White Nationalism Is Destroying the West

As a former Republican and one who has followed white ostensibly Christian "family values" for more than two decades one trend has grown exponentially within the Republican Party: overt racism and white nationalism.  If one looks closely at the "family values" groups, many of which have been certified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center, one thing is central to their agenda: maintaining the political and social power of white Christians against anyone who does not embrace their extremist, anti-democratic religious agenda and anyone who is not white.  Black pastors and their parishioners are only courted when these hate groups need to use religion as a tool to have minorities ultimately vote against their own best interest. That many blacks continue to fall for the ruse is maddening since many of these lily white "family values" organizations trace directly back to segregationists. Frighteningly, this white nationalism has similarly grown in Europe where a similar desire to maintain control and privilege has grown among right wing political parties.  The threat most often held up to justify anti-democratic agendas is the presence of Muslim immigrants and refugees.  Meanwhile, the far right groups themselves are the biggest threat to democracy and Enlightenment values.  Disturbingly, too many people - including a number of those I know - seemingly deliberately close their eyes to this reality because it is easier than examining their own inner prejudices.  A piece in the New York Times Sunday Review explores this reality.  Here are excerpts: 

[D]espite the breathless warnings of impending Islamic conquest sounded by alarmist writers and pandering politicians, the risk of Islamization of the West has been greatly exaggerated. Islamists are not on the verge of seizing power in any advanced Western democracy or even winning significant political influence at the polls.

The same cannot be said of white nationalists, who today are on the march from Charlottesville, Va., to Dresden, Germany. As an ideology, white nationalism poses a significantly greater threat to Western democracies; its proponents and sympathizers have proved, historically and recently, that they can win a sizable share of the vote — as they did this year in France, Germany and the Netherlands — and even win power, as they have in the United States.

Far-right leaders are correct that immigration creates problems; what they miss is that they are the primary problem. The greatest threat to liberal democracies does not come from immigrants and refugees but from the backlash against them by those on the inside who are exploiting fear of outsiders to chip away at the values and institutions that make our societies liberal.

Anti-Semitic and xenophobic movements did not disappear from Europe after the liberation of Auschwitz, just as white supremacist groups have lurked beneath the surface of American politics ever since the Emancipation Proclamation. What has changed is that these groups have now been stirred from their slumber by savvy politicians seeking to stoke anger toward immigrants, refugees and racial minorities for their own benefit. Leaders from Donald Trump to France’s Marine Le Pen have validated the worldview of these groups, implicitly or explicitly encouraging them to promote their hateful opinions openly. As a result, ideas that were once marginal have now gone mainstream.

The trend is unmistakable. Hungary’s ruling party has plastered anti-Semitic ads on bus stops and billboards; an overtly neo-Nazi movement won 7 percent of the vote in Greece’s 2015 election; Germany’s upstart far-right party, which includes a popular member who criticized Berlin’s Holocaust memorial as “a monument of shame,” won 13 percent in last month’s election.

In France and Denmark, populist leaders have gone to great pains to shed the right’s crudest baggage and rebrand themselves in a way that appeals to Jews, women and gay people by depicting Muslims as the primary threat to all three groups. But their core goal remains the same: to close the borders and expel unwanted foreigners.

Cultural and demographic anxiety about dwindling native populations and rapidly increasing immigrant ones lies at the heart of these parties’ ideologies. In America, Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, worries about the impossibility of restoring “our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” In Europe, the right frets about who’s having the new German or Danish babies and the fact that it’s not white Germans or Danes — a social Darwinist dread popularized by the German writer Thilo Sarrazin, whose best-selling 2010 book, “Germany Abolishes Itself,” warned that barely literate Muslims were poised to replace the supposedly more intelligent German race.

The leader of the Netherlands’ newest far-right party fears that Europe will not exist “as a predominantly white-skinned, Christian or post-Christian, Roman-law-based kind of society” a few decades from now. “If I go to a museum, and I look at these portraits, they are essentially people like me that I can see. In 50 years it won’t be,” he worries.

Ms. Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right National Front party, has a similar fear, and she sees birthright citizenship as the vehicle for replacement. Although she doesn’t use the term favored by many Republicans in the United States (“anchor babies”), she insists, as she told me in an interview last May, that “we must stop creating automatic French citizens.”

This argument has a long pedigree. It can be traced back to the Dreyfus Affair, when the virulently anti-Semitic writer Maurice Barrès warned that immigrants wanted to impose their way of life on France and that it would spell the “ruin of our fatherland.” “They are in contradiction to our civilization,” Barrès wrote in 1900.

Today’s version of the argument is: if you have foreign blood and don’t behave appropriately, then you don’t get a passport.

The notion of a Great Replacement has crossed the Atlantic and found an eager audience among groups who have long espoused similar white supremacist ideas. The Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders warned in 2015 of “masses of young men in their 20s with beards singing ‘Allahu akbar’ across Europe.” He labeled their presence “an invasion that threatens our prosperity, our security, our culture and identity.”

A year later, Mr. Wilders attended the Republican national convention, where he headlined an L.G.B.T. pro-Trump event along with the anti-Islam activist Pamela Geller and the alt-right wunderkind Milo Yiannopoulos. . . . . Mr. Wilders was introduced as “the hope for Western civilization.”

Calais and Charlottesville may be nearly 4,000 miles apart, but the ideas motivating far-right activists in both places are the same. When white nationalists descended on Charlottesville in August, the crowd chanted “Jews will not replace us” and “you will not replace us” before one of its members allegedly killed a woman with his car and others beat a black man; last week, they returned bearing torches and chanting similar slogans.

Just as Mr. Trump has plenty to say about Islamic State attacks but generally has no comment about hate crimes against Indians, blacks and Muslims, the European far-right is quick to denounce any violent act committed by a Muslim but rarely feels compelled to forcefully condemn attacks on mosques or neo-Nazis marching near synagogues on Yom Kippur.

Mr. Trump, Mr. Gauland and Ms. Le Pen would never admit to being white nationalists, but they are more than happy to dog-whistle to them and accept their support.

Those who worry that a godless Europe and an immigration-friendly America are no match for Islamic extremists have ignored an even greater threat: white nationalists.

Their ideology is especially dangerous because they present themselves as natives valiantly defending the homeland. Because they look and sound like most of their co-citizens, they garner sympathy from the majority in ways that Islamists never could. White nationalism is in many ways a mirror image of radical Islamism. Both share a nostalgic obsession with a purist form of identity: for one, a medieval Islamic state; for the other, a white nation unpolluted by immigrant blood.

If the influence of white nationalists continues to grow, they will eventually seek to trample the rights of immigrants and minorities and dismiss courts and constitutions as anti-democratic because they don’t reflect the supposed preferences of “the people.” Their rise threatens to transform countries that we once thought of as icons of liberalism into democracies only in name.

 Of course, once the white nationalists prevail against unwanted foreigners, they will next turn to those native citizens the deem as unwanted. Under Trump, it is already happening with respect to the LGBT community which has long been the target of white Christian nationalists.  If their power grows, others will join the list of targeted elements of society.  Closing one's eyes to reality does not make it go away.  It merely allows the society cancer to grow. 

France Avoids Making America's Mistake

French president-elect Emmanuel Macron

With most of the votes counted, right wing Neo-fascist French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen has gone down to a nearly 2 to 1 defeat to centrist Emmanuel Macron who will be the youngest French leader since Napoleon Bonaparte.  Le Pen tried to excite the same emotions of hate and resentment that took Trump to the White House but French voters seemingly saw the dangerous the toxic brew Le Pen was peddling - in sharp contrast to aggrieved white voters in America, many of who will lose their health insurance coverage if the current hideous of Trumpcare were to pass. Hopefully, Trump's victory and the aftermath here in America proved cautionary to French voters and will do the same in Germany when it holds elections in September, 2017.  One can only hope that Macron can reinvigorate the French economy and help unify the European Union after the UK's foolish exit vote.  The Washington Post looks at the election results.  Here are highlights: 

The anti-E. U. French leader Marine Le Pen’s larger-than-expected defeat Sunday in her nation’s presidential election was a crushing reality check for the far-right forces who seek to overthrow Europe: Despite the victories for Brexit and Donald Trump, they are likely to be shut out of power for years.

Given one choice after another since Trump’s U.S. presidential victory, Western European voters have delivered mainstream candidates to office despite a post-November sense that an anti-immigrant populist wave was washing over the Western world. Far-right candidates in Austria, the Netherlands and France have faltered. The euroskeptic far-right party in Germany has collapsed in recent polls ahead of September elections. And an unforgiving election calendar now offers few routes into power for years.

The thwarted momentum comes despite clear evidence that views that would have been taboo to express just a few years ago are no longer too toxic to exclude politicians from coming a breath away from leadership. When Le Pen’s father reached a presidential runoff in 2002, his opponent refused even to debate with him, so unacceptable to the mainstream were his views. This time, many French citizens sat out the election altogether because they detested both Le Pen and Macron — even though the pro-European centrist Macron offered a vastly different platform from his opponent. Le Pen’s result, just above 34 percent with most of the vote counted, was still a historic high for her party.

French people have chosen the continuity candidate,” a visibly disappointed Le Pen said in a brief concession address. She said she would seek to rename her National Front party, a measure of the extent to which her defeat rattled supporterswho just weeks ago harbored hopes of capturing the Elysee Palace.  Instead, Le Pen’s numbers sank in the two weeks since she placed second in the first round of the French elections.

[T]he failure of the far-right to seize office comes in stark contrast to expectations in November that Trump’s ascendance in the United States would unleash a global wave of populist politicians. Le Pen was one of the first leaders around the world to congratulate Trump the night of his victory. Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders exulted the day after. And Trump advisers and top European far-right leaders conferred in the weeks after the U.S. election.

The subsequent elections have shown a clear trend in Western Europe: Voters are sick of the mainstream and fed up with their leaders. But they are still not ready to hand power to the far-right. The chaotic first months of the Trump presidency may actually have hurt Europe’s populists rather than helping them.

European leaders rushed to turn the page on a grim year for the bloc, embracing Macron’s victory as the first step in the rejuvenation of an embattled alliance against forces that would tear it apart. Many mainstream leaders feared political Armageddon if Le Pen had won. In Brussels, the seat of the E.U., cheers could be heard in the streets the moment the exit polls were released Sunday evening, as though a favorite soccer team clinched a match.

In Germany, meanwhile, the far-right Alternative for Germany has collapsed in opinion polls in recent months following post-Trump heights. The party presided over a smaller but still telling defeat on Sunday, bringing up the rear in Sunday’s vote in the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein, with projections showing it winning less than 6 percent of vote.

Macron hopes to soften Germany’s exacting insistence on fiscal austerity as he imposes sweeping pro-business reforms inside his own country. If he succeeds, he may help disarm anti-E. U. voices across the continent. But if he fails to jump-start France’s economy — and Europe’s — he will fuel questions about whether the European Union is helping or hurting its citizens’ lives. 

I wish Macron lots of luck and success.  The far right needs to crawl back under the rocks from whence it emerged.  

Is Putin Trying To Reprise a Stolen Election in France?

Putin and Le Pen - both enemies of democracy

For the record, I continue to believe that Russian dictator - that is, after all, what he is - Vladimir Putin helped steal the 2016 presidential election for Donald Trump and that it is very likely that the Trump campaign cooperated with that effort.  Now, the same effort seems to be taking place in France where on the eve of the presidential run off election a massive dump of hacked documents has taken place with the apparent goal of damaging Emmanuel Macron and throwing the election to neo-fascist Marine Le Pen.  Le Pen has very open ties to Putin and her political party has even received funding from Putin's government and henchmen.  One would hope that French voters will be smarter than many angry white voters were and will see the hacking and document dump for what it is and run screaming away from La Pen.  If not, expect Putin to try to steal Germany's election next.  The irony in all of this is that the would be authoritarian rulers claim that are out to protect traditional values and the common citizen, yet as the House GOP's Trumpcare bill reveals, that is the furthest thing from the truth.  The House GOP's bill basically tells millions to just get sick and die and do the wealthy and the oligarchs a favor by doing so.  The New York Times looks at what can only be a Russian effort to undermine and destroy France's democracy.  Here are excerpts (note that fake documents were mixed in with real ones to dupe voters and lazy journalists):

PARIS — On the eve of the most consequential French presidential election in decades, the staff of the centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron said late Friday that the campaign had been targeted by a “massive and coordinated” hacking operation, one with the potential to destabilize the nation’s democracy before voters go to the polls on Sunday.

The digital attack, which involved a dump of campaign documents including emails and accounting records, emerged hours before a legal prohibition on campaign communications went into effect. While the leak may be of little consequence, the timing makes it extremely difficult for Mr. Macron to mitigate any damaging fallout before the runoff election, in which he faces the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, who has pledged to pull France out of the euro and hold a referendum to leave the European Union.

The hacking immediately evoked comparisons to last year’s presidential election in the United States, during which American intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, ordered an “influence campaign” to benefit the Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump.

Groups linked to Russia, that are also believed to have been involved in the hacking related to the 2016 United States presidential campaign, have previously been accused of trying to breach the Macron organization. Security experts tracking the activity of suspected Russian hackers say they believe those same groups were involved in this latest attack.

In a statement, the Macron campaign said the hackers had mixed fake documents along with authentic ones, “to sow doubt and misinformation.”

The Macron campaign said the documents leaked Friday were stolen several weeks ago after the personal and professional emails of staff members at En Marche, his political movement, were hacked.

It was not the first reported hacking attempt of Mr. Macron’s campaign. In April, a report by the cybersecurity firm Trend Micro said there was evidence that the campaign was targeted in March by what appeared to be the same Russian operatives who were responsible for hacks of Democratic campaign officials before last year’s American presidential election. Mr. Macron’s campaign said the attack was unsuccessful.

Vitali Kremez, the director of research at Flashpoint, a business risk intelligence company in New York, said he suspected the involvement of a Russian-linked espionage operation known as APT28. “The key goals and objectives of the campaign appear to be to undermine Macron’s presidential candidacy and cast doubt on the democratic electoral process in general,” he said.

“If indeed driven by Moscow, this leak appears to be a significant escalation over the previous Russian operations aimed at the U.S. presidential election, expanding the approach and scope of effort from simple espionage efforts towards more direct attempts to sway the outcome,” Mr. Kremez added.

Security researchers who have been tracking APT28, also known as Fancy Bear, say it has been moving aggressively against NATO members and a variety of Western targets using various hacking tools, including so-called spear-phishing attacks, but also through the exploitation of vulnerabilities in technologies that allow hackers to invade their targets undetected by security software.

The National Commission for Control of the Electoral Campaign, a regulatory body, said it was contacted by the Macron campaign on Friday night. The commission, which planned to meet on Saturday about the hacking, urged the news media to be cautious in its reporting.

“It therefore asks the media, and in particular their websites, not to report on the content of these data, recalling that the dissemination of false information is liable to fall within the scope of the law — in particular criminal law,” the commission said.

The Macron campaign appealed to journalists to not do the hackers’ bidding by widely publicizing the contents of the emails.

Given what is known about Russia's involvement and Putin's goals of an ascendant Russia at the expense of Europe and America, I cannot fathom why anyone sane would vote for someone favored by Putin.  

On a different note, criminal hacking is not only occurring in the political realm.  More and more businesses and law firms are targets with the goal being to steal trade secrets and steal monies in trust accounts.  Nationwide, millions of dollars have been stolen from law firm trust accounts through hacked e-mails and altered wire instructions. 

Like Trump, Marine Le Pen Keeps Lying and Re-writing History’s

One of the common traits of the political right nowadays, both in America and in Europe is a total disregard for the truth and a desire to rewrite history.  Here in America, the white supremacists of the GOP base conveniently forget the injustices and horrors that took place against minorities - gays included - during the "good old days" that they seek to bring back.  America's past sins are whitewashed away and the myth of American exceptionalism inflated.  Hand in hand with this is a celebration of "traditional Christian belief" with all its bigotry and mistreatment of others.  Something similar is happening in France under the banner of Marine Le Pen and her National Front. Appeals to open racism are the norm and a whitewashing of ugly, inconvenient facts of France's history are underway.  An editorial in the Washington Post calls out Le Pen for her lies and denials of French culpability in the Holocaust.  Here are highlights:

WHEN A front-runner in France’s impending presidential election obliterates history by denying the country’s well- documented complicity in deporting tens of thousands of French and foreign Jews to Nazi death camps, it is clear something sinister is afoot in the birthplace of the Enlightenment.

Characterizing France as a victim rather than a willing and even enthusiastic participant in World War II’s mass liquidation of French and foreign Jews, Marine Le Pen, head of France’s far-right National Front, tried to remove the indelible stain left by that shameful chapter in her country’s history. Instead, she only ensured the stain attached to her own candidacy.

Founded by her father, the racist Holocaust minimizer Jean-Marie Le Pen, the National Front spent several decades mainly at the extremist margins of French politics. Since taking the party’s reins in 2011, Ms. Le Pen has presented herself as a gentler sort of immigrant-bashing nationalist. But, evidently loath to alienate the party’s old guard, she has negated her efforts to detoxify the National Front with dog whistles to the party’s nativist base. With her willfully denialist remarks last weekend, she went even further — squarely into the realm of historical revisionism.

“I think France was not responsible for the Vel d’Hiv,” she said, referring to the Winter Stadium in Paris where more than 13,000 Jews — mostly women and children — were rounded up in July 1942 before being sent to their deaths in Nazi gas chambers. “I think generally, if anyone is responsible, then it is those in power at the time, not France as such. It wasn’t France.” She added that “France has been mistreated, in people’s minds, for years.”

Actually, it was very much France that carried out the stadium roundups — specifically, some 4,500 French police, deployed in pairs, fanning out through the City of Light beginning at dawn on July 16, 1942, and acting on the direct orders of French officials. In all, 13,152 Jews were picked up over five days: 5,919 women, 4,115 children and 3,118 men; nearly all of them were then deported and murdered.
 Following the war, more than 50 years passed before the French government officially acknowledged the nation’s guilt and collaboration in abetting the Holocaust, in which, of 6 million Jews who died, more than 76,000 were deported from France. Nonetheless, denialism and willful historical ignorance have maintained their grip, thanks partly to Mr. Le Pen, who advanced the idea that the Nazi gas chambers were “a detail” of World War II.

[T]he party, which leads in next weekend’s first-round presidential races, according to some opinion polls, hasn’t really been remade, just recast. Ms. Le Pen has made that clear.

Again, it is not lost - at least for me - that those who talk the most about traditional Christian values are the ones who most want to harm and persecute others.  Religion is a pestilence on mankind. 

Will France Be Putin's Next Rigged Election?

With ongoing investigations taking place in America over Russia's impact on the 2016 presidential election and possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence operatives (British reports say collusion did occur), many in France worry that their nation will be the next to have a manipulated election that places an unfit and mentally unsound leader in office.  Most disturbing is the fact that Marine Le Pen, Russia's favorite, in many ways makes Donald Trump seem sane and at least somewhat rational and in touch with reality.  An op-ed looks at the possible disaster approaching France and the machinations of Russia that are heavily involved in pushing for another election coup.  Here are column highlights:

Never, it is being said, has a presidential election in France seemed so uncertain. And never has there been so much concern about possible attempts by the Russian leadership to shape — perhaps even interfere with — the outcome.

Last month, President François Hollande of France denounced the Kremlin’s efforts to “influence public opinion” through “ideological operations” and its “strategy of influence, of networks” in France. His comments followed another accusation, by Richard Ferrand, the national secretary of the En Marche! (Onward!) movement, who claimed that the Kremlin was responsible for a series of cyberattacks against the party’s website and that it was seeking to undermine Emmanuel Macron, En Marche!’s presidential candidate, for being, among other things, too pro-European Union. The Kremlin has denied this.

The French government is worried that hackings or cyberattacks may occur during the upcoming elections — for president, in April and May, and for the national legislature, in June. Partly as a result, French nationals living abroad will not be allowed to vote electronically in the legislative election. Computer breaches, propaganda, disinformation — even campaign financing — there are indeed many reasons to worry. And all the more so because the Kremlin’s sapping offensive in France is a vast and long-running project. The Russian authorities have set up at least three influential organizations here. Le Dialogue franco-russe (the Franco-Russian Dialogue) is an association created in 2004 under the auspices of Jacques Chirac, then president of France, and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. It includes companies involved in trade between the two countries, and claims that its purpose is to develop “economic cooperation and business relationships.” More than anything, though, it seems to be making the case for lifting sanctions against Russia and promoting the Kremlin’s geopolitical views. . . . According to the French secret services, the organization is “infected” with the Russian foreign intelligence service.

L’Institut de la démocratie et de la coopération (the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation) was set up in Paris in 2008. Its stated purpose is to create “a bridge of solid friendship between two great European nations, France and Russia.” Yet in numerous interviews its director, Natalia Narochnitskaya, has put forward very hostile views. . . . For Ms. Narochnitskaya, Russia offers “an alternative to the West.”

The Kremlin’s third main proxy organization in France is the much less formal Forum des compatriotes (the Compatriots’ Forum). It first convened in 2011 and brings together Russian-speaking émigrés and descendants of émigrés in meetings held at the Russian embassy in Paris. This forum, and others like it in other countries, are at the heart of Mr. Putin’s “Russian World” initiative: an effort to mobilize the Russian diaspora for various linguistic, cultural or economic projects but also to build support for the Kremlin on such geopolitical questions as the war between Russia and Ukraine.

The leaders of these three organizations appear regularly in French news outlets and various media, in French and other languages, that the Kremlin has created and is wholly funding. . . . Sputnik and RT have published numerous articles about, say, the problems ostensibly caused by immigrants, thereby reinforcing the fear and the backlash triggered by recent terrorist attacks. They do not hesitate to distort facts and even invent some.

Backing from Russia can also be more concrete, particularly financial. So far only one such case is known in France, but it may not be unique. In 2014 Ms. Le Pen, the leader of the Front National party, received a loan of 9 million euros from the First Czech Russian Bank. (The bank, now in bankruptcy, counted Vyacheslav Babusenko, a former senior official in the K.G.B., among its principal directors.) A Cypriot company gave 2 million euros to Cotelec, the micro-party of Jean-Marie Le Pen, Ms. Le Pen’s father and the Front National’s former leader.

The Front National has actively supported the Kremlin lately and stated that it is “opposed to sanctions against Russia.” Mr. Putin welcomed Ms. Le Pen to Moscow recently, saying he was “very happy” to see her. She has called him “a man committed to values,” in particular “the Christian heritage of European civilization.” . . . French people, for their part, seem to be skeptical. In a 2015 poll (the most current on this issue), 85 percent of respondents did not trust Mr. Putin or his judgment in foreign policy.

But none of that makes much difference to Moscow. As a recent article in the newspaper Die Zeit convincingly demonstrated in the case of Germany, the central aim of the Kremlin’s media outlets and networks is to foment fear and mistrust outside Russia and to undermine Westerners’ faith in the security of their countries, the integrity of their institutions and the stability of their daily lives.

[A]nyone who is aware of Russia’s internal situation — generalized corruption, a nonperforming economy, widespread poverty, the obvious deterioration of political and civil liberties — cannot but tremble at the prospect that Mr. Putin may have any influence on the presidential election in France.

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Russian Bank is Financing French Neo-Nazi Party

It seems that Vladimir Putin is once again employing techniques of Hitler and the Nazi regime not to mention those of the former Soviet Union: funding political parties in foreign countries to cause unrest and fan support for Putin's own Neo-Nazi policies.  As Time magazine reports, a Russian bank is providing loans to France's National Front, a Neo-Nazi and virulently anti-gay political party in France.  Here are article highlights:

Is Russian President Vladimir Putin meddling in the internal politics of countries in the European Union? That seemed a strong possibility to some Europeans this week, after French political leader Marine Le Pen confirmed she had secured a €9-million ($11.1 million) loan from a Moscow-based bank, in order to run her right-wing National Front party.

“At this stage, Russia is trying to influence French domestic policy,” says Jean-Yves Camus, a political researcher at France’s Institute of International and Strategic Relations (IRIS). If so, Putin’s strategy resembles the Soviet Union before its collapse in 1991, when Moscow funded trade unions and political groups in western Europe in an attempt to buy influence and destabilize foes. “In this respect Putin is pretty much in line with the former USSR. It is the same policy all over again,” says Camus.

The French investigative news site Mediapart first broke the news that the National Front had taken the loan, with a 6% interest rate, from First Czech Russian Bank, a small Moscow-based institution, the chairman of which is Roman Popov. Mediapart said the deal emerged partly as a result of Le Pen’s visit to Moscow last February, where she met Alexander Babakov, a Russian lawmaker with connections to Putin. 

Le Pen has been a staunch supporter of Russia. For months she has lambasted the E.U. for its sanctions against it, and she told Naryshkin in Moscow last year that Europe’s “Cold War on Russia” was “not in line with traditional, friendly relations nor with the economic interests of our country.”

Le Pen — whose party is similar to populist movements like the United Kingdom Independent Party (UKIP) and the Alternative for Germany — aims to pull her country out of the Union and reclaim its sovereignty over border control and fiscal budgets. As Putin fights to keep Ukraine and other countries allied to Russia, anything that weakens the 28-country E.U. could help further that cause. The far-right parties in Europe share certain ideological opinions with Putin including opposition to gay marriage and open immigration.

[S]ome believe Putin might be misjudging the potential for right-wing leaders in Europe to take control of their governments. “In practical terms the far-right parties are of little help to him as they hold no power,” says Cas Mudde, associate professor in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia. Similarly, Camus believes that Putin could be further isolated if Le Pen fails to become French president. “This strategy can backfire,” he says. “Putin is pretty much isolated in the international community. So I think he doesn’t have anything to gain by supporting or helping the extreme right.”

Putin continues to demonstrate that he is a very dangerous individual who is driven by one thing alone: a quest for power to satisfy his megalomania.  I may just have to nickname him "Adolph Junior."