France’s top literary prize has been awarded to a novel that portrays the Nazis as the product of big business interests — including businesses that remain major industrial players today.
Eric Vuillard’s “L’Ordre du Jour,” or “The Agenda,” was awarded the Goncourt Prize on Monday in a Paris cafe, part of a long-running tradition.
The choice prompted criticism from some quarters because the book’s publisher, Actes Sud, was co-founded by French Culture Minister Francoise Nyssen.
The publisher describes the book as an investigation of the backstage of the Nazi phenomenon that asks “what if the foundation for the first (Nazi) exploits was found in wheeling and dealing, in vulgar combinations of interests?”
Last year’s winner of the Goncourt, Leila Slimani, is expected to be named to the French government later Monday.
(AP)
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Interesting since in fact the Nazis were part of a populist anti-business movement. Big business to varying degrees learned to live with the Nazis, but it is a “big lie” to say that the big businesses spawned the national SOCIALIST movement. Of course, it is not politically correct to blame the working class people who elected the Nazis, and “business” is as good a scapegoat as any (especially since the can’t say the Jews did it – their usual preferred scapegoat for anything that went wrong).