While it is a foregone conclusion that Chirac will triumph, especially now that his former political opponent Jospin is throwing his support behind him, LePen has seized the moment to foment his own revolutionary views. LePen has targeted immigrants. The media also factors in LePen’s “anti-semitic” views — the former paratrooper has called gas chambers “a detail of WW II.”
There are significant issues at play with that last statement. First, let’s consider LePen’s campaign slogan: “French first”. From this swells the anti-immigrant rhetoric, LePen’s program, for instance of increasing welfare for white French citizens and of sending refugees that are in “transit” to Britain.
Sounds like nationalism, granted ultra-nationalism. Yet nothing that has not been seen elsewhere. The bogeyman of Nazism is everywhere in Europe. In Austria — birthplace of Hitler — an extreme right-winger was elected to lead the country. In the Czech republic — home to some of the most intense pogroms of history, the first country to fall to Hitler, a publisher is in court arguing for the right to publish Mein Kampf. Ukraine, a country torn between its slavic heritage and a foothold in in the old Austro-Hungarian empire, by extension, a part of western Eutrope, is experiencing an explosion of vandalism directed against synagogues and growth in public anti-Jewish sentiment. Even placid and proper Sweden has seen reaction against immigrants of a different dermal pigmentation. In short, this is not a French phenomenon.
Small wonder. For what is at stake is a European issue. LePen is against the European Union — as are many Europeans. The democratic system of majority decision in referenda, many of them close, means that there still are tens of millions perhaps even well over a hundred million Europeans against the EU. That is a formidable number, an aquifer for people like LePen to tap into.
The collaboration issue is especially painful in France, and is milked by the left as much as possible. The circus in the mid 80’s around the arrest and trial of the Butcher of Lyons, Klaus Barbie focussed on precisely those painful wounds. Barbie was a war criminal, no doubt, but the left and Jewish groups snatched the chance to trot out the duplicity of many Frenchmen during the war.
Historian Julian Jackson, in a book published last year titled France: The Dark Years 1940–1944, provides perhaps the definitive history of the period by combining views of occupation, collaboration, and resistance. Jackson emphatically makes the point that one must ignore the traditional dichotomy between “collaboration” and “resistance”. One must accept, in view of all historical evidence, that the ideological frontiers between Vichy and the Resistance were often blurred. A social history, the book should be read by apologists for either side. Presciently, Jackson notes that LePen’s Front national has provided a home to former Pétainists and collaborationists. It is no secret that LePen loathes DeGaulle, indulges Pétain, and most obviously, openly expresses his dislike for Jews. Thus leaving him wide open to the broadsides of the western media, that is ever so careful not to alienate the people that they ignored during WW II. Yet negationism is alive and well in the France of today, a legacy if you will, of the internecine battles that generations have waged on French soil.
Critical to an understanding of the issues at play throughout Europe is the awareness that there is an inherent conflict between nationalism and the push for a borderless Europe — the European Union. This leaves the ground fertile for extremists like Jean-Marie LePen, and should serve as a clarion wake-up call for vacillating politicians elsewhere.