Steve Sailer: From the New York Times:
Marine Le Pen, French National Front Leader, Speaks at Her Hate-Speech Trial
By ADAM NOSSITER OCT. 20, 2015
LYON, France — With pugnacity and self-assurance, the French far-right leader Marine Le Pen defended herself in a courtroom on Tuesday against charges of inciting religious hatred against Muslims, provoking cheers of “France for the French” from supporters in the courthouse halls afterward.
Drawing on French anxiety over the migrant surge in the east, an electoral campaign in which Ms. Le Pen’s National Front is seen as having momentum, and her own charisma, she turned what was meant as an accusatory stage into a full-throated platform for her views.
The context was unusual, but the hard line taken by the populist leader was not: France’s Muslim immigrants are an alien force threatening French values.
Human rights lawyers — France’s court proceedings allow their intervention — tried to challenge her, but Ms. Le Pen, a skillful lawyer herself, batted them away. …
But it took the lifting of her parliamentary immunity by the European Parliament in 2013 for the case to move forward, spurred on by the human rights groups. …
When the case finally came to trial on Tuesday — a final judgment is expected on Dec. 15, and Ms. Le Pen could face a fine of over $50,000 and up to a year in prison — it did so at an ideal moment for the political leader.
Okay, but isn’t the idea that the frontrunner in the first round of Presidential voting in 2017 is on trial and facing a year’s imprisonment for a speech somewhat eye-opening to Americans? Does nobody notice the irony in “human rights” lawyers and groups trying to stifle freedom of speech in the land of Voltaire and Liberte, Egalite, et Fraternity?
Or has the term “human rights” simply become, like “civil rights,” a who?-whom? term to depict whose side you are on, with no relation anymore to general principles?
COMMENTS TO STEVE SAILER:
* Steve, I have a feeling that you think that there used to be general principles in politics because you believed in them yourself in your youth. And as you became more skeptical and cynical, you subconsciously assumed that the world was getting that way too. No, the world of politics was always devoid of any principle save for tribalism, which is really more of an instinct. It’s just that when you were young you didn’t yet notice this.
* German constitutional law has made some reasonable distinctions here (don’t know about U.S. constitutional law).
First, it is inevitable that one person’s rights are confined by other persons’ other rights. So it is reasonable to accept that free speech can be subject to restrictions.
Secondly, these restrictions have to be restricted, too. The most important qualifications are (1) that a basic right A can only be restricted in favor of another basic right B and (2) that, even in this case, the restriction mustn’t damage the “essence” of the basic right.
Unfortunately, German constitutional law has not yet defined precisely what the “essence” of free speech comprehends. Which makes hate speech trials in Germany unpredictable (yet a lot of convictions are quashed by the highest courts).
* Human rights, like race, are social constructs, and therefore they have no “taxonomic”/insert correct word/ significance.
Only a zealot wedded to outmoded 19th century ideas could still believe in human rights.
* The wider point is, Steve, is that the French political class, over the past half century, have created an imminent racial and demographic catastrophe in their nation.
– They know this. And they are shit scared of the day of reckoning, when it will *inevitably* come. So they are forced to flail out by duplicitously and hypocritically taking fundamentally ‘illiberal’ measures.
* Contempt for freedom of speech by the establishment is one of the two keys to the Nazi seizure of power.
Once the Depression was on, lots of nationalist and socialist parties and movements were organizing everywhere. In Germany, the Communists and various nationalist movements were threatening the established parties. One of the measures taken to damp down power of the nationalists was a ban on discriminatory and anti-semitic propaganda.
Of course the Nazis — being true believers and shameless and drunken crooks willing to brawl with cops in the streets — were undeterred. The respectable FN and UKIP type movements were suppressed and appeared to voters to be milquetoast losers. The brawling Nazis were strengthened by the laws that suppressed their natural competition.
Eventually the Nazis took power on the basis of their well-honed SA street fighting. Suppressing the vote by open threats in front of the polls in unfavorable areas got them up to 33% in ’32 after which they took control of the police and openly beat down competitors’ supporters and got up to 40%.
None of that could have happened without the boost from knocking down legitimate nationalists.
Of course, Germany and France learned nothing and their wishy-washy national supposed leadership thirst for another strongman to lead them. Spilled blood and a failed nation seems a small price to pay so they continue to cut down reasonable leadership. Bans on nationalist parties, bans on Nazi symbolism, and various other official suppression of ideas continue in both nations. Failure to face up to Nazis and communists honestly and defeat them intellectually often ends tragically. The Anglo nations survived both challenges because their leadership had to defeat communists and fascists in open debate.
But the leadership class of Europe aches — almost sexually — for a new Hitler’s boots to kiss. That is the dirty secret to why they behave as they do.
* The public prosecutor has asked for Marine Le Pen’s acquittal. Of course, the tribunal is not obliged to abide by the prosecutor’s request, so, theoretically at last, MLP could go to jail for one year.
MLP is using the trial as an opportunity to express her un-PC views. Usually, the public at large sympathizes when someone is prosecuted for speaking the truth, as journalist Eric Zemmour knows quite well. Few politicians can say, like MLP, “I’m not afraid to go to jail for speaking the truth, and I can prove it.”
Since what MLP is tried for, is what most French people said at least once in private (or in not so private places, such as barrooms). Most people tend to sympathize with the accused when such a trial takes place, and she knows it.
The threat of a trial is more than enough to deter most people from saying un-PC things.
I’ve noticed that the people who cling to PC thinking usually are timid types. They’re terrified of being ostracized if they are un-PC, and to protect themselves they preventatively ostracize the un-PC. As a colleague of mine once said about Zemmour: “I know that what he said is true, but nevertheless I think that he shouldn’t have said it.”
Which is another way of saying: “I agree with Zemmour, but I’m afraid of being rejected if I say it aloud. Whereas if I abide by PC ideas, no one will reject me outright.”
Is there any country other than France in the world where a female frontrunner for the next presidential elections could go to jail, at least in theory? I can think of one… But if, in that other country, the female frontrunner ever goes to jail, it won’t be for having spoken the truth…
* They also protect the right to receive information, yet the EU pays millions of euros to the BBC, which threatens imprisonment for any householder in the UK who refuses to buy a “TV licence”, without which (I am not kidding) it is illegal to watch live TV (i.e. as it is being broadcast). The licence costs £145.50 a year. Payment is enforced by an army of ill-educated goons.
The money received by the BBC from Brussels is relatively inconsequential compared with their annual rake-in of about £4 billion, but helps to explain the blatant pro-EU bias in BBC programming – which will be especially evident as the In/Out referendum approaches.
The BBC is also, of course, one of the champions of demonizing any views which do not precisely match their own: their funding model is, after all, socialism writ large.
* In the US we have categories of protected free speech. libel isn’t protected, slander isn’t protected, going up to someone and goading them into hitting you isn’t protected(they are free to hit you). hate speech on the other hand is very much protected precisely for the reason that defining it is pretty subjective.
* But, that is exactly what is so cool about PC! You have a tough day at work, your spouse or kids are annoying you, then you just go to a random site online and state some simple scientific truths — the genetic potential for any trait that varies within a population must vary between populations, predicting the long-term global climate is scientifically challenging, etc. — and it is like shooting fish in a barrel. You get to take out your frustrations in micro-aggressions against the PC weenies.
* As I have been saying for the past few months, the Age of Ideas–the Enlightenment–is drawing to a close. Tom Wolfe has it exactly right; we are headed back to blood. The Marxists are just hoping they’re the last ones in the cannibal pot.
* France has always had a somewhat dubious record when it comes to freedom of speech. Zola had to flee to London after the publication of J’Accuse.
But Britain is going the same way. A few years ago a Stephen Birrell was jailed in Scotland for tweeting insultingly about the Roman Catholic pope.
In Canada freedom of speech is dead and buried. Some guy in Ontario is facing several months in prison for calling a woman ugly on twitter. Ezra Levant is also facing prison for saying a member of the Human Rights Commission was stupid.
* Tribalism can be a principle in itself, more or less, i.e. the belief in homogeneous nation states and the rejection of diversity. Without this underlying principle, no society can remain stable. The best that a multiracial country can do is have a dominant race, or at least a race whose culture is accepted by the rest of the population, as in America when it was 90 per cent white. In countries with near-equal proportions of competing ethnic groups, the most you can hope for is a state of controlled hostility.
The sort of tribalism you see in highly-inbred, low-trust societies is a different matter.
* This happened in England in 2005, when the British National Party leader Nick Griffin was arrested on charges of inciting religious hatred under a law just concocted by the Home Secretary David Blunkett. Rod Liddle investigated the case and found it stinking of political interference from above, despite official police denials.
An officer who visited another BNP member, Paul Cromie, as part of the same investigation said to him: ‘At the end of the day this whole thing should be … well, it is very political. It’s not coming from senior police. It’s coming from much higher than that.’ Cromie recorded this and gave a copy of the tape to Liddle.
The purpose was to damage the BNP during the upcoming election campaign, and to gain more of the Muslim vote for Labour.
* France has some history of the verdicts of particular trials ultimately being meaningless in the face of public opinion. Jacques Verges, the half-Oriental superstar lawyer known for defending unrepentant terrorists and Nazi commandos and Khmer Rouge big-wigs, made his reputation by losing his trials but winning the public; he would “win” in that the presiding judge would respond to pressure, public or “from on high”, with a curtailed or meaningless sentence. Le Pen, I think, will win this trial most especially if she loses it technically and is thereby jailed. Remember another blonde female politician, Yulia Timoshenko, was universally despised until pictures surfaced of her passing time in her prison cell. Then she became an object of pity and was rendered less odious to many people (for better or for ill. I am pretty sure she deserved the garrote rather than a comfortable prison cell). Yes, there is a good chance Le Pen wins most by losing, unless serving time prevents her from running in 2017.
* Lenin was a very sharp man and his ‘who-whom’ dictum pretty much sums things up succinctly. One can’t get much clearer than that. Human rights is a great concept but it’s been used as a cudgel to beat opponents over the head with, just a tool to use against political enemies. People in general may have accepted the idea that they have constitutional rights, human rights, free speech, etc, but the leadership class mostly doesn’t; they’re in it for the power trip and the money. It’s like one of those mega-churches where the congregation believes in the religious precepts but those running it regard it as a business.
* “Free speech” is an idea that has no relevance in a diverse society. All it is is a cowardly mask for privileged white “men” to hide behind when called out for their loathsome hate.
* The Time’s decision to have Nossiter writing from France is very unfortunate, and may be important. His depiction of both Marine’s new FN and her father’s is dishonest and tendentious (though her father’s party did draw in a lot of Algerie Francais extremists.) It seems Nossiter is reverting to the view that anyone who opposes mass immigration must be portrayed a Nazi, which is so 1990′s.
* I wonder how many French opponents of these hate speech laws pointed out that if adopted, sooner or later they would be used to jail the leader of a popular opposition party.
* The part you’re missing is that people can adopt principles, but principles don’t make people. Jews for example hold many diverse views, but they are still here because enough of them agree on one thing: that they have a right to exist as a genetically distinct people.
* The Mongols and Huns and Goths and Vikings and Wehrmacht didn’t spend their time kissing boots. They spent their time conquering.
Nobody gets lebensraum by “kissing boots”. And everyone is seeking lebensraum these days. In the next 50 years we either find a warrior who will preserve our lebensraum or we go extinct.
* Restriction of the right of free speech is yet another product of mass immigration that our elite conveniently omitted to tell us beforehand.
