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Friday, May 23, 2003
posted by gbarto at 5:36 AM:
Marcus had a very long piece the other day (June 18, last/first entry before June 17) on the latest in the saga of Jean-Marie Le Pen. I can't get the specific link to work; you might just visit his page and scroll down. In any case, Marcus has assembled a hell of a lot of info about the question of whether Jean-Marie Le Pen is just a narrow-minded bigot or was in fact a torturer. A couple observations:1) Maybe Le Pen tortured. Maybe he didn't. Numerous other French did, even if Le Pen didn't. Bottom line: An arrogant France was very shaken by Algeria because it had always prided itself on having brought a superior civilization to a backward wasteland. It had even taught generations of North Africans to recite prattle about "Our ancestors, the Gauls," as though there were so little native culture for them to inherit that identifying with their European conquerors was their only ticket to a meaningful history. Algeria woke a part of France to its racist, self-satisfied tendencies. The other part was so convinced of France's good intentions and superior conception of humanité and fraternité that it was prepared to bludgeon any human beings who couldn't appreciate it. Unfortunately for Le Pen's detractors, torture was widespread enough that the ultimate indictment lies with Jacques Chirac's hero, Charles de Gaulle, a former military leader and rather martial president who was at the top of the list of those who would kill every last Algerian if that's what it took to convince them how lucky they were to have been conquered by the French and brought French civilization, or at least its table scraps. We've seen shades of this attitude of cultural superiority quite recently, and again, not in the guise of the odious Le Pen but in the Gaullist Chirac's insistence that somehow France had to have final say on what happened in Iraq. We in the US would do well to study France's handling of Algeria in order to know what not to do in Iraq, particularly in terms of getting too arrogant about the nobility of our intentions. We should constantly remind ourselves that we're there for our purposes, though we're delighted when those purposes benefit them too, and should make a point of satisfying our purposes so we can get the hell out of there and let them build their own nation once they've recovered enough from Saddam's dictatorship to understand that it is theirs to build.
2) Le Monde's article was embarrasing in myriad ways. The first was in its timing, which clearly indicated they were trying to influence the election. The second is in how little confidence that newspaper apparently had in the French public. We know, they seemed to say, we'll show that Le Pen was a torturer. After all, you can't count on these people to know better than to vote for his program. The third is that Le Monde's actions boiled down to an effort to push up Jacques Chirac's vote totals. I don't have anything specific to say about that except that when Le Monde is shilling for Chirac, it has strayed so far from anything it has ever stood for that it ought to have to retitle itself En quelque sorte, une espèce du Monde (Kinda sorta Le Monde) and acknowledge that either it or France is just too far out of whack for the traditional relationship between the two to obtain.
3) The actual evidence in the Le Pen case is moderately convincing... on both sides. I certainly believe Le Pen might have been capable of such things. I'm not sure Chirac wouldn't have been. But, let's face it, rumors of an SS past didn't stop Mitterand's political career. Why should "Sig heils" draw lighter criticism than serving la Patrie overseas? I hope, in a way, that Le Pen is proven innocent, or at least that the charges prove inconclusive enough that Le Monde has to back down. For years, the political elite in France has been trying to stigmatize as subhuman members of the Front national in exactly the way that the Front stigmatizes anyone not of Western European extraction. Trying to prove Le Pen was a torturer, while not getting so excited about Mitterand, or about other potential torturers in Algeria, shows that this is above all a campaign to demonize the Front. But the Front's ideology alone should be enough for that... if the establishment can come up with a real program designed to meet the people's needs, rather than satisfy the criteria of their poli-sci profs at ENA for being a "serious" leader. That the left was too busy navel-gazing to put together a coherent program and that anyone perceived that Chirac needed Le Monde's help in defeating Le Pen is proof of France's political bankruptcy. If in any way I am rooting for Le Pen, it is in this: It is time that the leaders of France face the Front's criticisms head on, time that they spent as much time addressing the concerns of the 10-12% who vote FN as they do for the unquestioningly respected 3-4% who vote communist (!). Le Pen may deserve to have his head handed to him, but the leaders of the UMP and the PS alike do too for not being able to come up with a better answer to Le Pen's program than to indict the man.
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