In Defense of Le Pen and Vichy posted:

BY KATHLEEN MILLAR, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 04/22/17 10:00 AM EDT 58
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Le Pen's opponents twist France's WWII history for political gain
Rick told Ilsa “We’ll always have Paris,” but he was wrong. No one always has Paris, or France.

That was Marine Le Pen’s point, clearly, when she pointed out to the shock of her critics that by February 1942, Hitler’s henchmen and puppets in Vichy were calling the shots in the City of Light while the “legitimate government of France,” led by Charles de Gaulle, maneuvered from London.

The Vichy government, not France, was a Nazi collaborator and Le Pen, rightly, isn’t going to be pressured into apologizing for the actions of a puppet government as if they were the actions of her nation.

But to the Allies, Vichy wasn’t always a villain.

In the late 30s, the U.S. made a stab at full diplomatic relations, and Britain and Russia were up for making the best of it as well.

After the British sank the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebar in the summer of 1940, killing 1,297 French seamen who, unlike so many others, really were only following orders — Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin (the last caught off-guard, first, by Hitler’s decision to invade Russia in lunatic violation of a recently signed non-aggression pact and, second, by Vichy’s insult-added-to-injury support for the invasion) abandoned any illusions about Hitler’s Vichy maybe being an “enemy of our enemy,” with concomitant opportunities for cooperation.


It was at that point that the U.S., Britain and Russia rightly abbreviated Vichy’s official status to just “the enemy.”

Little known aside: we jumped ship even though Philippe Petain, Vichy’s leader-by-Nazi-permission, had his own crazy, authoritarian but at least not-Nazi agenda (he blamed the left and republican policies of the 1930s). Instead, Petain, on a relatively loose leash, blamed democracy for France’s fall to Hitler, and — this is my favorite — moved quickly to reinstate an old crime called “felony of opinion,” (délit d’opinion) repealing freedom, not just of speech, but also of thought.

Of course, anyone stupid enough to transition from thought to speech and verbally criticize Petain’s judicial backflip was instantly arrested.

In addition to all this, France was pockmarked with hundreds of partisan actors, at high levels and in the streets, each with their disorganized eyes on different prizes — collaboration, resistance, cooperation followed by cooption as a two-step strategy to a communist state. And the list goes on.

There were also last-minute patriots, like Admiral Jean de Laborde, who on Nov. 27, 1942, months after the deportation of Jews from Vel D’Hiv, scuttled a French fleet (77 vessels) at Toulon when Allied forces landed in North Africa. His goal was to prevent the acquisition of the fleet by panicked Germans — a move precipitated by a flood of Free French sentiment to which Le Pen might point as evidence of French leaders either willing or free to act without fear of execution (think London) or by men like de Laborde, caught between a swastika on the horizon and the deep blue sea.

So liberal French politicians who want Le Pen to mouth an apology for her country’s part in the July 16, 1942 deportation of more than 13,000 Jews living in France via a central internment camp tagged Vel D’Hiv, a stadium that had housed other bound-for-glory groups as well as the 1926 Olympics, are both over-reaching and politically-motivated when they dredge up a policy decision to send Jews from France to German concentration camps and fail to acknowledge that dozens of saboteurs conspired to make this atrocity part of history.

Yes, there were a lot of natural-born collaborators in France, as there were across Europe.

Yes, there were hordes of anti-semites in France, as there were across Europe in the days preceding WWII and as there are today, right now, in dangerous numbers, across these same countries.

Yes, 13,000 Jews were the least of Petain’s concerns as he envisioned a France cleansed of the libertine (versus liberal) policies he believed had made both the character and the military defenses of his great country weak — even so, he did not dissolve the republic; he maintained the Tricolor, and he wasn’t a fascist.

It appears his plan, as Vichy’s head, was to “dance with the one what brung him” until the music stopped.

But back to Marine Le Pen, the presidential candidate much-maligned by the left: daring to say “no” to the argument that France, today, as a whole and without exception, should branded an accomplice to the murder of thousands of Jews — that the shifting acquiescence of a murky alliance of psychopaths, cowards, the morally-indifferent, the politically opportunistic, the absolutely terrified and the deeply confused, all operating under the occupation of one of history’s most savage regimes — translates into a wholesale moral failure on the part of the entire nation, is a bold and honest move.

By 1942, when the U.S. was in the war, the allies’ loyalties were with de Gaulle and the Free French Government exiled in London. The Free French government sent no Jews to their deaths. And what Le Pen’s argument tells us is that, had she been alive at that point, like countless other citizens of France alive in 1942 and in 2017, she would have been standing, in London or in France, on the right side.

History is not simple enough to prove that nationalism is synonymous with bias or genocide.

When Rome was at its imperial peak, everyone in the world wanted to be a citizen of Rome — they wanted to get in, not out.

The problem rich nations face today is similar, an over-desire and over-demand for residency in prosperous places that understand full well the cost of immigration to their prosperity.

It’s a moral dilemma. And it’s an economic dilemma, one which globalization, with its borderless opportunities and the mega-billionaires these opportunities create, has no incentive to solve. “We take the profits,” whisper these entrepreneurs-without-borders. “You take the people.”

Nations, even rich ones, have limitations and priorities.

Until someone figures out how to please all the people all the time, to make us all citizens of Rome, Le Pen’s “France First” ideology will continue to compete with the visions of dreamers, bless you, who believe we can create a world elastic enough to eliminate steerage and book every living soul into a cabin on an upper deck.

But calling Le Pen out for defending French citizens, most long-dead, who had nothing to do with the deportation of Jews during WWII is a low blow, one designed to paint Le Pen as much of a collaborator as the Vichy traitors who loaded the cattle cars.