Court finds nationalist guilty of speech crime
Jean Marie Le Pen, the leader of the patriotic French Front National, has been convicted of a speech crime for statements made in an interview with a weekly magazine in 2005.
“In France, at least, the German occupation was not particularly inhumane, although there were some blunders, inevitable in a country of 550,000 sq km,” he was quoted as saying in the magazine Rivarol. A French court found Le Pen, 79 guilty of “denying a crime against humanity” and “complicity in condoning war crimes,” the kinds of charges that criminalize thought and speech across Europe.
Le Pen was handed a suspended three month jail sentence and a fine equivalent to about $16,000.
Le Pen called the trial what is was, a political witchhunt, and refused to attend. The French establishment hates him for making nationalism a part of the political mainstream, which led to his spectacular elimination of Socialist hopeful Lionel Jospin in the 2002 presidential elections, forcing a runoff against conservative Jacques Chirac.Le Pen’s success is partly a dividend from the political bankruptcy of the French ruling elite, which is now a managerial class devoid of ideas or ideology and increasingly unstable as the problems they created through mass Third World immigration bear fruit. Growing numbers of ordinary people are willing to listen to fresh ideas, and this is the danger Le Pen’s Front National presents to the elites.
The charge was a pathetic attempt to rework the worn out claim that any independent political assertion from white people is automatically an expression of “Nazism.” In fact, many of the older members of the Front National were members of the Resistance against the German Occupation. The underlying “tactic” of attempting to smear Le Pen shows how desperate the French ruling class is.