France’s National Front: Le Pen, mightier than the sword?, The Economist, 5 May 2011:
UP CLOSE, the most unnerving thing about Marine Le Pen is not her obsession with Islam, her populism or her divisive politics—but the way she oozes charm. With a ready laugh and unaffected manner, this steely politician deflects awkward questions with an easy grace that makes her a rarity in French politics. The newish leader of the far-right National Front is an intriguing study in how to make extremist politics marketable—and in doing so, perhaps to reshape French party politics.
In the short run, Ms Le Pen wants to decontaminate the National Front, stripping it of the skin-headed image it had under her father, Jean-Marie. At the party’s annual May 1st rally, she surrounded herself with fresh-faced young women in jeans and T-shirts. Her father, a former paratrooper, perfected a line in anti-Semitic and xenophobic outrage. She shares much of his programme, such as support for the death penalty and job preference for French nationals. But she has junked the anti-Semitism and neo-Nazi sidekicks in favour of a subtler tone. “When I talk about the immigration problem, I don’t talk out of hate, or xenophobia, or Islamophobia, or fear,” she insists, but pragmatism. “We cannot afford to let everybody in.”
Across Europe, traditional divisions between left and right have blurred, Ms Le Pen argues, giving way to a new fracture between those who believe in globalisation, international governance and open borders, and those who believe in the primacy of the nation. In her eyes President Nicolas Sarkozy and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the IMF and a likely Socialist candidate, are “interchangeable”: standard-bearers for a globalised world view. By contrast, she wants a return to national sovereignty, a withdrawal from the euro (“before it collapses”) and NATO (“submission to America”), the return of border controls and an unapologetic protectionist policy to “re-industrialise France”.
For under scrutiny, many of Ms Le Pen’s ideas, when not toxic, are deeply flawed. France cannot compete with China on cost, she says, so better to put up borders, go for a competitive devaluation and start building factories at home again. She dismisses worries about the colossal cost of protectionism or of debt-servicing with a devalued currency as scaremongering. For now, such details have yet to spoil the seductive simplicity of her message. And this will keep her a highly disruptive figure in the run-up to 2012 and beyond.
Unlike DSK, Marine Le Pen has never been accused of committing a crime, violent or otherwise. However, as made clear by the defamatory, accusatory opinion quoted above – fairly typical of the limited coverage Le Pen receives in English-language media – Le Pen is regarded with a poisonous cynicism, a combination of fear and loathing that would elicit outraged cries and condemnations of “hate” if it were directed at any representative of immigrants or jews. Le Pen, like all European nationalists, is treated to a different standard, worse than any accused rapist. She’s undeniably popular with the native French, who for perfectly normal reasons would like to be led by someone, anyone who actually favors them over aliens. Naturally this frightens and disgusts anyone who loves aliens and hates the French.
The double standard was clearly visible amid the empassioned cacaphony following the arrest of DSK. The realization that the scandal would likely improve Le Pen’s prospects frightened certain pundits so much that they couldn’t help but couple their open-minded reminders that DSK is innocent until proven guilty with cognitive-dissonance-inducing paranoia and hang-wringing over Le Pen. The most egregious examples I’ve found are Doug Schoen and Anne Applebaum. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that while neither one is French, both are jews.
UPDATE 20 May 2011: Marine Le Pen becomes Front National leader: A pivotal moment for French politics? – Telegraph, by Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, 16 Jan 2011:
It’s a measure of the inroads Marine Le Pen has already made in the French political debate that she now splits opinion among the rarefied world of Parisian intellectuals.
On the one hand, the philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy still thinks she reeks of sulphur: according to him, the youngest daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, 82, the longstanding Front National leader, is “even more dangerous than her father”.
Yet on the other Elisabeth Lévy, the shrewd editor of Causeur magazine, the French answer to The Spectator, considers not only that Marine Le Pen “says nothing scandalous or morally unacceptable”, but also that she might well “be truly breaking away from the old French extreme-Right, to create something new.”
It’s a measure of just how un-French “French” political debate is that Moutet cites two jews as representative, even though they are members of a powerful, exclusive ethnic group who comprise less than 1% of the overall population.
[Marine’s father, Jean-Marie] Le Pen, an orphaned Breton fisherman’s son, tried to join the Résistance in 1944, and later fought in Algeria and in the Suez expedition.
But he made his indelible mark in French politics by obsessively picking at the scabs of the country’s dark past. He boasted of using torture in Algeria to combat terrorism; called the gas chambers “a point of detail” of the Second World War; used time-and-motion calculations to dispute the number of Auschwitz victims; and described France’s German occupiers as “very civilised”.
He was several times condemned under French incitement laws – all of which he used to paint himself as a larger-than-life pariah in the too-tame, self-referential world of French politics.
Le Pen is being painted as a pariah here for having the audacity to try to represent his people. Let’s be honest. Is there anyone who picks more obsessively at scabs from the past (like Auschwitz) than jews do? Argue with them, like Jean-Marie Le Pen, and you’re painted as dangerous. Don’t argue, like Marine Le Pen, and you’re painted as worse.
At 42, a handsome, single working mother of three, she presents herself as the young, modern face of the Front National, in sharp contrast to her defeated opponent in the Party leadership contest, the 60-year-old academic Bruno Gollnisch, under whose banner the Party’s residual hardliners had sought an increasingly exiguous shelter.
In the Gollnisch camp gather the “tradis”, the traditionalist Catholics who are horrified by Marine’s support of gay rights – short of gay marriage – and refusal to support abolition of the 1975 law permitting abortion. (She says she only wants all provisions of the law strictly applied, so that women are first offered “alternatives” such as pre-natal adoption.)
No-one in France will admit to anti-Semitism, which is actionable by law, but campaign rumours from the Gollnisch camp included descriptions of Marine’s entourage as “full of Jews, queers and Arabs”.
Actionable by law is an innocuous way of saying that in France you can be persecuted for making elementary observations like the ones I just have. Meanwhile no special laws prevent jews living in France from saying whatever they wish about the French.
It is interesting that two personalities she quoted positively during a half-hour conversation were two Jews: Simone Veil, the former health minister and European Parliament president, who first introduced the abortion bill, and Elisabeth Badinter, the left-wing feminist author.
It is interesting how jews keep coming up in Moutet’s piece. Is she jewish? At any rate, the impression Moutet creates is that what’s most important about Le Pen is what jews think about her, not what she thinks about anything. And never mind what the French think either.
The Economist won’t be happy until there’s a World Government, that’s how globalist they are.
Their readers go to sleep each night cursing that the free flow of people and goods ever has to be put through the horror of passing through a border crossing.
“Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too.” -John Lennon
That should be the motto of The Economist.
How dare Marine Le Pen try to preempt that beautiful vision of global brotherhood and universal nation destruction with her petty xenophobia!
Of course what they don’t get at The Economist is that if they get their way, if the takeover of France by North Africans and Blacks is never stopped by “xenophobes”, their lovely vision of no borders won’t come true anyway.
The Muslims will set up borders, there’s no reason to doubt it.
Also doubt they’ll be the best friends capitalists ever had.
What a horrible world it would be with nothing to die for.
A world with nothing worth dying for in it, at least to the more idealistic people, would be a world with nothing worth living for in it.
Men and women would start to lose their minds, just like the characters at the end of the great Jean Luc-Godard film Alphaville.
Yet this perverse vision of Lennon’s song Imagine is considered by almost all Leftists as a depiction of some kind of utopia we should work toward.
No wonder they vilify anyone like Marine Le Pen who dares to try to get in the way.
They know deep down that they need to vilify such people as their vision is when you get down to it repulsive to normal people.
Update posted.
Strauss-Kahn incident a catalyst for Europe’s angst – Attention supranational jet-setting elites: the natives are getting restless
One wonders, assuming Marine Le Pen were magically made dictator of France, if she would expel under pain of death all Jews, non-Whites and mongrels from France. Is that the measure of her personal resolve which she keeps secret for the sake of electoral viability? That is really what the Jews are tearing their hair out about, right? A Trojan Horse for fascism. But if that ain’t the case, then the joke is on us, not the Jews.
These jews who see nothing but deceit in their political rivals reveal the deceit in their own minds and methods. By treating the more mild-mannered rivals as more of a threat they create a positive feedback loop. As they demonize and marginalize the largest threats and eventually work their way down to stomping on even the mildest, deracinated resistance they demonstrate themselves to be intolerant, obsessed, paranoid, hateful, totalitarian – all the negative traits we’re so used to hearing them pin on Whites.
Regardless of the extent to which Le Pen is a compromiser, I’d much rather have someone like that than the genocidal anti-White regimes we have on our backs at the moment.
Not that different from how our media treats people with even small deviation from the acccepted multicultural orthodoxy. Look at the descrptions Buchanan went through in his runs for President.
This cycle they will demonize Bachmann. Funny that it’s women who are at the forefront of this.
I think you will be interested in this article, Tan.
“While US President Barack Obama was busy orchestrating the assassination of terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, his half brother Mark Ndesandjo reconnected with his Jewish roots on his first trip to Israel.
Ndesandjo, 45, was born to Barack Obama Senior’s third wife, a Jewish American kindergarten teacher and the daughter of Lithuanian immigrants.
Ndesandjo’s trip to the Holy Land was kept a secret for fear that he would fall victim to hostile attempts to avenge the US-perpetrated assassination of bin Laden.
One of the main purposes of Ndesandjo’s visit was to meet with the Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel, Yona Metzger, to receive a blessing and a letter for his mother, Ruth Nidesand.”
http://www.shalomlife.com/eng/15205/Obama's_Jewish_Half-Brother_in_Israel/
Flanders
You asked whether Moutet was jewish, Tan. She is listed as a speaker at the 100th annual meeting and international leadership Conference of the American Jewish Committee. This is from May 6,
“Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, Deputy Chair, Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute”.
This was just prior to the “Plenary Lunch Session, “Confronting the Myth of an International Jewish Conspiracy:A Century of Combating Anti-Semitism”
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ajc.org%2Fatf%2Fcf%2F%257B42D75369-D582-4380-8395-D25925B85EAF%257D%2Fajc_am_program.pdf
Flanders
Good find Flanders.
“Confronting the Myth of an International Jewish Conspiracy:A Century of Combating Anti-Semitism“
No doubt the irony eludes them. In their minds “the jews” don’t conspire to aggress, they organize to combat “anti-semitism”.
they organize to combat the world-wide anti-Jewish conspiracy.
“they organize to combat the world-wide anti-Jewish conspiracy.”
heh
OT, but has anyone been reading Auster’s recent comments about Israel and Obama? He’s really come out as a rabid Israel firster who has no concern for American interests. There’s a level of sucking up to Israel among the commentators there that approaches ritual groveling.
The Beckster: Does a race of people have a right to live?
The Beckster: Does a race of people have a right to live?
It’s the usual ruse, but only implicit in this case: “if you support White people having a sense of identity, then you should support Israel because they’re a good role model!” You have to be stupid to fall for it… but unfortunately, most of Glenn Beck’s fans are pretty stupid.
I liked Svigor’s comment on Sailer’s It’s AIPAC Policy Conference time.
He was responding to someone who wrote:
“What I am against is this mindless bashing of Jews for no reason other than what is probably just malice and envy.“
What Svigor wrote in response applies here too:
“I’m into reciprocity. And there’s an awful lot of Ashkenazi malice and envy to reciprocate. But really, the only thing I’m envious of is the fact that my people recognize Ashkenazis’ right to rule themselves, but not their own.“
It’s tempting to imagine Beck is trying to sneak up on “the jews” by wrapping a stealthy argument for the survival of the White race inside an obsequious jew-first pose, but I think it’s actually more likely he’d be sincerely disgusted (Pavlovian-style) by any suggestion that Whites, completely distinct from jews, are threatened and should fight to survive. He and many of his fans have the capacity for chauvinism. It’s just that the easiest, most semitically correct way to express it is in favor of the interests of “the jews”, rather than their own kind. I think they understand at some level that the former may get them ridiculed, but know for sure the latter will get them demonized. The underdog factor plays a part. The predominant anti-White/pro-jew narrative – with Whites as eternal oppressors and “the jews” as eternal victims (the prototypical “minority”) – fools many Whites, until it outrages them. Mocking over-the-top out-group altruism like Beck’s, especially while pointing out how “the jews” largely reciprocate with distaste and contempt, may help some Whites see the light. For myself it was facts and arguments presented in plain terms that were most effective, not condescension or ridicule.
This was a good post. A very creative way of highlighting and illustrating the pretty much subliminal propaganda war waged by the media against us. It’s a subtle but effective way of controlling elite (in this case) opinion. They don’t call it The Ecommunist for nothing.
It’s tempting to imagine Beck is trying to sneak up on “the jews” by wrapping a stealthy argument for the survival of the White race inside an obsequious jew-first pose
This is Beck’s act: he pretends he’s winking at us and that he’s just saying all the pro-Israel and pro-Black stuff for “cover”, but really the winks are just there to lure Whites into supporting an anti-White agenda. The Beck fan is the sucker at the table, not Beck himself or the Jews who write Beck’s paychecks.
Mocking over-the-top out-group altruism like Beck’s, especially while pointing out how “the jews” largely reciprocate with distaste and contempt, may help some Whites see the light. For myself it was facts and arguments presented in plain terms that were most effective, not condescension or ridicule.
I think you’re an exception. Most people don’t respond well to facts and arguments. I say, lay on the mockery pretty heavily if you want to get through to the average patriotard.
Just stumbled into this.
Unholy alliance: Israel’s right and Europe’s anti-Semites – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News:
“Politicians like Le Pen have exchanged the Jewish demon-enemy for the criminal-immigrant Muslim, but they have not really discarded their ideological DNA. The Israeli seal of approval they seek to get is intended to bring them closer to power.“
No matter how much the “anti-semite” criminal-demon-enemy changes, it remains the same. Damnation either way: Israelis don’t approve the idea there is an Israeli seal of approval.
“Le Pen herself has decided to leave behind the anti-Semitic scandals of her father, Jean-Marie. She wants to make the National Front a popular and legitimate party.
She is already popular (19 percent in the polls). Legitimate? In two interviews she gave to Haaretz in the past, she attacked President Jacques Chirac for his historic 1995 declaration in which he took, in the name of France, responsibility for Vichy war crimes. She adamantly refused to denounce French fascist crimes and showed that she cannot really disengage from her father, his heritage and her party’s Vichy and anti-Semitic hard core.“
Interesting definition of “anti-semite” – a criminal-demon political leader who will not side with jews in condemning their own people.