Understand the Empire (The title should end with an exclamation point!) is the English translation of Alain Soral’s 2011 best seller Comprendre l’Empire, which was his prescient attempt to explain the role which France played in the global empire. Because it is only a part of that empire, France presents a simplified case study which allows us to understand the whole. That’s why this ten-year old study is still instructive. The past hasn’t changed. The forms of control which got imposed on the French people through the empire’s proconsuls are virtually identical to the forms which got imposed on Americans because it is the same oligarchs who are imposing them throughout the world.

In comparing the American Empire with a vassal state like France, the similarities outweigh the differences. The American Revolution begat the French Revolution, but America did not have to suffer the same consequences as France because, as a vast expanse of unsettled wilderness, it lacked the social structures to implement them. Nonetheless, in the not-too distant past, Freemasons constituted the covert ruling class of the American Republic. That is no longer the case, but the Masonic grammar of esoteric vs. exoteric organizations has suffused all of American culture, including business and academe. France, in this regard, continues to be what America was. The hidden grammar of French political and economic life is, according to Soral, Masonic:

Freemasonry, freed of blood ties, shared faith, and class homogeneity, is the network of influence that exemplifies post-Enlightenment modernity. Possessing a sort of egalitarian solidarity founded on complicity and combined with hierarchical submission based on deception, Masonry has in effect rebuilt a new “corps intermédiaire” between citizen and State, the Republican equivalent of the old corporations that were abolished by the Republic! The Grand Orient de France (GODF) and its estimated 50,000 brothers are omnipresent in French politics, just as the Grande Loge Nationale Française (GLNF) and its declared 43,000 brothers are omnipresent in French business. Together, they are a testament to the reality of power-sharing by the Left and the Right: one manages social affairs, while the other manages capital. The more modern Club Le Siècle and its 630 high-powered members (of which 150 are guest members) constitute the hidden hand that sets the country’s direction. All of these networks epitomize the lie that is democracy.1

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Lie is too strong a word. Oligarchic organizations like the Freemasonry have declared war on representative government, which is now making a come back in the United States in states like Florida, which just banned de-platforming, and Texas, which was the first state to defy the COVID lockdown, and Missouri, which has banned abortion. Soral’s book predicted the equivalent of that pushback in France years before it happened, and the only flaw in Understand the Empire[!] is the missing chapter on Macron, the Yellow Vests, and the COVID lockdown which destroyed the biggest uprising in France since the May revolt of 1968. In that missing chapter, Soral should proclaim his identity as that rarest of all creatures, the prophet who has been vindicated by the course of events. But even in its absence, Understand is worth reading for its historical analysis.

The main legacy of Freemasonry in America is the reality of oligarchic control and its total hegemony over the political process, rendering local government an essentially meaningless formality. The Duc d’Orleans, who changed his name to Phillippe Egalite when he abandoned aristocratic privilege and joined up with the French Revolution, expressed this trajectory best when he said, in a memoir written the night before the revolution which he supported marched him to the scaffold, that the lodge was to the revolution what the candle was to the sun. Once the sun of revolution rose, the candle was no longer necessary.

This is precisely what happened in America. Once the oligarchs had taken control of finance and the flow of information, they…

[…] This is just an excerpt from the June 2021 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To read the full article, please purchase a digital download of the magazine, or become a subscriber!