France's Schizoid Politics
ALAN, RAY
EURO VISTA BY RAY ALAN Frances Schizoid Politics Both the Gaullists and the Communists played intriguingly devious roles during the campaign preceding this month's French Parliamentary...
...When I was a boy, popular newspapers used to publish every year the photos of a dozen or so ghouls and scarecrows and label them the best-dressed men or most elegant women...
...I am naturally impressed by the intelligence and good taste of anyone who tells me that a periodical I write for is the best in the world...
...Its authors, this Right-winger said, were Charles de Gaulle and Maurice Tho-rez, then head of the French Communist party (PCF...
...if he merely placed it among the 50—or even the five—best, I should wonder why he wasted his breath...
...Unfortunately, he has not yet been elected...
...The Gaullists have a clannish dislike and mistrust of President Valery Giscard d'Estaing...
...Gaullist and Communist leaders are equally demagogic, nationalistic and anti-American...
...EURO VISTA BY RAY ALAN Frances Schizoid Politics Both the Gaullists and the Communists played intriguingly devious roles during the campaign preceding this month's French Parliamentary elections...
...It was first published in the conservative daily ABC, and is quoted in my book Spanish Quest...
...This bulletin denounces the "hegemonic ambitions of Germany and America" and attacks U.S...
...Perhaps, for the initiated, this "50 best newspapers" list was simply a carnival-time gag...
...Why on earth 50 "best" newspapers...
...Alexandre de Marenches, director-general of France's SDECE, will leave his post now that the election is over...
...In Spain, too, U.S...
...True, these arbiters of journalistic excellence did include Russia's Pravda and Izvestia, China's Jen-min Jih-pao, Yugoslavia's Bobar, and Spain's ABC...
...I never understood the criteria or rationale and assumed that this must be some kind of adult in-joke...
...Hating the US...
...He has had enough of bug-and-dagger politics and feuds...
...The press doesn't seem to do that so much nowadays...
...An anti-Gaullist Right-winger observed recently that the first "historic compromise" between Communists and non-Communists (excluding the Nazi-Soviet pact) was reached not in Italy but in France, back in 1945...
...In the last resort, sign whatever they put in front of you...
...Cyprus is now a major base of the Palestinian activists: They receive Soviet and other arms and Arab petrodollars there, and subsidize some non-Arab collaborators through Cyprus banks...
...Areilza describes in his diary —Diario de un ministro de la Monar-quia (Planeta, Barcelona)—a session of Spain's National Defense Council, presided over by King Juan Carlos, that degenerated into an anti-Yanqui meeting, with impassioned generals advocating neutralism and wanting to deny all facilities to the U.S...
...In fact, the service had to be reconstructed under de Gaulle's successors...
...There are Socialists who suspect that the PCF played the same kind of game in the just concluded electoral campaign...
...Did the Communist-Gaullist understanding outlive de Gaulle...
...The Communist leader, Georges Marchais, certainly went out of his way to split the Left by picking quarrels with the Socialists...
...cooperation...
...The Communists have always been unenthu-siastic about helping Socialist leader Francois Mitterrand into the premiership and do not want to see him move on to the Presidency—a post he covets and could very well win if he ever got the chance to make a good impression as prime minister...
...By a coincidence, Moscow mistrusts both Giscard and Mitterrand, preferring the predictable nationalism and anti-Americanism of the Gaullist leaders...
...Under its secretary, Vassos Lyssarides, even the Cyprus Socialist party is becoming a Palestinian instrument...
...Must we thank the jeans industry...
...According to the Air Minister," Areilza writes, "Spain alone could not sustain the Torrejon base on which the air defense of Madrid depends...
...It contains not one word of criticism of the Soviet Union or of Communist policy...
...And therein may lie a tale...
...He was incredulous when I said that the Gaul-lists—whom he saw only as "safe anti-Communists" included some of France's most anti-American politicians...
...Unfortunately, thousands of Europeans will now believe that somewhere in the United States there are university departments teaching their hapless students to admire the fearless objectivity of Pravda, the intellectual profundity of Jen-min Jih-pao, and the opportunistic speed of ABC's conversion to democracy after being for 40 years a daily insult to journalism...
...The Candyfloss Department Many universities have a candyfloss department in which a few grains of fact and opinion are transformed by hot air and legerdemain into a sticky mass of hopefully intellectual ectoplasm...
...I have been reading the internal bulletin of a Gaullist faction (the Union of Gaullists for Progress) whose members are considered more "progressive" and "enlightened" than the visceral xeno-phobes like Michel Debre and Jacques Chirac...
...The political mentor of the anti-treaty officers was the neofascist agitator Bias Pifiar, whose ferocious declaration of anti-Americanism, Hypocrites, was pinned up in many Army messes...
...What would our Army be without U.S...
...economic policy and the EEC's supposed subservience to the United States...
...Franco, no friend of the U.S., had told his negotiators: "We need this agreement...
...De Gaulle's policy of "defense against all azimuths" was an excuse for Gaullist-Communist cooperation against the United States and opened France's main external secret service (the SDECE) to Communist infiltration...
...They ought, perhaps, to have made a really comprehensive job of it and gone for, say, the 200 "best" newspapers...
...There are interesting references to this subject in the diary kept by Jose Maria de Areilza, Count of Motrico, during his seven months as foreign minister in Spain's first post-Franco government, In January 1976, Areilza signed a new defense agreement with the U.S...
...diplomats were often unaware that many of the safe anti-Communists in General Franco's entourage hated the United States...
...And in an interview with the Gaullist magazine L'Appel in February, Marchais bluntly declared that Gaullists and Communists "have convergent interests...
...London Gumshoe Gossip Gossip around a favorite watering-hole of the London gumshoe set has it that: •Admiral Stansfield Turner, director of the CIA, who sank a flotilla of Agency veterans during the winter, is to return to Navy duties...
...Well placed for the succession is Frank Carlucci, who attracted too much attention in Lisbon but switched to orthodox diplomatic duties in time to avoid Turner's torpedoes...
...They might then have honored the cream of the Albanian, North Korean, Libyan, and Iraqi press, so unfairly excluded...
...universities, was a groan rather than a cheer...
...In the 1960s, dissident Communists accused the party leadership of having a secret understanding with de Gaulle that committed the PCF to a moderate domestic policy provided le grand Charles kept on good terms with the Soviet Union...
...They criticized President Carter in similar terms during his stopover in Paris in January...
...investment in France, U.S...
...Charles Tillon, a former member of the PCF's central committee and de Gaulle's first air minister, alleges that the party deliberately split the Left-wing vote in June 1969 so as to give the Presidency of the Republic to Gaullist Georges Pompidou rather than to the liberal Alain Poher...
...Yet, as Areilza recalls, these officers had been the "main beneficiaries" of 22 years of American aid...
...Or don't I read the right papers...
...Most senior officers were hostile to it—and to the U.S...
...Egyptian and Israeli security men, having frustrated a Palestinian plot to kill President Sadat in November, are continuing to cooperate, notably in Lebanon and Cyprus...
...I remember an American official in France expressing delight over de Gaulle's arrival in power...
...Soon after France's liberation, de Gaulle pardoned him, shook his hand and gave him a Cabinet post...
...Who was the great American President who said: "Only a simpleton believes that his enemy's enemies are his friends...
...The weekly paper, Fuerza Nueva, which disseminated Pinar's message through the Armed Forces, received editorial assistance from a London subsidiary of the CIA...
...Thorez had deserted from the French Army during the "phoney war" of 1939-40, when his party opposed the Allied War effort (Hitler had not yet attacked Russia), and fled to Moscow...
...So my reaction to the list of "the 50 best newspapers in the world" published in February by a few European dailies (those listed), and attributed to two U.S...
...Were the compilers of the list lacking in self-confidence or worried about the UN reaction...
Vol. 61 • March 1978 • No. 7
