Vichy Down Under:
Is John Howard the Maréchal Pétain of Australia?
Harold Hark
10 July 2003

The German offensive in May-June 1940 breached the Maginot Line and prompted the French army to collapse. The armistice accord -- actually a surrender agreement -- was signed on June 22. This brought the Third Republic to an end, and on July 10, 1940, the French parliament in joint session dissolved the Republican regime and installed Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain as head of the French state with full governing powers. The government established its seat at Vichy, in the southern part of the country. The results of the armistice were already evident by the end of June. France was partitioned into two sectors: a German-occupied zone (including the Atlantic coast, the English Channel front, and Paris); and an unoccupied zone in the southeast, administered by the Vichy government. The Vichy regime replaced the principles of the French Revolution -- Liberté, égalité, fraternité -- with new principles: Travail (work), Famille (family), and Patrie (fatherland). The Vichy regime, bolstered by nationalists who demanded a policy of "returning France to the French," began systematically to circumscribe "aliens" influence and erode the rights of refugees and Jews. Vichy adopted a policy of courting Nazi Germany in order to extract more tolerable arrangements from the German authorities. The Vichy regime did much to help the Germans persecute the Jews and took anti-Jewish actions at its own initiative -- such as the Statut des Juifs -- the Jewish Statutes (October 1940) and the establishment of institutions such as the Commissariat for Jewish Affairs (March 1941).
Chronology of the Holocaust 1939-1941

The parallels are striking between John W. Howard, the Prime Minister of Australia, and Maréchal Henri-Philippe Pétain, leader of the collaborationist Vichy Government in France during World War II.

Australia has suffered no invasion, yet the events of September 11 have caused John Howard to entirely subordinate his government to the Bush Administration in Washington. Australia no longer acts independently.

Before this world shaking event, the Howard regime had already begun its insidious drive to root out Australia's (perhaps mythical) "fair go" and replace it with fear and loathing. In seven years, Howard has successfully turned this country into the pariah of the developed world. With his every breath he has endeavoured to bring out the worst in a majority of Australians by championing racism and xenophobia.

With the passing of the notorious ASIO Bill, those Australians who have remained faithful to their humanity by speaking out must carefully consider the possibility of being arrested and detained indefinitely for their views. It would be alarmist to conclude that there is every possibility that they could eventually be put before a firing squad or removed to already existing concentration camps, but for the Jews in Hitler's Germany of 1933, such a consideration was also alarmist.

It is not certain what our future holds, but a look at Pétain's Vichy is instructive.

Pétain replaced the social basis of French law since the Revolution, Liberté, égalité, fraternité, with Travail, famille, patrie. He hated the French taste for leisure, believing that travail, or work, and lots of it, would keep their nose to the grindstone and away from ideas unsuitable to a population captured by the Nazis. He may not have been aware at the time that his masters had chosen a similar slogan, arbeit macht frei.

He then chose famille over egalité (equality is anathema to the totalitarian ideal) to promote the concept of "family values," which continues to be championed by reactionary governments bent on socially engineering subservience. A husband and father will hesitate to fight an oppressive state for fear of reprisals against his family. A wife and mother will be concerned with the safety of her children and caution her spouse to keep his nose to the grindstone of inconspicuousness. Thus the promotion of "family values" tends to aid totalitarian states by locking populations into a paralytic apathy.

Patrie (homeland, fatherland) is, of course, the easiest trick of all. Replacing fraternité, which exhorts belief in the brotherhood of mankind, with the siren call of nationalism inevitably ensures obedience from a frightened majority. Appealing to the fear of invasion or subservience to the invaders for fear of retribution, is as easy as stealing candy from a baby.

It is clear that John Howard has adopted these measures to control Australians.

Pétain was an anti-Semite who used "nationalism" in the service of the German occupation to deport Jews and round up all dissidents. John Howard has used nationalism, and it's idiot offspring racism, not to deport Jews but to cleanse the nation of Australia's modern equivalent, non-Anglo asylum seekers. He has done this easily, because he is by nature a dog-whistler, a master of vaguespeak, or doublespeak, who uses ambiguity to mask his baseness. His dog-whistling has awakened dormant prejudices in people who normally coped with them. With the exception of his defining speech during the 2001 election, where he said: "We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come", he parrots vacuous homilies straight out of a textbook for tyrants.

Pétain made feeble attempts to protect French citizens from the wrath of the Nazis, but John Howard has turned all of Australia over to the Americans. His cowardly betrayal of David Hicks, who is about to be tried by an American kangaroo court with less rights than Eichmann was granted in Israel, is obscenely complimented by his rush to sign an agreement preventing Americans from being turned over to the International Criminal Court for war crimes similar to those Hicks is accused of. Hicks guilt or innocence is yet to be proven, but Howard's behaviour ranks him as an indictable traitor.

Howard is either too clever to show his distaste for those who reside beyond the concrete, steel-reinforced white picket fence defending him from his fear of life, or completely unaware of it. If he is unaware, it is doubtful the most qualified psychiatrists and psychologists could get to the bottom of his tangled mind. When he is finally charged with crimes against humanity, he will, like those who went before him at Nuremberg, plead the bewildered innocence of a psychopath.

Pétain took power after the German invasion. John Howard has used the threat of terrorism, a threat largely manufactured by himself, to turn Australia into Vichy-down-under. For Howard (and Bush), September 11 was like manna from heaven. It gave him an excuse to consolidate his party's ideology by turning Australia into a nation of heretofore consumer-driven, now fear-driven, sheep. Worse, the patriotism Howard has foisted on a gullible public is false. It is false because it owes its allegiance, not to Australia, but to America. It could be said that Pétain was to Hitler as Howard is to Bush

Unlike the Maréchal, who was a hero in World War I and retained the respect of his men into the second war, or at least until the armistice when he became a traitor, John Howard is a chicken hawk. The extent of his knowledge regarding warfare and its horrors is confined to endlessly visiting RSL's and memorial sites, and welcoming home troops from their unprecedented and, as we now know, unwarranted invasion of Iraq. His are the tears of a cunning crocodile.

Cowardice, moral weakness, and the cunning that covers them up are the common traits ultimately shared by Pétain and Howard. Both came to power as centreless vacuums, without a shred of authenticity. Pétain had flourished in the simplistic world of the military, but in the world of Machiavellian politics, he proved to be a bumbler who changed his mind at the whim of the strongest adviser of the moment, often changing his mind again the minute the adviser's back was turned. Howard is a born Machiavellian, though of such inferior calibre that the Prince would have been forced to remove his white gloves and use them to slap him in the face.

Pétain would often pretend to stand for the honourable thing and then renege immediately, with rationalisations befitting a toddler caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Pétain was 84 at the time of his Presidency, but had the petulant ego of a child. Howard is about to turn 64, yet he too is given to childish petulance. His voice still breaks when he is under pressure as if he were an adolescent. Like Howard, Pétain was always on the verge of stamping his feet and throwing a tantrum when reasonably questioned about his decisions. Howard calls upon his infamous "three well's" to drown out an interviewer's interrogation. "Well, well, well!" he says, each "well" growing louder until the interviewer is forced to shut up.

After the war, Pétain blamed his treacherous four years as President of the Vichy Republic on his subordinates, intimating that he would have acted otherwise given honourable advice.

It is not certain that John Howard knows the difference between right and wrong to the extent that Pétain may have, but he is already adept at blaming others and claiming ignorance of the obvious. "I wasn't told" he says with sickening regularity. That he claims to have been kept continually uninformed of events that almost everyone else suspected or outright knew of has earned him the profound disrespect of all but those who remain wilfully blind.

The Gestapo, and Pétain's version of it, the Milice, is alive and well under Howard's Labor-backed ASIO bill. It will eventually give birth to a resistance movement, if it hasn't already. Australia awaits its Jean Moulin.

The French Resistance, whom Moulin brought together from disparate groups into a coordinated underground (Maquis), is legendary. One of their earliest and most effective symbols of defiance was to write in chalk or paint, the letter "V" (for victory) on footpaths and walls throughout the country. Soon, the letter incorporated the double cross of the Free French flag...

to become

It was a daily reminder to occupied French men and women that the tyranny of the Germans and the Vichy Government would not stand.

Perhaps it's time to start marking "V" signs all over Australia. Instead of the double cross, we could scratch in a replica of razor wire.

When the Germans were routed in 1944, Pétain was arrested, tried for treason and sentenced to death. Because of his advanced age, DeGaulle commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. Pétain died in prison in 1951.

Pétain's chief henchmen were Pierre Laval, Premier and enthusiastic Nazi collaborator who helped deport workers and Jews to Germany, and Joseph Darnand, Pétain's police chief who headed the Milice, the secret police operation modelled on the Gestapo.

After the war, Laval and Darnand were tried, convicted and executed as traitors.

Alexander Downer and Philip Ruddock have many of Laval's "qualities", while we are yet to know who will be Darnand's analogue in Howard's Vichy. Attorney-General Daryl Williams and ASIO chief Dennis Richardson will likely give way to one among us whose villainy has yet to be discovered.

Yet, there is hope. Howard is losing control over public opinion. At some point he will be the only one left who still believes his lies. His delusion of invulnerability could crack at any time, the entire nation seeing him finally as the emperor with no clothes that he has always been. And when they finally do turn their backs on his repugnant emptiness, Downer and Ruddock will be forced to stand beside him, gibbering and afraid, as the most heinous traitors ever to shame Australia.

Something is bound to happen to awaken Mr and Mrs Australia to the handover of Australian sovereignty to the Americans, and to the criminal behaviour being enacted against asylum seekers, and ultimately, against themselves. They, the Australian representatives of the human race, will awaken, because they always have. If not, humanity would still be struggling to stand upright. The John Howard's and the Maréchal Pétain's only flourish for short periods. We must remember this.

Please read Julian Burnside's speech at Parliament House on World Refugee Day 2003. In it he suggests that there are existing laws to try John Howard and Phillip Ruddock for crimes against humanity.

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