French Far Right Candidate Eric Zemmour Faces Lawsuit for Denying Nazi Deportation of Gays

I found this on France 24. Eric Zemmour, the far right candidate for the French presidential elections, is facing being sued by a number of gay rights groups, who claim that he denied that gays were rounded up in France and deported to the concentration camps during the Nazi occupation. The report runs

‘Far-right candidate Éric Zemmour faces yet another lawsuit in the run-up to France’s presidential election, this time filed by gay rights groups who say he denied that homosexuals were rounded up and deported during the country’s wartime Nazi occupation.

Six gay rights associations told AFP on Wednesday that their criminal complaint for “denial of crimes against humanity” stemmed from Zemmour‘s latest book, “France has not said its final word”, published in September.

Zemmour, a writer and talk show pundit known for his polarising attacks on Muslims and immigrants, is currently polling in fourth position, at around 11 percent, ahead of the first round of France’s presidential election on April 10. 

In his book, the far-right candidate agreed with another politician who argued that deportations of homosexuals to concentration camps were a “myth”. Such a claim “distorts history to support [Zemmour’s] homophobic positions”, the associations alleged in their complaint.

The candidate’s entourage retorted that “it is not Zemmour’s words that are cited in the book”. They called the legal move a smear attempt ahead of the first round of voting in the presidential election on April 10.

Gay-rights groups feared the candidate’s stance against “propaganda in our schools”, Zemmour’s team added, referring to the former pundit’s claims that children are exposed to “anti-racist and pro-LGBT propaganda” in French schools.’ See

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/far-right-zemmour-faces-lawsuit-for-denying-nazi-deportation-of-homosexuals/ar-AAVpWHc?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531

I don’t know what happened in France, but the Nazis certainly did put gay men in concentration camps, where many died. Decades ago one of the great gay British thesps – I think it might have been Sir Ian MacKellan – was in a play, Bent, about the Nazi persecution of gays. My guess is that they were almost certainly rounded up and deported to the camps in France as well, along with Jews and everyone else the Nazis decided was subhuman.

Zemmour has got many other grotty views, mostly about race and Muslims. I think a month or so ago he was accused of something similar by French Jews. I think he was caught saying that Jews weren’t deported to the camps under the Vichy Republic. Now it seems he’s made a similar claim about French gays during the Second World War. But the Sargon of Gasbag, the man who broke UKIP and his fellow Lotus Eaters put up a post praising him on YouTube. Which shows how squalid some of their views are.

Given how horrific the Nazi persecutions were, it’s about time somebody sued him. If he really denied the deportations, then the gays are quite right to sue him.

The British Press’ Glowing Reviews of Second World War Pro-Nazi Book

Richard Griffiths, What Did You Do During the War? The Last Throes of the British pro-Nazi Right, 1940-45 (London: Routledge 2017).

I recently sent a review of the above book to the conspiracy/parapolitics website and magazine, Lobster. It’s been proofread and corrected, and hopefully will go up on the site before too long. The webmaster’s been very busy with work recently, hence the delay.

Richard Griffiths is an Emeritus Professor of King’s College London, and the author of several books on the British and European extreme Right. These include a biography of Marshal Petain (1970), the head of the collaborationist Vichy government during the Second World War, Fellow Travellers of the Right (1980), Patriotism Perverted (1998) and An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Fascism (2000).

The book is a study of how British Nazis and Nazi sympathisers reacted to the outbreak of the Second World War and internment. Some gave up their activities entirely, others carried on underground. A number also carried on as before. And some angrily denied that they had been Nazis, and blamed and attacked instead their former comrades. Another tactic was to infiltrate genuine, non-political pacifist groups, like the Peace Pledge Union, in order to influence British politics to avoid a war with Nazi Germany.

Oswald Mosley’s Lies about Not Collaborating

One chapter gives the British Fascist leader, Oswald Mosley, another well deserved kicking. Mosley claimed that when war was declared, he ordered his goose-stepping squadristi to cooperate with the authorities and obey their orders. This was in the text of a speech published in Action, the British Union of Fascists newsletter. In fact, Mosley advised only those members of squalid organisation, who were members of the armed forces, to obey orders and cooperate. In the original speech he made it clear that he expected the rest of the thugs to carry on their activities and pro-Nazi propaganda as normal. The speech was then carefully edited, published in Action to make it appear that Mosley had issued orders for comprehensive cooperation with the authorities. This was then taken up uncritically by his biographers.

This is another piece to add to the mountain of scholarship demolishing the sympathetic picture of Mosley created by Skidelsky’s biography in the 1970s. This was comprehensively refuted by Stephen Dorril in his biography of Mosley, Blackshirt, which came out a few years ago. Among other things, Dorril disproved Mosley’s claim that if the Nazis had invaded, he would never collaborate with them and serve in government ‘as another Quisling’, referring to the head of the puppet Norwegian government. In fact, he was quite prepared to do so.

Bryant’s Nazi Apologia, Unfinished Victory

But one of the most unsettling studies in the book is chapter 2, ‘The Reception of Bryant’s Unfinished Victory ‘, subtitled ‘The myth of public unanimity against Nazi Germany in early 1940’. Arthur Bryant was a writer of popular histories, such as English Saga (1940), The Years of Ednurance 1793-1802 (1942) and The Years of Victory 1802-1812 (1942). In the ’30s he had written academically respected biographies of Charles II and Samuel Pepys.

Bryant was a committed Conservative, and one of that party’s functionaries. In 1929 he became educational advisor to the Bonar Law Conservative College at Ashridge. His first book was The Spirit of Conservatism. Shortly after its publication he became editor of the college magazine, Asbbridge Journal. In 1937 he was made general editor of the National Book Association, the Tories’ answer to Gollancz’s Left Book Club. He was not only strongly in favour of appeasement, but also a supporter of Hitler and the Nazi regime. In 1934 he described Hitler as a mystic, who had enabled Germany ‘to find her soul’. From the late 30s he included in his columns in the Ashbridge Journal and The Illustrated News diatribes attacking what he saw as the libels and slanders put out by the ‘warmongers’ who were leading the country into conflict with the Nazis. In 1939 he was asked by Horace Wilson to write an article on the British point of view for the German press. This was never published, though it did form the basis for much of Unfinished Victory, and was approved by Chamberlain. In July 1939 he was unofficially authorised by Chamberlain to go to Germany to speak to a number of Nazi leaders, and Chamberlain later offered to pay his expenses from Secret Service funds.

The book’s introduction began by asserting that now we at war, Britain would fight with a unity of resolve and purpose. But it then qualified this with arguments for peace with the Nazi regime. And much of this was explicitly anti-Semitic, following Nazi propaganda. He described how Hitler’s seizure of power was greeted with joy by the German people as the new revolution.

He then went on to blame the Jews for the abortive Communist Revolution, claiming that it was led by the ‘Jew, Kurt Eisner’, and the Russian ambassador, the ‘Hebrew, Joffe’. Joffe had indeed been involved in promoting the Communist revolution, but Eisner was the leader of the workers’ soldiers and peasants’ council in Bavaria. I think he was a radical Socialist, rather than Communist, who believed that the Councils should form an addition to parliamentary government, not their replacement. It’s an attitude very different to Lenin’s idea of a bureaucratic state controlled by the Communist Party.

He then went on to accuse the Jews of exploiting the property market in the First World War, so that by 1939 after by five years of anti-Semitic legislation and persecution they still owned a third of real property in Germany. He stated that the Jews had exploited the 1929 Crash and the consequent inflation to make themselves increasingly dominant in politics, business and the learned professions. A quarter of the Social Democrat politicians in the Reichstag in 1924 were Jews, and they controlled the banks, the publishing industry, cinema and theatre, and a large part of the press ‘all the normal means in fact, by which public opinion in a civilised country was formed’.

He then claimed that there was a Jewish campaign to remove gentiles completely from politics and the privileged occupations. He wrote

Every year it became harder for a Gentile to gain or keep a foothold in any privileged occupation. At this time it was not the Aryans who exercised racial discrimination […]. By the third decade of the century it was the native Germans who were now confronted with a problem – that of rescuing their indigenous culture from an alien hand and restoring it to their own race.

Press Reaction Largely Positive

This is vile, murderous nonsense supporting a regime bent on persecuting the Jews to their deaths, even before the launch of Hitler’s infamous ‘Final Solution’. So how did the British press react to this nasty, mendacious piece of Nazi propaganda? In general, they loved it. The book received glowing praise from the Times Literary Supplement, the New English Weekly, the Fortnightly Review, the Church of England Newspaper, Peace Focus, and very many provincial newspapers, like the Sheffield Star, the Aberdeen Press and Journal, the East Anglian Daily Times, and the Cardiff newspaper, Western Mail.

There were critical reviews, however, in the Spectator, which was strongly anti-appeasement, the Jewish Chronical, the Manchester Guardian, New Statesman and other newspapers of that type. Two female critics of the Nazi regime submitted highly critical reviews in the journal Time and Tide. One of these was Emily Lorimer, the author of What Hitler Wants, who stated

“All the best and biggest Nazi lies are here, presented with a garnish of scholarship and erudition […] Please God, your clever book has come too late to take any readers in. “

Rebecca West writing in the same magazine declared that the book was
“a paean to Hitler so glowing, so infatuate, that it might be have been entitled ‘Kiss Me, Corporal’.”

The great historian, A.J.P. Taylor called the book and its author what they were in the Guardian in the very title of his review ‘A Nazi Apologist’ and made the point that much of the book was based on Hitler’s speeches. And Richard Crossman in the Staggers pointed to Bryant’s connection to the Conservatives and the appeasement camp.

Bryant himself started a series of correspondence defending himself with the Spectator and the Jewish Chronicle. His publishers at MacMillan, initially enthusiastic, became progressively cool towards it, trying to find reasons to refuse publication. Bryant was still promoting and defending his book as late as May 1940. What changed his attitude was the accession of Winston Churchill as PM, and the disappearance of pro-Nazi groups like Information and Policy. Later in the month Lovat Dickinson of MacMillan’s asked Hugh Trevor-Roper to inquire whether Bryant should be interned as a Fascist. Trevor-Roper advised against this on the grounds that views change with the times. And Bryant ended up writing pieces in the Ashridge Journal describing Hitler as ‘a terrible calamity’ and referring to the ‘terrible and evil things we are fighting’.

The Myth of British anti-Nazism and Concern for the Jews

One of the great myths about the Second World War was that it was fought to defend the Jews. In fact, as the Tory journalist and polemicist, Peter Hitchens points out, Britain entered the war to honour the defence treaties we had made with France and Poland. And the historian Martin Pugh has also said that Churchill’s reasons for promoting war with Germany were hardly altruistic. They were entirely geopolitical. Churchill was afraid that German domination of the North Sea and Baltic would threaten British naval supremacy. And although in private he described Mussolini as ‘a perfect swine’, he had made trips to Fascist Italy and was an admirer of General Franco. And a friend of mine pointed out that in none of Churchill’s speeches does he ever condemn Fascism. He attacks Nazism and the Axis, but says nothing about the wider political ideology to which they belonged.

Griffiths points out that the book’s enthusiastic reception by the majority of the British press shows that large numbers of the British population were indifferent to the sufferings of the Jews. He argues that the idea that the war was fought to destroy a brutal regime was a later war aim. Most Brits at the time believed that Nazi aggression had to be countered, but there was more interest in understanding Nazi Germany than condemning the internal structure of Hitler’s vile dictatorship.

He also argues that while there was little of the visceral anti-Jewish Hatred in Britain like that, which had propelled the Nazis to power, there was considerable ‘social anti-Semitism’ in popular culture. Jews were excluded from certain social groups, jokes based on anti-Semitic caricatures, such as their supposed greed for money, ignorance of British social conventions, as well as the suspicion in popular literature that they were the leaders of subversive groups, and were cowards and profiteers in war. Griffiths writes

Though, in contrast to rabid anti-Semitism social anti-Semitism may have appeared comparatively innocuous,, its depiction of the Jew as ‘other’ could lead to apathy and lack of concern when faced with examples of racial intolerance and persecution. On the one hand, as Dan Stone has pointed out, the British public could manifest a ‘casual anti-Semitism’ which fell into the trap of accepting the ‘reasons’ for the German dislike of the Jews. […] on the other hand, while Nazi measures could shock people of all views, may people found it possible to ignore the problem altogether, while speaking only of the matters, in relation to Germany, that they believed to be ‘important’.

The Importance of Maintaining Auschwitz and Educating People about the Holocaust

This attitude clearly changed after the War when the Allies investigated and condemned its monstrous crimes against humanity, prosecuting and hanging the Nazi leaders at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials. And an important part of this change was the revelations about the Holocaust. Which is why Holocaust Memorial Day, the preservation of Auschwitz as a museum and memorial to the innocents butchered there and the various Holocaust memorials and museum across the world are important. Its why the real Nazis, unlike Mike, are keen to minimise the Holocaust and deny it ever occurred.

Hypocrisy of British and Libels against Mike and the Left

But this also shows up the hypocrisy of the various papers, which last week published the gross libel against Mike, accusing him of being a Holocaust denier when he is certainly no such thing. Much has been published on the Net and elsewhere about the Daily Mail’s murky, pro-Nazi past, including how the father of editor Paul Dacre was a fanboy of Adolf. And the scum are still doing it. Mike has put up an article this morning about a vile piece in the Torygraph repeating the anti-Semitic tropes of the American Right about the Jewish financier and multi-millionaire, George Soros, accusing him of covertly funding anti-Brexit groups. This part of the American Right’s suspicion that Soros is responsible for all manner of anti-democratic, subversive political groups. It’s part of the anti-Semitic trope of the Jew as leader and instigator of subversion. Perhaps they’d like to go a bit further and claim that he’s also trying to enslave the White race and bring about its destruction through race mixing?

https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2018/02/10/anti-semitic-jewish-conspiracy-story-about-soros-confirms-the-businessmans-own-fears/

Soros against Zionists Because of Collaboration with Nazis in the Murder of Hungarian Jews

Of course, this is just more politically motivated smears. The Israel lobby also hates Soros, because, as Mike points out, he is bitterly critical of Israel’s persecution and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Soros himself is of Hungarian descent, and he despises Zionism because of the way they sold out Hungarian Jews to the Nazis. Kasztner, the leader of the Zionists in Hungary, tried to make an agreement with the Nazi authorities to allow several thousand Jews to be deported to their deaths, so long as the Nazis spared some by sending them to Israel. it’s another example of the way Zionists would collaborate with real Nazis and murderous anti-Semites to promote their own cause, even if it meant the mass murder of Jewish men, women and children.

The Hypocrisy, Smears and Anti-Semitic Tropes of the Israel Lobby, the Blairites and the Lamestream Press

This shows just how selective and hypocritical the British press’ attitude to anti-Semitism is, as well as that of the groups promoting the smears – the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, the Jewish Labour Movement, the Tories and the Blairites in Labour. These smears are used exclusively to isolate and marginalise the Left as a political threat to the cosy neoliberal politics and support for the racist, persecutory regime in Israel. But when it serves their purpose, they will use the same anti-Semitic tropes against those Jews, who also threaten them.

Steve Bannon’s Admiration for French Fascist and Nazi Collaborator

The more you find out about Steve Bannon’s views, the clearer it is that he’s a real Fascist, who should be kept as far away from government, and decent society, as possible. In this piece from TYT Nation, the host, Jeff Waldorf, talks once again about Bannon’s love of the French racist novel, The Camp of the Saints, and how he views the wave of immigrants that entered Europe from Syria through the prism of its narrative.

The book was written in the 1970s by Jean Raspail, and describes an armada of boats carrying 800,000 poor immigrants from India, who come to France to overthrow White, Christian civilisation. The immigrants are described in scatological, pornographic terms, and their children are also described as diseased, ‘like spoiled fruit’. They are welcomed into Europe by a corrupt liberal establishment, including a liberal pope from Latin America. The book’s hero, Calgues, is a White supremacist, who kills both these immigrants and the White liberals, who have allowed them in and help them. After murdering a hippy, Calgues reflects on how these young people have been ‘culturally cuckolded’ and deprived of the sense of knowing that they belong to the superior civilisation.’
I’ve put up a piece about this before, when one of the other left-wing YouTube news presenters did a segment about it.

But Bannon’s admiration for French Fascism seems to extend beyond this novel, right back to the French monarchist and Fascist, Charles Maurras. Maurras was the founder and editor of the extreme rightwing newspaper, Action Francaise. He was bitterly anti-Enlightenment, a view that Bannon also shares. Bannon has also said that he wants the Enlightenment to end. Maurras was bitterly anti-Semitic, and was prosecuted several times for urging and demanding the assassination of Jewish politicians, including, in 1936, the then president, Leon Blum. During the Nazi Occupation and the Vichy Regime, he wrote articles supporting the deportations and the arrests of resistance members, Jews and Gaullists. Indeed, he went so far as to recommend that if the Gaullists themselves could not be found and arrested, then their families should be rounded up and shot. Waldorf shows how this parallels Trump’s own views on the arrest and torture of the families of terrorists suspects.

It doesn’t surprise me that remotely that Maurras was anti-Enlightenment. There was a very strong element of this in European Fascism generally. After the Nazi seizure of power, Hitler wrote that the shame of 1789 – the year of the radical phase of the French Revolution – had been undone. So strong was this element, that many historians viewed Fascism as an entirely anti-Enlightenment movement, until later research showed how Fascism had also taken on elements of Enlightenment thought. The religious right also despises the Enlightenment for its attack on Christianity and organised religion. Here again, the situation is rather more complicated, in that recent historians have pointed out how European Enlightenment doctrines built on earlier philosophical attitudes and religious concepts. The doctrine of democracy and equal human worth are two of those. The idea that humans all have equal value and dignity ultimately comes from the Christian doctrine that everyone is equal before God, though medieval philosophers like Thomas Aquinas were quick to point out that this did not apply to their functions in earthly society. Similarly, the doctrine that people have inalienable human rights is also a metaphysical, religious doctrine, in the sense that it is not immediately obvious. It seems so to us, because it is so much a part of our culture. Nevertheless, it rests on a series of arguments and attitudes that are not self-evident, and have to be demonstrated.

Bannon is already notorious for his White Supremacist and anti-Semitic views. This adds further details on them. Waldorf also notes that Bannon has described himself as a ‘cultural Leninist’, which he equates with Bannon’s economic populism. This isn’t quite right. Bannon is a ‘cultural Leninist’ in that he shares Lenin’s goal of destroying the state, and then reconstructing it to serve his movement and ideology. Which makes Bannon very dangerous, indeed.

And it isn’t just America, which is in danger. Hope Not Hate has also published articles on Breitbart’s role in supporting UKIP, and their plan to create an even more extreme, anti-immigrant, racist party. Among the various Breitbart columnists in this country is James Delingpole, who also used to write for the Spectator. It has also given space to the bigoted rantings of the right-wing troll, Katie Hopkins. I gather she’s got a column in the Scum. The fact that she is also being embraced by real White Supremacists like Breitbart, whose leader admires such overtly racist works and individuals, should disqualify her from having her racist nonsense published in the mainstream press, even one as low as the Scum.

Bannon himself is only one of a number of a racist ‘basket of deplorables’, which includes Richard Spencer, the founder of the Alt-Right. All of them should be cleaned out of government as quickly as possible, before they can bring even more misery to America’s working people and people of colour, and export their vile views and policies over here.