...continued article

'Synarchism' Defined
Among the thousands of documents that EIR obtained from the U.S. wartime archives was an 18-page French military intelligence report, summarizing a 100-page dossier on the French Synarchist groups, dated July 1941. The report dealt with the Synarchist Movement of Empire (SME), the Synarchist Revolutionary Convention (SRC) and the Secret Committee of Revolutionary Action (SCRA), the military leadership arm of the SME, also known as the "Cagoulards" (the "hooded ones").
The report provided a brief history: "The Synarchist movement is an international movement born after the Versailles Treaty, which was financed and directed by certain financial groups belonging to the top international banking community. Its aim is essentially to overthrow in every country, where they exist, the parliamentary regimes which are considered insufficiently devoted to the interests of these groups and therefore, too difficult to control because of the number of persons required to control them.
"SME proposes therefore to substitute them by authoritarian regimes more docile and more easily manueverable. Power would be concentrated in the hands of the CEOs of industry and in designated representatives of chosen banking groups for each country. In a word, the idea is to give to each country a political constitution and an appropriate national economic structure organized for the following purposes:
"1. Place the political power directly into the hands of chosen people and eliminate all intermediaries. 2. Establish a maximum concentration of industries and suppress all unwarranted competition. 3. Establish an absolute control of prices of all goods (raw materials, semi-finished or finished goods). 4. Create judicial and social institutions that would prevent all extremes of action."
The dossier reported that, following failed Cagoulard insurrections in 1934 and 1937, the SME infiltrated all the economic and related ministries of the French government, conducted sabotage from within the regime, and set the basis for the Vichy government of 1940, which was dominated, from top to bottom, by Synarchist secret society members. The report named 40 top officials of the government of Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain, who were all SME members.
The dossier repeatedly emphasized that the French SME was but one component of an international Synarchist apparatus, "organized and financed in all countries by certain elements of industrial CEOs and high banking circles. Its objective on the international level is to subvert all of the democratic regimes in the world, and substitute them with stronger governments, more docile and whose leaders of command in each nation are centralized in the hands of a number of affiliates belonging to big business and international banking interests which coordinate their activities around the world." In France, under the Vichy regime, noted the dossier, "the main administrations of the country, have become the arms of Bank Worms whose administrative council controls all of the top administrators of the state."
The Synarchists did not concentrate all their efforts on infiltrating and controlling the Vichy regime. A U.S. military intelligence report, dated July 27, 1944, from the military attaché in Algiers, warned of Synarchist penetration of the upper echelons of the Free French government of Gen. Charles de Gaulle, headquartered in Algeria. "Some of the oldest and formerly most faithful supporters of General de Gaulle are worried by what they call a tendency to let 'Synarchism' penetrate even the highest brackets of the Algiers Administration," the report began. "It is believed that General de Gaulle up to recently, opposed Synarchism, which is a strongly reactionary movement, financed by the Haute Banque. He has even ordered a confidential study to be made on the subject, a copy of which has been seen by American officers." The report concluded, "If it is a fact that many individuals who are holding positions of importance in the cabinet and the immediate entourage of General de Gaulle, are also closely associated with political ideas alien to the program which de Gaulle and his government publicly endorse, then far-reaching political inferences may be drawn." Of course, a decade later, leading wartime "Gaullist" Jacques Soustelle would launch the Secret Army Organization (OAS), which would be responsible for repeated assassination attempts against de Gaulle, and would be implicated in the Permindex assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
While it is not certain that Soustelle was a wartime member of the Synarchist plot, it is certain, from French and American government records, that one leading Synarchist operative infiltrated into the de Gaulle Free French camp was Robert Marjolin, one of Alexandre Kojève's prize student/protégés of his 1933-39 courses on Hegel, Nietzsche, and the "end of history." Marjolin became Minister of Economy in the first de Gaulle postwar government, and he immediately brought Kojève into the ministry.
The Cult of Napoleon
At its core, the Synarchist international—like its front group Pan European Union—sought to create a one-world tyranny, modeled on the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte. The first "Synarchist" text was written in the 1860s by Joseph Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre (1842-1909), an occultist and follower of Napoleon Bonaparte's own mystical advisor, Antoine Fabre d'Olivet (1767-1825). Fabre d'Olivet had started out as a leading member of the Jacobins, participating personally in the foiled assassination plot against King Louis XVI in 1789. He later served as a top official of the Interior and War Ministries under Napoleon Bonaparte. His occult writings about "purgative violence" and the "will to power"—antecedents of the works of Nietzsche—were adopted by Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, who launched the idea of Synarchism as a counter to the anarchy that had destabilized all of Europe, from 1648.
Saint-Yves' successor, Gerard Vincent Encausse ("Papus"), founded the Saint-Yves School of Occult Sciences, and began a recruiting drive for a secret society, which he called the Synarchy Government. In his 1894 book Anarchie, Indolence & Synarchie, Papus spelled out an ambitious scheme to recruit all of the leaders of industry, commerce, finance, the military, and academia, to a single power scheme, aimed at destroying the "internal microbe" of society, anarchy.
Both Saint-Yves and Papus envisioned a global Synarchist empire, divided into five geographic areas: 1. the British Empire; 2. Euro-Africa; 3. Eurasia; 4. Pan-America; 5. Asia. Indeed, Alexandre Kojève is identified in Russian sources as a leader of the so-called "Eurasians," a group of Russian emigrés in the 1920s Berlin and Paris, led by Sir Samuel Hoare's Guchkov and tied into the Soviet secret service project called "the Trust." The "Eurasians" welcomed the Russian Revolution as a purgative force to wipe out corrupt Western civilization. Kojève's own cosmology of great tyrants counted Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler as second only to Napoleon, in achieving the "end of history" goal of a true global tyranny.
Strauss, Kojève, Schmitt, and Schacht
While none of the American archive documents reviewed to date by EIR identify Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt as a Synarchist, circumstantial evidence points to that conclusion. Schmitt was an emissary to Spain, Portugal, France, and Italy, during the height of fascism, turning out a series of juridical documents, justifying the jackboot tyrannies. Schmitt was a protected asset of Göring, the leading Synarchist figure in Nazi Germany. Like the banker Hjalmar Schacht, Schmitt was cleared of war crimes by the Nuremberg Tribunals.
In effect, as documented in The Hitler Book, Schacht blackmailed the Tribunal, by aggressively asserting that he was only acting on behalf of the international financial establishment, represented by the Bank for International Settlements, in his incarnation as a top Nazi official. If backed against a wall, he threatened, he would provide evidence of the international financial cabal behind the "Hitler project." Schacht was acquitted, over the strenuous objections of both the American and Soviet judges. In effect, the perpetrators of the Nazi Holocaust were brought to justice at Nuremberg, while the architects of the larger Synarchist scheme, like Schacht and Leo Strauss' mentor Carl Schmitt, were given a safe conduct, and, through the efforts of postwar occupation figures like John J. McCloy and Gen. William Draper, were vetted for future service.
A final note: In 1955, Schmitt was corresponding with Kojève, arranging for the Paris-based Russian emigré to address the Düsseldorf industrialists' association—which had been a focal point of Franco-German "Synarchist" collaboration between the Nazi and Vichy governments—and meet, during that visit, with Schmitt's close friend Schacht.
It was this Kojève who maintained the closest collaboration with Leo Strauss, and who promoted his theories of purgative violence and universal tyranny with such leading Strauss disciples as Allan Bloom (the mentor of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz) and Francis Fukuyama. This Synarchist stew remains Vice President Dick Cheney's gang's "French Connection."

—Al and Rachel Douglas, Katherine Kantor, Pierre and Irene Boudry, Anton Chaitkin, Stephanie Ezrol, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, and Barbara Boyd contributed vital research to this article.