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The outcomes of the primary spherical of the French elections are astonishing. Whereas Ukraine is desperately preventing to defend its freedom from the armed aggression of its japanese neighbor, greater than half of the French voters gave their votes to events that advocate leaving NATO and reversing alliances in favor of Russia. Are we nonetheless worthy of a really European future?
The French are attentive to the martyrdom of Ukraine, as proven by their dedication to humanitarian motion in favor of this nation. However they refuse to study the teachings of the tragedy that Ukraine is experiencing, nor to think about that the liberticidal ardour of Russia may presumably have an effect on France. The Kremlinophile events are incapable of doing what’s the ABC of all politics, establishing a hierarchy of enemies and risks that threaten France. For them the one adversary is “American hegemony”. It doesn’t matter that Putin threatens the West with nuclear strikes, that Kremlin brokers infiltrate our parliament, our assume tanks, our events, or our media. The hazard comes from the US, this nation that for almost 20 years has labored to unload the burden of its worldwide commitments, to the good thing about rogue states prospering in an more and more chaotic world. This blatant lack of overseas coverage judgment bodes unwell for his or her home coverage.
Such persistent blindness requires clarification. The anti-American, even anti-Western, slant in a big a part of the French inhabitants has deep roots. That’s the reason it stays immutable, impervious to actuality like an inheritance of which one is not conscious. The origin of this French idiosyncrasy will be traced to Stalinist propaganda. We at the moment are discovering the extent that this propaganda has left its mark on folks’s minds in Russia. However its deleterious impact can also be nonetheless felt in France.
It was throughout the marketing campaign unleashed by Stalin in opposition to the Marshall Plan from the autumn of 1947 that the most important themes that also articulate the discourse of the intense events of the left and the appropriate had been inaugurated. The American architects of the Marshall Plan had a two-fold goal: to elevate post-war Europe out of its distress in order that it will be much less susceptible to Moscow’s propaganda; to encourage the Europeans to cooperate, and, particularly, to reconcile France and Germany with the intention to lay the foundations of the European Neighborhood. Stalin understood instantly that the success of this coverage would sound the loss of life knell to his ambitions for domination of the continent. He undertook mobilization of the European Communists to sabotage implementation of the Marshall Plan. In September 1947, he summoned them to Poland, the place Jdanov undertook to dictate the broad outlines of the propaganda to be deployed in opposition to the American initiative. Stalin’s important concept was to attraction to nationalism and to current the USSR because the champion of the sovereignty of European states within the face of a undertaking of “subjugation” of Europe by the US. Unsurprisingly, Stalin deployed this argumentationat the identical time that he was imposing a communist regime within the international locations of Central and Jap Europe, the place terror, mass arrests, deportations and present trials turned routine.
Allow us to take heed to Jdanov: “The ideological marketing campaign that goes hand-in-hand with the plans for the enslavement of Europe relies on an offensive in opposition to the precept of nationwide sovereignty […] to which the concept of a world authorities is opposed. The aim of this marketing campaign is to hide the unbridled growth of American imperialism, which openly violates the sovereign rights of countries, to painting the US because the champion of common legislation and people who resist American penetration as advocates of an outdated and egocentric nationalism… The Soviet Union defends the sovereign rights of all nations, small and huge. At current imperialist international locations like the US, England and their shut allies have gotten harmful enemies of nationwide independence and the self-determination of countries…The existence of the Attlee-Bevin labor authorities in England and the Ramadier socialist authorities in France doesn’t stop England and France from strolling like satellites, so far as the primary points are involved, within the pothole of the imperialist coverage of the US.” The Marshall Plan is “a undertaking that consists of making a bloc of states indebted to the US and granting credit to European international locations as a reward for giving up their financial after which political independence… The concept of a ‘world authorities’ taken up by dreamy and pacifist bourgeois intellectuals, is used not solely as a technique to stress with the intention to morally disarm the peoples who defend their independence in opposition to the assaults of American imperialism, but in addition as a catchphrase particularly against the Soviet Union, which tirelessly and consequently defends the precept of a real equality of rights and the safety of the sovereign rights of all of the peoples, nice and small .” Doesn’t this sound like Le Pen, Zemmour or Mélenchon? In 2008, Marine Le Pen noticed some good would come out of the subprime disaster: “The disaster provides us the chance to show our backs on America and switch to Russia.”
This propaganda highlighting the “sovereignty” of countries in opposition to “American hegemony” didn’t stay the unique protect of the french communist occasion. It percolated as effectively by the Gaullist occasion. Within the early Fifties, Gaullists and Communists campaigned collectively in opposition to the EDC (European Protection Neighborhood) undertaking… within the title of French “sovereignty”. Since then, the necessity to go it alone, to flaunt one’s “independence”, after all from the US, has turn out to be a should go-to in French diplomacy. Moscow has skilfully exploited this French declare to uniqueness, to the detriment of our alliances and European commitments, and continues to take action with unchanging success to weaken Europe and NATO. President Macron lately welcomed the truth that Vladimir Putin “respects France and makes a distinction with the remainder of the West.”
The Soviet regime appealed to nationalism from its earliest days. However it’s a specific nationalism, one appropriate with domination by Moscow. Kremlin ideologues have confined it to a innocent variant, “nationalist in type, socialist in content material”. They’ve diminished nationalism to parochialism, folklore, “tune and dance teams”, embroidered shirts of this or that republic or area, stapled to the social mythology of Bolshevism. This Soviet-style nationalism is the truth is a provincialism, which in a manner requires the tutelage of “huge brother”. And it’s one of these nationalism, steeped in folklore (Joan of Arc, Napoleon, de Gaulle, the Normandie Niemen squadron), which is now being disseminated within the French identitarian proper, and which is completely Kremlin-compatible. As a result of it smells musty. As a result of it perceives in Russia the identical will to shut doorways and home windows. As a result of it’s empty of free thought and particularly of any try to grasp the world through which we dwell, aside from the conspiratorial clichés which can be a part of its demonology. The acrimony with which this milieu assaults the “elites” is because of the truth that the latter are extra oriented in direction of openness to the world and refuse the complacent navel-gazing of the “populists”, who really feel extra snug in a province tucked away in opposition to the winds and built-in into Putin’s Eurasia, somewhat than a part of a nation compelled to imagine its future and its protection in a world of predators, compelled to face disagreeable realities, in a European Union that they accuse of not being “protecting” sufficient.
On the finish of the communist period, when Russia was in ideological disarray throughout the Yeltsin interval, France briefly inherited the torch of anti-Americanism and anti-liberalism from Moscow. Apprentice gurus like Dugin turned to the New French Proper, from which they borrowed their anti-Westernism (Alain de Benoist, the primary theoretician of the New Proper, was invited by Dugin to Moscow in 1992). Different Russian consultants in France eagerly found “multipolarity”, the alpha and omega of the Mitterrand and Chirac diplomacy. Thus French affect fed probably the most poisonous currents of the ideology of the Russian revanche. Our “realists” who preach “multipolarity” are partly accountable for President Putin’s present idée fixe of disruption of the worldwide order to the good thing about the sovereignist dictators swarming the planet, who like Putin, confuse sovereignty and impunity.
Right this moment osmosis is so nice between the social networks of the French identitarian proper and people of the Kremlin that Russian media convey the virulent hatred of Macron carried by the sovereignist motion, to such an extent that Russian observers are astonished. Political scientist Boris Mejuev wonders: “Why is there such a hatred of Macron in Russia? … Why does Macron provoke such a shrill response? Sarkozy, who, along with the British, compelled the US to dump Gaddafi, didn’t provoke such a response. Hollande aroused solely indifference. Macron is extra hated right here than Boris Johnson….Whereas to us the one factor that ought to matter is that of all of the European globalists he has taken probably the most conciliatory stance towards Russia.” After the setbacks of the marketing campaign in Ukraine, the Russian media have returned to fundamentals, insisting more and more that it’s not a query of profitable again “the brotherly folks”, that the stakes of the battle are elsewhere, that Russia is within the course of of making an “worldwide anti-globalist coalition”. “Russia is waging battle in opposition to the globalized world order, which has a totalitarian anti-human character, whose financial and cultural coverage is expansionist and which denies the multipolarity of humanity. …This world power is sort of a cancerous tumor. It’s tough to localize, it’s not a part of the physique, it’s consistently increasing and spreading in all places by metastasis. How one can cease it? Struggle is like chemotherapy. Generally there isn’t any different treatment, but it surely damages the organs together with the tumor”.
The second important axis of the Stalinist assault in opposition to the liberal order that the US wished to determine after World Struggle II was anti-colonialism. Allow us to return to Jdanov: “The disaster of the colonial system, accentuated by the end result of the Second World Struggle, is manifested by the highly effective rise of the nationwide liberation motion within the colonies and dependent international locations. By this actual fact, the spine of the capitalist system is threatened. The peoples of the colonies not need to dwell as they did previously. The ruling courses of the house international locations can not rule the colonies as earlier than. Makes an attempt to crush the nationwide liberation actions by navy power at the moment are colliding with the rising armed resistance of the peoples of the colonies and are resulting in long-lasting colonial wars…”
Comintern anti-colonialism is the supply of the Third Worldism of the Sixties-70s and at this time’s “decolonial” ideology. Regardless of the strident denunciation of “woke” and “cancel tradition” by Putin’s ideologues, the Kremlin continues to attraction to anti-colonialist and anti-European feeling, not solely in Africa and the Center East, but in addition right here in its denunciation of the “collective West”. Thus Moscow goals to advertise the junction of right-wing and left-wing extremism advocated by Dugin to destabilize Western societies.
Can we hope that the sacrifice of the Ukrainians will assist us dismantle this Stalinist ideological matrix that continues to be so resilient in France? Can we rid liberalism of all of the detrimental connotations with which it’s charged, typically by the very fault of our elites who’ve allowed Western civilization to be dragged by the mud by permitting the youthful generations to neglect all that we owe to it: civic freedom, respect for fact that permits science, disinterested curiosity, tolerance, benevolence that characterizes free societies, which the Kremlin’s propaganda is attempting to switch by a tradition of suspicion?
The Azov battalion underneath siege in Mariupol has been in comparison with the 300 Spartans defending the doorway to the Thermopylae move (480 BC) in opposition to a Persian military of at the very least 70,000 males, to offer the Greeks time to arrange their protection. Greek cities, beforehand so quarrelsome, had united to face the barbarian invader. Throughout these heroic days, the Greeks turned conscious of what they defended. Herodotus reviews an trade between two Lacedemonians questioned by the Persian satrap Hydarnes, who requested them why they didn’t need to turn out to be the chums of the “Nice King (of Persia)” by placing themselves at his service, which the king would generously reward. The Greeks responded: “Hydarnes, the explanations for this suggestion are usually not the identical for you and for us. You advise us of this place, as a result of you’ve the expertise of it, and since you have no idea the opposite. You understand how to be a slave, however you’ve by no means tasted freedom, and also you have no idea how candy it’s. Certainly, in case you had ever skilled it, you’d advise us to struggle for it, not solely with pikes, but in addition with axes.” The bravery of the Ukrainians reminds us at this time of this 2500 years previous message : phrases that announce the start of Western consciousness.
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