Posted on 04/21/2002 6:50:43 PM PDT by summer
How is calling for the annihilation of the Muslims any different from calling for the annihilation of the Jews? Genocide is wrong, regardless of which way it swings. I'm not the one changing its definition to fit my goals.
I wonder if Herr Thadden would be equally distressed if the only options were the Left and the Extreme Left.
-Kevin
I won't deny that the statement was monumentally insensitive, politically stupid, and very likely designed to provoke shock and outrage. But on the face of it, that quote cannot be considered anti-Semitic--unless I am missing a big chunk of the context. Of course, the news outlets themselves never provide the context...
According to Prof. R.J. Rummel (author, Death by Government, a study in 20th century genocide and democide), some 170,000,000 souls were lost in the various wars, purges, and pogroms of the 20th century. The Holocaust thus represents some 3.5% of the total.
Le Pen's critics would be right to call him inhumane, insensitive, and needlessly caustic. But the charge of anti-Semitism, if based on this idiotic quote alone, doesn't stick. Does it?
Le Pen was convicted and fined heavily under French law for some comments he made in the past with respect to the Holocaust. I think the jury's still out on him.
French Jews Want
Anti-Semitism On Table
By Andrew Diamond
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
PARIS, Feb. 7 -- With presidential elections approaching, French
Jewish leaders see an opportunity to air their grievances with a
government they believe has waffled in its response to
anti-Semitic aggression.
The election landscape became slightly more treacherous this
week as Jean-Marie Le Pen, longtime leader of the extreme-right
National Front, announced he has the signatures of 500 elected
officials needed to run in the first round of presidential elections
this April.
During some three decades on the national stage, Le Pen has
made no secret of his anti-Semitic views, a tactic that has
contributed to his support in conservative areas of southeastern
France.
On a national radio show in 1987, Le Pen called the Nazi gas
chambers a mere "detail" of World War II. The comment earned
him widespread notoriety -- and was followed by the strongest
electoral returns of his career.
Le Pen amassed 4.4 million votes, nearly 15 percent of the
French electorate, in the first round of the 1988 presidential
election.
Since that time his support has been waning -- a situation that led
a large contingent of National Front members to defect in 1999
and form a new center-right party, the Republican National
Movement, under the former party secretary of the National Front,
Bruno Megret.
Following Megret's lead, Le Pen is trying to reinvent himself as a
more "respectable" candidate of the center-right.
"I am not perfect," he responded recently to a question about his
history of anti-Semitic remarks, which Le Pen now refers to as
"unfortunate phrases."
Le Pen, 73, appears to have toned down his rhetoric for his fourth
-- and, in all likelihood, final -- presidential bid.
But his "France First" platform still contains an anti-Jewish plank.
In December, a National Front primer entitled "Le Pen Was, Is,
And Will Be Right" revisited the candidate's past views on the
Jewish "lobby" in France.
"We would be wrong to forget the role of the Jewish Masonic
International of B'nai B'rith," Le Pen claimed. "This powerful and
hidden minority has chosen to erect invisible barriers inside the
French people."
So far, it appears doubtful that Le Pen's new posture of
"respectability" will appeal to many voters in the political center.
The French daily Le Monde, for example, greeted his campaign
announcement with derisive cartoons and the caption, "He
presents himself as 'a man of the center-right,' but his program
has not changed."
While Le Pen may not be a viable candidate for president,
however, his presence in the contest may prove problematic for
Jewish organizations seeking a stronger governmental response
to a rise in anti-Semitic attacks.
In the latest such incident, anti-Semitic vandals defaced a statue
in Paris honoring Alfred Dreyfus. The vandals scrawled a Star of
David and wrote the words "Dirty Jew" on the statue.
In a case that sparked a wave of anti-Semitism in France,
Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French army, was falsely
convicted of treason in 1894, publicly degraded and sent to
Devil's Island, a penal colony in South America.
He served five years of a life sentence before receiving a
presidential pardon.
In three other anti-Semitic incidents earlier this year, groups of
Arab youths stoned Jewish teen-agers and schoolchildren in
Paris suburbs.
Those incidents largely passed under the radar of the French
media, but the French dailies did provide substantial discussion
on anti-Semitic violence at the end of 2001.
In a campaign that thus far has emphasized rising juvenile
delinquency and the need for greater security from attacks by
teen-agers, French Jews are depending on media attention to
force the two presidential front-runners, incumbent Jacques
Chirac and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, to take more assertive
positions on anti-Semitic aggression.
Many French Jews view the inclusion of such discussion in the
presidential campaign as a key objective, more important even
than who wins.
French Jewish leaders long have criticized both leading
candidates for downplaying the seriousness of the anti-Semitic
incidents.
With Le Pen's entry into the race, Jewish leaders potentially will
face an additional challenge as they seek to make their voices
heard.
Le Pen has in the past made insinuations about the "Jewish
lobby's"
alleged power over the national media -- a message that some
fear could color and confuse coverage of Jewish issues.
(c) Jewish Telegraphic Agency
http://www.jewish.com/news/french0211.shtml
40% of the popular vote was for the right, split between 20% hard right (Le Pen and Megret) and 20% center-right (the Gaullists). The rest is in the center - UDF, Lib Dems, Ruralist. The big difference between the two ends of the spectrum is that the right side is mostly organized into two large parties, while the left is scattered over 9, only one of them of appreciable size (socialists).
As for the comment that Le Pen is "victim of the same sort of smear campaign as American Conservatives", I think this shows a complete lack of understanding of the lineage of the French right and where Le Pen comes from. He is not a Barry Goldwater by any stretch of the imagination.
He is a former paratroop officer and veteran of the war in Algeria, who spent his formative years fighting in France's vanished colonial empire, torturing FLN terrorists for Massu's Casbah war. He was an intelligence officer in the 10th Parachute Division in the Battle of Algiers. He was amnestied along with everyone else for actions in that era by general laws passed in 1964 and 1966. His idea of the right comes out of that struggle, its coup threats and attempts, its betrayals and massacres, racial warfare and terrorism.
He founded the FN in 1972 to unify various elements of the radical right. There are layers of it in France, having no real counterpart in free-market, centrist America, and nothing whatever like Goldwater's libertarianism. The more respectable members traced themselves back to turn of the century Catholic conservatism; others to Vichy; others to the OAS. When founded it included the PNF, outright neo-Nazis lead by former members of the SS. They broke with Le Pen's FN in 1981. Presently FN spokesmen are half ultramontane Catholic and half later more radical versions of the French hard right. They do not believe in working with even the Gaullists.
It may help to have some idea of the intellectual and political tradition of the hard right in France. Its origins can be traced back to Josphe de Maistre and the exiled nobility of the French revolution period. "Man is too wicked to be free" was the core idea. Conspiracy theory, race thinking, and Catholic ultramontane ideology fleshed it out. As in, the free masons are duping the untermenschen to sell themselves to the devil, instead of obeying the moral authority of the nobility and the religious hierarchy.
Then in the 19th century the Count de Gobineau added modern race thinking, that demographics are destiny and racial purity or mixing is the key to political vitality or decadence and decline. It was a replacement ideology for the vanishing role of the nobility. Stripped of their political, military and then their economic leading roles, they turned to predicting decline and mayhem from loss of their purity of blood.
At the turn of the century, the French hard right took up antisemitism under Edouard Drumount and Jules Guerin. The former edited the Libre Parole and the later led the Ligue Antisemite. The ideology spread to colonial France, for example the mayor of Algiers, Max Regis - "water the tree of freedom with the blood of the Jews" - during the Dreyfus Affair. This was at a time when Civilta Cattolica, the ultramontane mouthpiece of the last reactionary popes, was denouncing "Rothschild Imperialism".
Around the same time Charles Maurras led the new formation Action Francais, a group of atheist monarchists who mimicked the ultramontane propaganda line (against Jews, protestants, free-masons, and foreigners), and who were infatuated with "Caesarism" and "Direct Action". Understand, these are the more respectable antecedents.
Then came Vichy and outright collaboration with the Nazis, including numerous French members of the SS. Who later formed the PNF, part of Le Pen's FN for its first 10 years, but too much baggage in the last 20. Less well known, after WW II many members of the SS joined the French Foreign Legion to get away from their past, and soon found themselves fighting in Indochina. It was easy enough to adapt to a war against communism and lesser races half way around the world. Alongside French regular units, especially the paras. By the time of the Algerian war, they had been rubbing shoulders for quite some time.
The FLN also traces its organizational roots to the Nazis, incidentally. Nazi Arabs of WW II helped train its founding members. The Mufti of Jerusalem among them. Their terrorist methods, half Nazi and half Communist, then brought about the horrific Algerian war. The paras replied with General Bossu's policy of torture, which broke the FLN's urban terrorism in the Battle of Algiers. Here is where Le Pen went to "school".
The extreme measures used by the French military in Algeria sparked a reaction in metropolitan France, despite their effectiveness. (In the case of the hard left, probably *because* of their effectiveness). The army bucked against civilian attempts to put restrictions on them. In 1958, they were ready to bring down the 4th republic in a military coup - they already controlled Algeria and had just taken over in Corsica, de facto. De Gaulle came back to lead them or to stop them, depending on how you look at it. They at first thought the former, he actually intended the latter.
By 1961 De Gaulle had amassed enough power than he could dispense with the generals who had helped bring him to power. He broke them, although they tried another revolt then, against him this time, but when it was too late. The rank and file followed de Gaulle. The leaders were arrested, although later amnestied. With their institutional base in the army broken, de Gaulle changed course and began preparing a French withdrawl from Algeria.
The hard right reacted to this by forming the OAS, the organization de l'armee secrete. It was a right wing, "pied noir" (Algerian colonist) terrorist group, and it imitated the methods of the FLN (to wit - kill all the moderates and anybody who tries to compromise in order to enforce political polarization) against the French army. They killed about 12000 civilians and 500 French military or police. They tried several times to assassinate de Gaulle.
The end in Algeria was not pretty. The FLN, sensing victory, went on rampages. The OAS retaliated, and when it did the French military went after them instead of after the FLN. In the end a neighborhood with 60,000 French colonists was blasted by fighter bombers, point blank tank fire, and then assaulted by several divisions of infantry.
The remnants of the pied noirs fled to France - 1.4 million of them in all. Where they didn't exactly think very highly of de Gaulle, or the left, or Arabs. Arab loyalists who had supported the French all along were left to the non-existent mercies of the FLN, and probably around 100,000 of them were slaughtered. Sometimes right under the noses of the remaining French troops, who were ordered to stand by and do nothing.
Going through this sort of thing tends to politicize those involved. Le Pen was a pro-colonist army officer through all of it, and saw the whole as an enourmous sellout by de Gaulle and the majority of the French people. He was not concerned with the size of government. He was not concerned with the defense of liberty. He was madder than hell at the whole French establishment from de Gaulle leftward. He decided to speak for the pied noirs, the Algerians who had come back to France after the defeat.
10 years after the war he was leading the French hard right. The platform was what you might expect from someone who had seen the OAS, the coup efforts, the battle of Algiers at first hand, etc. Nothing moderate about it. At that point in time, he welcomed the support of veterans of the SS. He wanted and still wants all Arabs expelled from France. He believes with Gobineau that race is what matters and demography is destiny, and only a willingness to wield political power ruthlessly allows one race to defeat another.
In the 1990s, the politically respectable way (to the extent that it is) to sell these views to the French public, is to cast it as concern over immigration and crime. "Those Arab immigrants are causing all the crime, and diluting the French nation". That is the public face of it, meant to sound presentable. But everybody knows he means expulsion, and everyone knows why he wants it. He says things like Chirac (the Gaullist president) is "in the pay of Jewish organizations, and particularly of the notorious B’nai B’rith".
Barry Goldwater he is not...
Le Pen apprears to be an embittered verteran. Well, his background you describe here has resemblance to that of Adolf Hitler. Hitler's cause was to avenge "injustice". Did not know French colonialists are still so active in France.
My problem, I suppose, is that the shallowness of media coverage about Le Pen infuriates me. He may well be an anti-Semite, per JasonC's comments above. But the fact that our media routinely indicts and convicts him based on this single statement really rubs me the wrong way. It is so typical--analysis becomes conventional wisdom, which becomes shorthand, which becomes sloppy thinking.
Anti-Semitism is a serious charge. False accusations only cheapen it, and so it is imperative that we maintain a proper rationale for making such an accusation.
Of course the French Right is not as "Libertarian" as the American Right. No European Conservative group is. They have a different tradition--very different tradition. While upholding the old order--what the term Right really denotes--in America means upholding an Agrarian Jeffersonian Republic, steeped in the values of the Founding Fathers, the term Right in Europe has always involved upholding the traditions of the great families, etc..
However, while the scale is vastly different--the former French Empire being considerably more significant in relation to Metropolitan France than our own Empire--the reaction of the French Right to DeGaule's betrayal of the Settlers in Algeria is not appreciably different to the outrage of the American Right over our surrender of the Panama Canal. It has other echos in some aspects of our Western expansion. To the French Right, the Algerian Settlers (I mean the French Settlers in Algeria, not the present Algerian Settlers in France) were seen much as Americans saw the early Texans.)
I do not think that most right leaning Americans, had they been transposed into French in the late 1950s and 1960s, would have felt any different about Algeria than did the French Right. The bulk of the differences, you cite, simply relate to the particular tradition being upheld.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
He even wished that Charles Martel had been defeated so that Germany might have had the Islamic creed.
Not true. An Arab suggested to Hitler that but for the Battle of Tours, Europe would be Islamic, to which Hitler replied that if that had happened, Germany (and Europe) would simply have arisen as world powers in their own right anyway; they would not have remained subject, but would have still taken over the world (albeit as Muslims rather than as Christians). The point was not that Hitler thought that becoming Muslim was a good thing (he did not say that) but rather that Germany and Europe would have recovered from a defeat and eventually dominated the world anyway, no matter what religion they practiced.
That's a pretty slipshod misinterpretation of what Hitler said, to misinterpret it as an endorsement of Islam. Now, Nietzsche said some kind words about Islam, but that was only in comparison to Christianity. I doubt that Nietzsche would have actually liked living in an Islamic culture.
Even Le Pen will support the Jews against the muslim savages. He is a xenophone, but not a Nazi. If you remember, Hitler had a real love-fest going on with the mohammedans.
That's because, back in the 30's and 40's, there were no Muslim immigrants in Germany or elsewhere in Europe, and no one considered the Islamic world to be any kind of threat to the West. The Islamic world was very weak and docile, compared to now.
Hitler were he alive today would have a very different view about Muslims. He'd want them out of Europe, for starters. Don't confuse Hitler's tactical courting of the Muslims for political and military reasons during a world war with a "love-fest". Realpolitik has no notion of any kind of "love-fest".
Le Pen was convicted and fined heavily under French law for some comments he made in the past with respect to the Holocaust. I think the jury's still out on him.
In France, you can get convicted and fined (or jailed) for saying "the sky is blue" if there are enough aggrieved "minority" groups out to get you. It isn't just the "holocaust" either; merely questioning any of the "facts" that were "established" by the IMT at Nuremburg can get you thrown in jail, even those "facts" which have since been disproven by historians of all political persuasions.
It's not just "nazis" they go after, either: a left-wing author who wrote a book critical of Israel was also prosecuted. It isn't just France; this legal terrorism exists all over Western Europe. There are absolutely no American-style 1st Amendment protections for free speach or free press. These in theory exist, but are so hamstrung by all manner of "exceptions" and loop holes as to be effectively meaningless.
All this legal terrorism tells us about Le Pen, ultimately, is that he is any enemy of the French Establishment. Taking these prosecutions at face value means taking the French political establishment at face value. A foolish thing to do, IMO.
You are omitting the rest of Hitler's point. He also observed that a Germany rooted in Islamic principles would be far more ruthless than the Germany rooted in Christianity, and thus believed that Germany would have ultimately been stronger under Islam.
In other words, Hitler was flattering his guest (the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem): a harmless political maneuver which cost him nothing.
Possibly that's the case; or maybe he really did believe it.
Well, let's do a little contextualizing, shall we. In WWII, Hitler needed the help of Arabs to further his war aims in the near east (and by extension, Soviet central asia and the Caucasus). There were no Muslims living or migrating to Germany.
It's now 2002; you have militant Islamics by the millions living in Germany and millions more living throughout Europe, and more are coming; and they show an increasing tendency towards more extremist versions of Islamicism. Now, do you still think that Hitler would be making sweet-talk with Moslems, were he in politics today?
Doubtless he would make common cause with them against the Jews, but not at the expense of tolerating them living in Europe. Hitler's attitude toward Islam was a case of practical politics, not of genuine desire to submit to Islam (if I may pun). Sure, maybe in an alternate universe an Islamic Germany would be "more ruthless" than a Christian Germany (although one does not have to search very far for numerous examples of Christian ruthlessness; on this score I frankly see no differences between the different "monotheisms").
But Hitler himself was more of an atheist who found it politic to placate the religious biases of his audiences. No, Hitler was not a pagan (Mein Kampf makes short work of the volkish neo-pagans) and he encouraged non-confrontational approaches to religion when possible, since his real interests were in politics, diplomacy, and war, not in religion. Many nazis did not immitate Hitler in this restraint vis-a-vis religion, however.
How do you compare Buchanan's "demography is destiny" ideology to Le Pen's?
Our Italian allly hampered us almost everywhere. For example, he prevented us from employing revolutionary policies in North Africa . . . for our Islamic friends suddenly saw in us voluntary or involuntary accomplices of their oppressers. The memory of the barbarous reprisals against the Senoussis is still very much alive among them. Moreover, the Duce's ridiculous claim to be regarded as the "sword of Islam" arouses just as much laughter today as it did before the war. This title rightly belongs by rights to Mohammed and to a great conqueror like Omar. Mussolini had it conferred upon himself by a few poor devils whom he paid or terrorized. There was a chance for us to pursue a grand policy toward Islam. But we missed that opportunity, like so much else, because of our loyalty to the Italian alliance.Source: Hitler by Joachim C. Fest
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.