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No figure of modern French history is as honored as Charles de Gaulle. His name has been given to more streets, avenues and monuments in France than to any other man of the nation’s past. The country’s largest airport bears his name. French politicians – right, left and center – invoke his name and claim his legacy.
In 1940 he refused to accept his country’s defeat by Germany, and from London he founded and led the pro-Allied “Free French” force during World War II. From 1944 to 1946 he headed the provisional government of France. In 1958 he was called from retirement by popular acclaim to resolve the seemingly unsolvable crisis over Algeria. He demanded, and got, a new French constitution with a strong executive, which established the “Fifth Republic” that has endured to the present. During the years that he dominated his country’s political life – 1958-1969 – he charted an independent foreign policy, tied neither to the US nor the USSR, and strove to make France the preeminent nation in Europe. Like other great historical figures, he was hated as well as revered. He was the target of more than two dozen serious assassination attempts, two of which nearly succeeded.
Julian Jackson, a professor of history with the University of London and a well-regarded specialist of modern French history, has produced a biography worthy of such an extraordinary man. A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles De Gaulle is detailed, balanced and well written. It’s impossible to read any lengthy biography of this man without admiration for his audacious self-confidence, courage, determination, and cunning.
After childhood and youth in a comfortably middle-class, traditionalist, Roman Catholic family, and a good education, he chose a military career. He did well at the Saint Cyr military academy. During the First World War, he served with distinction, was wounded in combat, and was taken prisoner. After the war, he rose to the rank of colonel, and lectured at a school for officers. He attracted some attention for his writings on military affairs, in which he made the case for a more “modern” and “professional” army.
Two days after German forces struck against Poland on September 1, 1939, France and Britain declared war against Germany. Even after Hitler’s forces quickly subdued Poland, the leaders in Paris and London still believed that the German Wehrmacht was overrated, and remained confident that it was no match for their combined forces. After several months in which the French declined either to accept Hitler’s offers of peace or to launch any serious offensive against Germany, German forces struck westward on May 10, 1940. In the battle for France, de Gaulle proved himself a daring and innovative commander, especially in his deployment of mobile and tank forces.
With French defeat imminent, the 49-year-old de Gaulle made the momentous decision to turn his back on his military commanders and government. Breaking his oath as an officer, he flew to England where he declared himself the embodiment and savior of France. “It is indeed hard to exaggerate the extraordinary nature of the step that de Gaulle was taking,” Jackson remarks. “Equipped with two suitcases and a small stock of francs, he was heading for a country in which he had set foot for the first time ten days earlier, whose language he spoke badly, and where he knew almost no one. He was going into exile.
In one of the most stunningly successful military campaigns of modern times, the German Wehrmacht defeated the numerically superior French-British forces after just six weeks of battle. France agreed to an armistice. According to its terms, the French coast as well as northern France – including Paris – would remain under German occupation. But everyone in France and Germany, including Hitler, considered this a temporary arrangement, anticipating that Britain would quickly “see sense” and likewise agree to an end of fighting.
Along with the great majority of his fellow countrymen, de Gaulle regarded the defeat not merely as a military calamity, but also as glaring proof of the failure of France’s parliamentary democracy. Their politicians had declared war against a country whose leader never wanted war with France. However valid the reasons they gave for going to war against Germany may have been, few could excuse their lack of adequate preparation for armed conflict, and their abject failure to anticipate the enemy’s markedly superior military leadership, morale, and resourcefulness.
French scorn and loathing for the regime that had brought on such a stunning and ignominious defeat was nearly universal. Most agreed that the Republic itself must be abolished. On July 9-10, 1940, the members of the French Chamber of Deputies and Senate met in extraordinary joint session in the town of Vichy, where they voted overwhelmingly — 569 to 80 – to end the parliamentary democracy of the “Third Republic,” and give sweeping authority to Maréchal Philippe Pétain, the country’s most distinguished military commander in the Great War of 1914-1918.
Even today, the significance of this popular repudiation of democracy is not well understood. As Jackson makes clear, Pétain became France’s leader by nearly universal acclaim. “The core of Pétain’s appeal to the French people in 1940,” he tells readers, “was his decision to remain on French soil to defend his compatriots, to defend French lives, while de Gaulle left France to defend what he later called his ‘idea of France’.” The dissolution of the Republic and the establishment of an authoritarian state was an entirely French affair. The Germans played no role in the decision to replace the “French Republic” with an authoritarian “French State.” Indeed, German newspapers at the time voiced some suspicion of the radical regime change, wary that France’s new leaders might try to use it as pretext for somehow evading the provisions of the armistice agreement.
Pétain and Hitler met in person for the first and only time in October 1940. In a radio address a short time later, the French leader announced: “I enter today on the path of collaboration” with Germany. The legitimacy of the Pétain government was based not only on its solemn ratification by the country’s political representatives, but also its formal recognition by nearly all of the world’s countries, including the United States and the Soviet Union.
De Gaulle’s rejected this government was not because it was authoritarian and “undemocratic,” but because it refused to continue the war against Germany from North Africa or overseas. Similarly, he disliked the Hitler regime not because it was National Socialist, but because it was German and formidable, and therefore an obstacle to French pre-eminence in Europe.
Jackson repeatedly makes the point that de Gaulle’s political views, values and worldview were not at all in line with the egalitarian democratic outlook that prevails in the US and western Europe today. Along with most Frenchmen, he was contemptuous of the multi-party democracy of the “Third Republic.” He was a traditionalist and an authoritarian. It’s little wonder that, as Jackson repeatedly reminds readers, he was widely regarded as a “fascist.” When an important member of his inner circle asked him to make a public commitment to democracy, he replied: “If we proclaim simply that we are fighting for democracy, we will perhaps win provisional approval from the Americans, but we would lose a lot with the French, which is the principal issue. The French masses for the moment link the word democracy with the parliamentary regime as it operated before the war … That regime is condemned by the facts and by public opinion.”
After establishing himself in England, his ambitious effort to win support for his “Free French” enterprise faced immense difficulties. Because he was only a second-level figure in French military or political life, few even recognized his name. No prominent Frenchman rallied to his side. As Jackson notes, his “efforts to recruit among the thousands of French servicemen who had ended up in Britain after the Fall of France were largely unsuccessful.” That’s because nearly all French during this period regarded the war for their country as finished and settled.
Moreover, French public opinion was very hostile to Britain – the only major power still at war against Germany. The French did not forget that when the chips were down, the British had refused to fully commit their forces against the common enemy, preferring instead to keep their remaining troops and military aircraft to defend their home island, thereby leaving their ally to its fate.
On July 3, 1940, British forces attacked French war ships at the Mers-el-Kébir naval base, near Oran, in French Algeria. They sank one battleship, damaged two battleships and two destroyers, and killed 1,297 French and wounded 350. This attack — by a country that just weeks earlier had been a military ally – intensified already bitter anti-British feeling in France, where it was widely regarded yet another example of betrayal and treachery by “La perfide Albion.” France came close to declaring war against Britain. In September, British and de Gaulle “Free French” forces attacked military and naval posts at Dakar, in French-controlled Senegal. For the first time in the war, Frenchmen fired on Frenchmen. The venture failed. De Gaulle later acknowledged that the campaign — which was widely characterized as the “Dakar Debacle” or the “Fiasco at Dakar” — was so humiliating that he contemplated suicide.
De Gaulle’s complete dependence on British funding and support during those years, 1940-1944, was a never-ending source of embarrassment and frustration. Each day, writes Jackson, “provided a reminder of this humiliatingly total dependence.” His radio broadcast speeches were subject to British approval, and he could not even leave the country without permission. Beyond that, he could never forget the reality that his ultimate success was entirely dependent on the military victory of the Americans and the Soviets.
De Gaulle’s personality, Jackson notes, was imperious, reserved, and ungracious. He was given to “terrifying and unpredictable rages, which were usually sparked by an imagined (or genuine) slight.” This contributed to the already inherently contentious relationship he was obliged to endure with his London hosts. Jackson cites many examples of his distrust and dislike of the English. “Hour after hour he ranted against the perfidy of the British,” Jackson notes on one occasion. “It is not enough for them to have burnt Joan of Arc once,” de Gaulle said. “They want to start again … They think perhaps that I am not someone easy to work with. But if I were, I would today be on Pétain’s General Staff.”
When British forces struck against the French colony of Madagascar in May 1942, de Gaulle was furious because the operation had been launched without consulting him. The French forces there – loyal to the Pétain government – fought against the invaders for nearly six months. As Jackson notes, “The French held out longer against the British in Madagascar in 1942 than they had against the Germans in 1940.”
De Gaulle’s distrust of his British ally was reciprocated. A meeting with British premier Winston Churchill in 1942 “reached new levels of acrimony. De Gaulle smashed a chair in his fury.” Churchill wrote at the time that “there is nothing hostile to England that this man may not do once he gets off the chain.” When American and British forces landed in French-controlled North Africa in November 1942, the British once again took care to keep de Gaulle in the dark. Understandably furious, he screamed: “I hope the Vichy people throw them back in to the sea.” Indeed, the French forces there met the American and British “liberators” with gunfire. Back at home, French authorities allowed German troops to land in Tunisia to counter Allied forces.
De Gaulle’s distrust and dislike of his hosts encouraged him to look across the Atlantic for support, a hope that proved short-lived. “De Gaulle, who had once hoped for so much from America,” Jackson explains, “now worked himself up into a paroxysm of fury against the United States. He started referring regularly in conversation to the threat of American ‘imperialism’.” Describing a wartime meeting with President Franklin Roosevelt, he later wrote: “As is only human, the desire to dominate was dressed up as idealism.” During a conversation with a “Free French” delegate to the US government who tried to defend American foreign policy, then under the direction of Secretary of State Cordell Hull, de Gaulle “screamed”: “You tell that old fool Hull from me that he is an asshole, a moron, an idiot. To hell with them. The war will sweep them away and I, France, will remain and I will judge them.”
On another occasion de Gaulle denounced the British-American “Anglo-Saxons,” shouting that after the war France would have to lean towards Germany and Russia. In his memoirs, he detailed episodes of that persistent wartime tension. “There was no doubt!,” he wrote. “Our allies were in agreement to exclude us, as much as possible, from decisions concerning Italy. It was to be predicted that in the future they would agree on the destiny of Europe without France. But they needed to be shown that France could not permit such an exclusion.”
In December 1943 Churchill and Roosevelt were so angered by de Gaulle’s behavior that the Prime Minister was “in a state of apoplexy” and the President spoke to the British leader of the need to “eliminate” the exasperatingly imperious man who claimed to speak for France. The American president had no sympathy for de Gaulle’s view of France’s past or future. For example, Roosevelt suggested that the US might create a new country of “Wallonia” out of French territory to serve as a buffer between France and Germany. This startling notion, Jackson writes, “revealed Roosevelt’s assumption that France would be treated after the war as a defeated nation, not a partner in victory.” In May 1944, de Gaulle told a Soviet official “We have no confidence in the English even when they talk of an alliance with France … Churchill has understood nothing of my mission … France for him is finished … He wants to turn me into an instrument of his policy.” As for America, it wanted a “docile France to make it a base for their European policy.”
Shortly before the Allied D-Day landing of June 1944 at Normandy, another meeting between Churchill and de Gaulle turned sour. In response to a dismissive outburst by de Gaulle about what he regarded as the intolerably condescending attitude of the British and Americans toward him and France, the British leader angrily retorted: “You must know that when we have to choose between Europe and the open seas, we will always be with the open seas. Each time I have to choose between you and Roosevelt, I will choose Roosevelt.” Two days later, on the morning of the D-Day landings, Churchill was so furious over de Gaulle’s behavior and attitude that he gave orders to remove him to Algiers, “in chains if necessary.” The prime minister, a British diplomat on the scene commented, “is almost insane at times in his hatred of de Gaulle, only less insane than the President.”
De Gaulle’s ability to stand against the British and Americans in defense of what he regarded as French interests was limited. All the same, it’s difficult to believe than any other Frenchman could have done better. In the wartime high-stakes game of international poker, he had only a weak hand to play, but he played it masterfully. His greatest strength in the repeated clashes with Churchill and Roosevelt, especially as the impending defeat of Germany became more obvious, was that they had no real alternative but to continue their support for him.
By 1944, and in the months prior to the Allied D-Day landing, most French understandably longed for an end to the war. Already weary and frustrated over the many wartime privations, as well as Allied bombings and other hardships, and also mindful that the tide of war was now running in favor of the Allies, ever more French looked to an Allied victory as the only realistic hope for a rapid end to the war.
All the same, most French apparently still trusted and esteemed Maréchal Pétain. When he visited Paris on April 26, 1944, he was greeted by large and affectionate crowds. Similarly enthusiastic throngs acclaimed Pétain during a visit to the city of Nancy just eleven days before the D-Day landing in Normandy. When de Gaulle finally arrived on French soil a few weeks later, he was also acclaimed by large crowds. It was astonishing, Jackson remarks, how quickly and easily the French transferred their loyalty from one national savior to another.
Given the Pétain government’s anti-Jewish measures, and its policy of collaboration with Hitler’s Germany, French Jews naturally sympathized with de Gaulle. As a result, Jews played an important and disproportionate role in his organization, which supporters of the Pétain government and the Axis cause understandably highlighted in an effort to discredit it. De Gaulle accepted Jewish support, even though, as Jackson remarks, he “certainly shared some of the anti-Semitic prejudices of his class – it would have been remarkable if he had not.” Apart from Jews, few people during the war years, or in the immediate postwar era – either in France or other countries – gave much attention to the anti-Jewish polices of the wartime French and German governments, or what today is called “the Holocaust.” As Jackson notes, “the issue was not one that loomed much in anyone’s mind at the time.” In none of his wartime radio broadcasts, for example, did de Gaulle make any mention of Jewish suffering or death in France or elsewhere in Europe.
De Gaulle’s early support for the new Jewish state of Israel, established in 1948, turned to wary skepticism. To German chancellor Ludwig Erhard he said in 1965: “We are being cautious regarding the Israelis We are calming them and telling them not to overdo it … One must not be taken in by the Israelis, who are cunning, very skillful, and who exploit the tiniest things for their propaganda about the Arabs.” The Israelis, he told Richard Nixon in June 1967, are a people who are always overdoing it [exagèrent], and they have always done so; you only have to read the Pslams.”
During a news conference that same year, de Gaulle referred to the Jews as an “elite people, sure of themselves and domineering.” The uproar caused by those words, Jackson notes, overshadowed remarks made on that same occasion about Israeli policies toward the non-Jews under its control that now seem “more prophetic than shocking.” “Now on the territories she has taken,” de Gaulle said, “Israel is organizing an occupation that will be accompanied by oppression, repression and expulsions, and there is now developing against her a resistance that she will describe as terrorism … It is obvious that the conflict is not over and that there can be no solution except by international agreement.”
De Gaulle was, above all else, a nationalist. In his political worldview, Jackson notes, the “starting point was the nation state, which he viewed as the fundamental reality governing human existence. One could fill pages with quotations on this theme … For de Gaulle, the conflict between nations was the eternal law of history.” “Like all life,” he said in a televised address, the life of nations is a struggle.” Accordingly, France must be a nation of “grandeur” that is strong enough and determined enough to wage war.
He was also a resolute European. In the postwar era, he hoped to fashion a new and strong Europe, led by France, that would be “first in the world”; a Europe “not dominated by either the Russians or the Americans.” He envisioned a “Europe of fatherlands,” and specifically denounced a “hybrid” Europe that would not recognize and seek to preserve the distinctive national characters and cultural contributions of Italy, France, Germany and the other European nations. “Europe, the mother of modern civilization,” he said, “must establish itself all the way from the Atlantic to the Urals” – a recurring phrase whose meaning he never made clear.
De Gaulle’s idea of France as a grande nation meant that it should be the preeminent country in Europe. For years he had regarded Germany as the greatest hindrance to fulfilling that mission. At the end of World War II that was no longer the case. Germany was devastated, in ruins, occupied by foreign powers, and divided. With the end of what de Gaulle called “the frenetic power of Prussianized Germany,” he now looked to the Germans as potential partners in a new Europe – one in which France would be paramount. De Gaulle read and spoke German better than English. From numerous examples cited throughout Jackson’s book, he seems also to have had more respect and a higher regard for Germans than he did for either English or Americans.
“After the war,” he said in 1942, “it will be necessary to give Europe a sense of herself; if not, American political administrators will come to colonize Europe with their primitive methods and their overweening pride. They will treat us all as if were negroes in Senegal! To rebuild Europe, we will need Germany, but a Germany that has been first defeated, unlike the situation in 1918.” “Do not forget,” he remarked to a French official in 1945, “that one will not make Europe again without Germany.” In 1948 he confided to a close colleague: “Supporting America at any price is not a cause! … Europe has always been the entente between the Gauls and the Teutons. We will need at some point to place our hopes in Germany, hope that she can create a European mystique.”
In keeping with that vision, he devoted great effort to courting and befriending Konrad Adenauer, Chancellor of the new German Federal Republic, and the towering political figure of postwar West Germany. The two men were both Catholic traditionalists who shared many values and a similar view of Europe and the West. De Gaulle told Adenauer that only a close French-German relationship could “save Western Europe,” adding that the British “were not proper Europeans” and that the Americans “were not reliable, not very solid, and understand nothing about History or Europe.” The two men got on well together. De Gaulle showed much more empathy and solidarity with Adenauer than with any other foreign leader. He was the only foreign statesman who was accorded the honor of being a guest at de Gaulle’s home. During his very successful visit to Germany in 1962, he did his best to charm and flatter, giving many speeches in German. In one city, he declared “You are a great people.” “De Gaulle came to Germany as President of the French and he returned as Emperor of Europe,” commented the German weekly Der Spiegel.
In the weeks following the end of the war in Europe, both France and Britain sought to re-establish their hegemony in the Middle East. A dispute over the deployment of French military forces in Syria nearly erupted into open conflict. Although de Gaulle was forced to back down, he did so with bitterness. In a meeting with Duff Cooper, a high-level British official, he said: “We are not, I recognize, in a position to wage war on you at the moment. But you have outraged France and betrayed the West. This cannot be forgotten.”
In his memoirs, de Gaulle poured out his bitterness over the “insolence” and “insults” of the British. “The events proved,” he wrote, “that for England, when she is the stronger, there is no alliance which holds, no treaty which is respected, no truth which matters.” “In the long history he carried in his head,” Jackson comments, “England was France’s hereditary enemy and historic rival, but that memory was overlaid by a more recent one: a bewilderment that Britain had allowed herself to lose a sense of national ambition and become, in his eyes, an American satellite.” For that reason, he blocked British membership in the European Economic Community or “Common Market” – forerunner to today’s European Union – fearing that the EEC would otherwise come “under American dependency and direction. That is not at all what France aims to achieve …”
If there is any theme running through his three-volume War Memoirs, Jackson notes, it is his “ceaseless struggle to defend French independence from all sides – from allies as much as enemies. Every detail of every quarrel with the British and Americans is recounted in meticulously unforgiving detail.” He sought good relations with the Soviet Union, not as an ally or partner, but as a counterweight to the power and influence of the United States and of Britain, which he regarded as a subordinate ally of the US.
De Gaulle returned to power in 1958 as a result of the national crisis over Algeria, the large north African country that for years had been regarded, not as a colony, but as part of the French Republic itself — even though the great majority of its population was not French by ethnicity, culture, or heritage. France was bitterly divided about how to respond to the rising demand among Algerians for independence. (Already in May 1945, French forces in Algeria had killed thousands in suppressing protests against foreign oppression.) The French turned to the one man who commanded enough public confidence to solve the seemingly intractable dispute. What Jackson calls de Gaulle’s “coup” succeeded “because France’s elites had lost confidence in the existing regime to resolve the Algerian crisis.”
The death of France’s “Fourth Republic” in 1958 had parallels with the demise of the “Third Republic” in 1940. In each case, the country’s parliament gave nearly plenipotentiary powers to a single man, who was regarded as a kind of national savior. At it had with Napoleon and Pétain, France once again put its trust in a towering leader. The constitution of the new “Fifth Republic,” which has endured to the present, gave sweeping, but not dictatorial power to de Gaulle, the new President.
In early 1960 de Gaulle persuaded parliament to allow him to govern by ordinance for a year, and after an attempted putsch in April 1961, he governed on the basis of sweeping emergency powers as provided for in the new constitution. During that period, one astute observer remarked, France was “neither a parliamentary democracy nor a dictatorship. De Gaulle’s rule was authoritarian but not dictatorial.” The “Fifth Republic” was ratified by national referendum, in which the needed “Yes” votes were generated with an intense campaign of official propaganda – a process that, as one prominent observer put it, was “very close to the Hitlerian conception of the law.”
When de Gaulle took power in 1958, nearly everyone still wanted to somehow keep Algeria “French.” Almost no one at the time supported Algerian independence. At that point, the French did not want a divorce; they still wanted to save the marriage. De Gaulle’s public statements at the time were words of obfuscation. Reflecting his own uncertainty about just what to do, he voiced support neither for independence nor for the “integration” of Algeria and “metropolitan” France, as demanded by most French “patriots” and supporters of Algérie française. Instead, he talked ambiguously of Algeria developing her “courageous personality” or her “living personality.”
Along with an increase in violence, including torture, carried out both by Algerian Arab-Berber nationalists and French authorities and “patriots,” came a shift in public opinion until, by 1961-62, most French had come to accept the idea of Algerian independence. French efforts to hold on to Algeria, or, if one prefers, the Algerian struggle for independence, resulted in at least 400,000 deaths, most of them Algerians, the flight of a million “Europeans” to France, and the resettlement or displacement of more than two million Algerians.
More quickly than most French, de Gaulle understood and accepted the reality that all efforts to make the very different Algerian and French peoples live together harmoniously in the same society were doomed. In his handling of the crisis, de Gaulle rejected the universalist-egalitarian premises of French republicanism. He showed that he was a French ethno-nationalist, or at least a racial-cultural “realist,” rather than a civic “patriot.” By today’s standards, he was a “racist.” To a member of parliament he said in 1959: “Have you seen the Muslims with their turbans and their djellabas? You can see that they are not French. Try to integrate oil and vinegar … The Arabs are Arabs, the French are French. Do you think that the French can absorb ten million Muslims who will tomorrow be twenty million, and after tomorrow forty?”
Mass immigration of non-Europeans would mean the end of traditional France, he once warned, adding “my village would no longer be called Colombey-les-Deux-Églises [Colombey of the two churches] but Colombey of the two mosques.” On other occasions de Gaulle spoke of “the incompatibility of the French and the Algerians, and supported measures to limit the “influx of Mediterraneans and Orientals,” and instead to encourage migrants from northern Europe. “It is a fiction,” he also said, “to consider these people [Algerians, North Africans] as French like any other. They are in truth a foreign mass …” And, in 1964, he remarked: “I would like there to be more French babies and fewer immigrants.”
During the “Algerian crisis” of 1958-1962, it was ironically the “patriotic” French “right” that sought to keep the Arab-Berber Algerians as part of France, while it was the “left” that embraced the ethno-national solution that was ultimately adopted. With the passage of time, writes Jackson, the French increasingly look back on de Gaulle’s achievement with Algeria not as a “noble act of decolonialization” but rather as a “prophetic – not to say racist – anticipation of the dangers of multiculturalism.”
De Gaulle’s sharp criticisms of the US military effort in Vietnam during the 1960s also proved prophetic, even as they enraged many Americans and rekindled latent scorn for the French. Whereas the US government framed the Vietnam War as a battle between “freedom” and “international Communism,” de Gaulle regarded it as essentially a nationalist struggle for independence from foreign rule.
The catastrophic misfortune of Europe’s Jews during World War II receives barely passing mention by de Gaulle in his memoirs – similar to the cursory treatment in the memoirs of Churchill and Eisenhower. For Americans and western Europeans today, accustomed to repetitious emphasis on “the Holocaust,” it is perhaps difficult to understand that during the Second World War, and for several decades afterwards, the grim fate of Europe’s Jews was not a matter of particular interest or concern to the great majority of people, including their military and political leaders.
De Gaulle also had surprisingly little to say about Adolf Hitler in his memoirs. What he did say betrays what Jackson calls “a certain fascination with Hitler.” De Gaulle wrote of the “somber grandeur of his combat … He knew how to entice, and to caress. Germany, profoundly seduced, followed her Führer ecstatically. Until the very end she was to serve him slavishly, with greater exertions than any people has ever furnished any leader.”
In spite of, or perhaps because of, his imperious mode of authoritarian governance, and helped by the country’s economic growth and rising standard of living during the 1960s, de Gaulle remained a popular leader. All the same, he was troubled during his final years by a growing sense of failure. Unburdening himself to the British ambassador in 1968 he admitted that the image of France he tried to convey was mostly an empty theatrical performance. “The whole thing is a perpetual illusion. I am on the stage of a theater, and I pretend to believe in it; I make people believe, or think I do, that France is a great country, that France is determined and united, while it is nothing of the sort. France is worn out …” A few months later, he despaired that his country had chosen the path of “mediocrity,” and that the French has had not been able to “sustain the affirmation of France that I practiced in their name for thirty years.”
“The regret of my life,” he confessed some months before his death in 1970, “is not to have built a monarchy, that there was no member of the Royal house for that. In reality, I was a monarch for ten years.” The European Economic Community — forerunner to the European Union of today – he went on, is not, and cannot be, the foundation of a solid Europe. “To make Europe,” he continued, “one needs a federator, like Charlemagne, or like Napoleon and Hitler tried to be. And then one probably needs a war against someone to weld together the different elements.”
If he could somehow look at what has become of his beloved country in the years since his death, de Gaulle almost certainly would be appalled or at least deeply saddened: increasingly secularized and non-Christian, with a large and growing non-European, “third-world” population, and a consumerist “Americanized” culture – a homeland not at all in accord with his “certain idea of France.”
De Gaulle’s impressive achievements in spite of daunting obstacles, and his courageous and imposing personality, have justly earned him a place in history as a great leader. All the same, one should not forget that his success in World War II was due entirely to the military victory of the Allied powers – above all, the USSR and the USA, which he regarded with suspicion and distrust. In the end, his failure to accomplish the central goals he set for himself and France mark him as a profoundly tragic figure.
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LOL, the enduring legacy of a kike lover.
Fought for the kikes and their goyim, but didn’t like what he has caused. Typical nigger-mentality.
Let’s face it, there was nothing worth saving after 1945.
Fight for kikes, die forever.
Correct. Vichy France was indeed neutral, not a German ally as western propagandists now proclaim. De Gaulle was rightly viewed as a traitor by nearly all French. The title of this article does not match its content, declaring him “Great” when in fact he foolishly helped Churchill destroy the French empire with the lives of thousands of “Free French” fools. De Gaulle also led an idiotic effort to reclaim its worthless colony of Vietnam.
Few Americans know that the primary goal of Roosevelt and Churchill in 1942 was the dismantlement of the French empire. They were mostly successful. Macron is finishing the job with his foolishness as he loses unofficial French colonies in Africa. Without them, France is nothing. What do you buy that says “made in France”?
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Another great critique by Mark Weber. France died a silent death with the De Gaulle. Aster his death, Jews took over France and turned it upside-down. I had to leave. Jews even have a Jewish pimp by the name of Sarkozy as a president. And then, Jews installed a goy by the name of Macron. Next, it will be the Islamophobic Neo-fascist gang who will be put in charge of France on behalf of the Jews. How low down can France go?
French fries became Freedom Fries–remember?
This guy seems have surrendered to the kikes he even admitted some Jews may have been gassed
Hot air balloons!
In 2024 it looks like all nations and nationalities that fought WW2 lost. Every Western nation is being overrun with the third world and are breeding themselves slowly out.
The Central Bankers/Globalists won WW2, the peoples lost.
Quite an informative outline, with some important facts missing or omitted:
One of Charles De Gaulle’s great achievements, if not the greatest, was to give the American occupiers two weeks to leave France, and France left Nato altogether very gracefully over a period of 4 years. (This was not only due to the criminal behavior of the US troops when they invaded and stayed in France (rapes and murders), but was also based on De Gaulle’s consciousness, as the situation in Germany confirms to this day).
De Gaulle’s success was his loyalty to patriotic France, to the French people, to French France, including or especially De Gaulle’s intelligence and integrity. It had nothing to do with a US military victory, which never happened. The USSR – the Bolshoi scum – won the bloodiest victory with complete disregard for Russian losses. America, as in WWI, was again a free rider and freeloader, to this day in Germany and Italy, but not extended to this day in France thanks to Charles De Gaulle. America won in the surrender; in and especially after the surrender, the great American slaughter of German soldiers and civilians began and that did not pass the French by.
There is very little glory for Americans! You fucked up and continue to fuck up this known world; Jews and hyenas!
“The catastrophic misfortune of European Jews during World War II…. and for several decades afterward, the grim fate of European Jews…”
The “catastrophic misfortune” you postulated for the supposed ruminants was actually sound “investment planning”, evil scheming and genocide of the others, while the poor victims could count more of their species right after their Second Jewish World War than before. As Bibi Naziyahoo & ilk keep saying: nothing was as successful for us Jews as our WWII.
(De Gaulle underestimated or was subserviant to The Money. He was a mason and installed Rothschild’s then Macron namely Pompadour as prime sinister).
“For Americans and western Europeans today, accustomed to repetitious emphasis on “the Holocaust,” it is perhaps difficult to understand that during the Second World War, and for several decades afterwards, the grim fate of Europe’s Jews was not a matter of particular interest or concern to the great majority of people, including their military and political leaders.”
There was, of course, a good reason for that, that it hadn’t been invented.
Leave it to Weber to get it wrong. One narcissist giving accolades to another.
Gaullism is the only rational policy for France and probably for Europe as a whole.
Chirac was the last Gaullist in the Élysée
Perhaps de Gaulle’s most important act was to show everyone how fragile the post war US denominated financial system was. His idea? Instead of US dollars for repayment of foreign debt, France should be paid in actual gold (artificially set to 35 dollars per ounce of gold).
Realizing this would immediately deplete US gold reserves (or at least alleged reserves) Nixon had no choice but to suspend dollar to gold convertibility. Below are Nixon’s words to the American public. Read and laugh out loud…
Mike Piper tried to expose Weber and his role in the (((takeover))) of the IHR – https://carolynyeager.net/mike-pipers-lonely-battle-expose-jewish-takeover-ihr
Death.
Either France repents of The Revolution and all the cultural filth it has spawned, which will require France to re-embrace Traditional Latin Mass Catholicism, to else France will die a suicide.
WHAT does one buy that is made in the United States these days? Practically NOTHING.
In doing so, Maréchal Philippe Pétain did far more to hobble the German war effort than De Gaulle and his Free French Forces, by keeping enough buffer between Germany and Spain to allow the latter to be of little use to German designs on the Med and North Africa. De Gaulle knew this, which is probably why a true national hero was “allowed” to rot in prison rather than simply executed.
De Gaulle was a poser at the time, not unlike M. Zelenskiy today. That he later redeemed himself with proper French chauvinism is his saving grace. Pétain had real skin in the game, but was sacrificed on the alter of De Gaulle’s ego.
Charolais beef, a celler of nice wines, and some lovely camembert and brie de meaux.
In the end, De Gaulle was a traitor thrice at least.
Firstly, he betrayed the government of Petain by running away and allowing the British to sink most of the French fleet, and presuming command of French forces in North Africa.
One would imagine that many French soldiers of the time did not agree, but they had to cooperate or be murdered.
Second betrayal. allowing Algerian indepence while also allowing immigration of many Algerian invaders to France.
A coup d’etat against that point was detected and defeated.
Third point: After mainly Jewish-led riots in May of 1968, de Gaulle stepped down.
What kind of “Historical Review” is this? Coming from IHR’s Mark Weber, words like “the grim fate of Europe’s Jews” and “The catastrophic misfortune of Europe’s Jews during World War II” and so on are completely disgusting and a reversal of genuine “historical review”. Has Weber sold out to the Jews? We’re gonna have to rename the place: Institute for Hebrew Reverence. Go ahead, Weber, keep bowing to the Jew and see what your legacy will look like. Something like de Gaulle’s: a complete ruin.
Let’s also rename the damn article: The Ruinous Legacy of a Poisonous Frog: de Gaulle-asse (a play on the word “dégueulasse”, which means “disgusting” and comes from “dégueuler” or “to vomit.”)
The Jews won the war and are pissing on France’s gene pool as we speak. The “legacy” of de Gaulle is what we see in Paris today: it’s much more of an African city than a French city. And the giveaway that de Gaulle has a lot to do with this were these lines in the article:
Well, now the French have to accept much more than Jewish “support”: France has been colonized by the Jew. If de Gaulle had been a real “nationalist” he would have never let this happen. If de Gaulle admits he was a “monarch for ten years”, then why did he let his kingdom become a mere satrap of the Jew? What de Gaulle did was bestow his authoritarian powers to his political heirs, an even more disgusting lineup of slaves of the Jews like Macron or to real-life disgusting Jews like Sarkozy. It’s pathetic. France is pathetic.
And what’s happening now in the Hexagon? Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) may win the next elections, but what good would it do? She has already sold out to the Jews after the “rebranding” of her father’s Front National. So let’s rebrand the party again: the “RN” really means Ridicule National. That’s what France has become, a ridiculous nation whose president literally worked for the Rothschilds. They don’t even try to hide it any more!
And now Macron is set to fulfill the Jews’ most ardent desire: to go on a warmongering path and set the world ablaze. The Jews will have their Armageddon one way or another, and that’s why they put these trigger-happy puppets in charge of the nuclear codes. That’s the legacy of your “great man” de Gaulle, Weber: a world heading toward a real “Holocaust” of goyim, that is, toward yet another genocidal Jew crime against humanity aided and abetted by a ridiculous France headed by a dangerous slave of the Jews — a Macronincompoop.
Thank you for this shocking info, Hans!
As an European deeply marinated in the official “truth”, I easily embraced the idea of Mark Weber being a decent/honest revisionist. But I actually started reflecting upon the matter of Mr.Weber being a true revisionist when I was reading his current article republished on Unz.com.
Japanese cars and bourbon.
A little known statistical fact is that during WWII more French people were killed by the allies than by the Germans. The Germans overran the country in only six weeks. Then the allies spent 4 years bombing and shelling the crap out of it in order to “liberate” it. Plus Churchill sank the French fleet before they could surrender.
Proof of his greatness is he pissed off the CIA till they tried (and failed!) to kill him too. Le Pen needs to be vigilant and use UNTOC to control CIA criminality.
Apr 28, 2023 Charles de Gaulle – 1969 | Movietone Moment
On this day in 1969, Charles de Gaulle, resigned from President of France after 11 years, following his defeat in a referendum on governmental reforms. Here is a British Movietone report showing highlights of his career.
https://youtu.be/DybwaCHXpoU?si=s8VnS-FINqqc_4V7
Video Link
The article mentions a very important but largely overlooked fact, that the memoirs of De Gaulle, Eisenhower and Churchill, totaling more than 7000 pages, do not mention anything about the Holocaust. That is because all of them took these as propaganda fake news which would be debunked sooner or later, and should anyone of the three affirm the story, he would risk debasing the validity of his memoirs.
Unfortunately, Jewish propaganda and Hollywood proved more influential at promoting their side of the story and now it has become a crime in most Western countries to dispute the Holocaust narrative, facts be damned.
One historian, whose name I cannot remember, floated the idea that De Gaulle was a protege of Pétain and the two played a dove and hawk game vis a vis the occupying Germans. De Gaulle’s attitude towards Germany gives validity to this theory since he clearly trusted the Germans more than the British.
The author could have added few important facts related to the legacy of De Gaulle and the French resistance:
– most of the French resistance was made up of French Jews and communists, as Germany sought a peaceful relation with the Vichy government and most French Catholics had no interest in fighting the German occupation seeing it as temporary and ending with a peace agreement with England as the writer asserts.
-Near the end of De Gaulle’s mandate, he stopped supplying Israel with arms and Jews had less influence than they possess today.
– the 1968 student uprising starting from the Sorbonne was nothing more than an Anglo- American- Zionist colour revolution that was meant to topple a strong French president whose nationalist agenda displeased the globalists. The many assassination attempts De Gaulle had survived are testimony to his unabashed nationalism which put France and the French people above any globalist consideration.
De Gaulle emulated National Socialist Germany by enhancing industry and the welfare of the people when he took special measures to support small businesses and at the same time promote essential industries such as nuclear energy, arms and infrastructure putting France on the path of a leading industrial power. All his successors failed to keep the De Gaulle’s legacy alive and anyone entering France today can sense that France is a shadow of herself during “Les Trente Glorieuses” (the years 1945 till 1975).
De Gaulle, one of the greats of the French nation, ranks within the circle of the greatest protagonists of France’s history.
Actually, it was Sisley Huddleston, a leading journalist of that era. I discussed it all in this 2018 article:
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-post-war-france-and-post-war-germany/
You put many valid points, but in fairness to De Gaulle, let us not forget that it took King Faisal of Saudi Arabia less than ten minutes to convince De Gaulle that the Zionists were usurpers of Palestine when he asked De Gaulle the hypothetical question: does the presence of the Romans in occupied Gaul give the Italians any claim of ownership over France?
Soon after this exchange of views between De Gaulle and the Saudi King, De Gaulle told his ministers that France would suspend all arms shipments to Israel.
Also let us not overlook the fact that since the French Revolution, Jewish power in France had been on the ascendancy. No French president or important official could resist that Jewish dominance except under the brief German occupation. The Dreyfus affair is testimony of the hold Jews in General and Zionists specifically had over the French Republic. In fact the concept of the Republic was tailor made for the dominance of Jews and their Masonic acolytes. The strong presidency that De Gaulle promoted was one way to stem the tide of that nefarious influence.
One of the mysteries of World War II was the senseless aerial destruction of Axis occupied cities by American bombers. These weren’t bomb strikes to support ground forces, but carpet-bombing raids on city centers. Several cities in Axis occupied China, Italy, Yugoslavia, and France were blasted by American mass bombings. These events are inexplicable and thus overlooked by historians.
Video Link
And ARMAMENTS…
No different than the American GIs destroying villages in Vietnam, in order to “save” them…
“DeGaulle was a mason”. First time I heard that one. Evidence please.
If I remember correctly, there was a reference to De Gaulle and Petain being ‘two arrows in the same quiver’ or words to that effect in The Vichy Syndrome by Henry Rousso, taking different paths towards the same goal, that being the preservation of an independent France.
As Cosmic cycles reveal themselves it is obvious that the Church of Rome will fade into the shadows of the past.
Though there have been numerous wonderful individuals whose work was done under the aegis of “Holy Mother Church”; individuals such as Francis of Assisi; Teresa of Avila; Hildegarde of Bingen, were as Individuals, blessings for humanity; the Church itself, the primary product of Constantine’s destruction of the Classical world; was responsible for both the Dark Ages and the numerous numerous sins of the Inquisition.
Proof of the pudding was that because of the totalitarian mind-control structure embraced and enforced by the church; Western Europeans devolved into illiterate serfdom for several hundreds of years; encompassing almost the entirety of the First Millennium.
Cosmic time cycles indicate that our planet is emerging from the horrors of the devolutionary epoch of Kali Yuga. The proportion of Awakeners to spiritual truths keeps growing. Another two generations and the whole edifice of organized religion’s mind-control matrix will have largely dissolved. Historians of the future will openly declare that the role of organized religion will be replaced by Cosmic Consciousness, as human cultural values mature.
Churchill treated De Gaulle as an ambulatory mushroom…keeping him constantly in the dark. There was no way that “Le Grande Charles” allowed the Brits to sink the French fleet. He would never have stood for that. From that statement alone, it is clear that you are historically, hysterically ignorant.
DeGaulle was late in the game in North Africa. It was initially military men such as Admiral Darlan and General Giraud, who were acquiescent in the Allied drive in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. DeGaulle finally arrived in the picture when General Mast’s Free French Army crossed the Sahara and managed to flank the Germans in the latter stages of combat in Tunisia, where an ally of De Gaulle began a significant combat role.
Once again, had you done your homework/research, it would have become evident to you that the age of Colonialism was drawing to an end and that Algerian independence was inevitable. The Algerians whom DeGaulle allowed into France were those tens of thousands who had backed the French in their ultimately doomed colonial efforts in Algeria. It was years after De Gaulle left office when the mass influx of unassimilable Algerians…and other African Muslims from the Francophonie flowed into France.
In general, most Americans are geographically and historically ignorant and have little or no grasp of geopolitical realism. Citizens of our ruptured republic have been deliberately dumbed-down since that tragedy of 12-23-1913 when our financial system was taken over by the enemies of humanity and are currently the successful destroyers of our republic.
With untold millions of Arabs/Muzzies, France is already doomed… c’est la vie!
Thanks, good documentary. I had never heard of the Royan bombing before. Arthur “Bomber” Harris was another psychopath on the British side.
Two Catholic masons, De Gaulle & Adenauer (“never underestimate Jews” and always gave them what they demanded):
“ What do you buy that says “made in France”?”
Cheap French Perfume/cologne.
My mother would say, “you smell like a French whore in church”. As a child I took it as a compliment, when I matured, I realized the connections.
You call it maturing trend and I call it anarchistic trend. Bolsheviks tried some variation of “maturing”, with catastrophic results. They now try a new concept in Gaza. Cosmic Consciousness, for some reason, keep avoiding the concept of time origin and space infinity.
“Paris today: it’s much more of an African city than a French city.”
It’s great that you bring us back to reality. Even in ‘better circles’ it seem to be completely forgotten. Bowing before realities means something like de Gaulle’s: a complete ruin.
It’s sad that we don’t accept the realities in time.
For what it’s worth, Howard Zinn gave a neat little summary of the Royan bombing, about 20-30 pages or so. When I read it back in the day, it was the first time I had heard of the bombing myself.
From Amazon:
What became of France and other allied countries after WW2 was the emergence of the largest global racketeering and criminal organization to ever sweep across the face of the earth under the auspices of Zionism using Holocaustic Schizophrenia to destroy Aryan nationalism and culture.
The rest is fake history.
The evidence shows that Jewish yoke on France started after De Gaulle time. He correctly detected Churchill evil tendencies and perversity way before British public did.
This is an interesting piece, although, based on the comments, maybe not perfect.
I’ve never known much about de Gaulle, mostly because he was French, and I never really cared about the French. I’m probably more interested in their current plight, than any of their history.
WWII really screwed Europe, the fools that they were. In retrospect, they should have united around Hitler’s Germany, and told the Americans, and the Soviets to fuck off. Imagine what kind of world power they would be now (or if not “now”, certainly through the 40’s, 50’s, and beyond), had they done so.
Instead, at US Jew behest, they fought yet another, completely suicidal war, ending their greatness as a continent, for good.
Just think- None of their countries would have been destroyed, or millions of lives lost. They would have been well positioned to stand up to the Soviet Union, instead of selling their souls to the US for “protection”, and what would prove to be an endless military occupation, and at this stage, completely subservient colonialization; economically, militarily, culturally.
Europe’s centuries of greatness ended with WWII, and what do they have to show for any of it? “Dur, we saved Poland!” Fucking clowns.
And who knows, maybe if they had followed that path, they wouldn’t be a shithole today, the US might not have taken over the entire continent, and when/if the Soviet Union collapsed, they could have combined with modern Russia to be the most powerful bloc on the planet.
At least they would have had a chance to resist International Jewry, and being flooded with mud people, and seeing their relevance disappear.
But instead, the White World is still being tricked into fighting and killing each other, by the jews, and at the same time, allowing their entire nations, cultures, and people’s to be destroyed by fake democracies, mud people invasions, and jewish cultural rot.
What’s that Frenchy saying?
c’est la vie
As with most US Presidents
CFM-56 turbofan engines which are best selling engines globally
Nuclear reactors
Nuclear submarines
Pharmaceuticals
You might take a look at Thales or Sanofi or Dassault or Alsthom or Saint-Gobain or Michelin
It is as if the moment the various European ethnicities were infected with the concept of the “huh-why” “race”, everything just went to shit.
Do you seriously believe in:
-A yellow race (Asians)
-A red race (American tribes)
-A black race (All the various ethnicities inside the entirety of Africa)
Or most ridiculously: A white race that includes Turks, Mongols, and North Africans?
Funny enough, the jews coined the term “huh-why” race and then worked very hard to keep themselves a SEPARATE ethnicity from fellow huh-whys. And dumbfuck angloid mutts fall for it.
Today, we see the emergence of the BRICS bloc, full of all kinds of nations and ethnicities, but they are all independently pure and distinct from each other, with no indication that will change.
All “huh-why” countries (a.k.a the West) are mixed in blood and culture. HMMMMMMMHHHH??????
I think it is time for this shitshow to end.
It’s very sad that religion has played an important role in the wars and destiny of Europe. Religion is not a right thing to make politics. All politic activity should first and foremost be based on rational facts, not emotional or religious things.
Instead, at US Jew behest, Europe fought yet another, completely suicidal war, ending its greatness as a continent.
Mark Weber has written an article of Judaism
The Weight of Tradition: Why Judaism is Not Like Other Religions
https://ihr.org/other/judaism0709-html
Chill my friend, it was only sarcasm with a little satire thrown in for good measure.
Nick Fuentes is an American de Gaulle. Viva la USA.
Ummm…. Maybe because the UK became a Talmudic Slave State after Cromwell? Just as there is no difference between the governments of Ukraine and USA/UK. All run by jews for their own interests and against the interests of the native populations.
“Breaking his oath as an officer…”
Admirable as de Gaulle was in many ways, the fact remains that he did break his oath. Moreover, his determination to continue fighting against Germany was illegal under every sort of law. France had declared war on Germany – not the other way around. Germany had decisively defeated France, and the legitimate French government had surrendered unconditionally. The war was then over.
Any attempt by anyone – de Gaulle, or the “Resistance” – to use violence against Germany was then terrorism pure and simple.
“Their politicians had declared war against a country whose leader never wanted war with France”.
Exactly. But guess who did want France and Britain to go to war against Germany?
Uncle Sam. That’s right: good old benevolent FDR. He deliberately wound up Germany to demand the return of Danzig; Poland to refuse it; and Britain and France to declare war on Germany if it lifted a finger against Poland. The USA would be right behind them, he declared.
Yup – two years and three months behind them. After allowing plenty of time for Poland and France to be conquered and Britain nearly defeated.
FDR played almost the same trick against Japan. He arranged for their oil to be cut off, and virtually forced them to attack Pearl Harbor – and he knew exactly how and when they would do it. See Robert Stinnett’s canonical book “Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor”.
By some weird coincidence, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor came just a day or two after the Germans reached the Moscow tramlines and were driven back by snow, ice, and bitter cold – followed by fresh divisions from Siberia. The moment Germany’s attack on the USSR was turned back and Germany’s defeat became inevitable, the USA was in there leaping on Germany’s back, grabbing the Pacific from Japan, and making sure that it was the only winner of WW2.
Yes the Frenchmen were the first in fight. That’s an undeniable historical fact.
To be fair, the new French reactors are not terribly good. A pity, because we Brits signed away our nuclear future to them, 15 years after Tony Blair announced a cessation of nuclear building in the UK, losing us a generation of nuclear engineers.
Not only that, but it transpired the firm making the steel containment vessels, Le Creusot Forge, had been fiddling their quality control figures since around 1966.
Their Moutarde de Dijon is rather good.
Well, thanks, Hans! I’m really glad I clicked on the link. But this email exchange between Carolyn Yeager and Michael Collins Piper shouldn’t be buried way down in a link within the comments section — it should replace the damn article itself. Not being aware of any of this, I reacted simply out of gut instinct when I wrote “Has Weber sold out to the Jews?” in my comment above. I didn’t know how right I was! Here are a couple of quotes from that link:
That “Taylor” above is Jared Taylor, another frequent contributor to this site. Come on, Mr. Unz, at least you could start putting a label on writers like Weber and Taylor: “Warning: Author has connections to Mossad and Zionists. Proceed at your own risk.”
So thanks again for the link — everyone here should go read it. It’s all so revolting and disgusting. Is there any outfit in the world that the Jews haven’t infiltrated? Here is a short chatbot summary of that page, focusing on Weber:
De Gaulle also created some controversy in Canada when he shouted “Vive le Québec Libre!” in 1967.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vive_le_Qu%C3%A9bec_libre
Much of the ‘Resistance’ movements in German-occupied Europe during WW2 were what we would today call ‘astroturf’. These movements were organized, funded, and directed by the Allies, in particular by Britain under their ‘Special Operations Executive’.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Operations_Executive
“On 16 July 1940, Hugh Dalton, the Minister of Economic Warfare, was appointed to take political responsibility for the new organisation, which was formally created on 22 July 1940. Dalton recorded in his diary that on that day the War Cabinet agreed to his new duties and that Churchill had told him, “And now go and set Europe ablaze.”Dalton used the Irish Republican Army (IRA) during the Irish War of Independence as a model for the organisation.
“Dalton’s initial statement about outline of methods to be used by SOE’s was “industrial and military sabotage, labor agitation and strikes, continuous propaganda, terrorist attacks against traitors ands German leaders, boycotts and riots.”
Dalton’s early enthusiasm for fomenting widespread strikes, civil disobedience and sabotage in Axis-occupied areas had to be curbed. Thereafter, there were two main aims, often mutually incompatible; sabotage of the Axis war effort, and the creation of secret armies which would rise up to assist the liberation of their countries when Allied troops arrived or were about to do so. It was recognised that acts of sabotage would bring about reprisals and increased Axis security measures which would hamper the creation of underground armies. As the tide of war turned in the Allies’ favour, these underground armies became more important.
In general also, SOE’s objectives were to foment mutual hatred between the population of Axis-occupied countries and the occupiers, and to force the Axis to expend manpower and resources on maintaining their control of subjugated populations.”
There are many books documenting the activities of the SOE:
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=special+operations+executive&i=stripbooks&crid=2ZQTUXGBB6LWL&sprefix=special+operations+executive%2Cstripbooks%2C90&ref=nb_sb_noss_1
My crutches – they are the coolest. They’re what happens when good design and good materials intersect: the padded bits are beautifully soft while giving nice grip.
But your point it well-made: my crutches happen to be made in France; I certainly didn’t start the purchase process thinking “Where do I get the coolest elbow-crutches imaginable? France, of course!”
$129 delivered on eBay.
As to the story: it is pure spin and bullshit that de Gaulle was “great” – the sort of bullshit that the French state has done for centuries (e.g., celebrating Napoleon;s victory over the Mamluks in stone, when he actually lost).
l’Asperge (“The Asparagus” – de Gaulle’s nickname used by people who rightly see him as a traitor, a coward, and a thief ) – arrived in London with more than a “few francs”.
The Algeria issue was also totally retarded: France had been raping MENA for a century, and had all these browns that it knew were a bad fit for integration… so they thought “Fuck it… let’s integrate them.”
If you do that, you own the consequences – and the various Maghrebains in France have every right to get every last centime that they can out of France: France had a chance to give them independence – ideally should have been with compensation for all the theft and slaughter – but instead dragged its feet.
Cultural rot?
Here’s Norway for you:
Norwegian Minister of Culture and Gender Equality Lubna Jaffery has exposed her breasts at an Oslo Pride event, where she was awarded the “Fag Hag 2024”award for her work. The controversial act received praise from the country’s top leadership.
Last week, Jaffery was featured on the Skeiv Preik (‘Queer Sermon’) talk show, affiliated with Oslo Pride, where she was given the prestigious award recognizing her as the top patron of queers.
Footage from the event shows the minister onstage holding the award – a large pink bow with the golden inscription “Fag Hag.” Jaffery then proceeds to expose her breasts, adorned by nothing but two tasseled nipple covers. She received lengthy applause from the audience.
“I am very grateful to have been named Fag Hag, the main patron of queers, during Oslo Pride this year. This is a great honor,” Jaffery told the Nettavisen newspaper
The minister’s performance was lauded by the head of Oslo Pride, Joakim Aadland, who said that it was the best thing the event had witnessed in years.
“I think it’s wonderful that we have a minister who goes ‘all-in’ and is not afraid to put herself forward a little. I’ve never experienced the applause she received in the ten years we’ve had Pride. So it’s clear that the audience appreciated Lubna’s stunt,” he told Dagbladet newspaper.
Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store described Jaffery’s appearance at Oslo Pride as “wonderful.” “Lubna is a confident, free and wonderful person who is warmly welcomed at cultural events all over the country,” the PM told Nettavisen.
—————
The rainbow chaps were happy to see the disgusting fat, ugly imbecile- it confirmed their conviction that women are repugnant
One of De Gaulle’s most striking — and generous — remarks came when he visited Stalingrad/Volgograd as a guest of the Soviet Union. Looking out over the Volga, he remarked to an aide, ‘What a people.’
‘The Russians’?
‘No, the Germans. To have come so far.’
And of course it is true. Whatever else there is to be said about it, the explosion of national energy that hurled the Germans all the way to the Volga was remarkable.
I have seen 👀 it, and now I can’t un-see it! 😞
Well, there was my moving van. Mack nameplate, but most of it was made by Renault.
It was a 1988 MS-250. I got it in 1993 or so, when it had 191,000 miles on it, for $11,000.
When I sold it, the odometer had quit working, but I estimate it had 650,000 miles on it. No rebuild on the engine, although the transmission had had to be replaced (that was American). By that point, it would smoke for ten minutes until it had warmed up, and if you made a cross-country run, something would probably go wrong at some point. It was definitely entering its golden years.
I sold it to a Guatemalan for $2000. He intended to drive it to Guatemala and resell it there. Whether he made it, I don’t know.
Derer: Your level of specific density is a bit amazing. Sure, there are some anarchistic trends, however, they are quite marginal. Perhaps you are alluding to the George Floyd Riots and the Antifa outrages. If you had done your homework, you would understand that these “movements” are by no means organic. They were financed and programmed by George Soros and other operatives for the enemy forces…the Dark $ide…the ultra materialists.
There are two still separate iterations to the awakening. On one hand we have those courageous students who demonstrated in their campuses against the genocide in Gaza. They are representative of Gens Y. and Z., particularly the latter. In essence these younger folks cannot envision themselves being part of a future which the self-selected “elites” are shoving down our throats. Beyond that specificity, they have reached the level of understanding that essentially each and every major institution has been corrupted…too many of them terminally.
Second grouping is made up of seekers, searchers, open-minded folk of all age groups. They have given up on not only the government, the mass media and the fake educational system…they also have had it with the pious pretenses of organized religions…in essence, the JudieChristieMagickMindfuck.
Human cultural evolution in the Western world had reached its apogee some 2,500 years ago in Hellenic Greece. It took almost two millennia for the efflorescence of the Italian Renaissance to reach a level of cultural development which might be slightly comparable to that of the Ancient Greek city states.
Here in the U.$. our highest cultural evolution occurred in the 1840’s. Though our materialist developments since that era have been amazing and even somewhat stupendous…they have come at a cost. The sense of community no longer prevails in the American “mainstream”. Those material inventions both produced and were the products of industrialization, urbanization and centralization.
The average American today is ignorant of history, geography and even an unawareness of the underside of current events. Consumerism has voided common sense. Indebtedness has gone viral. Most folks do not even control their own lives.
Little wonder that many of the youth and those elders who have maintained a deeper sense of reality are seeking for a cultural renaissance. That will begin in the arts…but not in the shit, sad sorry stuff peddled by the galleries in New York and Hollywood. Creativity cannot be canned or freeze-dried. One size does not fit all. Our entire mindscape is transitioning and transmuting.
Those who cling to the presumed security of the ways of the deluded herd with its memes and mores are simply becoming obsolescent.
Lubna Jaffery is NOT a Norwegian name…nor is it Pakistani. An assumed identity, perhaps. Point is, Norway hit the jackpot with those massive oil and gas discoveries in the North Sea. Even in ’79 when I spent several weeks there, Norway still retained much of its original rural culture…an energetic and hard-working people.
Norway now, however, has become a Nouveau Riche culture.
They enjoy the highest per capita income in the Western world. Prices are also of peak development. Like most deracinated cultures, Norway is seeking the exotic, thrills…but primarily of a passive rather than active nature. There is No Thor Heyerdahl these days and certainly no Roald Amundson.
Amerikkkan Kult-Sure has infused itself into their mindsets. Insane foreign policies, such as the ones characterized by the latter-day Quisling, Jens Stoltenberg, are yet another iteration of a devolutionary culture.
Gay Pride, which was real during the 1969-70 days of the Gay Liberation movement was something real…folks who had grown tired and disgusted for being treated as fourth-class humans. However, the Tranny Thang and samesex marriages have been introjected and popularized. Such trends have taken over all the human liberation movements…they are all a part of the elite’s policy of divide and conquer.
The Fag Hag dog n’ Pony show was nothing more than yet another way for the fringe on top to keep those “beneath” them fighting with each other.
This line from the article is a dead giveaway.
If one were to use Reality Translate the above would read:
The role of Jews in the catastrophic misfortune of Europeans during World War II.
ROFL. The Rothschilds and their agentur such as Adam Weishaupt placed their “yoke” on France after they staged their “revolution” in 1789. Napoleon finished it off for all of Europe when he “liberated” the Jews.
De Gaulle was a stooge for the Jews, about like Nancy Pelosi, Donald Trump or Joe Biden today. If De Gaulle had not been acceptable to Jewish power he never would have been allowed to represent or lead the “Free French”. Perhaps, like Trump, he was irascible, but like Trump was merely fighting for his position in the Jewish pyramid of power.
Just as Oct. 7 has turned Jewish psychopathic lust for genocide into a character flaw that is now “common knowledge”.
Today, the Coudenhove-Kalergi plan to race mix (n*ggerize) all of Europe is on the cusp of becoming “common knowledge” too. Kalergi was the first winner of the “Charlemagne Prize” which is in reality just an award for the European race traitor of the year.
Hitler and the NSDAP were trying to prevent this Judeo-Masonic plan from the very beginning. France had already sent its negro colonial troops to occupy the Rhine in 1919, and the Jews had been working on the genocide of the European Edomites for over 2 decades when De Gaulle fled France. One of the primary targets for the infamous NSDAP book burnings after they were voted to power was Kalergi’s book laying out the Jewish plan for the genocide of Europe, which we see unfolding before our eyes in Paris today. De Gaulle could not have been unaware of all this. He could not have been aware that by fleeing to England in 1940 he was playing directly into the Jewish schemes.
This is a great thread with lots of interesting video on the Kalergi plan for genocide of the European Edomites. The video I linked to below is of particular interest, and one important point is that the EU emblem has 12 stars representing the 12 tribes of Judea.
Sickening that men like De Gaulle are still referred to as ‘great’.
Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, De Gaulle, … The worst war criminals in so many ways. And still books are being written about their greatness. It’s disgusting.
Wonderful and concise description of the sorry state of affairs that is Europe. Yet the people keep standing in line to vote for their tormentors under the crooked republic. Indeed, judging by hindsight, Hitler was the last line of defence against the globalist takeover of Europe. De Gaulle called the United Nations “ le machin” (the thing) and fought against a deeper political union among the European states of the Common Market. Unfortunately, under a republic this is how much a great leader can do.
The revolutionary spirit among Whites has simply died; materialism has replaced idealism. From now on it looks like a total slide into the abyss.
“ All politic activity should first and foremost be based on rational facts, not emotional or religious things.”
Yet a deeper scrutiny of history shows that war and politics revolve primarily around religion. The first White settlers in the New World were Puritans, the most Judaised sect among so called Christians. The legacy of the U.S. foreign policy is the most crooked among the big empires. Just think that since her inception in 1776, the U.S. has been in a state of war, from minor to major, around 220 years.
The Roman Empire was the first great Western empire and it was a truly secular one where every society within the empire had the full freedom of religion and by extension all the social tenets that were peculiar to the corresponding society. True to their original Puritanism, the American PTB are on a crusade to spread their new religion of Wokism and LGBTQ…
Without wars, the U.S. would lose her raison d’être.
Twaddle
I used to wonder why Franklin Delano Roosevelt is considered either in the top three greatest, or the number one greatest, U.S. president of all time. Rarely does anyone list off his “pros” and “cons”; they just regurgitate what they consider to be favorable and leave out anything unfavorable. No one ever says that FDR is the George W. Bush of his day, or that he created the “Patriot Act” of his time, or that he is probably the person most responsible for the “military industrial complex” and the many intelligence agencies of America operating today. I think all those comparisons and attributes are appropriate. And depending on who you ask and how honest they are, that might be exactly why he’s considered the greatest president.
In the West, hagiographies about Stalin are not so common, at least today. He has his admirers and perhaps they are ostracized a little bit. But there is a certain level of tolerance and acceptance in Western academia for those few hardcore Stalin loyalists. The story might be different in Russia and possibly Georgia. Recently I watched a video of a man walking the streets of Russia and Georgia, asking certain people what they thought of Stalin and recording their responses. It was translated with English subtitles, but as one might expect, younger people tended to respond unfavorably or indifferently whereas older people tended to give much more positive opinions. The whole thing was rather amusing because of how politically incorrect it was. One older woman even tried to qualify her opinion with, “Don’t they celebrate Hitler in Germany?”, at which point the cameraman paused and responded very seriously with “No.”
Good God!
There’s just “no bottom” in the descent into gross debauchery!
Agreed.
It’s vomit inducing to watch.
A major part of Free French military efforts were directed against Frenchmen rather than Germans. How patriotic is that?
Albeit such efforts were made with a decided lack of enthusiasm. In Syria in 1941, the Australians became so disgusted with the reluctance of the Free French to actually fight that they openly expressed their preference for the Vichy French — who most certainly did fight, even if on the wrong side.
I think the answer lies in contemplating what would have happened to the US in the Thirties absent Roosevelt. We’ve got Huey Long — or would you prefer a heaping helping of Father Coughlin? Douglas MacArthur, per chance?
I don’t worship Franklin Delano Roosevelt — any more than I think much of Trump. In both cases, though, ya gotta consider the alternatives.
This is actually quite easily answered.
Video Link
(Go to about 4:10 if you’re impatient.)
To be honest, I don’t really see how that relates to the particular point I was making. If I’m critiquing the justification and logic of the Iraq War and the “Patriot Act”, as well as the consequences of those things, then it doesn’t really matter to me who George W. Bush was running against. I would just like FDR to be recognized for the president he was: the president who established domestic illegal FBI spying and surveillance, the president who created several intelligence “agencies” without oversight including what became the CIA, the president who had no problem suspending the civil liberties of “problematic” citizens, the president who lied about the USS Greer incident and the “secret Nazi map” to invade South America, the president who believed America should by the world police and take out regimes who don’t follow the leader, etc.
A relatively dodgy character. The fleet thing was just as much of a mess as abandoning the Harkis for being slaughtered in Algeria, after the Algerian war had already been won! That’s why the OAS became active and tried to stage a coup against de Gaulle. When that failed, he took bloody revenge and got a number of officers executed – in France in the 60s! And then he backed down with the ’68ers. Many French see him as a traitor.
I’m not as well versed on the long term effects of his economic policies. A cursory overview of the TVA makes it seem like a corrupt organization. The FDR administration also established the IMF and World Bank, which have also been accused of furthering U.S. interests, or the interests of some financial elite, at the expense of poor or developing countries. One legacy of FDR’s post-WWII vision could probably be America’s permanent “globalist” posture.
Sure — more or less. But what you’re doing is ignoring what would have happened without Roosevelt. Speaking broadly, absent Roosevelt, some kind of Red revolution, Rightest counter-revolution, religious tomfoolery, or just pure nuttery seems probable. We were headed off the rails. You may not like what we got with Roosevelt — you would have liked what we would have got without him even less.
A lot of what Roosevelt did was just pointless arm-waving — and a lot of it was as you enumerate.
And? It got us through the Great Depression and to the post-war boom without outright civil war. Most of the alternatives wouldn’t have. Really think your alternate no-Roosevelt 1955 universe would have been preferable?
1. One can argue Petain was the traitor in collaborating with the Germans. Granted, De Gaulle looked ridiculous as the poodle of the Anglos.
2. Ending colonization in Algeria was a realistic acceptance the end of European Imperialism, like the earlier departure from Vietnam.
Also, France was obligated to take in Algerian collaborators who faced reprisals from the new regime in Algeria. It was not about unlimited or replacement immigration.
3. The 68 retreat was shameful. Agree there.
I never said anything about a “No Roosevelt” universe. You’re inserting an entire premise here which you cannot attribute to me. It’s almost like you’re replying to someone else. I’ll say this again: I would like Roosevelt’s presidency to be weighted objectively instead of covering up the negatives, or the decisions he made which are incongruent with his hagiographic image. I would never even know about FDR’s collaborative relationship with J. Edgar Hoover unless I took a personal interest in it. Obviously it’s covered up or waved away by the liberal establishment. Instead, any negative impact of Roosevelt’s decisions are totally attributed to Truman or other presidents while essentially omitting the WWII framework that FDR constructed.
Your insistence on an “alternative” president is an unnecessary prerequisite which I am very suspect of. That is, unless you believe Roosevelt was an automaton who was unable to actually make alternative decisions himself. If we take that argument to its logical conclusion, then before criticizing any president—or any person for that matter—we must perform step (1): check to see if alternative persons are readily available to substitute, then step (2): if not, then shut the fuck up. I find it hard to believe you follow that criteria before criticizing other people’s decisions. The answer is this: He could have just told J. Edgar Hoover not to spy on people and not investigate people without proper legal justification. Instead he did the opposite of that. That’s just one example. Nobody put overwhelming pressure on him to do that either. And no, he doesn’t have to be perfect, but I think it’s reasonable to criticize him for that without sweeping it under the rug because “hey no alternative person”.
DeGaulle must have been doing SOMETHING right, as “they” had made numerous attempts to have him assassinated (murdered).
Thank you.
We’re going in circles here. You’re not ‘weighting it objectively’ unless you consider the consequences of its absence. I may feel that the garbage service’s charges are excessive and that their various dicta concerning how and when the can will be picked up are unreasonable — but it doesn’t follow I should just cancel. I really should consider the consequences of that choice.
Ditto for Roosevelt. He doesn’t belong on Mount Rushmore. Maybe he shouldn’t even be on the dime. I agree — at least to a point. But it doesn’t follow that you can say it was a bad thing that he was president, and he shouldn’t have been elected.
No, I totally disagree with your logic. You equate “alternative decision” with “alternative person”. I’ll break down the difference between us as I see it:
You: If you don’t like a decision that President X made, then the only alternative is substituting President Y. That’s the only choice you have. You must completely replace the President with another person who you think is better, otherwise stfu.
Me: I don’t like a decision President X made, and I believe President X could’ve made an alternative decision. For example, I think George W. Bush could’ve decided against going to war with Iraq. I think Congress could’ve also decided not to authorize military force in Iraq. Therefore I think it’s acceptable to criticize the President’s decision, and the decisions made by Congressmen, without first checking the primaries and seeing if there were any other viable candidates. No antiwar candidates? Oh fuck it then. War it is. But actually, it doesn’t matter who the other candidates were, for the simple reason that the elected politicians could’ve just not gone to war with Iraq.
What’s left unstated in your assumption is that people cannot make alternative decisions. That’s the only way your assertion makes sense, which is why it’s so perplexing to me.
I’ve noticed that you’re critical of the Israeli domination in Palestine. But I hope you haven’t criticized Biden or his administration for their stance on that matter, or really any U.S. President or Congress for the past thirty years, because it’s highly unlikely that any viable Republican or Democrat would take a radically different position regarding a post-October 7 Israel. Therefore, since there is no viable alternative, it’s not appropriate to criticize the current politicians since they are doing the same thing virtually any U.S. politician would do. At least when it comes to Israel.
Nobody said that. This is a classic male-male argument. We’re managing to quarrel even though we’re disagreeing about nothing of substance.
‘2 and 3 make 5.’
‘No, damnit. 3 and 2 make 5.’
It gets dull. This is the opposite of what women do — albeit equally absurd. Women tend to strive to pretend to agree even if their positions are fundamentally irreconcilable. If a woman says ‘a’ and her interlocutor says ‘b,’ then the woman will hasten to agree that ‘a’ and ‘b’ are both letters. I have literally heard my wife remark that blacks really were better off as slaves — and the women that she was talking to ‘agree’ that the lack of employment opportunities for young blacks is shocking.
I’m merely observing that whatever criticisms can be made of Roosevelt, he seems to have been a better choice than any of the alternatives. What part of that do you dispute?
Meh. Given a different outcome to the war — and a different Hitler — Petain could have gone down as the wise elder statesman who made the best of a bad hand. In fact, that seems to have been about what he conceived himself to be doing.
Consider, say, Adenauer. Didn’t he play it about as Petain did? And yet, would it be reasonable to call him a ‘traitor’? Indeed, outcomes aside, there are several parallels between Petain and Adenauer. Both were figures from the ancien regime. Both saw cooperation with the victors as necessary. Both repudiated the defeated order. Both sought to lay a new foundation for national identity.
Well, as amusing as that is, if this is boring then you’re welcome to cease and desist whenever you’d like. I won’t stop you. But I thought my entire comment addressed the issue of “alternative choices” versus “alternative people”. I don’t know if there were better people because criticism of a person’s choices doesn’t require that there be a better substitute of an entire person readily available. But it’s also hard to say because my main problem with FDR doesn’t really have much to do with his economic platform. Maybe he could’ve done things better in that area, but it’s not a hill I’m willing to die on. Rather it’s the particular decisions he made in office which really aren’t part of his platform. But for the sake of argument, let’s assume there were no other presidential candidates. Let’s assume you can’t swap out Roosevelt with anyone else until he dies. In that case, I still have the same criticisms, and they really don’t have much to do with the New Deal or his first term.
As a comparative example, albeit extreme, there’s really no one who can replace Joseph Stalin as General Secretary of the CPSU in the 1930s. Due to earlier decisions he made, some kind of authoritarian regime was necessary to hold the empire together and he might be the only man who could keep the U.S.S.R. from breaking apart or descending into civil war again. But be that as it may, it doesn’t alter my opinion of the man. He could’ve saved millions of lives if he handled the famines differently—if lives actually mattered to him—and he could’ve just not jailed millions of people on fake charges and had over a million people executed for being “foreign agents”, or something to that effect. Whether or not there were other people available to fill his shoes doesn’t alter my opinion of him.
My criticism of FDR doesn’t really begin until his second term, and then really with the third and fourth term, so let’s say 1937 through 1945. Whatever good he may have done during those years, he still should be recognized as the President who empowered and encouraged the FBI to exceed their legal authority and “get dirt” on political enemies. And he should be recognized as the progenitor of the “national security state”, including setting a precedent of telling lies and gross exaggerations about international threats in order to increase his own executive power, creating a state of existential fear within the country and empowering “agencies” under him to do his bidding. And he’s the President who jailed and interned thousands of people in the U.S. for political reasons, which Woodrow Wilson also did, but FDR exceeded him by an order of magnitude and even used his position to place thousands of Germans and Japanese people living in Latin America in captivity. All without any real justification, and that’s incredible to me. There must’ve been thousands of people who never got their homes back.
Gay liberation” was not “something real” anymore than “women liberation” was.
Anyone discriminated against on the basis of race, or sex, specifically in hiring practices and labor relations had legal recourse for redress of wrongs and, if honest, they should have fought for that.
The gay activists’ patform should have been: It is nobody’s business what consenting adults do behind closed doors in their bedrooms. Period. But they did not do that. They demanded public recognition and actual celebration of their “life style,” in schools too! They supported affirmative action for the gastrointestinal sex “community” and got it.
Now they whine that the “trans” have taken over their noble movement and are demanding to have the letter “T” deleted from LGBTQ etc.
They have not been undermined by “the elite’s policy of divide and conquer.” They were themselves part of it and, upon reaching maturity” are now undergoing the predictable further division, just like cancer cells, as the goal of complete atomization of the society of the “elite” demands.
I’m just adding this for edification. I actually wasn’t aware of the extent of this program until recently. There were also thousands of Japanese and a couple hundred Italians in Latin America that were rounded up at the behest of the U.S. state.
Source: Friedman, M. P. (2003). Nazis and Good Neighbors: The United States Campaign Against the Germans of Latin America in World War II. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.
Western Europe and also Maghreb had just ceased to be a significant part of the world mostly for climactic reasons no empire could foresee nor measure let alone counteract : the Roman Empire just decided to move South-Eastwards, nearer to where most of its riches would still be exchanged and produced, and abandoned their backwater zones. Britain and then Gaul were no longer profitable. The Germanic hordes won over chiefly because they mastered the technical means to make that kind of land productive, which didn’t require a far-reaching empire to be managed.
In Western Europe the Church was not a very dominant institution during that specific dark period (it seems to have been powerful because they alone concerned themselves with history and chronicles and leaving testimonies of their actions ; other economic agents were rather busy erasing the traces of their own deeds : yourself as a student were taught the history of your own country and of England most probably as well as WWII but not that of Venice which was the financial and diplomatic nexus of all Western Europe) : it was challenged by a far more powerful conjunction of Jews and late pagans who knew better how to manipulate small kings like puppets always in the direction of ever more obscurantism and misery. Jews, who of course do their best to wash their hands of all social evils they might have fostered during that period and downplay or deny all their crimes against the rest of humanity, had the monopoly not only over credit but over all commercial routes eastwards and southwards as well as over most scientific knowledge which was to ke kept as secret as possible to as much as possible.
Judging the late Christian Roman empire by the fate of Western Europe is like judging that of today’s American empire by the fate of latin American countries such as Venezuela or cartel-ridden Mexico, or that of France by former French Africa. Interesting things for civilisation are rather happening in South and East Asia by now. Western Europe during the so-called dark ages was rather the world’s sail-around country like there are fly-over countries. India was experiencing one of the most interesting periods of its history, called Shivaite Renaissance by specialists. But the Byzantine Empire, although Christian, also allowed the Greek zone of civilization to be sovereign and intellectually creative again for the same number of centuries as India. Curiously enough the Keltic peoples became something else than mere illiterate serfs and developed into peoples among the richest in poets ever (but not of great builders) right at the time they developed their own brand of Christianity.
Imo, de Gaulle was a great man and an important historical figure of the 20th century. I was surprised by the amount of disrespect for de Gaulle and even hate in the comments. No one in here mentioned that it was de Gaulle (to his credit) who kicked NATO out of France, compelling the move to Brussels.
Why did he do it? Obviously, because the CIA had been deeply involved in the attempts to assassinate him.
De Gaulle also deserves respect for doing right by Algeria, that is, for pulling France out. That wise decision no doubt contributed to de Gaulle’s warm relations with JFK who also supported a free Algeria. It’s apparent from various accounts the two men were on friendly terms. No doubt, de Gaulle attempted (in vain) to warn Kennedy about the US deep state. The French leader cared enough to travel to America for JFK’s funereal procession down Pennsylvania Avenue.
Many in here trash de Gaulle because he welcomed Jewish support for the Free French movement. This is a bogus argument imo. De Gaulle welcomed support from wherever he could find it. Clearly, there was no special love for Jews or Zionists.
De Gaulle was himself as much of a victim of Jewish power as Kennedy. Please remember, it was de Gaulle who ordered a cut-off of French nuclear assistance to Israel after the IDF’s June 1967 six day war of aggression. Beforehand, De Gaulle had warned Israel not to attack. As we know, the nuclear pact continued because other ardent Zionists in de Gaulle’s government went behind de Gaulle’s back – and enabled it.
Afterward, French Jews turned on de Gaulle. In 1968, Jewish student revolutionaries took to the streets of Paris and brought down his government.
Credit to Mr Weber for a well written historical review.
Adenauer appears to have flirted with Rhenish separatists after WW1. Some of whom were killed by German nationalists as traitors, and indeed they were in receipt of French and Belgian funding. It is actually a little surprising to me that he did not have more trouble with the Nazis than he did.
The sad truth is that De Gaulle was completely dependent on the ” anglo-saxons” from the first day he set foot in England . Somehow it is a wonder they tolerated him and even helped him ; credit must be given to Churchill for that . The americans despised him .
De Gaulle succeeded in turning the american tide in 1945 , not allowing the US to treat France as an occupied country , or at least not completely. How he really did that we don’t know , but the answer might be the strength of the french communist party after 1945 De Gaulle respected the communists , I come from a french catholic traditionalist family and they all respected the communists , even if they had no love for them .
But the first sad truth is that Westen Europe was lost as a power already after WW1 , the allied french and brits had the american come to the rescue in 1918 and they paid a dear price for it : once the US had their foot in european politics and counting the money loaned to them by american banks , there was no way the rising american financial sector was going to let go and they came to collect in 1945 and establish the US of A as the new empire .
“Vae victis” ( woe to the vanquished ) as the romans said …
Credit must be given to De Gaulle for his settlement of the algerian question, at least the man was coherent with his nationalist opinions and recognized the right of the algerians to be equally nationalists . The “National Front” founded by Le Pen in 1972 included a huge number of “French Algeria” proponents who denied the algerians the very nationalism they claimed for themselves . The french of Algeria , also made of italians and spanish immigrants, were mostly ” petits blancs ” ( small whites ) who thought themselves superior to the “native scum” ; It is no wonder that today’s National Front’s heirs are supporters of Israel .
De Gaulle’s true legacy…
How any of that was due to de Gaulle escapes me.
That’s precisely where his achievement lies.
He should have been a minor figure, a token client. That he became more was due to sheer…well, it would have been chutzpah if he had been Jewish.
This will only end when the dirty joo ends.