With or without fake noses, they seek to dynamite Western unity in the face of the destructive madness of Vladimir Poutine. Out of anti-Americanism, out of hatred for our liberal democracy, those who are nicknamed the pro-Russians and the “useful idiots” of the Kremlin are active on social networks and in political spheres. We thought they were condemned to silence since the Russian invasion, they have never been so dangerous.
EPISODE 1 – Between Russia and the French far right, lasting support and a facade of mistrust
EPISODE 2 – War in Ukraine: when Russophiles insist on boasting of a “powerful Russia”
EPISODE 3 – Idriss Aberkane, Silvano Trotta… When the conspiracy joins the pro-Kremlin argument
EPISODE 4 – War in Ukraine: when pacifism plays into the Kremlin’s game
EPISODE 5 – “Putinophiles in the army”: these French officers who lean for Russia
In September 2002, Jean-François Revel, the former director of L’Express, published an essay entitled The Anti-American Obsession (Plon). He castigates the European, and often French, reflex to make the United States responsible for all the disorders in the world. “Americans only make mistakes, commit only crimes, speak only nonsense and are guilty of all the failures, all the injustices, all the suffering of the rest of humanity”, he quips. . More than twenty years later, the analysis has aged very well. We recognize the anti-American by his reflexes. We talk to him about the invasion of Russia in Ukraine, a characteristic aggression which has already caused more than 100,000 deaths, all camps combined, he replies “American imperialism”.
Essayist Emmanuel Todd is one of them. In Le Figaro of January 13, he endorses what he claims to be the analysis of American geopolitician John Mearsheimer. “Ukraine, whose army had been taken over by NATO soldiers (American, British and Polish) since at least 2014, was therefore a de facto member of NATO, and the Russians had announced that they would never tolerate a NATO member Ukraine. These Russians are therefore (as Putin told us the day before the attack) a war from their defensive and preventive point of view, “he explains. A sort of geopolitical counterpart to the theory of the skirt too short for sexual assault, the Atlanticist provocation thesis transforms the invasion of a sovereign country into a defensive operation. Vladimir Putin’s narrative is reproduced almost word for word.
In February, Todd drives the point home in Point. “France should have said: ‘It’s out of the question that we get involved in this thing.'”, he thunders. “Gaullian logic”, justifies the essayist, frightened by the American determination, likely to cause a “third world war”. Gaullian logic? Radicalized Gaullism, then, given that de Gaulle never left NATO. In this vision of the world, France must think above all of its interests… and act as a counterpoint to the United States. The idea is to draw inspiration from the “politics of grandeur” imagined by de Gaulle and to set up a mediator, in all circumstances, between the Atlanticists and Russia. “What is the interest for the French? On the other hand, we can clearly see the interest for the United States. They sell their gas, it’s great”, advances the essayist Michel Onfray, in February on Europe 1 and Cnews . “This war was fabricated, it’s as big as a house, and we’re falling into the trap,” adds the sovereigntist, convinced of an American plot.
Royal and the CIA
The argument of the risk of escalation, attributable to the United States, crosses political divisions. Mentioned by the former deputies LR Henri Guaino, Jacques Myard and Pierre Lellouche, it is also mentioned by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who is a signatory from a column published in The world, February 10. The war in Ukraine “allowed the United States to revive the old role of NATO, to strengthen the support of Europe in its hegemonic dispute with China and to stimulate its gas and oil exports”, writes -he.
On the left, the concern for the independence of France is superimposed on an existential distrust for the United States, assimilated to a predatory capitalism. With, sometimes, a pinch of conspiracy theory. “Ursula von der Leyen has today become the spokeswoman for NATO, there is no difference between what she says, the Pentagon and the CIA”, declares Ségolène Royal about the President of the European Commission, in October 2022, on i24News. The former socialist minister will go so far as to doubt the veracity of certain Russian war crimes, before recanting. Jean-François Revel had found a phrase to qualify this phenomenon: “The mystery of anti-Americanism is not disinformation – information on the United States is very easy to obtain – it is the will to be misinformed”.