re: #74 Lupin

History has rightly vilified Marshall Petain’s so-called Vichy regime. I would urge you all to read William Shirer’s FALL OF THE THIRD REPUBLIC to understand how France got there. The parallels with our country’s recent history are rather striking.

Now, we have our own puppet regime created by loathsome reactionary forces (Bannon is a good equivalent of Pierre Laval) supported by a hostile foreign power using an old doddering yet still charismatic fool as puppet head.

Is it too early to refer to Americans as “burger-eating surrender monkeys”?

You mean The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940, I think.

ADDENDUM: I’ve read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich twice: once while I was still in high school and again many years later, but not the work about the Third Republic. I’ve added it to my Kindle wish list.

From my other perusal of WWII histories, France in the 1930s had problems similar to France of the mid-1910s: Factional disputes among its political leaders, and a military still entrenched (pun intended) in 19th century tactics and command structure. Both times, Germany caught France unawares, because both Kaiser Wilhelm and Adolf Hitler threw away the old rulebook for waging war as “gentlemen” and played dirty.