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Breaking
… or Englishman for that matter…
Sounds like the old guilt-by-association technique favored by the followers of Tailgunner Joe.
(I wonder if anyone will notice what I did there.)
Its that Blut und Boden thing.
I don’t know beans about French elections, but I hope you’re wrong Claire. I hope Le Pen wins.
Isn’t that roughly equivalent to the charges of Putin interfering in our election?
It’s OK when Obama does it. Especially since the side he supports generally loses.
It’s guilt by association because the two actively associate with each other.
I think what it means is that Macron either got 23 or 7 percent of the vote, and Le Pen either got 21 or 7 percent of the vote.
I was hoping for Le Pen. Several of my liberal friends always point to Europe as the way to run countries, and simply cannot recognize the differences between a European nation and the US (e.g. European nations, excepting Switzerland have no concept of “gun rights” as monarchs feared an armed peasantry). So it would be nice to say “those Europeans don’t look so smart now, do they”?
I have never been able to get over the anti-Semitic strain that exists in Le Pen’s party. I won’t say they are Fascist, that is a very over-used word, but certainly anti-Semitic.
And as an engineer who works frequently with European firms, I hate the use of the comma for decimal numbers.
Sargon of Akkad has made his prediction.
It’s the last straw, I agree. They have forfeited any rights they once had.
yea, verily.
A little worried. It’s possible. But on the scale of global worries, if I were in the US now, I wouldn’t devote 30 seconds of my precious time to worrying about it. It’s a little more worrying for me — I’d sure rather not be in the path of any scheme ISIS or Putin dreams up to get out the vote (or keep it home) — but I’m not worried enough to do anything more than think, “Hope it doesn’t happen,” and keep doing what I usually do.
If you’re the worrying sort, I’d use this formula: “x = degree of horror should it happen,” and “y = likelihood.” Multiply those to decide what’s really worth worrying about, since we can’t worry about everything, and for most of us — unless it’s our job, which is rare — it does no good to worry about any of it. I reckon the world’s highest degree of xy right now is here. What might happen in France in the next two weeks doesn’t even come close. I mean, it’s not a zero-risk thing, but it’s so small by comparison that it’s hardly worth thinking about.
In fact, as I’ve said before, I wouldn’t for a moment discourage people from visiting Paris right now (though if you’re paid in dollars, last week would have been much better: the Euro’s really rallied).
That said, call me a nervous nelly, but I’d say put off your North Korean vacation plans until this thing blows over. (Well, maybe the phrase “blows over” is a poorly-chosen one in this context. Until it settles down, let’s say.)
Perhaps you can explain something else to me, @claire.
In Jonah’s NRO post today, like in many other articles by other writers, the author considers it necessary to describe Le Pen’s National Front party as founded by “veterans of the Nazi-collaborationist Vichy government.” Does this make any more sense than reminding people that the UK’s Conservative Party was once headed by Neville Chamberlain?
Is the National Front essentially the same as it was 50 years ago? Does its conduct under Nazi occupation inform anyone on its current priorities?
Reminding the world of the FN’s origins as a Nazi-collaborationist party is akin to conservatives’ reminding all that Democrats were historically the party of slavery, segregation, and the Ku Klux Klan.
Aaron’s question is a fair one regardless.
What is FN’s de-demonization all about–revamping its public image to be seen as no longer antisemitic or truly excising the antisemitism which informed its origins?
The base is close enough, yes, that I think it makes sense to remind people of this, especially since many Americans don’t know it at all. And while obviously we’re not now in the era of Nazi Germany, so the peril is not as acute, enough of her close advisors and senior figures in the Front seem to be apologists for Nazism, or certainly apologists for Vichy, that the likening it to the relationship between the present-day Tories and Chamberlain doesn’t seem a reasonable analogy to me.
Consider Frédéric Chatillon and Axel Loustau, for example. They’re in her inner circle, they’ve been among her closest associates and friends since the 1980s, and the “de-demonization” strategy didn’t go so far as to boot them (which is notable, because it did go so far as to boot her own father). They’re genuine national socialists, with all the historic meaning of that phrase, which has caused a lot of strife within the party. Other advisors, like Aymeric Chauprade, who was her principal adviser on foreign affairs, fell out with her partly over his pro-Israel stance and partly over her unwillingness to give them the heave-ho. Some of this has been reported in The New York Times, but it’s much more widely known here, and the people who vote NF definitely know it. This is the way Chauprade put it in an interview with the Times:
And this is borne out in court documents, tons of interviews — they don’t even hide it. That Times article ran with a photo that makes the case pretty well: This is Chatillon at a rally for neo-Nazi student movement:
Note the Iron Cross, which is what real Nazis use these days in Europe because they’ll be arrested for displaying the Swastika. It’s not a watered-down Nazism; it’s the real thing. Court affidavits include testimony from former members of that group who describe the way Chatillon organized rallies where students showed up shouting “Sieg Heil” and giving Nazi salutes; his affidavit says, “During that period, every year, Frédéric Chatillon organized a dinner on the birthday of the ‘Führer,’ April 20, to pay homage to ‘this great man,” he apparently also liked to kiss a portrait of Hitler saying things like, “My beloved Führer, he is magnificent.” The affidavit says, “The only debatable point, in the use of the term ‘neo-Nazi,’ is the wrongful qualifier ‘neo.’”
If you feel like running them through Google Translate, here’s some of the reporting in French:
VIDEO – “Saluts nazis et croix gammées” : un proche accable Chatillon et Loustau, les hommes de Marine Le Pen
Salut nazi, «extermination» des Arabes: à Lyon, identitaires et frontistes font la fête ensemble — that’s especially notable because on the video they’re saying, “Everybody hates the Arabs. Today we dare not talk about extermination, so we say remigration! Enough already, Stalin’s methods weren’t so bad!” They’re yukking it up, and as usual you’ve got people defending this by saying they were just joking, come on — but they’re punctuating this with some very un-funny Nazi salutes, ones I’m just never going to think are all in good fun. Imagine how it sounds if you’re a French man or woman of Arab origin here (like all of these people, for example) and you hear that; or if they’re your wives or husbands or kids — are you going to feel totally sure they’d never dream of trying to exterminate you? I frankly think you’d be a fool if you concluded they couldn’t possibly mean that. The Jews who dismissed Hitler’s ravings about exterminating the Jews as a vulgar joke were very, very wrong.
“Les hommes de l’ombre du FN”: un documentaire sur l’inquiétant entourage de Marine Le Pen. This is a documentary about the FN youth wing that aired recently, focusing on Nicolas Crochet, treasurer Axel Loustau and Frédéric Chatillon, (who are also all financial fraudsters), and which makes it pretty clear that we’ve got what they call a disturbing “nostalgia for Nazism” on our hands. Here Chauperade, says, “Marine Le Pen ignores or neglect the dangerousness of these people. There is no reason why this group should disappear [in influence]. This is the group that will have brought Marine Le Pen to power. Obviously she can’t do anything without them and she can’t do anything against them, which is obviously very serious.” I’d agree.
Chatillon, Loustau, Péninque…les “gudards” de Marine Le Pen: They note that in 2009, Frédéric Chatillon supported Dieudonné (the quenelle guy), as well as Faurisson (the one who denies the existence of the Nazi gas chambers) during their trials. He also paid what he called were “galvanizing”visits to to Leon Degrelle, the Belgian collaborationist leader during the Second World War.
Interpellée sur le geste d’un de ses proches, Marine Le Pen tacle Pujadas: This is about another one of her close intimates, Axel Loustau, who’s just an all-out piece of filth (Nazi is maybe too strong, though he too likes his Hitler salutes) and about the other so-called “négationnistes” (Holocaust-deniers) and “visceral anti-Semites” around her.
All of this is just very well-known stuff here; not really much dispute about it. No one in the UK Conservative Party would even dream of carrying on this way, and would immediately be turfed out — it would be unimaginably scandalous — if photos or quotes like this showed up in the news. Even if you could argue (and you can’t) that the Tories are still full of Chamberlain sympathisers, that would be something pretty different from Nazi sympathizers (or Nazis); Chamberlain was a weak and delusional man, but never believed the Nazis were just terrific, or a model for Britain, only that another European war was be a catastrophe to be avoided at all costs.