Dick Cheney Has a French Connection To Fascism, by Jeffrey Steinberg, Tony Papert, and Barbara Boyd

Opinion May 2003 Al-Jazeerah.info

Dick Cheney Has a French Connection To Fascism,

by Jeffrey Steinberg, Tony Papert, and Barbara Boyd

{EIR'}s ongoing investigation into the "Straussian cabal" in
and around the Bush Administration, which is behind the ongoing
"American Empire" drive, has unearthed a major scandal, linking
some of the leading players in the current drama to a notorious
network of World War II and postwar outright Nazi collaborators.
The central figure in the investigation is the life-long
collaborator of neo-conservative "godfather" Leo Strauss--the
Paris-based Russian emigre, Alexandre Kojeve.
Strauss and Kojeve first met in Germany in 1928, and
throughout Strauss's subsequent career in the United States--at
the New School for Social Research, the University of Chicago,
and St. John's College--Strauss funneled his leading disciples to
Paris, to study under Kojeve. Thus, for example, Strauss's top
protege and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz' teacher, the
late Allan Bloom, made annual pilgrimages to Paris, from 1953 up
until Kojeve's death in 1968, to immerse himself in Kojeve's
Nietzschean fascist beliefs.

Although he taught for six years at the Sorbonne's Ecole
Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE) on the German philosopher
G.W.F. Hegel, Kojeve's post-World War II nest was the French
Economics Ministry, where he was an architect of the European
Community. His informal seminars at his ministry office, however,
were the finishing school for several generations of avowed
American and European "Straussians," including Francis Fukuyama,
the author of {The End of History and the New Man}, a Kojevian
diatribe, promoting Napoleon Bonaparte as the hero of modern
history for having brought about the advent of a global one-world
tyranny.

- An American `Synarchist Empire'? -
{EIR'}s investigation has established that Kojeve was not
only an ideologue of universal fascism, but he was also a leading
figure in the most powerful fascist circles of 20th-Century
France, the Synarchists. Both French and American wartime and
postwar military intelligence services probed the role of the
Synarchists in France's Vichy government, and branded the
underground secret movement as amply willing Nazi
collaborationists. Indeed, the Movement for Synarchist Empire
(MSE), founded in France in the early 1930s, was part of a
Europe-wide apparatus of businessmen, bankers, and government
officials, who were dedicated to a unified fascist Europe, and
who chose to support Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party as their
instrument.
U.S. Army, State Department, and FBI files from the World
War II period labeled the French fascist circles of Kojeve
"Synarchist/Nazi-Communist." This was more than a reference to
the 1938-1941 interlude of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, which abruptly
ended with the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in May 1941. The
Synarchists, while promoting a Europe-wide totalitarianism to
crush the threat of "anarchy," had penetrated and financed all
the political movements of the extreme left and extreme right, as
well as the leading government ministries, particularly those
dealing with economic and financial policy, as well as
Franco-German relations. Thus, following his death, Kojeve was
identified by French intelligence as a 30-year Soviet agent,
operating inside the French bureaucracy. His ostensible Soviet
agentry overlapped with his recruitment into the Synarchist orbit
in the mid-1930s.

The fact that Leo Strauss considered Kojeve his intellectual
partner, and the man who brought the element of "purgative
violence" to Strauss' own esoteric power schemes, is of special
significance, given the current dominant role that the
Strauss-Kojeve "kindergarten" is playing in Washington--promoting
a U.S.A.-centered global empire, with many Synarchist features.
Among the leading Strauss disciples who dominate the war
party in and around the Bush Administration are: Paul Wolfowitz,
a personal protege of Kojeve student Allan Bloom; Rupert
Murdoch-bankrolled neo-con propagandist William Kristol; Pentagon
disinformation czar Abram Shulsky; Supreme Court Justice Clarence
Thomas; Attorney General John Ashcroft; Project for the New
American Century director Gary Schmitt (he and Shulsky
co-authored a paean to Strauss, titled "Leo Strauss and the World
of Intelligence" which trashed CIA National Intelligence Board
founder Sherman Kent); and "World War IV" propagandist Robert
Kagan.

Within Israel, a parallel network of Straussian think tanks
has emerged in recent years as the backbone of Ariel Sharon's own
Jabotinskyite fascist regime. The Institute for Advanced
Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS)--which commissioned the
now-infamous 1996 study, "A Clean Break," by Richard Perle,
Douglas Feith, David Wurmser, and others, promoting perpetual war
in the Middle East sparked by the military overthrow of Saddam
Hussein--is one center of Strauss-Kojeve influence in Israel.
Alexandre Kojeve and his Synarchist cronies evaded postwar
prosecution--leaving Vichy head of state Marshal Petain to sit in
the dock--and emerged as mainstays of the Fourth Republic
bureaucratic elite. Yet Kojeve personally never abandoned the
universal fascist/Synarchist cause. He, along with Leo Strauss,
played a major role in the postwar "rehabilitation" of leading
Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. In 1955, Kojeve addressed a group of
Dusseldorf businessmen, at Schmitt's invitation, and Schmitt
attempted to arrange a private meeting between Kojeve and
Hitler's former Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht, the architect
of the Nazi slave-labor system.

- The `Synarchist/Nazi-Communist' File -
This extensive Nazi/Vichy collusion was well known to French
and American patriotic military intelligence circles, who worked
closely throughout World War II gathering in-depth information on
the worst fascist/Synarchist elements within the Petain
government. Throughout the war, the United States maintained a
diplomatic and military legation in Vichy, headed by some of
President Franklin Roosevelt's most trusted associates.
In 1947, William L. Langer, a official of the wartime Office
of Strategic Services (OSS), later a Harvard University
professor, published an book-length account, {Our Vichy Gamble}
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947), which was formally
commissioned in 1944 by Secretary of State Cordell Hull. The book
was based on the entire classified files of OSS, the Department
of State, and the War Department, as well as Langer's in-depth
interviews with all the key FDR Administration policy players,
including OSS founder Gen. William Donovan and the President
Roosevelt. Langer's account of the highly controversial U.S.
engagement with Vichy made it absolutely clear that the
Synarchists were understood to be among the most hard-core Nazi
collaborators and enthusiasts.

Speaking of Adm. Jean Francois Darlan, one of the leading
pro-Hitler figures in the Vichy government, Langer wrote: "But
Darlan's henchmen were not confined to the fleet. His policy of
collaboration with Germany could count on more than enough eager
supporters among French industrial and banking interests--in
short, among those who even before the war, had turned to Nazi
Germany and had looked to Hitler as the savior of Europe from
Communism. These were the elements which had originally backed
Petain and Weygand--elements that stuck to the program after both
these men had begun to back away from it. These people were as
good fascists as any in Europe. They dreaded the Popular Front
like the plague and were convinced that they could prosper even
under Hitler's iron rod. Many of them had long had extensive and
intimate business relations with German interests and were still
dreaming of a new system of `synarchy,' which meant government of
Europe on fascist principles by an international brotherhood of
financiers and industrialists. [French Prime Minister Pierre]
Laval had long been associated with this group."

Langer identified the center of the French Synarchists as
the Banque Worms et Cie. "To realize the extent to which members
of the Banque Worms group had been taken into the government by
the Autumn of 1941," Langer wrote, "a brief survey of the council
and of the Secretaries of State will be most profitable." At
which point Langer listed dozens of top Vichy bureaucrats,
particularly in the ministries in charge of industry, finance,
and Franco-German relations, who were part of the
Synarchist/Banque Worms group.

On March 29, 1944, William Donovan wrote a memo to President
Roosevelt, recounting interviews he had recently conducted with
several French Resistance leaders, who had underscored that the
Synarchists were at the core of the Hitlerite grouping in Vichy.
Alexandre Kojeve's personal role during the Vichy period is
shrouded in mystery. His whereabouts from 1939 through the end of
World War II are not publicly documented. However, French
intelligence files show that one of his best students in the
Sorbonne EPHE Hegel seminars, Robert Marjolin, was a leading
member of the Synarchist/Worms group, who became France's
Minister of Economics in 1945, and sponsored Kojeve's own 20-year
career at the ministry.
But the ultimate proof of Kojeve's unrepentant, deeply held
fascist/Synarchist views is to be found in his writings and
teachings (see accompanying article).

- Dick Cheney's Kindergarten -
Kojeve's rabid glorification of Jacobinism, Bonapartism, and
purgative violence has clearly made its mark on the war party
apparatus in and around the Cheney-Wolfowitz cabal. Defense
Policy Board "revolution in military affairs" guru Newt
Gingrich's recent violent attack on Secretary of State Colin
Powell and the entire Near East Bureau of the State Department is
one graphic incident of the group's impulse to purgative
violence. Bloom intimate Wolfowitz' dozen-year promotion of
Hitlerian "preventive war" is another, even more ominous example.
Leo Strauss, sensitive to postwar Americans' hatred for all
things fascist, deceptively wrapped himself in the legacy of the
Founding Fathers, for public consumption. He sent his favorite
disciples to Paris--to Alexandre Kojeve's salon--for the full
fascist/Synarchist indoctrination. Despite that sleight of hand,
the stench of historical fascism is too deep to rub off
Wolfowitz, Kristol, Fukuyama, and the entire coterie of Dick
Cheney-protected putschists, who would turn the U.S.A. into a
sick parody of the first modern fascist empire, the France of
Napoleon Bonaparte.
The fact that prominent present-day American Synarchists
like Richard Perle and self-professed universal fascist Michael
Ledeen have been waging a non-stop attack against French
President Jacques Chirac and all things French is being
increasingly viewed as a weak attempt to divert attention from
their own, very nasty "French Connection."

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