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WSWS : News & Analysis : North America : Clinton Impeachment
US media downplays links between congressional Republicans and fascists
Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott praised white supremacist group
By Martin McLaughlin
23 December 1998
Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, who will play a major role in the
upcoming Senate trial of President Clinton, has close and longstanding ties
to a white supremacist organization that has denounced Clinton in strident
and racist terms, according to reports which surfaced last week.
In an article by reporter Thomas Edsall, published December 16, the
Washington Post reported that Lott addressed a meeting of the Council of
Conservative Citizens in 1992, praising it for standing "for the right
principles and the right philosophy." The group is the direct
organizational successor of the Citizens Councils which organized
segregationist forces in the 1950s and 1960s, serving as a more
respectable, upper-middle-class ally of the Ku Klux Klan.
The CCC came to public attention a week earlier, after attorney Alan
Dershowitz, an anti-impeachment witness before the House Judiciary
Committee, revealed that one of the committee's members, Congressman Bob
Barr, addressed the white racist group this past summer. The Georgia
Republican has been the most rabid partisan of impeachment in the House.
Barr represents the suburban Atlanta district where the modern Ku Klux Klan
was founded. He claimed to be unaware of the CCC's racist views prior to
giving the keynote address to its convention, and cited Lott's association
with the group as proof of its bona fides.
The views of the CCC are well known in Republican right-wing circles. A
spokesman for the Conservative Political Action Conference, David Keene,
said the CCC had been barred from its annual gatherings in Washington
"because they are racists."
The spring 1992 newsletter of the organization, Citizen Informer, carries a
photograph of Lott addressing the group's meeting in Greenwood,
Mississippi, asking for its support and praising its activities. Lott also
appeared at political rallies sponsored by the CCC in 1991 and 1995, along
with other Mississippi politicians, both Democratic and Republican.
A 1997 issue of the Citizen Informer shows a smiling Trent Lott meeting in
his Washington office with CCC President Tom Dover, CEO Gordon Lee Baum and
national officer William D. Lord Jr. Baum and Lord both have records in
racist politics going back decades, with Lord serving as a regional
organizer for the Citizens Council and Baum serving as the group's Midwest
director.
To this day the CCC's newsletter continues to reprint Trent Lott's column,
without objection from the senator, side-by-side with editorials denouncing
interracial marriage as a genocidal attack on the white race, attacking
welfare programs as a conspiracy to enrich the Jews, and opposing
immigration as a threat to the "European derived descendants of the
founders of the American nation."
Significantly, given Lott's role in the Senate trial of Clinton, his allies
in the Council of Conservative Citizens have attacked Clinton over the
Monica Lewinsky affair in language which combines racism and pornography,
suggesting (in one of the few passages which can reprinted) that Clinton's
extramarital affair is "a result of his inner black culture. Call him an
Oreo turned inside out."
Despite the importance of these connections between leading Republicans and
fascist elements, there has been virtually no reporting of these
revelations in the American press. While the Washington Post ran four
articles or comments on the subject during impeachment week, the issue has
been ignored by the major television networks, the New York Times and most
other publications.
The resignation of Robert Livingston as the House Speaker-designate
provides further evidence of the decisive role of the extreme right among
the congressional Republicans. Despite his decision to bar a vote on
censuring Clinton, compelling an up-or-down vote on impeachment, Livingston
was under suspicion from the far right, which considered him insufficiently
zealous on issues such as abortion and too inclined to compromise with the
Democrats.
When Livingston publicly admitted past marital infidelities on the eve of
the impeachment vote, after learning that Hustler magazine publisher Larry
Flynt was about to publish a report to that effect, a group of Republican
congressmen with close links to the Christian right moved against him.
These included Steve Largent of Oklahoma and Donald Manzullo of Illinois.
Some of the right-wingers let it be known they would oppose his election as
Speaker in January, and Livingston decided to step down and resign from
Congress.
Dennis Hastert of Illinois, handpicked by Republican whip Tom DeLay to
replace Livingston as the next Speaker of the House, is known as an
evangelical Christian who has close ties to the Christian right.
Livingston's successor in his suburban New Orleans congressional seat could
be former KKK leader David Duke, who announced his candidacy within hours
of Livingston's resignation. Duke once held a seat in the state legislature
in the same area, and carried the district in his unsuccessful 1990 race as
the Republican candidate for the US Senate.
See Also:
The impeachment of President Clinton
Is America drifting towards civil war?
[21 December 1998]
Judiciary Committee Republican Bob Barr spoke at white supremacist
convention
[12 December 1998]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 1998
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved
~~~~~~~~~~~~
WSWS : News & Analysis : Europe : France
French fascists fall out
Le Pen's Front National splits
By Gerard Naville
23 December 1998
After days of virulent infighting, the fascist Front National has split in
two. One wing is led by the FN's founder leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, the
other by his former lieutenant, Bruno Megret. Both tendencies are fighting
for control of the party's membership and assets.
Megret had insisted on holding a special congress, hoping to win sections
of the membership by giving himself a unifying and "democratic" coating. Le
Pen opposed this, using his powers as the movement's president to wield the
administrative axe, and has been expelling and sacking his opponents.
Amidst the mutual recriminations in the FN's committees and the media,
there has been recourse to the courts regarding party assets. In
Marseilles, one of the offices of the Megret tendency was invaded by Le Pen
supporters looking for lists of party members.
The crisis has been developing over several months. It intensified when the
FN won the leadership of several local councils, mainly in Southern France,
and when the party made gains in the March 98 regional elections. Things
came to a head after Le Pen verbally abused and assaulted a female
Socialist Party (PS) candidate in the regional elections. He was taken to
court and found guilty of the unprovoked attack. This had the effect of
debarring Le Pen from standing in the 1999 European elections as the
party's lead candidate, leaving the field open to Megret. However, Le Pen
bureaucratically imposed his own wife to head the party list against
Megret, nominally the FN's second in command. This triggered a series of
attacks and counterattacks involving all the party's leading layers. The
bitter and public infighting has culminated with the present split.
As far as their basic programme is concerned, there are no fundamental
differences between Megret and Le Pen. Although Megret often uses
democratic phraseology, they both share the same fascist ideology.
Megret had tried to instigate a "reform" of the FN, in order to win wider
support and make the party more acceptable as a partner to the traditional
right-wing parties, the Gaulist RPR and the UDF. In Italy a similar change
took place when Gianfranco Fini changed the fascist MSI into a more
"respectable" Alleanza Nationale, able to form an alliance with the
right-wing populist party of Berlusconi Forza Italia. For the first time in
post-war Italian history, a party that came directly out of the fascist
tradition of Benito Mussolini entered government in the spring of 1994. The
regime headed by Berlusconi and Fini then imposed drastic attacks on the
living standards of the Italian working class, provoking mass protests and
demonstrations.
Megret sought to emulate this in France, but it proved difficult given the
FN's reliance on lumpen and semi-lumpen elements. Under his influence, the
FN presented itself as "efficient politicians" in the councils they manage.
Although trying to distance himself from the "bully boy" element in the FN,
Megret's policies are no less racist. In Vitrolles, where his wife was
elected mayor, they expelled Algerian families from council flats, cut
funding to cultural organisations that did not agree with their aims, and
banned "left-wing" books from libraries.
After initially opposing moves to get closer to the Gaullists and
Conservatives, Le Pen reluctantly agreed to sanction this in March last
year. Megret's policy of making the FN more acceptable as a coalition
partner then found some success in the regional elections. For example, in
Rh'ne-Alpes, the region around Lyons, the votes of FN members of the
regional council were decisive in the appointment of the regional
president. The growing support for Megret within the FN provoked Le Pen to
mount a counterattack.
French daily Le Monde quotes Megret saying, "Le Pen's position was one of
sterile opposition.... He presides over the demonisation of the National
Front in order to stay in a comfortable bunker ... and becomes the great
divider of the ... national right ... after being its creator." He wants to
"launch the offensive in order to achieve power".
After the March regional elections, the already weakened traditional
right-wing parties literally disintegrated. The process of their
restructuring is still going on. In May this year Philipe Seguin, chairman
of the Assemblée Nationale (parliament) during the Juppé administration,
created his own grouping, L'Alliance, after the UDF and RPR fell out
following the regional elections. Seguin tried to gather in one single
political group all the elements in the RPR and UDF that opposed direct
collaboration with the FN. L'Alliance has never really gained any ground.
The UDF also collapsed over the question of collaboration with the FN.
Leading figures such as former president Valerie Giscard d'Estaing and
former Prime Minister Edouard Baladur gave credibility to the racist theses
of the FN. D'Estaing advocated a reliance on FN votes to support the
elections of UDF regional presidents, and Baladur spoke in favour of a
debate with the fascists.
Out of the splintering of the traditional right-wing parties, François
Millon, a former Minister of Defence, created La Droite. This was meant to
become a focus to regroup all the elements of the UDF and RPR prepared to
collaborate with FN politicians. La Droite was joined not just by Megret
supporters, but also by leading Le Pen supporters, like FN number three
man, Bruno Gollnish, in the Lyons area.
For some time now, the FN has been able to play the role of arbiter in many
elections, because of the weakness of the right-wing parliamentary parties.
Although they are not represented in the national parliament, they occupy a
central position in today's political set-up in France. The FN won just
under 16 percent of the vote in the regional elections, where they do have
a number of councillors.
The establishment of European Monetary Union from January 1999 has caused
all the bourgeois parties to make certain political adjustments, including
the FN. One after the other, all the other parties, from the RPR to the
Stalinists of the PCF, have dropped their opposition. One of the reasons
why Lionel Jospin and his Socialist Party won the general elections last
year was their more pro-European stance compared to other parties.
It is no accident that the conflict exploded inside the FN over the issue
of who would head the party's list in next year's European elections. Under
conditions where the big bourgeoisie supports the single currency and the
"alliance" with German capitalism, the FN's fierce nationalist opposition
to Maastricht creates a problem. Many of those politicians that received
support from the FN in the last regional elections, such as François
Millon, are for a federal Europe.
The main responsibility for the FN's ability to increase its influence lies
with the Stalinists in the French Communist Party (PCF), for two decades
after the war the biggest political party in France. In the 1980s, the PCF
abandoned a policy of social reforms in favour of social cuts, and then
helped to implement them under the so-called "government of the left". In
local councils the PCF proved no less racist than the FN, with Communist
Party mayors overseeing the forced eviction of immigrant workers. The
chauvinism of the PCF is also expressed in their "France first" policy.
By attacking the working class directly as part of the bourgeois government
on behalf of big business in the 1980s and '90s both the PCF and the social
democrats drove layers of the lower middle class and even sections of more
backward workers into the arms of the fascist demagogues. Under the
previous conservative government of Alain Juppé, the unions linked to both
the PS and the PCF sought to demobilise the mass opposition which
culminated in the strikes of November-December 1995 and channel support
behind Jospin's social democrats and the PCF and Greens.
Today these parties are in office, and are doing everything they can to
allow the FN to resolve their crisis. Their reaction is to join hands and
collaborate even more closely with the so-called "Republican Right",
sections of the RPR and UDF that are opposed to an open alliance with the
FN. The Socialist Party is presently engaged in a campaign to "destabilise
the alliances between the right wing and the FN" in the regional councils
by supporting the election of UDF and RPR politicians as regional council
leaders. In this way they are creating the political conditions where the
extreme right wing can resolve their crisis without any independent
intervention by the working class and therefore prepare the way for future
disasters.
See Also:
Ten months of the Jospin government in France
Why are the fascists gaining influence?
[28 April 1998]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 1998
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved
~~~~~~~~~~~~
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but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust
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