today was all-around strange, which i’m sure you noticed. woke up this morning to news that while israel had officially and finally pulled out, to no ceremony at all, not even screams of “about time!” because, simultaneously, europe had its breath taken away by a stunning electoral development in france. reading about this guy, i laughed in disbelief but also in the irony of it: sanctimoniously leftist france had just given one out of five votes to a man who proposed to create jobs by deporting the country’s 3.6 million immigrants. how exactly does this jive with their defense of arabs’ human rights?
This party gained a single seat in the French Assembly this time, and — perhaps more significantly — 15% of the national popular vote during the “first round” of the general election. All of this might be less important if the “FN” were not a rhetoric -oriented demagogic group, using techniques playing to base fears and
insecurities among the genuinely unhappy voters. This is not the “Prairie Populism” or “City Boss Machine” of US political history, however, but something darker and more disturbing, from Europe’s own particularly – 1930’s past. This is Jean – Marie Le Pen, who thinks that the “Holocaust” concept is overblown and doubts that Nazi
concentration camps existed, and who doesn’t like immigrants.
{FYI France}
an article in the post puts france now in the illustrious position of being clustered together with austria, italy, and, is it e’en so?, denmark, as it denounces them all for their rightist tendencies. of course, it’s not fair to include denmark as “right” here is still moderate by american standards, but media doesn’t seem to make that distinction. i myself’d be more sympathetic to denmark if we hadn’t gotten to WWII today in class and my teacher hadn’t flatly stated that denmark, just like sweden, switzerland, and norway (the other social-democratic countries you’d expect better of, she said) did everything it could to keep jewish refugees out of the country. over a decade, only 1200 made it in, the majority on the condition that they would leave within months.
i forewent the bus and walked home, brooding. what i wanted most of all was to talk to people, face to face: adults, preferably, who’d seen the world gag on its own hypocricy before and recover. even though i’ve never had her as a prof, i wanted to talk to dorsey; i just wanted to hear what she’d have to say. i’ve never really had a mentor and always wanted one — some strong, intelligent older woman to tell me that people have despaired before; and also that it will be all right.