HISTORY

JACQUES PAUWELS—There was no épuration sauvage before or during the Liberation, and the allegedly major purge that was to follow the Liberation itself turned out to be a charade. The elite of the French state as well as the private sector had profited handsomely from collaboration and had good reason to fear an advent to power of its enemies in the Resistance. But in the wake of the Liberation, the radicals of the Resistance did not come to power; the elite received little or no punishment for its collaborationist sins; its cherished capitalist social-economic order remained intact (in spite of some reforms); and the elite itself retained most of its power and privileges. For this undeserved blessing, they had to thank the Americans liberators of the once grande Nation, as well as Charles de Gaulle, the general who aspired to make France great again.

Khrushchev’s rise to power, and the revisionism he instituted, was built on many lies and the demonisation of Stalin. His actions effectively destroyed the global communist movement, invigorated the enemies of revolution everywhere, generated a great ideological split with China, and paved the road for America’s ascendancy to sole superpower status after the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991.

Jacques R. Pauwels est né à Gand, en Belgique Flamande, en 1946. Il est historien, politologue et essayiste belgo-canadien. Il a fait ses premiers pas à l’université en obtenant une licence d’Histoire en 1969 en Belgique. Il poursuit ensuite ses études au Canada jusqu’à un Doctorat en histoire, à la York University, à Toronto, en 1976. Il continuera son cursus universitaire dix ans plus tard, en obtenant une Maîtrise en sciences politiques, puis un Doctorat en sciences politiques en 1995 à Université de Toronto.

Jacques R. Pauwels a enseigné l’Histoire et les Sciences Politiques dans plusieurs universités canadiennes. Il s’est spécialisé dans l’histoire de l’Allemagne contemporaine, le Troisième Reich en particulier, et la proximité du géant états-unien. Cela va l’amener à analyser le rôle des USA pendant la Seconde Guerre Mondiale. Jacques Pauwels a publié une dizaine de livres. C’est en 2002, que Jacques Pauwels écrit « Le Mythe de la Bonne Guerre : Les États-Unis et la Deuxième Guerre mondiale » qui sera traduit en six langues et en français par les éditions Aden, en 2005. Il écrira “Big Business avec Hitler” en 2013, où il explique que Hitler a comblé les attentes qu’industriels et banquiers avaient placées en lui.

GARY OLSON—Although I also lived in Minnesota and South Dakota, my formative years were spent in Fargo, North Dakota along the Red River of the North on the eastern border of the state. The city was named for William Fargo, an owner of the Wells-Fargo Express Company and one of the directors of the Union Pacific Railroad whose tracks ran through the center of town and held up traffic three times a day.  When UP engineers and surveyors first arrived, they were accompanied by U.S. Army officers. This continuing symbiotic partnership between the capitalist state and big business was exemplified by Congress granting rail companies 10 million acres of free public land in Minnesota, amounting to 20 percent of the state’s land area. It was, of course, in the interest of railroad officials to lure immigrants to the region because it increased the value of their line. The construction of Fort Abercrombie in 1857, just thirty miles south of Fargo and the first fort in North Dakota, helped prompt immigrants to surge into the region through the “Gateway to the West” and stake their claims. Fort Abercrombie was followed by six more military bases across the state in the 1860s and early 1870s.

We are here focusing on literary forgeries, but there were other kinds. Michelangelo himself launched his own career by faking antique statues, including one known as the Sleeping Cupid (now lost), while under the employment of the Medici family in Florence. He used acidic earth to make the statue look antique. It was sold through a dealer to Cardinal Riario of San Giorgio, who eventually found out the hoax and demanded his money back, but didn’t press any charges against the artist. Apart from this recognized forgery, Lynn Catterson has made a strong case that the sculptural group of “Laocoon and his Sons,” dated from around 40 BC and supposedly discovered in 1506 in a vineyard in Rome and immediately acquired by Pope Julius II, is another of Michelangelo’s forgery