[MD] Neoconservatism

[david buchanan]

This article appears in the May 9, 2003 issue of Executive Intelligence 
Review.

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 emigré, Alexandre Kojève.

Strauss and Kojève 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 Kojève. Thus, for example, 
Strauss's top protégé and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz' teacher, 
the late Allan Bloom, made annual pilgrimages to Paris, from 1953 up until 
Kojève's death in 1968, to immerse himself in Kojève's Nietzschean fascist 
beliefs.

Although he taught for six years at the Sorbonne's École Pratique des Hautes 
Études (EPHE) on the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, Kojève'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 Kojèvian 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 Kojève 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 Kojève "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, Kojève 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 Kojève 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-Kojève "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 protégé of Kojève 
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-Kojève influence in Israel.

Alexandre Kojève and his Synarchist cronies evaded postwar 
prosecution—leaving Vichy head of state Marshal Pétain to sit in the 
dock—and emerged as mainstays of the Fourth Republic bureaucratic elite. Yet 
Kojève 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, Kojève 
addressed a group of Düsseldorf businessmen, at Schmitt's invitation, and 
Schmitt attempted to arrange a private meeting between Kojève 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 Pétain 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 François 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 Pétain 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 Kojève'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 Kojève's own 20-year career at the 
ministry.

But the ultimate proof of Kojève's unrepentant, deeply held 
fascist/Synarchist views is to be found in his writings and teachings (see 
accompanying article).

Dick Cheney's Kindergarten
Kojève'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 
Kojève'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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