Jacob Heilbrun writes: “Unlike in the 1930s, Le Pen and her compatriots do not deliver spittle-beflecked speeches calling for the extermination of other races.”
I am unfamiliar with anyone giving spittle-beflecked speeches in the 1930s calling for the extermination of other races. I am curious if anti-racists ever give spittle-beflecked speeches?
Heilbrun’s point is that any white who cares about his fellow whites as a group is a knuckle-dragging Nazi.
Heilbrun adds:
Le Pen avoids the kind of demagogic language used by her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, a former intelligence officer in France’s vicious war in Algeria, who called the Holocaust a mere “detail.”
Most people don’t care about the suffering of out-groups. There’s nothing heinous in Jean-Marie Le Pen’s attitude. Why should he care about the Jewish Holocaust any more than he cares about any other genocide?
Heilbrun writes: “Today, a new generation of leaders on the right has seized on Europe’s economic malaise to argue that the real culprit is Islamic immigrants taking jobs away from the native-born. The underlying sentiment — the demonization of an “out” group — recalls the wave of anti-Semitism that helped propel fascist political parties to triumphs during the 1930s.”
All in-groups tend to demonize out-groups.
“The demons that European leaders tried to suppress after 1945 are back. It won’t be easy to exorcise them.”
It’s called Genetic Similarity Theory. People and animals prefer their own kind.
