Another day, another link between Donald Trump's White House advisers and actual Nazi collaborators.
Stephen Bannon, President Donald Trump's chief strategist, recently spoke approvingly of the ideas of an anti-Semitic French intellectual who was sentenced to life in prison for cooperating with the Nazis during World War II.
Because sure, that's exactly what you'd expect from Donald Trump’s top White House adviser—singing the praises of virulently anti-Semitic Nazi collaborators.
In an article on Bannon's interactions with European right-wing nationalists who want to break apart the European Union, Politico reported last week that Bannon has "expressed admiration for the reactionary French philosopher Charles Maurras, according to French media reports confirmed by Politico." [...]
Maurras blamed World War II on the Jews, faulting them for the German occupation of France. "The barbarous occupation of 1940 would not have taken place without the Jews of 1939, without their filthy war, the war they undertook and they declared: our occupiers were introduced by them, it was the Jews who launched us into catastrophe," he wrote, according to 2001 article by Callil in the New Statesman. Callil also noted that Maurras' newspaper supported the Nazis and "named names, hunted down enemies, and called for hostages, resistants, Jews and Gaullists to be shot."
For collaborating with the Nazis, Maurras was sentenced to life in prison.
That Steve Bannon expresses admiration for the ideas of yet another notorious anti-Semite has ceased to be even a little surprising. That the White House is now crafting budget ideas that dabble in eugenics-based notions of why we ought to stop feeding the elderly and providing healthcare to the sick (under the all-too-familiar banner of military strength and renewed national greatness) is at this point unsurprising as well.
Yes, the occupants of the current White House are crafting polices taken from fascist movements and fascist "thinkers." All while praising Nazi collaborators, or in some cases while sporting the military medals of those collaborators during public events.
And it's all right to say this out loud. They're not attempting to hide it.
On the contrary, they have achieved their current success and positions within the administration based on those ideologies. They will make the fatherland great again, they say, by weeding out the non-Christians and "dangerous" ethnic people, by slashing aid to the elderly and care for the poor, and by building the greatest military the world has ever seen. They will publicize government-sponsored lists intended to demonstrate the "criminality" of the ethnic other. They condemn revelation of inconvenient facts as merely the continued plotting of the Lügenpresse. And they brag to their admirers about the inspiration for all those plans, not being the least bit shy about doing so.
Call it what it is—and call Republican support for their plans what it is, as well.