Vanguard News Network

by Michael O’Meara

After years of economic stagnation, labor unrest, and
increased international marginalization, French elites
had hoped the presidential campaign of 2007 would help
re-educate and thus help prepare the French for the
economic reforms needed to complete their country’s
transition to globalization. Instead, the campaign
has turned into a red, white, and blue debate on
national identity. All the leading candidates are
presenting themselves as critics of the established
System, highlighting their commitment to the national
heritage and their opposition to globalism’s
ultra-liberal assault on national institutions. As
one nationalist puts it: “Our ideas are everywhere.
Every candidate criticizes Europe, every candidate
talks about immigration and law and order, every
candidate suddenly sings ‘La Marseillaise’.” Jean
Marie le Pen claims that “all the candidates are
running after me.”

1. The “Lepénisation” of the Presidential Campaign
Though Nicolas Sarkozy of the “Cohnservative” UMP,
Ségolène Royal of the socialist PS, and François
Bayrou of the centrist UDF have taken up themes
borrowed from Le Pen’s National Front and now pay
lip-service to nationalism’s anti-globalist agenda,
they remain creatures of Parisian financial-media
interests, having spent their entire lives serving the
Judeo-liberal System that seeks the nation’s
destruction. That they have re-packaged themselves as
outsiders solicitous of native French concern and done
so in Le Pen’s populist anti-System rhetoric — what
the mainstream media (MSM) refers to as the
“lepénisation des esprits” — says, of course, less
about their conversion to the nationalist cause than
it does about the current malaise and what it takes in
this period to win the electorate.

Thus it is that Royal, who began the campaign as a
Blair-style modernizer, has recently taken to wrapping
herself in the tricolor, offering a more palpable
version of Sarkozy’s neocon nationalism, with its
counterfeit recuperation of Le Pen’s ideas, while
Bayrou talks of rejecting the “party pigsty” of
right-left divisions for the sake of national unity.
Issues relating to patriotism, national identity,
sovereignty, and other themes which globalists and
Eurocrats not so long ago relegated to the garbage
heap of history have also become major speaking points
in their campaigns. More shamelessly, each candidate,
after having prominently supported the EU Constitution
which went down to a stunning defeat in the referendum
of 2005 now pays homage to the “no” vote, promising
(with crossed fingers) to uphold it against German
efforts to surreptitiously impose it.

The campaign’s nationalist turn not only bucks current
European and North American trends, it reverses
decades of established politicking. Since the
National Front’s founding in 1972, Le Pen has been the
“Bête Immonde,” the filthy beast, of the political
class that has spawned Sarkozy, Royal, and Bayrou.
That this class’s unscrupulous representatives —
after ruining and plundering the French — now
addresses nationalist issues associated with the
National Front and opportunistically renounces much of
what they previously stood for, twisting and turning
their convictions for the sake of electoral advantage,
testifies to the fact that Le Pen’s nationalist ideas
speak, as no others do, to the burning questions of
the age, having been borne out by the course of
events.

If polls are any guide, two-thirds of all Frenchmen
identify globalization with outsourcing and job loss
— and thus with economic decline and popular misery.
With the acceleration of Europeanization, following
the signing of several treaties that augmented the
EU’s powers in the period immediately following the
Cold War’s end, France began restructuring her
economy. For the majority of the white population,
this has meant escalating unemployment rates,
pervasive job insecurity, a lowering of living
standards, and a feeling that it has been abandoned by
its elites. Whole sectors of the economy have, in
fact, been dismantled or abandoned. Unemployment is
officially at 10 percent (though actually higher) and
14 million workers are classified as impoverished,
while more than a million of the country’s recent
university graduates have emigrated to Britain,
Ireland, and Germany. At the same time, the state has
buried itself under a 2.5 trillion euro debt
(proportionally equivalent to the astronomical debt
accumulated by the Likudists in the White House) and
done nothing to extricate itself from its failed
policies. The social-economic devastation this has
wrought, combined with corruption and scandal at the
highest reaches of the state, has set off a general
anti-System revulsion in broad layers of the
population.

This revulsion comes, though, not just in reaction to
the System’s depressing social-economic effects, but
even more from the rising tide of color that is
sweeping through the European heartland. In a country
which criminalizes such thought, the degree of this
revulsion is reflected in the fact that a majority of
the population now views immigration as an unmitigated
disaster, a third openly labels itself “racist,” and
an equal number no longer sees the National Front as a
party of “extremists.” Le Pen argues that the
System’s loss of legitimacy is such that it has
shifted all responsibility to the EU — for the EU can
do whatever it wants without electoral consultation.

In promoting the mass population transfers of the last
thirty-five years, the System’s “ideology of
consummate meaningless” (that is, its Judeo-liberal
dismissal of the meaning inherent in Europe’s
genetic-spiritual heritage) has waged an unrelenting
war on the national aspect of the nation-state it
governs. In this spirit, the economic, media, and
bureaucratic elites the System serves (and are served
by) endeavor to demote everything native to the French
people, repress all perceived expressions of racism
(unless it’s anti-white racism), criminalize deviant
thought, encourage the emasculating forces of feminism
and homosexuality, establish preferences for
non-natives, leave the nation’s borders undefended,
and refuse to tame the violent, crime-ridden
communities of non-whites squatting outside France’s
ancient cities.

The consequence of all this is intruding more and more
into popular life, helping reshape political
sensibilities. The authorities have accordingly been
especially anxious to keep the lid on ethnic violence
(Le Figaro, 3-23), which is the nationalists’ greatest
recruiter. But the collective thuggery of France’s
Negro-Arab population refuses to subside. The recent
race riot at the Gare du Nord on March 27 — a riot in
which a black-brown horde rampaged through a key
transportation hub because one of its own was
apprehended for not paying his fare — again reminded
French France of the darkness into which it is
descending.

In itself there was nothing unusual about this latest
riot, except that it happened in the center of Paris,
was caught on camera, and broadcast on TV. In the
immigrant suburbs of metropolitan France, the
conquered territories, where the “Albanians” of
France’s Kosovo have settled, such violence is endemic
— though police and state officials there rarely
apply the same standard the native French are obliged
to uphold.

The petits blancs caught up in the nihilistic rampage
at the Gare du Nord, and those who later saw it on TV,
witnessed something they would probably have preferred
to not to have seen — something suggesting that they
were not only loosing their country (which, after all,
is an abstraction of sorts), but loosing the prospect
of living out their lives in the safe, trusting
environment native to peoples of European descent.

This riot, though, did more than revive the themes of
insecurity and immigration which Le Pen has worked for
decades, it intensified the resentment that comes with
the increasingly irrefutable recognition that the
newcomers have not just invaded their public spaces
and made them unsafe and inhospitable — but that they
are now openly asserting their domination over the
petits blancs powerless to resist them.

This has long been the case in the conquered
territories, where a simple identity check or a
transportation control has the potential to set off
violent clashes. The colored hordes of the great
housing estates, the “cités,” have, in fact, made it
virtually impossible for the state to apply its law in
them. Since January 2007 there have been at least
1,400 organized attacks on the police by the ethnic
gangs controlling the cités. One police union likens
the situation to the West Bank Intifada and has
requested armored cars to patrol the estates. The
rate of these attacks continues to increase in
frequency and in violence, often taking the form of
armed ambushes on police or emergency workers entering
the cités. Such incidents, in another sign of the
times, are generally treated as un-newsworthy, given
the MSM’s unwillingness to bring grist to the
nationalists’ mill.

The petits blancs — white workers, small shopkeepers,
retirees — who are on the frontlines of multicultural
France are consequently becoming more and more
alienated from the reigning powers. And this
alienation threatens to take political form. Even the
mainstream media grudgingly acknowledges its depth.
A recent story in Le Monde (4-4), for example, reports
that the white inhabitants of Creil, a small town 30
miles north of Paris, now live as if they are under
constant siege by the Maghrebians and Sub-Saharan
Africans housed in the nearby cités. Many complain
that they can’t even take public transport without
fear of being assaulted. Every public experience thus
poses a threat to their safety. Relatedly, few of
these petits blancs have any respect for the leading
presidential candidates, realizing as they do that the
System these candidates represent has reduced the
native French to pariahs in their own land. But in
addition to the pervasive threat of violence, the
petits blancs are daily humiliated, forced to bow
their heads and change their behavior at the approach
of the black-brown gangs in baggy pants and hooded
sweatshirts, who swagger down French streets as if
they own them. The System in their view indulges the
“poor immigrant,” utterly indifferent to their own
plight. Le Pen, Le Monde alarmingly notes, is the
receptacle of their resentment.

The electoral weight of white alienation has yet to be
measured at the polls, but it’s already making itself
felt in the nationalist ideas dominating the
presidential campaign. The System is obviously
worried. For as Marine Le Pen says, “The ideological
victory always precedes the political victory.”

2. The Lepénisation of the Nationalist Movement
The prominent nationalist Bruno Mégret argues that
three conditions are necessary for a political
upheaval favorable to the nationalist cause: 1) the
general situation in the country has to be critical,
2) the political class has to be impotent,
incompetent, and divided, and 3) nationalist ideas
have to achieve currency in response to the crisis.

To one degree or another, all three conditions now
exist in France.

Le Pen’s growing support in the polls, especially in
the popular milieu, has to be seen, though, from two
perspectives. At the mass level of the electorate,
where image prevails, voters are attracted to the
National Front as an anti-System party that resists
invaders. However, at the militant level, where
program, action, and analysis count, there is in
nationalist ranks a spreading discontent with Le Pen.

Le Pen, in other words, is gaining at the mass level,
but retreating on the second. Indeed, the political
propitiousness of the current situation comes at a
very unpropitious time in the history of the National
Front. For nationalists may have won the battle of
ideas, but they now risk losing their movement.

On numerous occasions (at this site and elsewhere), I
have emphasized not only what is remarkable about the
National Front, but what’s unacceptable from a
(racial) nationalist perspective. Given that
practical politics follows a logic different than that
of political theory, my tendency has been to emphasize
the positive — except in cases when the negative
betrays the movement’s core principles. The National
Front, I believe, is rapidly approaching this
unacceptable point.

Unlike the largely computer-generated “movement” in
the United States, France’s nationalist movement has a
long history, with several tens of thousands of
militants, fifteen distinct political parties, and
hundreds of associations and networks. Indeed, the
very diversity of the movement poses many of its most
intractable problems. This is especially problematic
given that the French are a highly individualistic
people (Spengler uses the term “anarchistic”)
resistant to collective organization.

Historically, one of the National Front’s most
remarkable achievements was its earlier success in
keeping revolutionary nationalists, Catholic
traditionalists, racial identitarians, national
libertarians, regionalists, neo-fascists, and others
within a single political formation. Combined with Le
Pen’s charisma and the successful social-populist
strategy of the party’s greatest organizer,
Jean-Pierre Stirbois, this broad front of diverse
nationalist tendencies imbued the party with an
exceptional reach. It also imbued it with a
propensity for scission.

The worse of these occurred in 1998 (a decade after
Stirbois’ mysterious death), when a large part of the
party, discontent with Le Pen’s autocratic management
style and his strategic failings, split to form the
Mouvement National Républicain of Bruno Mégret. In
many respects the NF has never recovered from this
split, which saw the loss of 60 percent of its
membership, 70 percent of its cadre, 60 percent of its
elected officials, and two of its four municipalities.
As a result, it is no longer a mass organization of
militants.

Marine Le Pen has since entered the story. Le Pen’s
youngest daughter was trained as a lawyer, but for
most of her twenties (she’s now 39) she was less known
for her contributions to the nationalist cause than
for her night clubbing and her defense of illegal
immigrants. Then, in late 2003, in a blatant act of
nepotism, Le Pen appointed her to several prominent
party positions. She has subsequently become a NF
member of the European Parliament, a party
vice-president, personal adviser to her father, and
his campaign director — with all the amenities,
perks, and power that comes with such positions. In
effect, she’s being groomed to succeed her father.

Given that the children of great men rarely inherit
their father’s genius, Marine’s performance in her
entrusted roles has been something of a
disappointment, even though the old man, the “Menhir”
as he is called, continues to promote her as his
successor. Worse, Marine views the National Front in
ways that are not only unlike that of the movement’s
old guard, but unlike that of her father.

Le Pen is essentially an old-fashioned nationalist,
whose 19th-century references are remote to those of
racial nationalists. Historic nationalism and white
nationalism are nevertheless kindred movements,
sharing many of the same concerns. His career as the
foremost champion of the nationalist cause in postwar
Europe has thus been one that has attracted much
sympathy from white nationalist ranks — in France and
worldwide.

Le Pen, moreover, is a remarkable individual. He rose
from humble beginnings to become a larger than life
public figure. He possesses great physical and moral
courage in a world alien to these ancient Aryan
traits. He’s a charismatic personality, the greatest
French orator since Degrelle, and arguably the
greatest European nationalist of the last half
century.

Whatever his political failings, it’s impossible not
to admire this man who has repeatedly and publicly
belittled the mightiest of the System’s scoundrels;
who has described the alleged “gas chambers” as “a
detail in the history of the Second World War” and the
German occupation of Vichy France as “relatively
benign;” who alone among European politicians opposed
both the First and Second American Wars on Iraq; who
once advocated quarantining HIV carriers; who called
Jacques Chirac, the president, a hireling of the Jews;
who leans toward Russia, favoring a “Europe of
nations” stretching from Brest to Vladivostok; who
resists the one-worldism of American elites and the
Atlantism of the European ruling class; and who has no
hesitation pointing out that Sarkozy, the son of a
French Jewess and a Hungarian father, is not really
French.

By contrast, Marine Le Pen did not grow up in a poor
Breton fishing village, where house floors were made
of dirt and there was no indoor plumbing or
electricity. She is the daughter of a famous public
figure bequeathed a fortune. As a consequence, her
social references are more those of High Society than
of the pre-Semitized people who were her father’s role
models. She may therefore share many of her father’s
criticisms of the System, but to her it’s still not
the alien imposition that Le Pen instinctively feels
it to be.

Like Nick Griffin of the British National Party and
Gianfranco Fini of the Alleanza Nazionale, Marine also
realizes that the established parties have so
discredited themselves that a “modernized” National
Front — minus its “racist, xenophobic, and
anti-Semitic” trappings and minus its ideological
debts to the revolutionary nationalism of the interwar
years — has a real possibility of becoming a
governing party (nevermind that these trappings are a
large part of what has made the NF a nationalist
party). In this spirit, she’s shown a greater
interest in achieving power within the System than of
destroying it.

Under her direction, the National Front has gotten a
major face-lift, which, admittedly, has not been
entirely negative. For instance, she’s done a good
deal to transform the NF’s image from that of a mere
protest party into that of a governing party. In this
spirit, early in the campaign, she had her father
deliver a comprehensive series of policy talks that
outlined the party’s position on the various issue
likely to face a prospective Le Pen government,
thereby enhancing the party’s standing as a viable
alternative to the established parties. She also
altered the Menhir’s style, curbing his propensity for
improvised street-fighting rhetoric and substituting
the measured prose of the prepared public statement.

As a consequence of her various softening activities,
Le Pen has gained unprecedented access to TV and the
print media — and thus to the electorate. Although
now 78, with his powers beginning to fail, his
grandfatherly appearance on the electronic jew has had
a reassuring effect on voters, just as his obvious
superiority (in intellect, language, and character)
over all the other candidates has mollified the sting
of his numerous detractors. All this has made it
increasingly difficult for the System to marginalize
his candidacy.

Marine’s innovations, however, have come at the cost
of diminishing (perhaps abandoning) the NF’s
nationalism. Let me mention just two of the most
important areas of changes. The first relates to the
burning question of our age: Race. For the left, Le
Pen is “le vieux facho.” Its mantra is: “‘N’ as in
‘Nazi’, ‘F’ as in ‘Fascist’.” In the MSM’s less
politicized discourse, he’s a “racist, a xenophobe,
and an anti-Semite.” In actuality, though, he’s
neither a fascist, a racist, a xenophobe, nor an
anti-Semite — but simply, as said above, an
old-fashion nationalist. A major part of Marine’s
effort to modernize the party has thus aimed at
dissociating it from its image as an explicitly
racial-national formation, putting greater emphasis on
the social-economic implications of its anti-globalist
critique and less on its core national values.

This effort got underway last September at Valmy, when
Le Pen formally announced his candidacy. A
much-discussed section of his Valmy discourse focused
on “French people of foreign origin” — i.e., on
non-whites. True to the spirit of Marine’s
modernization, the Valmy discourse proposed a creedal
notion of the nation in which colored immigrants
willing to learn French and adopt French ways (that
is, willing to assimilate) would be considered
“French.”

Though the NF has always been reluctant to define the
nation in specifically racial terms, the party’s
thirty-five year opposition to Third World immigration
and its insistence on “national preference” (whereby
native French are given priority in employment,
housing, and social services) usually implied an
ethnic-racial definition. But now, in step with his
daughter’s modernization, Le Pen (who was once fined
10,000 francs for acknowledging “the inequality of
human races”) leans backward to prove that he’s not a
racist and that his vision of the nation welcomes the
black-brown hordes legally residing in the European
heartland.

Just last week Le Pen made an unannounced visit to the
Paris banlieue — the “abandoned territories” — where
the racial skirmishes of November 2005 originated. In
an obvious appeal to the immigrant vote and in direct
opposition to everything the NF historically
represented, he characterized the black and beur
(Arab) youth of the cités (who white nationalists, if
ever they were to achieve power, would immediately
ship back to their godforsaken homelands) as “part of
the nation” — a part which a NF government would help
assimilate — making no mention of the destructive
impact they have had on French life or the fact that
they are responsible for making the banlieues the
dangerous, wretched places they’ve become. He also
had not a word to say about the banlieue’s
Islamization, which is making large parts of France
more like the Middle East than Europe.

Though Le Pen continues to criticize the System’s
failings and its criminal immigration policies, the
assimilationist, anti-racist principles of Marine’s
modernization have had the cumulative effect of
repudiating the ethno-racial concept of the nation,
redefining it in terms compatible with the creedal
conception of liberals, Jews, and other race-mixers.
In this spirit, Le Pen joins our enemies in denouncing
identitarians as “racist extremist;” he’s taken to
cavorting with black and beur celebrities willing to
indulge his Jacobin fantasies; he talks of zero
immigration but neglects all mention of repatriation;
he concentrates his attacks on the System’s social and
economic failings, while ignoring Islam and the
civilizational clash presently dividing French
society; finally he’s refused to rally what Saint-Loup
called “le patrie charnelle” — the nation that lives
in the blood and breathe of its people and is the
heart of every true nationalism.

But there’s another, equally disputable aspect to
Marine’s modernization. Prior to the devastating
split of 1998, the National Front was still largely a
party of militants — not simply an electoral
connivance. Under Marine this too is changing.
Instead of using the presidential campaign to rebuild
the party she’s opted for a strategy centered almost
exclusively on the System’s media. This, of course,
has given Le Pen greater access, but at the cost of
suffocating the life of the nationalist movement. At
the same, the party’s veteran leaders have been
marginalized, as Marine and her creatures monopolize
almost all the party’s public functions, hoping thus
to ensure her succession to the party’s presidency
after the election. There have also been no mass
demonstrations, no street mobilizations, and no effort
to circumvent the System’s established media. Most
grievous of all, Marine and her modernizers have
refused to form a united front with other nationalists
and thus to use the campaign to rally them in a
movement that will survive the election. In fact,
she’s done a great deal to scatter and disperse the
nationalist movement.

3. The Movement Is Everything
The polls presently put Le Pen fourth in the campaign,
anywhere from 4 to 14 percentage points behind the
leading candidates. But the polls (whose veracity is
widely disputed) are almost certainly wrong — as they
have been in pass campaigns. Moreover, a large part
of the electorate, more than 40 percent, is still
undecided. The French remain highly skeptical about
almost all the candidates, though the election is
being closing followed, political programming has
drawn record TV audiences, and voter registration is
up 50 percent over 2002. Anything is possible on
April 22.

Yet even if the impossible should occur and the NF
wins, it’s doubtful if it would be allowed to take
power — for the postwar System has no intention of
re-enacting Weimar’s fate.

That said: The presidential election is still
important as a national forum to define and articulate
who we are and why it is important to defend our
unique genetic-spiritual heritage.

Elections, in other words, may be charades, but
they’re also ideal organizing opportunities —
opportunities which make it possible to awaken in a
people the political or ideological consciousness of
what it means to be a nation.

The overriding imperative for white survival in this
highly politicized and volatile period is thus to
prepare the nationalist movement to become a
counter-hegemony, in the Gramscian sense — to become
that conscious agent ready to rise from the ashes of
the present System, once the convergence of its
cascading catastrophes comes to a point and it
collapses of its own internal failings.

It is in not meeting the great rendezvous that the
presidential election was to be that the Le Pen
campaign has most failed us. For at a time when
nationalist ideas dominate the political debate and
increased numbers of Frenchmen are uncertain of what
lies ahead and are looking for leaders, it has
neglected the nationalist opposition, failing to
consolidate and energize it as a movement.

The big question now is not about who will win the
election: Le Pen might possibly come in first on the
first round of the balloting (no one can predict at
this point), but he hasn’t a prayer on the decisive
second round (where he’ll have to garner 50+ percent
of the vote). The big question for all who struggle
in defense of the white race is thus not the question
of who will win the presidency, but of who will win
the movement — for it alone can lead us to power.