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Tout le monde aiment la paranoia en France

June 25, 2002 ~ 8:35 p.m.

There is a book on my must-get list � required summer reading, as it were. It is a strange little tome entitled �The Horrifying Fraud� by one Thierry Meyssan, a left-wing French politico. A former theology student, Meyssan formed his own political research company, R�seau Voltaire (Voltaire Network) eight years ago, and recently campaigned against far right-wing presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen. Messyan and his company have fostered and maintained an image of trustworthiness and rationality in the reporting on its website. Any opinions formed were the result of objective original investigation. The company�s website attracted much attention from French journalists and was largely responsible for the respect that Meyssan and R�seau Voltaire fetched.

So how is it possible that such a clear-thinking man could write an account of the September 11 terrorist attack with �conspiracy theory� written all throughout its 235 pages. Messyan asserts that no airplane parts were visible in photos of the Pentagon. This one fact alone seemed to launch the material behind his �research� into the tragedy.

This theory concludes that extreme right-wingers in the U.S. government ordered a guided missile to strike the Pentagon and also gave the orders for the planes to crash into the World Trade Center towers. And they were not so much flown as programmed to crash into the towers. Meyssan believes that this was a warning from U.S. reactionaries (apparently, our government is flooded with Timothy McVeigh types, according to him) to Bush that he either launch a war in the Middle East to protect American oil interests or face a coup d�etat. Blaming Osama bin Laden and the ruling Taliban in Afghanistan was the excuse they needed to justify war.

Mssr. Meyssan appears to think that we not only accepted the Statue of Liberty from France, but French political methods as well. Sorry, mon ami, but coups do not happen in the United States, that is not the way our government or political process works. And proof that bin Laden and Al-Qaeda were planning attacks on the U.S. are now surfacing all over the place.

The French media are puzzled and are actually deriding Meyssan�s theories. Two journalists, Guillaume Dasqui� and Jean Guisnel, responded with a book of their own entitled �The Horrifying Lie.� To explain why Meyssan�s book has sold more than 200,000 copies in France, they assert that French society is stricken by a �social and political sickness� that convinces people "that they are victims of plots, that the truth is hidden from them, that they should not believe official versions, but rather that they should demystify all expressions of power, whatever they might be.�

Two left-of-center newspapers � no friends to the Bush administration or American interests � Lib�ration and Le Monde, have attacked Meyssan as well. Lib�ration editorial writer G�rard Dupuy wrote, �The pseudotheories of �The Horrifying Fraud� feed off the paranoid anti-Americanism that is one of the permanent components of the French political caldron.� Le Monde news editor Edwy Plenel speculated that, �It is very grave to encourage the idea that something which is real is in fact fictional. It is the beginning of totalitarianism.� It is encouraging to the max that even the leftists in the French media care enough to see that the truth about September 11 be told.

Yet, in a popular television program, Meyssan was allowed to explain his theories behind September 11 without once being challenged by the program�s host. After the show, the book sold 100,000 copies. In writing �The Horrifying Fraud,� Meyssan worked entirely from material off the internet, most of it of a clearly speculative nature. He did not interview any American officials or any witnesses of the attacks, especially concerning the Pentagon crash; his theory is that the guided missile would look like a plane to most people. (In stark contrast, Dasqui� and Guisnel did travel to Washington to interview 18 witnesses of the incident.)

In spite of this, the book remains a hit, topping French best-seller lists and catapulting the publisher of �The Horrifying Fraud,� Editions Carnot, to greater heights in the publishing industry. They had previously published books by authors expounding on the �fake� moon landing of 1969 and material �proving� the existence of U.F.O.s. I must read �The Horrifying Fraud� for myself, but from most of the news that I�ve read about it, I know enough about it already. It is a waste of paper. I will also treat myself to �The Horrifying Lie� after reading Meyssan�s piece of trash.

Although the phenomenal success of Meyssan�s book is distressing, what can one expect from a country that gave the world the Dreyfus Affair, in which a Jewish general, Alfred Dreyfus, was court marshaled and discharged without honor from the French military. Soldiers formerly under Dreyfus� command turned their backs to him as he walked away from his court marshal. In the France of 1899, Jews were not to be trusted, they had hidden agendas, they were backstabbers. I wrote a column about the Dreyfus Affair in college; back then, good little hippy that I was, I blamed it on �conservative elements.� Dreyfus was merely a victim of societal paranoia, a disease unique to France, regardless of the political spectrum. Even Charles de Gaulle was affected. No conservative worth his salt would rant on about the English � �Anglo-Saxons� in Gaullish � and purposely wind America up, alienating the two very nations that meant the most to France�s survival during its shaky Fifth Republic. But de Gaulle knew not what he did. He was a sick guy. He was French.

And now, the France of 2002 is dishing out another form of paranoia, one that scandalizes America for destroying its own landmarks in a bid to justify a war for oil.

Tout le monde aiment la paranoia en France � everyone loves paranoia in France.

� M.E.M.

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Copyright � 2001-2007 by M.E. Manning. All material is written by me, unless explicitly stated otherwise by use of footnotes or bylines. Do not copy or redistribute without my permission.

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