Panicked leftists such as Andrew Coates have been comparing Le Pen to Hitler; I would compare her to former head of the French Communist Party, Maurice Thorez.
It's fairly easy to identify Le Pen as an agent of Russia. As soon as a Western politician starts spouting 'Great Patriotic War' gibberish, you know they're in the tank for Putin:
The Front National leader said it was time to “secure Russia to the European continent” and hit out at Hollande’s decision not to sell Mistral battleships to the Cold War superpower over their actions in Ukraine.
It comes as populist leaders like Donald Trump have expressed their desire to improve relations with Russia – and eschew globalist movements like the European movement with typically anti-Russian sentiments.
Ms Le Pen said: “During the last world war she [Russia] paid the heavy price.
“The 25 million Russian and national deaths of the different nationalities of their empire have contributed to our freedom.
“No one has paid the same price, and France will not forget it, even if the European Union gives the order to forget it.
“Russia was badly treated by the European Union, it was badly treated by an indentured France.
“We deplore the denial of our commitments when we yielded to foreign pressures and refused to deliver Mistral Projection and Command buildings that would not have altered the strategic balances or contributed to increasing tensions in Ukraine.”
Around 19 million Soviet civilians died during the war and the vast majority of these deaths were caused by Stalin's mistreatment of the Soviet civilian populations - you can read about it in Walter Sanning's classic The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry (1983). But Allied and Russian propaganda blames these deaths on the Germans, of course, and so does Le Pen. Some neofascist!
Let's examine Le Pen's claims further: what has the 'freedom' that Russia helped bring to France led to? For one thing, a permanent, irrevocable change in France's demographic makeup:
The leftist Anton Shekhovtsov has written an article on Le Pen which contains an interesting piece of information: Le Pen fell under Putin's spell in 2013, well before the propaganda blitz Putin launched on the Western world following the Maidan uprising and the annexation of Crimea in 2014:
Since 2013, it has been obvious that her views on international relations, especially those related to Russia, were guided by the Kremlin’s positions on those issues. For example, in June 2013, during her visit to the Ukrainian city of Sevastopol – at that time not yet annexed by Russia – Le Pen supported the Ukraine-EU Association Agreement, but, after her first ever visit to Moscow the same month, she would denounce Ukraine’s rapprochement with the EU and vote against the Association Agreement in the European Parliament. Since Le Pen started meeting Moscow’s officials on a regular basis, no Russia-related statement of hers has ever conflicted with the Kremlin’s line: neither on Putin’s repressions of domestic democratic opposition, nor on the Russian invasion of Ukraine or Moscow’s support of the murderous regime of Bashar al-Assad.
Not that by repeating Moscow’s disinformation Le Pen pays off the debt to the Kremlin; rather, she appears to echo Moscow’s narratives because she simply hopes to have continuous Russian financial support. Thus, Le Pen seems to lack not only her own views on international relations, but also self-respect. She wanted to meet someone from the Russian ruling elites already in 2011, but no Russian high-ranking official wanted to invite her to Moscow, because the Kremlin waited for the outcome of the 2012 presidential election in France. The Russian authorities aspired to have good relations with either François Hollande or Nicolas Sarkozy – relations that could have been potentially damaged, had the Kremlin invited Le Pen, and demonstrated political support for her, before the presidential election. It was only after President Hollande criticised Putin, in June 2012, for his support of Assad that the Kremlin decided to play rough on France and build relations with the Front National to destabilise social peace in the country.
Embarrassingly for Le Pen, she wasn't Putin's first choice in the 2017 presidential elections - it was Fillon:
But in 2016, Le Pen became a fall-back option for the Kremlin, and for this very reason the Front National not only failed to obtain another loan from a Russian bank that year (the First Czech-Russian Bank went bankrupt in 2016), but also started having problems with the Russian Deposit Insurance Agency that managed contracts of that bankrupt bank and threatened to recover the loan from the Front National through legal action. Given the fact that the Deposit Insurance Agency is a state-controlled institution, it is inconceivable that its position vis-à-vis the Front National was not coordinated with the state authorities.
The Front National became a fall-back option for the Kremlin, because Moscow adopted a wait-and-see attitude towards the political developments in France and, after the Republican primaries, decided that it would support François Fillon, who is known for his soft stance on Russian domestic and international policies, rather than Le Pen. And only after Fillon started losing popularity because of the “Penelopegate” did the Kremlin, again, decide to turn to Le Pen and even invite her to Moscow to demonstrate who Putin’s preferred candidate in the French presidential election was.
French voters today are faced with a stark choice between an Atlanticist and a Putinist. But does a 'Third Way' - neither Trump nor Putin - exist for France? In Yockey's last essay, 'The World in Flames: An Estimate of the World Situation' (1961), Yockey thought so. The answer lay in De Gaulle, who sought a position of neutrality and non-alignment in the Cold War:
The growing tide of neutralism in the world, is due to the political incapacity of the leadership corps of America-Jewry. If this tide rises in Europe, America-Jewry would be defeated before the war. De Gaulle is not a great man, but if he is able to gain French independence, he will immediately find himself the spiritual leader of all Europe, pygmy though he is. De Gaulle is a cretin, but people will follow even a cretin if he embodies their deepest, most natural, instinctive feelings. De Gaulle’s driving force is a vanity of super-dimensional extent. Even Churchill, the embodiment of the Idea of Vanity itself, was still content to be a Zionist executive with a front position, a big office, and a resounding title. But De Gaulle wants more: he wants to be equal to the masters who created him and blew him up like a rubber balloon. Because of the spiritual force upon which he has accidentally alighted—the universal European desire for neutrality—he may even succeed. An idiot might save Europe. History has seen things as strange.
If and when Le Pen loses, the French Far Right should undergo a self-reassessment. Perhaps a turn back to Gaullism could show the way forward.
In the meantime, let's pause to consider the feelings of the Charlemagne SS Division who fought in the battle of Berlin this month 72 years ago: what would they have thought of Le Pen?
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