[BartSimpson]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/world/ ... b9ebe6087d

Amazingly this was posted by the Washington Post. I'm really surprised that they'd allow anything even vaguely positive to be written about Le Pen.

It's a very long article and this is just an excerpt. Still, the MSM is evidently being careful not to write off the French Nationalists like they did the Brexit and Trump. This is encouraging for anyone who's not interested in the world becoming a homogenized socialist dystopia.

$1:

Songbirds flitted among the redbud trees. The wind tickled yellow flowers in fields of rapeseed. The medieval church clock clanged on the hour.

Otherwise all was still in this one-boulangerie town in the French countryside when Marine Le Pen strode to the lectern and, with the unwavering force of a freight train, vowed to save the country on behalf of its forgotten young.

“Our youth are in despair,” the 48-year-old thundered. “I will be the voice of the voiceless.”

Two-thirds of the way back in an overflow crowd, Adrien Vergnaud knew instantly that the leader of France’s far-right National Front was speaking for him. The joblessness, the migrants, the terrorism. She was the only one who cared.

Without her, said the tautly muscled 25-year-old construction worker, his troubled country has “no future.”

But with the backing of young voters like Vergnaud, Le Pen may become the next president of France.

As the country hurtles toward the election this spring that could alter the course of European history — the first round is Sunday — Le Pen’s once-longshot and now undeniably viable bid to lead France rests heavily on an unlikely source of support.

Populist triumphs in Britain and the United States came last year despite young voters, not because of them. Millennials — generally at ease with immigration, trade and multiculturalism — lined up against both Brexit and Donald Trump. It was older voters who sought to overturn the existing order with nationalist answers to the problems of a globalized world.

But France is a land of youthful revolts, from the 18th century barricades to the fevered university campuses of May 1968. And with youth unemployment stuck at 25 percent, Le Pen’s reactionary call to return the country to an era of lost glory by closing borders, exiting the European Union and restoring the national currency has fired the passions of young voters craving radical change.

“We’ve been told our whole lives that everything is set. Free trade. Forgetting our borders. One currency for all of Europe. Nothing can change,” said Gaëtan Dussausaye, the mild-mannered 23-year-old leader of the National Front’s youth wing. “But young people don’t like this system. This system is a failure.”

The National Front’s strength among millennials suggests the populist wave that’s unsettled the West may be more durable than many may assume. Far from the last gasp of closed-society older voters who are demographically destined to be outnumbered by a rising tide of cosmopolitan youth, the populist insurgency could continue to build over years and decades if enough disenchanted young voters can be lured by the promise of something new.

And across Europe, that’s exactly what far-right movements are attempting. In Germany — a country where the two main parties are led by political veterans in their 60s — the anti-Muslim Alternative for Germany party is run by a fresh-faced 41-year-old. Scandinavian parliaments, meanwhile, are stocked with politicians in their 20s hailing from parties that just a decade ago were consigned to the extremist fringe.

[Thanos]

Keep in mind that LePen pretty much feels the same about Jews as she does about Muslims. She all but went into full blown Holocaust revisionism the other day when she said Vichy had nothing to be ashamed of when it came to assisting the Gestapo in rounding up French Jews to ship off to the death camps in WW2.

Looking at the Muslims as a threat is one thing, keeping grand dad's murderous old hates alive against those who are entirely harmless is something else altogether.

[BartSimpson]

Thanos Thanos:

Keep in mind that LePen pretty much feels the same about Jews as she does about Muslims. She all but went into full blown Holocaust revisionism the other day when she said Vichy had nothing to be ashamed of when it came to assisting the Gestapo in rounding up French Jews to ship off to the death camps in WW2.

Looking at the Muslims as a threat is one thing, keeping grand dad's murderous old hates alive against those who are entirely harmless is something else altogether.

I can agree with the nuance of what Le Pen is saying here. France was occupied by Germany at the time and blaming France as a nation for what happened is nonsensical because they were utterly unable to act as a nation.

Are individual French responsible? Where the case can be made then I'd say yes.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/wor ... 100277180/

And nowhere did she say that Vichy was not responsible, she said that Vichy was not France and on this I am inclined to agree with her.

$1:

Israel on Monday slammed statements by French far-right presidential contender Marine Le Pen suggesting that France was not responsible for the roundup of Jews at a stadium in Paris during World War II.

“I don’t think France is responsible for the Vel d’Hiv,” she told RTL radio on Sunday, referring to the Paris cycling stadium where 13,000 Jews were rounded up in July 1942 before being sent to Nazi death camps.

Former president Jacques Chirac was the first French leader to admit the country's culpability in 1995. President François Hollande has said what happened at Vel d’Hiv was a "crime committed in France, by France."

"I think that generally speaking if there are people responsible, it's those who were in power at the time. It's not France," National Front party leader Le Pen told the broadcaster LCI.

She later defended her comments in a statement, saying: "I consider that France and the Republic were in London during the occupation and that the Vichy regime was not France," referring to the government at the time.


"It does not in any way exonerate the personal and personal responsibility of the French who participated in the vile round-up of the Vel d'Hiv and all the atrocities committed during that period," she added.

“This declaration is contrary to historical truth,” Israel’s Foreign Ministry said Monday in response to Le Pen’s remarks.

“This recognition is the basis for remembrance day events that mark the anniversary of the Jewish expulsion from France as well as the study of the Holocaust in its education system,” it added.

The nation of France is no more responsible for what transpired during the German occupation anymore than a rape victim is responsible for her coerced behavior during a rape.

I'm a major supporter of Israel but if this offends them then so be it.