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Intelligence Reports on the Two Enemies: Launching the New Fascist International
- Abstract
MORE than a year ago, in May 1951, Swedish Malmi was the scene of a strange congress attended by several dozen people who came from five or six different Western European countries. This meeting caused something of a stir all over the world, and its proceedings were reported in the New York Times, the Paris Monde, and other big newspapers. Then, as usually happens, they lost interest. Yet this congress constituted the first open move to create international unity among fascists in postwar Europe-perhaps the first open move ever toward such an end.
The names of those who visited the Malmo congress are not altogether unfamiliar to the European public: there were Maurice Bardeche and Henri Bernard of France, Augusto de Marsanich and Fabio Lonciari of Italy, Franz Richter and K. H. Priester of Germany, Per Engdahl of Sweden, and a good number of others. (Oswald Mosley and Otto Skorzeny had been invited but were unable to obtain visas.) Easily the most notorious was the Frenchman Maurice Bardeche, who considers himself the spiritual heir of his brother-in-law, the late Robert Brasillach, one of the superior hacks of the French collaborationist press, who was executed after the Liberation. Since 1948 Bardeche has been active as apologist for his brother-in-law and, by extension, for all other war criminals. He has published a number of anti-Jewish, anti-American, and practically openly pro-Hitler pamphlets whose aggressive cynicism and clever sophistries have found a wide public, with translations in every European language. Such was their effect that even in the tolerant atmosphere of France today the authorities felt compelled to intervene, and some time after the Malmo meeting, in April 1952, Bardeche was sentenced to a year in prison for “inciting to violence.”
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