loi Gayssot criminalizes in a very expansive manner any public expression of Holocaust-denial. The second has been applied in prosecuting Jean-Marie Le Pen for understating (but never denying) Hitler’s persecution of European Jewry.
This blame game has a purpose beyond limiting people’s freedom. The stigma of collaboration has been shifted from the Communists, who were Hitler’s principal collaborators during the fall of France, to French patriots and traditional Catholics. One sees this script at work in Marcel Ophuls’s highly tendentious film La Chagrin et la Pitié, which came out in 1972. Here the main Nazi collaborators are shown to be Catholic priests, peasants, movie actors and shop-keepers. Although the head of the French Communist Party at the time Jacques Duclos is among the many interviewees, only minimal attention is given in the entire film to Duclos’s activities, in discouraging his countrymen from resisting Hitler’s army. One wonders about Ophuls’s relative inattention to the Parti Communiste Francais, which worked on orders from Moscow to subvert the French defense against the German invasion.
Stalin was then allied to Hitler; and French Communists, especially Duclos, remained loyal to the Nazi-Soviet Pact, even at the cost of seeing their country fall under Nazi rule. After the Liberation, Communist mobs incited violence against supposed collaborators, which meant the enemies of the Party, including former Communists who refused to take orders from Stalin in 1940. Neither the Communists nor the present French Socialist Party have shown interest in acknowledging this shameful history. Thiessen might have asked whether some of Emmanuel’s Macron’s supporters on the Left are still whitewashing the most flagrant but well -hidden example of French collaboration during the War, plus the disgraceful retribution that followed. By the way, for all his mouthing-off, Jean-Marie was not a Nazi collaborator, but volunteered to fight for the French Resistance at the age of seventeen. Among the founders and leaders of the National Front, moreover, were decorated members of the Resistance, including two French Jewish officers.
Pace Thiessen, there is no reason to imagine that if Marine had been elected, she “would’ve almost certainly been the Putin puppet that Trump has not been.” Although this lady did take a loan from the Russian government, this borrowing only occurred after French banking concerns turned down her requests repeatedly. Edouard de Rothschild and other French banking magnates were heavily invested in the multiculturalist but also fervently pro-EU Macron. In fact Macron had been an employee of the Rothschild banking conglomerate before he was launched mysteriously into French presidential politics. Despite all the gloating that has come from the pro-globalist, pro- multinational media, Macron won under 50% of the French vote in the second phase of the presidential race. This takes into account the heavy number of abstentions and those voters who left the space on their ballots for a presidential choice blank. Macron now faces the inconvenience that more than a third of the electorate, namely those on the nationalist Right, despise the forces that pay-rolled his election.
Allow me to speculate on what really concerns Thiessen, Chris Steierwalt, and the editorialists for the Murdoch-owned Jerusalem Post, all of whom seem to be cribbing from each other in going after Marine. Marine is a French patriot, in the tradition of France’s greatest leader of the twentieth century and someone who became the savior of his country more than once, Charles de Gaulle. Like de Gaulle, Marine has no desire to see her country fall under foreign hegemons and like de Gaulle, she’d only cooperate with NATO and the EU if she believed it was in her country’s interest. Her warnings against letting large numbers of Muslims come into France is no different from that of de Gaulle, who underlined this danger in words that would now be considered politically incorrect.
Unfortunately our GOP-neocon elites recoil from the idea that Western European countries should be allowed to assert their national independence. They would be delighted if other Western Europeans acted like the reeducated antifascist Germans, who seem eager to vanish as a people into international organizations that were created in Washington, D.C. (During World War Two, flanked by American advisors, Jean Monnet developed in Washington the plan for integrating European countries into a European Community.) Of course our Republican establishment didn’t say “boo” when the Brits exited the EU. But then England is a special case. It’s been joined to the US for so long that if the country distances itself from the continent, it’s likely to become even more tied to us. It’s the continental Europeans who must be shamed and hit over the head with a “fascist” anti-Semitic past lest they stray from American internationalist control. This all sounds like the antifascist agitprop that the Soviets and their satellites used for decades to justify their form of domination. I used to be dumb enough to believe that these leftist platitudes would go away once the Soviet Empire collapsed.
