Meet One of the Scariest People on Planet Earth

By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News

08 September 14

e know that almost one thousand jihadists with French nationality have gone to fight in Syria and Iraq and that many of them have joined the Islamic Caliphate,” declares Aymeric Chauprade, chief foreign policy adviser to the Front National’s Marine Le Pen and her likely choice to be foreign minister should she win the presidential election in 2017.

“We must eliminate them in situ and this should be the role of our special services immediately,” he said. “It is the responsibility of every European nation to eliminate its jihadist nationals before they return.”

Dick Cheney is alive and well and now living in France, having morphed into the controversial French political scientist now advising Europe’s ultra-right to make a priority of targeted assassinations. Did I say Dick Cheney? Or did I mean to say Barack Obama?

Chauprade presents himself as a geopolitical realist. In fact, he’s more an old-fashioned romantic and right-wing Catholic traditionalist defending the French nation, its identity, its 1500-year-old civilization, its European origins, and its Christian culture against a host of modernist evils. These include materialism, individualism, multiculturalism, the dictatorship of relativism, and the naive celebration of democracy and the Rights of Man, which Chauprade sees as an outlandish civic religion without God and “the good news of Christ.”

He sees “Holy Russia” as the “only major European power to openly and firmly embrace its Christian civilization,” and as a strategic partner against American hegemony and “the alliance of Western globalism with anarchist nihilism.” This unholy “alliance” Chauprade blames for “the color revolutions” in Georgia and Ukraine, FEMEN, Pussy Riot, homosexual marriage in France, gender theory, and “enslavement by consumerist urges and sexual impulses.”

The hands-on architect of the Le Pens’ collaboration with Putin, he traveled to Moscow to applaud Russia’s anti-gay laws. He appears regularly on Russian media and served as an international observer for Moscow’s Crimean referendum, along with former collaborationists and present-day neo-Nazis organized by a Russian-backed NGO in Brussels, the Eurasian Observatory for Democracy & Elections (EODE).

“Russia has become the hope of the world against new totalitarianism,” he told members of the Duma, Russia’s parliament. And Putin has become Chauprade’s personal hope for a return to what he sees as the natural attachments of family, nation, and the divine.

For Chauprade, these are significant concerns. But, in his current view, the greatest threat is a historic “Clash of Civilizations,” Muslim vs. Christian, and more pointedly the replacement of the native French “by a population that has an African and Muslim majority.”

Hold in mind that his fear is largely bogus. The CIA’s latest World Factbook puts the country’s current population at just over 66 million, of which only 5-10% are Muslim. But many here in France share Chauprade’s feelings, just as the declining white European majority in the United States feel threatened by the growing number of non-whites, Hispanics, Asians, and other “outsiders.” We need only look at the Tea Party or listen to Rush Limbaugh. The difference, at least of degree, is that Chauprade is trying to use the nativist fear to build a majority political movement around Marine with her undeniable Fascist roots in the Front National.

Newly elected as Marine’s hand-picked candidate for the European parliament, he sees the Front National as “the last chance for France to safeguard its civilization.” His Jesuitry is cold-blooded. “There is no other credible solution than to build this majority with those who have already understood the link between the internal Islamic threat and the external Islamic threat.”

This is not the Chauprade observers know from the past. In 2009, he wrote the first edition of his “Chronique du Choc des Civilizations,” in which he proclaimed without the least shred of hard evidence that the CIA and other elements of America’s “Deep State” conspired with Israel to create the horrors of 11 September 2001. It was hardly an original argument, but the defense minister sacked him from his influential teaching post at the Joint Defense College. Chauprade went to court, won back his job, and established his reputation as something other than a defender of Israel.

Now a major player Marine Le Pen’s newly repackaged Front National, he has become just that. “Israel is not the enemy of France,” he insists. “France today has but one true enemy: Sunni fundamentalism.”

“The throat slitting, beheading, rape of young Christian or Shiite virgins, summary executions, burying alive of prisoners, macabre videos posted on YouTube and downloaded in our urban ghettos tens of millions of times, all these evil deeds we owe to ‘our magnificent allies,’ our new Middle Eastern friends gorged on petrodollars, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.”

All of which brings Chauprade to support “without reserve” American military strikes against the Islamic State in Iraq and to call for a new alliance with Syrian dictator Bashir al-Assad. Anyone who can put all that together with backing Putin as the champion of Christian civilization and great white hope has a mind greatly to be feared.

A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold."

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