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There has been a widespread outbreak of harumphing, moaning and hand wringing by the forces of statism across Europe over the rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen‘s National Front Party in France.
Yet when Le Pen declares he is “socially to the left, economically to the right”, his remarks go reported but largely unchallenged. However somehow regardless of his being bitterly opposed to market driven mechanisms, free trade, ‘Americanization’ and globalization, the newspapers demonstrate yet again that the term “right wing” is largely meaningless.
John Lichfield of the Irish Independent tells us “Let us not exaggerate. Let us shut our eyes and think of France, the real France” after himself pointing out that when you add the neo-fascist vote in France for Le Pen to the extreme Troskyist vote for the far left, it is a whopping 35% of the French electorate. Sorry John, you cannot write off one third of a country as ‘not the real France’. Violent collectivist statism is as French as camembert cheese, Laetitia Casta, the Eiffel Tower… and the Guillotine.
It is the long process of erosion that French civil society itself has been undergoing for over 150 years that provides such welcoming ground for the Jean-Marie Le Pen’s of this world. Jaques Chirac is not part of the solution but is rather part of the problem. ‘National Greatness’ conservatives like him are no less statist than socialist Lionel Jospin or neo-fascist Jean Le Pen. There simply is no significant political constituency in France that does not see the state as being the very centre of society, rather than just its boundary keeper. Almost all significant interaction is touched on by the state and thus reduces society to a series of competing political, rather than social, factions, all clamouring for the violence backed recourse of the state to champion their interests. These people who are aghast at the rise of Le Pen are the self same people who tilled the soil in which he grows.
Statist political interests of ‘left’ and ‘right’ appropriate a vast swathe of the national wealth, encouraging people to simply vote themselves other people’s money, and then wonder why folks have no time for tiresome and time consuming social integration or a dynamist assimilative culture. Why bother when it is clear that the normal way for solving all problems is the hammer of the state? You don’t like American products competing with French ones in the shops regardless of the fact other people want to buy them? “There ought to be a law against it” and both socialist Lionel Jospin and conservative Jaques Chirac agree with that. You don’t like the sound of all those English language pop songs on the radio and TV? “There ought to be a law against it” and both socialist Lionel Jospin and conservative Jaques Chirac agree with that too. If all these other unjust things are democratically sanctified, then if you don’t like Africans or Moroccans, well, I guess there ought to be a law against them as well if that is the way everything works. If everything is up for grabs by the ‘democratic’ state, well, don’t be surprised if everything really does mean everything.
So why am I grinning? Simple. It shows that the entire edifice of the French Fifth Republic is rotten to its kleptocratic statist core. This is what the European Union’s amen chorus wish Britain to tie its political, economic and cultural fortunes to. Yet in fact this is a salutary lesson where statism inevitably leads… to ever more profound forms of statism, such as the nationalist racism of Le Pen. The non-assimilative post-modern collectivism of Jospin leads to the even less assimilative atavistic collectivism of Le Pen.
And to think the one thing Jospin, Chirac and Le Pen’s supporters all have in common is that they all look down on the Anglosphere. From people like that I take that as a compliment.
No link I regret to say but the BBC is reporting that exit polls in France indicate that fire-brand nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen has edged out the socialist Prime-Minister Lionel Jospin into second place in the presidential elections behind front-runner Jacques Chirac. At the moment it appears as if Chirac and Le Pen will be contesting the presidency in a head-to-head fight. This could get very….well, interesting.
The first round of the French Presential Elections are underway. Here is a list of the candidates:
Lionel Jospin
Current Prime Minister. Socialist.
Jacques Chirac
Incumbent. Markets himself as a ‘Conservative’ but his policies are virtually indistinguishable from those of Jospin.
Jean-Pierre Chevenement
Former Interior Minister. Marxist nationalist.
Jean-Marie Le Pen
Veteran National Socialist.
Bruno Megret
Another National Socialist.
Noel Mamere
Green Party.
Arlette Laguiller
Trotskyite Worker’s Struggle Party.
Robert Hue
Communist Party.
Francois Bayrou
Former Minister of Education. Centrist.
Jean Saint Josse
Hunting, Fishing, Shooting, Nature and Traditions Party.
Daniel Gluckstein
Party of Workers. Another Communist.
Christiane Taubira
Left Radical Party.
Olivier Besancenot
Revolutionary Communist League.
Corinne Lepage
Nationalist Enviromentalist.
Christine Boutin
Socialist.
Alain Madelin
Liberal Democracy Party. Advocates Anglo-Saxon style free market reforms. Very unpopular. Doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of even getting past the first round.
The two candidates polling the most votes go through to a run-off for the Presidency. It is widely expected that these will be Jospin and Chirac although Arlette Lagullier has been putting in a strong show and could pip either one of them.
Many years ago I visited Bergen, in Norway, and the locals told me that the weather for my stay was by far the best it had ever been. Well, now I’m in the south of France, in a town called le Boulou (they call it a ‘village’ here), just south of Perpignan. The weather is the worst it’s ever been. On Wednesday night there was a, by South of England standards, regulation noisy thunderstorm, with lots of rain, as you’d expect from a thunderstorm, and there was further heavy rain the next day. This turned the pathetic little smear of dampness they call their river into a real river! A raging torrent the width of a football field in fact. Le Boulouans couldn’t sleep for the din! The weather is now improving, and by the time I leave it will have recovered its normal warmth and sunniness.
Meanwhile France is … France. The food shops are far better than in England, but finding a job is far harder than in England – two facts which may be related. Employing other people is a nightmare of expense and bureaucratic awfulness. If you aren’t something like an enarque or a multinational or some such, the only way to get ahead economically is to run a Mom and Pop store of some sort and do your own labouring. Thus France abounds with these, and they’re run like crosses between ordinary businesses and art galleries, being expressions both of love and “greed, for want of a better word” (see my previous posting about Wall Street). France has the same inane cartoons on TV as England. It also, more famously, has the same currency as nearby Spain, which I have to admit is a convenience if you live twenty minutes by car from Spain, as my hosts do. The internet seems to work.
Le Boulou seems to be a real ‘community’. People know each other, perhaps because they still shop in the same local Mom and Pop stores that the English have abandoned for supermarkets. Tomorrow I am attending a rugby match, which will presumably abound with local spirit, rugby being at its strongest in this part of France (France having just beaten England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and Italy, i.e. everybody, in the recently concluded Six Nations Rugby Championship). I’m looking forward to this game greatly.
I’ve not been able to meet any local libertarian intellectuals so far. It would seem that they’re all on holiday, elsewhere.
Having made a dig at our Gallic cousins on Thursday it is only fair to point to a welcome burst of common sense from the land which has of course yielded such wise people as Alexis de Toqueville and Frederic Bastiat, both genuine liberals (i.e. not socialists).
In the Financial Times’ editorial pages today, psychoanalyst and author Michel Schneider writes that in France, the state has become so big as to represent a mother-figure to many of its citizens, who increasingly regard themselves as children. Schneider is the author of Big Mother: the psychopathology of political life, and the whole article is worth a read. So as Dr Glenn Reynolds would say, go read it.
Great news item via Reuters in Paris (no link yet, sorry):”a Paris bank employee who works for 37 hours a week, has 37 days holiday a year and sometimes wonders what to do with all her free time.
“When I go down to visit my family in Brittany for a long weekend they ask whether I actually have a job at all,” she says of the new leisure granted to her and millions of other French by a four-year-old law that has shortened working hours.
As certain columnists like to say, you couldn’t make it up.
Justice is sometimes achieved. Jean Bove, a key figure in the anti-globalisation movement who trashed a McDonald’s restaurant in France, has been jailed for three months for his offence, committed in 1999.
A report by Reuters on today states he claims he was protesting about US tariffs on cheese and other French foodstuffs, but I do not recall this French twerp as a principled advocate of free trade for American products in Europe. Frédéric Bastiat he most definitely is not!
An article in Wired reports a victory against the ‘forces of darkness’ with a US court refusing to allow the French state to impose Internet restrictions across the world. Does this mean I think wacko groups like the KKK or Nazi historical fantasists are ok? No I don’t. However I do not want my judgement and prejudices to have force of law, unlike the lawyer for the forces of statist authoritarianism, Stephane Lilti.
“If this ruling, which we will appeal against in the United States, is upheld, it will give total impunity to all those who seek technological asylum in the United States,” Stephane Lilti told Reuters. “This would make America a haven for all types of people on the extreme right and racists … for us French it will be extremely difficult to ensure our justice system’s decisions are respected because we will be dealing with someone who can take refuge in a U.S. computer.”
Excellent. Every time we can make a repressive law in France or anywhere else unworkable, the light of liberty shines a little brighter across the entire world. Why should anyone respect the French justice system’s decisions to repress free speech? Notice Lilti does not seem to worry about ‘the extreme left’. I guess this means a post to the Internet in support of the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot is just fine by him.
What force advocating statist lawyers like Lilti do not choose to realise is that the best way to destroy irrational buffons like the KKK is not by forcing them underground but by actually shining the light of day on them. Let them out into the open where everyone can see what preposterous little people they are by reading their own words… sort of like the way Stephane Lilti is exposed by his words as a noxious enemy of liberty who rails in fury against the rest of the world’s refusal to be a party to the repression of French internet users.
As Sinead O’Connor put it in a song:
Though their own words.
they will be exposed,
they’ve got a severe case
of the ‘Emperor’s new clothes’
So I would like to raise my glass to all you technological asylum seekers, yearning to speak free…the brave ones, the oppressed ones, the articulate ones and yes, even you stupid hateful ignorant ones.
And to those who would gag us, censor us and unplug us… fuck you
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