Chapter 1CollaboratorsIt is 2017. A Sunday evening. More than ten million viewers are watching the oldest newsmagazine on American television. The show airs, fatefully, on an infamous day in European history: March 5.
On March 5, 1933, the Nazi Party won the largest number of seats in Germany’s legislature. By the month’s end, Nazis and their allies had passed the Enabling Act, giving absolute power to Germany’s new chancellor, Adolf Hitler. Germany’s democracy became a dictatorship. The rest is history—a history littered with the bodies of the dead, most of them White. But Hitler’s ideological children in the twenty-first century—great replacement politicians—claim to be protecting White lives. The featured subject on this CBS segment presents herself as protecting White French lives.
“We begin tonight with a story about a populist politician,” correspondent Anderson Cooper opens. The camera zooms in. Darkness surrounds him, except for the iconic
60 Minutes clock logo flanking him.
Hitler’s reign of destruction across Europe during World War II had local collaborators. After invading France in 1940, Nazi Germany occupied the north. In the south, Nazis propped up the dictatorship of Marshal Philippe Pétain, based in the resort town of Vichy. The Vichy government, as it came to be known, rounded up and deported Jews to concentration camps, paid tributes to Nazi Germany, persecuted anti-Nazi dissidents, and enabled the forced labor of more than one million French people. The French Resistance, with the help of the Allied armies, liberated their nation from the Nazis and their French collaborators in 1944.
In the decades after World War II, former Nazi officials and their collaborators throughout Europe created and joined new political parties. Around the world, Nazi and neo-Nazi parties sprang up, with names that contained the word “National,” echoing the official name of the Nazi Party: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or National Socialist German Workers’ Party. In 1972, graying French collaborators marched into a new political party named the Front National, or the National Front.
France’s National Front was co-founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen. Born in 1928, Le Pen came of age in the late 1940s and 1950s. One likely early influence on Le Pen was René Binet, a French father of White nationalism who was killed in a car crash on his forty-fourth birthday, in 1957.
Binet edited a communist newspaper,
Le Prolétaire du Havre, before enlisting in the French army in World War II. But Nazi Germans captured him in more ways than one.
Binet joined the Charlemagne Division of the Waffen-SS, a French collaborationist unit of the Nazi paramilitary. After a brief postwar imprisonment for his Nazi military service, he became a prolific great replacement theorist, warning of “the end of the white world.” In 1948, Binet accused “anti-racists of the crime of genocide because they” are “imposing on us a crossbreeding that would be the death and destruction of our race and civilization.” In Binet’s 1950
Théorie du racisme (Theory of Racism), he lambasted racial integration, asserting that this “uniform barbarity” came into being as a result of global capitalism’s “constant promotion of more and more racially inferior strata to power.” Binet’s thinking proved to be a forerunner to Camus’s “global replacism,” which, to Camus, dissolves differences and makes people “all the same, hence interchangeable, replaceable, pure Undifferentiated Human Matter.”
In 1954, Binet helped found a pan-European alliance called the New European Order (NEO), led by Gaston-Armand Amaudruz, a Swiss Holocaust denier. The NEO advocated for “non-native” people to be deported from Europe. NEO officials demanded overseas decolonization to ensure “race purity,” all the while dismissing the Holocaust as “a few thousand Jews and degenerates who died of typhus in the labour camps.” Two decades later, Jean-Marie Le Pen said the Nazi occupation of France was “not particularly inhumane.” Jean-Marie Le Pen’s daughter Marine has claimed that the Vichy government “was not France,” whitewashing France’s history of Nazi collaborators.
These early theorists demonstrate that the structural renovation of Nazi great replacement theory into neo-Nazi great replacement theory did not happen overnight. They dabbled in the old and the new for decades, experimenting until they found the right mix. The old—traditional, unreconstructed Nazism—alienated voters. But once disguised in new language and aimed at new targets, the same ideas attracted new adherents.
Articulating these renovating ideas, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s daughter emerged in the 2010s as France’s most polarizing politician, and one of the most popular. Which is why she appears on prime-time television in the United States in 2017. CBS’s
60 Minutes introduces her to many American viewers for the first time.
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