What do you think of the victory of the National Front in France?
The problem with Madame Le Pen is that she is just as much a product of the French Revolution as the rest of them. They think they can mold the Muslims into good little secular Frenchmen. Madame Le Pen, who joined her family's National Front because of her admiration for General Bonaparte and his Jacobin army, will crush them with two of the Revolution's most destructive ideologies – nationalism and radical secularism – laïcité -- enforced by the powerful French state – she will ban the nun's habit along with the burqa. Such a sad situation – ever since Europe threw off Christianity they have no heritage, nothing to bind them but liberalism and nihlism. [c=#BF0000]http://bit.ly/1TJPMNBBut[/c] I would feel a little bit better with her niece, [b]Marion Maréchal-Le Pen[/b] , who is a devout Catholic trained by the Sisters [c=#BF0000]http://ind.pn/2pqRHCr[/c].....
Le Pen leads a party with fascist heretage. She had skillfully given it a makeover and uses the rhetoric of secular republican values but its a dog whistle.
The burqa ban is not really motivated by an atheist desire to seperate church and state but is aimed squarly at criminalising an non offensive aspect of Muslim culture. Any aspect that targets Christians is a thin veil of faux consistency. She is more Mussolini than Jacobin.
Le Pen will almost certainly lose the second round to Macron, who I am also no fan of but is a lesser evil.
Those concerned about fascism I think you have reason to be concerned, although I hate to use the word "fascism". Fascism was an interwar ideology which only reached full fruition in Mussolini's Italy. Nazism was a lot different with its racialism and German paganism. Fascism today is just an all-purpose epithet tossed at people we disagree with.
However, fascism is also an ideology which sprung from the soil of the French Revolution. See [i]Leftism: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse[/i] [c=#BF0000]http://bit.ly/2abX9xP[/c] (free download in epub or pdf format)
@beckychandler: Fascism and Nazism were a reaction against enlightenment values. Its support came from the right and it was used by the establishment to crush the left.
Having Marx = Hitler is all the more ridiculous given what Hitler actually thought and did to the German left.
@Burnley123: May I suggest you read the cited book by [b]Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn[/b]. You also might want to try [i]"The Birth of Fascist Ideology"[/i] by [b]Zeev Sternhell[/b][c=#BF0000] http://amzn.to/2oB3dqJ[/c]
I think most western countries are going through this .. lost once in globalism, national identity is being sought ... But I wonder, would the search have occurred at all if the fruits of globalism had been more equitablly shared
Lol, I love it when religious right-wingers criticize France and Western Europe as though it's this horrible place because religion basically has no purchase there. That region has the highest standards of living, the freest societies, and the most open media on the planet. What are you people bitching about? Not everyone is sucking God's cock enough?
@IvanKaramazov: Just because you would prefer for a common aspect of human culture to not exist doesn't mean it's healthy to ignore and neglect it. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if France's anti-religious laws aren't a major factor in why so many religious extremists there seem to think that they're freedom fighters.
That secularist revolutionaries, like yourself, in a post-Christian world are still able able to offer up Christian critiques is what Nietzsche described as the[i] "god-shadow"[/i] -- the lingering shadow of a dead God on the barren postmodern landscape. [c=#BF0000]http://bit.ly/1VfgC3g [/c]
Bu tit won't last:
[i]“The life of the West, Nietzsche said, is based on Christianity. The values of the West are based on Christianity. Some of these values seem to have taken a life of their own, and this gives us the illusion that we can get rid of Christianity and keep the values. This, Nietzsche says, is an illusion...Remove the Christian foundation, and the values must go too.”[/i] [b]~ Dinesh D'Souza[/b] [c=#BF0000]http://bit.ly/2pesEBR[/c]
@luckranger71: I realized that, and wondered if when I wrote this I should put something like "good showing" or someone would correct me,and someone did.
It's not a victory though. She passed the first round, but that's not a victory. She has to beat Macron before that. We'll know the result in a fortnight. I don't expect her to win though, since her party holds a tremendous amount of stigma from it being founded by former Nazi collaborators.
“One of the occupational hazards of being an atheist and secular humanist who hangs around on discussion boards is to encounter a staggering level of historical illiteracy. I like to console myself that many of the people on such boards have come to their atheism via the study of science and so, even if they are quite learned in things like geology and biology, usually have a grasp of history stunted at about high school level. I generally do this because the alternative is to admit that the average person's grasp of history and how history is studied is so utterly feeble as to be totally depressing.” [b]~ Tim O'Neill[/b] in [i]“ The Dark Age Myth: An Atheist Reviews 'God’s Philosophers'”[/i] [c=#BF0000]http://bit.ly/2pXmYtV[/c]
