Le Monde has a selection of posters put out against Jean-Marie Le Pen. Some of them are extremely graphic, and equate Le Pen with Hitler. While this may not be too terrifically far from the truth, it also strikes me as being terrifically one sided. Jonah Goldberg correctly points out that Le Pen is not the monster that the French make him out to be. Quoth Goldberg:
This does raise one of the more annoying aspects of Le Pen fever. The French think Le Pen is a "new Hitler" because he’s allegedly anti-Semitic and obviously anti-immigrant (though this is a bit redundant since most of the immigrants he hates are Semites too, just not Jewish ones). But the cheese-eating surrender monkeys have, over the years, permitted avowed Stalinists to hold positions of power with barely a word of protest. For example, Maurice Thorez, the old head of the French Communist Party — the largest in Europe — was cavalier about the fact that his Stalinism would require the murder of thousands of people should he ever come to power. His party often received 25 percent of the vote.
Exactly. The French have no problem with Trotskyites and Stalinists, but raise a holy stink when they get someone on the right. Le Pen wants to temporarily detain and then deport immigrants, predominantly Arabs. While that’s probably not the smartest solution, there’s nothing there that says anything about killing them or putting them into slave labor camps. Granted, it would still be a massive civil rights violation, but Nazism it’s not. Another good point that Goldberg makes:
The people attacking Jews for the last few months — or years — have for the most part been Arabs and North Africans who Le Pen hates and who hate Le Pen. The people making excuses for these attacks on Jews in France and, let’s face it, anywhere else in the world, inhabit the highest levels of the liberal-socialist French — and European — establishment. I would bet that if you compared the attitudes of first-time Le Pen voters — the folks who wanted to send a message about crime and immigration — to the folks who voted for the Marxist Mailman, you’d fine a lot more anti-Semitism among the followers of postal Communism than you would among the Le Penners.
The current Eurocrat elite seems to be more in favor of mass genocide than Le Pen is. Supporting the actions of the Palestinians as they support their thugocracy through suicide bombings is perfectly acceptable to the French elites, but when Le Pen speaks up against their unaccountable rule from above and questions some of the assumptions of the French system he’s instantly a Hitler and a threat to democracy itself.
Le Pen is a blowhard, an old-fashioned nativist like Pat Buchanan, and is quite likely a bona-fide racist, but the hysterical reactions against him from France only fuel his criticisms of the French political system. The elites are the ones who have been acting in a manner that distaines democracy, especially in terms of EU regulation. They are the ones who have supported racist regimes in the Middle East, and they are the ones who are getting exactly what they deserve.
