How France gave the modern world terrorism

"Virtue without terror is impotent. Terror without virtue is evil." -Robespierre

With that statement, Robespierre, the leader of the French Revolution, the Jacobin party and the insigator of the Reign of Terror made the linkage between terror and virtue and cemented his idea that terrorism was a moral crusade.

While the French Revolution is often assigned credit for bringing about the virtues of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, it also left another legacy - terror. The French were the first to utilize it in modern history, as well as the first ones to coin the term "terror."

The Jacobins used systematic terror, following their rise to power in 1792, to keep the populace under their control, strike fear into the hearts of their enemies, and consolidate their own power. They killed 17,000 men, women and children from all classes of French society. The mere public spectacle of their beheadings was enough to cause even their most resolute opponents to think twice before crossing them. The brutal dictators of the 20th century would utilize these tactics to keep their people under control as well. Lenin first used it in the Bolshevik uprising, then Hitler with the burning of the Reichstag, Kristallnacht, and the Holocaust. Stalin would later continue Lenin's terror with his own purges and the Gulag prison system.

Now, we see Usama bin Laden telling his followers that if they martyr themselves and kill those non-virtuous Americans, they will go straight to Paradise. Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Columbia, Yemen, previously Iraq and all the other nations that support terror and oppression are just learning from history. They've taken their cue from that all-knowing, first state-sponsor of terror: France.

Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité = Torture, Brutality, War Crimes

The nation of France’s motto is “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” It is a proud and noble motto, reminiscent of the ideals of French philosophers like Jean-Jacque Rousseau and Réné Descartes. The legacy of the French Republic’s long history has been tarnished by American pop-culture, with The Simpsons referring to the French as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys.” American politicians have added to the mix by switching the name of fried potato slices in the House of Representatives cafeteria from French fries to “freedom fries,” denying their truly Belgian heritage. However, I am not calling the French a noble nation. That would be careless. They are, instead, misunderstood. In all reality, the French are wine-swilling, cheese-nibbling, murderous war criminals.

It all started with the French Revolution. The Jacobins were a band of peasant criminals who read a little too much Rabelais. They would go around killing nobles indiscriminately, along with their often innocent families, women and children included. American Revolutionary, Thomas Paine, called for more restraint in his Age of Reason essay, which pointed out that morality, civility and the rule of law must be kept while throwing off the shackles of a totalitarian government. This call went unheeded. Peasants who were thought too friendly with the nobles were executed as well without even the common courtesy of a kangaroo court. One such case of crushing counterinsurgency was the Jacobins’ crushing of the Vendeans. In his book, A French Genocide: The Vendee, Reynald Secher exposes these atrocities. War against the Vendeans was done in the name of national unity. Secher quotes one as saying "We must crush the internal enemies of the Republic or perish along with it." The Vendeans were labeled as brigands who "must be exterminated." A call went out to "depopulate the Vendee." The Vendeans were spoken of as a race apart, and a call was made to "purge the soil of freedom of that cursed race." Of the Vendeans, Secher writes that "At least 117,257 people disappeared between 1792 and 1802," meaning that more than 14 percent of the Vendeans were exterminated.

In the waning days of the French Revolution, after Robespierre had met with her ladyship, Madame Guillotine, Napoleon Bonaparte was a general in the army. This army was under the control of the new ruling Directorate. A new revolt and riots threatened the new directorate and Bonaparte was dispatched to quell it. He did this with outstanding brutality, and with tactics similar to those used by the Jacobins. He sent troops to civilian homes and had suspect families summarily executed. Even this great general of French conquest was not immune to the ever-French temptation of committing war crimes.

Napoleon also instituted the French prison colony of Devil’s Island off the coast of French Guiana. Napoleon III made it a penal colony for political prisoners after his accession to power. A man’s stay on Devil’s Island was characterized by a prison term where they were never let out of their cell and experienced random beatings and torture quite often. There was no talking allowed ever, unless a guard asked them a question. During times of war, France’s prison budget would be cut to give more military funding, so at one point during the Wars of Spanish Succession, prisoners were not fed for more than two months. After serving a prison term, prisoners were put into forced labor, where also, there was no talking. The prison closed in 1942, but as early as 1933, you could risk a swim across the piranha-infested Moroni River into Nazi-held Dutch Guiana. At one point, the French government felt this prison so harsh that they decided only Africans, Arabs and Annamese would be transported to Guiana. Then, in 1884, after apparently laying its qualms to rest, the government resumed the transportation of white prisoners to Guiana. Many books and movies have been made about this, the harshest and most brutal prison in world history.

French racism continued in its Foreign Legion campaigns into Africa. In French Cameroon, the Cameroonian government suppressed a rebellion by anti-Government forces in 1961. It too was marked by terror and bloodshed. French fighting forces were not directly involved in this. However, the Foreign Legion equipped and trained the government soldiers, and French psychological services [an obscure branch of the French government seeking innovations for mind control in warfare, as well as common methods of propaganda] also participated in this counterinsurgency. The French practiced this brutality and tacit racism in the Algerian Conflict as well. A French Lie by Georges-Marc Benamou, citing government minutes from 1962, claims that in his haste to wrap up the Algerian trauma; President Charles de Gaulle pulled out white "pied-noir" settlers, but refused any escape route for the estimated 300,000 "harkis," or Muslim tribal fighters, who faced terrible reprisal for having fought on the French side during the war. Many of these fighters and their families were later slaughtered by the new rebel government. A statement made by General Paul Aussaresses in his book about the torture endorsed the tactics the Foreign Legion used on the Algerian rebels:

"Those we brought to Tourelles [a torture center run by the French army's intelligence service] were sufficiently implicated in terrorist activity that there was no way we were going to release them alive. On busy days, when all the regiments were overwhelmed with prisoners, they would send me everybody they had no time to interrogate. At Tourelles, as at the regimental headquarters, torture was always used if a prisoner refused to talk....When the suspects had talked and seemed to have nothing more to say...my men would take a batch of them out in the bush, 20 kilometers or so from Algiers, shoot them down with a machine-gun burst, then bury them.” – Le Monde, May 3, 2003.

In the years prior to that, during World War II, French Resistance fighters were shown to be anti-Semitic, and some even Nazis. In one case, Maurice Papon, the Prefet General de Police in Paris under de Gaulle’s post-war government effectively signed the death warrants of thousands of French Jews, during Nazi occupation, as General-Secretary of the prefecture of Gironde, under the Vichy. He was assigned to Jewish affairs and would meet regularly with SS agents, sending many Jews to concentration camps throughout Europe. His war crimes were not revealed under de Gaulle’s administration, and he was not held accountable until 2002.

However, World War II and the conflicts throughout Africa had their toll on French brutality, and the frogs learned their lesson. Or did they? In fact, the French knew Victor Charlie even before Dwight Eisenhower knew where Vietnam was. The French in Indochina, from the beginning is like the film Apocalypse: Now, only every day and with French, not American soldiers. Plus, the French were there to keep sugar plantations and protect their nobility that had settled there, while we would later go in to try to fight the evil that was the Stalinist regime of Ho Chi Minh. Once the French came down with the Dien Bien Flu, and the last Mirage flew out of Saigon airport, Vietnam collapsed and split into two, putting the Americans in more than a decade’s long quagmire, a nightmare we could never shake.

This brings us to where we are today: perceived French wussiness. More recent memory shows France trying to keep us out of Iraq through the forum of the UN. If we think back we can remember reports of fissile material being unaccounted for in France, possibly falling into the hands of the Iraqis, North Koreans, or more plausibly, the Iranians. France’s Muslim population is burgeoning, and lovely characters like Zacharias Moussaoui, a confidant of the 9/11 hijackers, was born in Paris. Career politicians like Dominique de Villepin: the Foreign Minister, Jacques Chirac: the President, and Paris’ Socialist Mayor Bertrand Delanoe, all seem to want a piece of that electoral pie. Villepin fights us at every turn in the UN. Delanoe has made Mumia abu-Jamal, a Black-Panther\Muslim\Cop-killer, currently on PA’s death row, an honorary Parisian. Chirac refused to allow US planes the over-flight right during our response to Libya’s downing of a Pan Am flight over Lockerbie, Scotland, or during Gulf War I, or Gulf War II.

There are many questions we should be asking ourselves today. Is France protecting terrorist-sponsoring states because of fears of reprisal by its own Muslims? I do believe so. Is France supplying aid and comfort to terrorists? I certainly hope not, but much evidence has pointed to this being true. Finally, if France were to miraculously give in and say they would send their troops to help us in Iraq, would we want them? No! The brutality and blatant inhumanity of the French military, the French Foreign Legion, its Revolutionary heroes, and many of its revered statesmen has proven that we do not want our courageous, brave and noble soldiers fighting alongside these swine.