RUTHFULLY YOURS

The success of Marine Le Pen in the first round of the French presidential election has the global left resorting to its usual exaggerations and dire predictions of a fascist resurgence. As happened with the progressive smears of Donald Trump, Le Pen’s similar appeals to patriotism, national identity, and the need to defend the nation’s culture and interests are immediately turned into sinister dog-whistles for the crypto-fascists, racist hordes just waiting for the Great Leader to start the pogroms and fill the gulags.

One hundred days into Trump’s administration, of course, nothing has happened that comes even close to beginning a fascist transformation of America. But the persistent phenomenon of the eternal fascist threat raises old questions about and other failed collectivists political ideologies.

Why is “fascism” or “right-wing” an epithet, but “communist” or “left-wing” isn’t? Why do the media, even those considered conservative, use a phrase like “extreme right” or “hard right,” but seldom use “extreme left” or “hard left”? Why is Le Pen’s National Front regularly described with such epithets, but Communist Parties or radical Green Parties rarely are? And why is there the vaguely honorific cliché “a man of the left,” but not the equivalent “a man of the right”?

In short, how has an ideology whose butcher’s bill is twice as large as fascism’s managed to stay acceptable? How do progressives in America like Bernie Sanders boast of honeymooning in the Soviet Union, but do not pay a political price for admiring a regime that killed more innocents than Hitler? How can a police-state like Cuba, which imprisons and murders and impoverishes its own people, continue to attract starry-eyed European and American progressives who at home loudly proclaim their concern for human rights and freedom and equality? Why are tee-shirts that sport images of mass murderers like Mao or thugs like Che considered chic, while Hitler’s or Mussolini’s likeness is verboten? Why in Europe can you wave the hammer-and-sickle flag of the defunct Soviet Union, but the swastika is forbidden by law? Why can the New York Times write a headline reading, “When Communism Inspired Americans,” when we will never, ever see anywhere a story about fascism “inspiring” Americans?

Or how is it that, as Martin Amis writes,

Everyone knows of Auschwitz and Belsen. Nobody knows of Vorkutlag and Solovestky. Everybody knows of Himmler and Eichmann. Nobody knows of Yezhov and Dzerzhinsky. Everybody knows of the six million of the Holocaust. Nobody knows of the six million of the terror-famine.

And why do there still exist legal Communist Parties in the West, and a superpower like China that still identifies itself as communist, but Nazism is a despised fringe cult that gets attention only because it’s a useful political demon for the left? If murderous tyranny is our standard for condemning and ostracizing Nazism, why isn’t it equally used to judge and proscribe the most murderous tyranny in human history?

A representative of the globalist elite faces a tribune of globalization’s victims. That’s the superficial read on Sunday’s presidential runoff between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen in France. The deeper question is whether French voters accommodate themselves to reality or cling tighter to their economic illusions. Plenty of clues about which path France might take were on display during the May Day holiday.

Start with the France of illusions. An estimated 40,000 red-clad activists snaked their way from the Place de la République to the Place de la Nation in the early afternoon. Hammer-and-sickle flags abounded. So did portraits of beloved mass murderers like Che Guevara. Gangs of masked youth set off firecrackers that boomed like gunshots.
One placard showed Ms. Le Pen and Mr. Macron side by side, asking: “Plague or Cholera?” A typical slogan was “Neither nation nor boss!”—a double rejection of Ms. Le Pen’s nationalism and Mr. Macron’s free-market liberalism. These sum up the views of supporters of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leftist firebrand who was eliminated, barely, in the first round last month.

The Mélenchonists have a great deal in common with Ms. Le Pen’s National Front, which held its own angry rally earlier in the day. Both camps would lower the retirement age to 60 from 62. Ms. Le Pen would keep the 35-hour workweek while Mr. Mélenchon would shorten it to 32 hours. Both would boost welfare spending and sever or strain the country’s trade ties in various ways.

The Le Pen-Mélenchon Venn diagram has a large overlapping set, because both camps blame everyone but the French for the country’s malaise.

“The French try to erase historical experience,” Pascal Bruckner tells me. The literary journalist is one of a very few classical liberals among French public intellectuals. He says his compatriots “have forgotten the experience of 1989 and only see the bad aspects of capitalism and liberal democracy.”

The tragedy of France, Mr. Bruckner says, is that the country never had a Margaret Thatcher or Gerhard Schröder to implement a dramatic pro-growth program. Incremental, haphazard changes have only prolonged the crisis. “So if you’re unemployed it must be because of the market economy.”

Yet it wasn’t shadowy globalists who in 1999 imposed a 35-hour workweek to make overtime labor prohibitively expensive. The law was meant to encourage firms to hire more workers, but like most efforts to subjugate markets to politics, it ended up doing more harm than good. Now it’s the main barrier to hiring in a country where the unemployment rate is stuck north of 10%.

Nor was it global markets that levied a corporate tax rate of 33% (plus surcharges for larger firms), a top personal rate of 45%, and a wealth tax and other “social fees” that repelled investors and forced the country’s best and brightest to seek refuge in places like London, New York and Silicon Valley.

Nor did globalization build a behemoth French bureaucracy that crowds out the private economy. As of January, this has created a 98% public-debt-to-GDP ratio. CONTINUE AT SITE

“In terms of public order and internal security, I simply need to know who is coming to our country.” — Austrian Interior Minister Wolfgang Sobotka.

Turkey appears determined to flood Europe with migrants either way: with Europe’s permission by means of visa-free travel, or without Europe’s permission, as retribution for failing to provide visa-free travel.

The migrants arriving in Italy are overwhelmingly economic migrants seeking a better life in Europe. Only a very small number appear to be legitimate asylum seekers or refugees fleeing warzones.

The director of the UN office in Geneva, Michael Møller, has warned that Europe must prepare for the arrival of millions more migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

The European Union has called on its member states to lift border controls — introduced at the height of the migration crisis in September 2015 — within the next six months.

The return to open borders, which would allow for passport-free travel across the EU, comes at a time when the number of migrants crossing the Mediterranean continues to rise, and when Turkish authorities increasingly have been threatening to renege on a border deal that has lessened the flow of migrants from Turkey to Europe.

Critics say that lifting the border controls now could trigger another, even greater, migration crisis by encouraging potentially millions of new migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East to begin making their way to Europe. It would also allow jihadists to cross European borders undetected to carry out attacks when and where they wish.

At a press conference in Brussels on May 2, the EU Commissioner in charge of migration, Dimitris Avramopoulos, called on Austria, Denmark, Germany, Norway and Sweden — among the wealthiest and most sought after destinations in Europe for migrants — to phase out the temporary controls currently in place at their internal Schengen borders over the next six months.

The so-called Schengen Agreement, which took effect in March 1995, abolished many of the EU’s internal borders, enabling passport-free movement across most of the bloc. The Schengen Agreement, along with the single European currency, are fundamental pillars of the European Union and essential building-blocks for constructing a United States of Europe. With the long-term sustainability of the single currency and open borders in question, advocates of European federalism are keen to preserve both.

Avramopoulos, who argued that border controls are “not in the European spirit of solidarity and cooperation,” said:

“The time has come to take the last concrete steps to gradually return to a normal functioning of the Schengen Area. This is our goal, and it remains unchanged. A fully functioning Schengen area, free from internal border controls. Schengen is one of the greatest achievements of the European project. We must do everything to protect it.”

our radically different candidates came in so close to each other that the order is almost arbitrary. But the consequences are enormous.

In contrast with the 1st round, polls were scarce and barely mentioned until Macron’s lead over Le Pen slipped by five points. On the eve of the May 3rd debate it stood at 59% / 41%. And nothing is certain. Nothing is stable. The French political scene is like the polar ice cap, with big chunks breaking away and floating on icy seas and huge masses looming on the horizon. No one is in control. If François Hollande and his cronies thought they could count on a “Republican Front” to carry their candidate to victory, they miscalculated. The media that was so cozy with the En Marche wunderkind on the 1st round has turned snippy. And, no matter how many old devils surface, they seem to think Marine Le Pen has managed to take the onus off of her party. More or less.

Many honest citizens will abstain or vote blank. Marine Le Pen is trying to seduce the 1st round voters of the lider maximo Mélenchon, who won’t take a stand one way or the other. Reportedly, one third are ready to go her way. In his concession speech, François Fillon said he would vote Macron. Hard to swallow for him as for his supporters, but consistent with the view that the Front National is not a legitimate political party. Many high profile members of the LR followed suit; others announced they would not vote for either candidate. A few have already edged into Macron’s camp since Fillon was weakened by scandal. François Baroin, once slated to be Fillon’s PM, is now running the LR legislative campaign. If the party maintains its majority, Baroin would accept the post of prime minister in an En Marche-LR cohabitation government. No one knows if the Assembly is going to be a patchwork, a tossed salad, or a sour soup.

And then there’s holier than thou Nicolas Dupont-Aignan (known as NDA), a man of such high principles that he broke away from the conservative party (today’s LR) and started his own movement to defend national sovereignty, dignity, and integrity. Fishing in the same voter pool as François Fillon, NDA reveled in his rival’s mishaps. The gift of expensive suits? NDA, mayor of Yerres, raises his eyebrows: “I gave back all the gifts I received.” You could just see the right honorable mayor depositing in the municipal treasure chest the paperweight offered by a local printing company, the tool kit donated by a hardware store, and other such precious gifts. Does he employ his wife as parliamentary assistant? “Yes,” he exclaims, “and she really works!!!”

On the 1st round election night, defeated candidates and prominent members of their parties announced one after the other their reluctant or enthusiastic support for Emmanuel Macron. Clean as a whistle NDA, who scored under the 5% minimum that entitles a candidate to reimbursement of an important share of his campaign expenses, coyly promised to state his position the next day. It dragged on until the Friday presentation of the dream team: Marine President, Dupont-Aignan Prime Minister. The vice president of NDA’s party (Debout la France / Stand tall, France), horrified by this unholy alliance, immediately resigned. Citizens of Yerres are disgusted. But most commentators seem to think Marine has finally achieved her goal of making a real alliance with a real political party. What a catch!

We have also found ourselves with an a ruthless, expansionist Iran, the preeminent objective of which is to exploit the disarray to take over the Saudi oil fields and the Middle East.

Thus the question of to whom Abu Musa [an Island seized by Iran] belonged was effectively answered, not in an international court of law, as the situation demanded, but by Iranian effrontery and American weakness.

More globally problematic, if America no longer wants to be the “world’s policeman,” Sunni countries will be cozying up to Russia or China or whatever country looks as if it will fill the ghastly vacuum into which America’s allies have been thrown. There is, dangerously, no shortage of candidates for the position of word hegemon; they are all, however, expansionist, authoritarian and anti-democratic.

Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman has shown with sophisticated leadership that he understands the danger his country is in. Iran has its sights set on Saudi Arabia.

The problem is that just as U.S. President Barack Obama was incapable of admitting that extremist Islam is what drives global terrorism, his administration seemed totally incapable of recognizing the true objectives of the Iran’s military buildup, missiles and nuclear program. Instead, the Obama Administration toadied up to Iran, lavishly bankrolled the leading state sponsor of terrorism and permitted it, in a deceptive, agreement still unsigned by Iran, to build a nuclear weapons capability. Meanwhile, as Iran’s leaders threaten to destroy Israel and the United States, what they are actually planning is the complete control of the Arabian Peninsula.

The lowest clerk in the CIA knows that for years Iran has been doing its utmost to subvert and destabilize the Arabian Peninsula, take Shi’ite control of Islam’s shrines in Mecca and Madinah, to dominate the sea lanes and oil reserves, and, following a plan of “today the Middle East, tomorrow the world,” to expel both the Americans and Saudis from the Hijaz: the western part of the Saudi Peninsula, formerly an independent kingdom, and where the Shi’ites and the major oil fields sit.

Iran also continues to pull the strings of its proxies, Qatar and Oman. From combination of self-interest and fear of Iran, they acquiesce to Iranian control. Others will follow. The entire region is increasingly anxious lest the Americans abandon the Arabian Peninsula altogether.

Iran’s aim is to use American’s northern neighbour, Canada, as a “forward operating base” for influence operations against the American government.

The Trudeau government has shown both a past and present affinity for dictatorial governments. Trudeau himself said he admires the government of the Peoples Republic of China and their “basic dictatorship.” He publicly mourned the passing of Cuban President Fidel Castro. The statement made no note of the 60-plus years of dictatorship, and Cuba’s brutal suppression of human rights.

Among its teachings, the Ontario Jaffari Mosque’s school suggested that boys should play sports so they can be “physically be ready for jihad whenever the time comes for it.” Girls, on the other hand, were told that they should “stick to hobbies that prepare them to become wives and mothers.

Iran and its Islamist regime is currently making a major effort to expand its footprint in Canada. Their aim is to use American’s northern neighbour as a “forward operating base” for influence operations against the American government. In a recent video, Hassan Abbasi, a leadership figure in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), was boasting about a “guerilla movement of Iranian agents living and working in the United States.” Iran, he says, is leading a clandestine army of potential martyrs within the US.

This does not seem to be an isolated event. Iranian diplomat Hamid Mohammadi said in 2012 there were many Iranian-Canadians “working in influential government positions” and called on others to “occupy high-level and key positions.”

Given Iran’s history of exporting violence and terrorism, that Iranians on both sides of the border are discussing how they are infiltrating North America should be of concern.

Iran has been forced to recalibrate its efforts during the past decade due to the shifting views of Canadian and American governments. The Obama Administration (2009-2017) gave virtual free rein to Iranian agents of influence. They were supported by a variety of Administration insiders such as Valerie Jarrett. When the Iranian Navy seized ten US Navy sailors and photographed them in humiliating positions, Vice President Joseph Biden described this as “just standard nautical practice”. Predictably, Iran forced a US Navy female sailor to wear a hijab , possibly as a way of showing male dominance over an American female.

The government of Canada had earlier allowed Iranian agents such as Faisal Larijani to build infrastructure and support. This included the Center for Iranian Studies, located in Toronto at 290 Sheppard Ave. W., which was incorporated in January 2008.

When Prime Minister Harper (2006-2015) was elected, governmental support for Iran quickly dropped, culminating in the shuttering of the Iranian Embassy in 2012, using, as the leverage to remove them, the newly enacted “Justice for the Victims of Terrorism Act”.

The current situation has now reversed itself. The newly elected Trump Administration appears to be taking a much harder stand against Iran while Canadian Prime Minster Trudeau is committed to outreach to Iran and a possible re-opening of the Canadian and Iranian Embassies.
Today’s Iran

Iran remains listed as one of three global state sponsors of terrorism, along with Syria and Sudan, according to the US State Department. Canada also lists the Qods Force as a terrorism entity and states that it “is the clandestine branch of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) responsible for extraterritorial operations, and for exporting the Iranian Revolution through activities such as facilitating terrorist operations.”

In addition, Iran also has one of the most dismal human rights records of any country. Human Rights Watch and others say that the human rights situation in Iran is “dire.” Under the rule of the Ayatollahs, Iranian women confront serious discrimination on issues such as marriage, divorce, and child custody. Women have been sent to jail for publicly speaking out in favor of equal rights for women.
Canada and the Trudeau Government — Unclear Intentions

According to Canada’s former Foreign Minister Stephan Dion (2015-2016), official talks with Iran on re-establishing diplomatic ties have already begun. This is not a surprise; Prime Minister Trudeau campaigned on the issue of doing just that. Some Canadian sanctions against Iran have already been lifted, as of February 2016. Canada also downgraded its warning against all travel to Iran — despite ongoing arrests and the torture of a variety of Canadians and others.

Trudeau’s interest in re-establishing ties with Iran is not new. In 2014, while a Member of Parliament, Justin Trudeau gave an interview to the Montreal-based newspaper Sada al-Mashrek. This paper is openly known to be Khomeinist in nature and supports Iran (as well as Hezbollah). That Trudeau would speak to such a paper in the year before an election suggests he was already reaching out to Iranian regime support in Canada. During this interview, Trudeau also told the paper that he would have a special immigration program that was more open to “Muslims and Arabs.”

In April, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that ISIS supporters have the right to defend their freedom, and was reported to have referred to Evangelical Christians as the “worst part of Canadian society.” These remarks came after is after he remained silent when Jewish centers received bomb threats, and despite Canada’s imams regularly calling for the annihilation of Jews.

Even more disturbing is a technical loophole in the Canada Elections Act. The law allows foreign entities to make contributions to Canadian candidates. This means that players such as Iran or Saudi Arabia will be able to further their agendas through a particular politician, as long as they pump him with funds for six months and a day prior to his official bid for office.

A journalist was taken to task recently for calling Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau an inelegant name during a press conference. In response, Josh Sigurdson justified his behavior in a YouTube video:

“The state-run media got to ask [Trudeau] questions — pre-screened ones, at that… How is it journalism to ask pre-selected questions of a politician? Restricting opposition, restricting free speech… pretending to stand for women while sending money to governments and dictatorships who stone women to death for driving and kill gays … that is the definition of scumbag.”

Although many might not have used that exact word to describe Trudeau, one might sympathize with the sentiment behind it.

As a Canadian citizen who was born in Iran and watched my country come under the Islamist regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini, it is not hard to spot a tyrant. It is not hard for Trudeau, either, apparently. Three years ago, as head of the opposition, he told a group of women in Toronto: “There is a level of admiration that I actually have for China, because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to turn their economy around on a dime…”

Walter Laqueur (Born in May 1921) is the author of, among other books, Weimar, A History of Terrorism, Fascism: Past, Present, Future, and The Dream that Failed: Reflections on the Soviet Union. His newest book,Putinism: Russia and Its Future with the West, was released in 2015 by Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s.https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2017/05/racing-before-hitler/

It’s not so common for people in their forties or fifties to start rereading the books they read at thirteen or fourteen. But it’s quite common for them to revisit and regale friends with their early sports achievements and those of others that they may have witnessed first-hand. “Those were the days, my friend. . . .”

The habit is pronounced not only in circles that sophisticated intellectuals look down on but among such allegedly superior types themselves. Nor is it confined to those fortunate enough to have enjoyed a “normal” youth. It was no less prevalent among the generation of Jews who, like me, grew up in Germany or elsewhere in Central Europe during the tumultuous 1920s and 30s—and certainly among my own colleagues, friends, and close contemporaries.

Much later, and throughout the decades beginning in the 1960s when I was living in London, I always looked forward to the pleasure of a visit from Abraham Ascher, the distinguished historian of Russia at the City University of New York. Like me, Abe was a native of Breslau and almost exactly my age, so I knew for certain that he had stopped first not at the British Museum but in Highbury, mecca to Arsenal Football Club fans. Of similar disposition was the Berlin-born historian Peter Gay of Yale, though I forget the name of his favorite British team. In the annals of British Zionism, Chaim Weizmann, destined to become Israel’s first president, may have had no great feeling for soccer, but his biographer Jehuda Reinharz, a former president of Brandeis University, has a deep knowledge of its history and its significance for other Jews in, especially, Central Europe, and above all of the exploits of the renowned Westphalian club known as Schalke 04.

At a luncheon before he became U.S. secretary of state, Henry Kissinger’s curiosity was sharply piqued when he discovered that I not only had a certain command of history and politics but also knew which sports club went by the nickname “1860 Munich” and could even talk intelligently about the exploits of Heinrich Stuhlfauth, the legendary goalie of Kissinger’s own hometown team, Spielvereinigung Fuerth. I also remember having a long debate at Dulles Airport with the world-class French political thinker Raymond Aron, a tennis fanatic and brother to a player once considered among France’s leading champions—and this at a time (the 1920s-30s) when France was a tennis superpower, boasting the likes of René Lacoste, Jean Borotra, and the other two members of France’s “Four Musketeers.” On the Parisian amateur front in those same days, a young Estonian-born devotee of tennis named Michael Josselson, later to become a consummate intellectual entrepreneur, had a regular partner in the composer and writer Nicolas Nabokov (cousin to Vladimir); in postwar Berlin, the two would give birth to the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

The great sports issuepreoccupying me and many of my teenage generation was the case of Gretel Bergmann. This young Jewish lady from Laupheim in southwest Germany, who had equaled the previous German record in high-jumping, was at first invited by the Nazi regime to represent Germany in the 1936 Olympic Games. But at the last moment the invitation was withdrawn.

Some brief background. In 1912, a decision had been made in favor of Berlin as a site for the Olympic Games. Then World War I intervened, and the decision was put on indefinite hold. It was only owing to the initiative and personal contacts of Theodore Lewald, the German representative of the Olympic Committee, that the original decision was reinstated and the games could take place, infamously, under Nazi auspices in 1936. And even then there were complications as some Nazi fanatics discovered that Lewald had a Jewish grandmother and demanded his removal. When his many personal friends in the U.S. made it clear that “no Lewald, no Olympic games in Germany,” the complainers were forced to capitulate. (As for the grandmother in question, Fanny Lewald, she is very much a story unto herself, which I have rehearsed in an earlier essay in Mosaic.)

PARIS—A live head-to-head debate Wednesday between French presidential candidates Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen rapidly descended into a tit-for-tat battle in which both struggled to land a knockout punch.

Seeking to close a 20-percentage-point gap in the polls before Sunday’s vote, Ms. Le Pen quickly went on the offensive in the live prime-time event with a blistering attack on Mr. Macron, centering on his past as an investment banker and a minister in the government of incumbent President François Hollande.

Over the course of the two-and-a-half-hour marathon, however, Ms. Le Pen’s barrage failed to deliver a destabilizing blow to the front-runner. Mr. Macron stood his ground, wearing his opponent down by highlighting what he said were technical holes in her sweeping plans to pull France out of the euro.

“Mr. Macron is the candidate of wild globalization,” Ms. Le Pen said.

Mr. Macron shot back that Ms. Le Pen was preaching isolationism.

“Confronted with this mind-set of defeat, I represent the mind-set of conquest,” Mr. Macron said.

A snap poll of 1,314 viewers by Elabe for BFMTV showed that 63% found Mr. Macron the most convincing and 34% Ms. Le Pen.

For Mr. Macron, who is running for elected office for the first time, the debate was a test of whether he can hold his footing under pressure from a battle-hardened National Front candidate who is tapping into deep resentment of globalization and the European Union.

The debate was watched closely by investors, who sold French assets when Ms. Le Pen polled high ahead of the April 23 first-round vote. If Ms. Le Pen can turn the table on Mr. Macron during the debate, it could cast renewed doubt over the outcome of an election that is crucial for the future of the EU.

Ms. Le Pen proposes pulling France from the euro and a radical overhaul of the EU to repatriate powers in Paris and implement protectionist trade policies. On Wednesday, Ms. Le Pen sought to paint Mr. Macron as a crony of the EU establishment who lacks the gravitas to stand up to Germany. She also characterized him as weak on terrorism. CONTINUE AT SITE