The Observer reports on an obscure mayoral election in Hénin-Beaumont, and the anticipated resurgence of FN under Marine Le Pen.

Le Pen’s daughter scents victory for resurgent far right

With a cheery “OK, let’s go,” Marine Le Pen leads her troop of activists down the steps of their campaign headquarters, through the narrow streets and into Hénin-Beaumont’s weekend market. Bottle-blond hair, white stilettoes clicking on the pavement, white jeans a sharp contrast to the tracksuits around her, the 40-year-old former lawyer and far-right politician offers handshakes, leaflets, smiles and encouragement in her smoker’s rasp.

By her side is Steeve Briois, the local boy and Front National (FN) candidate who she hopes will be the mayor of this depressed former mining town in northern France when the final count from the second round of Hénin-Beaumont’s municipal election is known at around nine o’clock tonight .

... For the Front National and Le Pen herself, a victory in Hénin-Beaumont would be “the start of a new era”. The FN would be running a municipal authority again for the first time in several years and for the first time in the blighted post-industrial political landscape of northern France.

Also, a first critical step will have been taken to reverse the steady decline since the heady days of 2002 when Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie, the former paratrooper who founded the FN in 1972, made it to the second round run-off in national presidential elections with a countrywide vote of 18%. And finally, Le Pen fille will be established as the unchallenged “leader in waiting” of the party once her father, now 80, retires as promised next year. Le Pen and her team are confident. In the first round of voting a week ago the FN scored well above 40%, twice as many as the nearest challenger.

... In Hénin-Beaumont, run by the Socialists since 1953, things could not be much worse. This weekend’s poll follows the imprisonment of the serving mayor on wide-ranging charges of systematic corruption and the resignation of virtually all his colleagues. The fraud is reported to have cost the town colossal sums, leading to local taxes rising steeply while schools’ grants are cut. To make up the losses, taxes will have to rise even further or deep cuts be made in the municipal budget or both. To make things even easier for Briois and the FN, the local Socialists have split.

... First, Roget said, came unemployment and the crisis of the welfare state. “The kids in France have got no jobs at all and we are all being asked to work longer and have our pensions and benefits cut.” Then came the politicians and the Paris elite who “don’t give a stuff about ordinary people” and simply spend money on “fast trains or big planes”. They never listened to any “ordinary people”.

Third, there was globalisation and, specifically, the Chinese. “We had jobs in Hénin,” Roget said. “But now everything is made in China. We can’t compete with them. They have factories where it is slave labour. What are we going to do? Work like slaves ourselves?

... The strategy of hunting for votes on the left as well as the right has split the FN and the debates have mirrored those in the British National party. Three years ago Marine Le Pen persuaded her father to ditch the hardline anti-immigration language and tone down the borderline racism and implicit antisemitism. Instead, she argued, the FN could break the barriers placed in its way by traditional parties by becoming “respectable” and gain support by adapting its key message. “We have put the economy, the preoccupations of ordinary people, in the foreground. I’m happy to see that my strategy has worked.” The extremism of her father, who dismissed the Holocaust as a “detail of history” and called the Nazi occupation of France “relatively humane”, was part of the past, she said.

“It’s true that we have sometimes given our opponents a stick to beat us with but ... as regards immigration ... my father was a visionary, far ahead of his time, and was attacked because of the truths he told. Immigration - economic, humanitarian, of relatives, because of global warming - is going to be the number one issue in the 21st century.

Whatever works, I guess.

UPDATE 06.07.09

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When we originally covered the story of Jörg Haider’s death last October, several commenters were very quick to sieze upon the assassination angle.  Today, The Times carried a story titled, Investigative reporter offers murder theory over death of Jörg Haider:

When Jörg Haider died in a car crash last year, many Austrians mourned the complex, fast-living populist. He may have been an admirer of Hitler’s employment policies, but he seemed to many rightwingers, frustrated with the Vienna Establishment, to hold the key to a new Austria.

Now pressure is growing to reopen the investigation into his death, and at least one investigative reporter is asking whether the 58-year-old politician was murdered.

“There are too many open questions,” said Gerhard Wisnewski, the author of the book Jörg Haider: Accident, Murder or Assassination? that has been selling quickly in Austria since it was launched last Tuesday. “After eight months of research I am convinced that it is highly probable that Haider was the victim of a politically motivated assassination.”

... “This case has to be reopened with an independent prosecutor . . . and with the involvement of international experts,” said Stefan Petzner, the former spokesman for Mr Haider and a leading figure in the right-wing BZOe party, the Alliance for the Future of Austria. He is threatening to mobilise a referendum on the issue unless the Justice Minister complies.

Mr Haider’s wife, Claudia, has also joined in the critical chorus, questioning the narrative provided by the police investigation team in the week after the crash. The police version, much of it leaked to the press before the official report, was that Mr Haider had visited various bars, including a reputedly gay hangout, on the night of Saturday October 10, in the town of Klagenfurt. He had drunk the equivalent of a bottle of vodka, according to blood sampling, and had driven at 142 kilometres per hour.

The car, a Phaeton limousine, had ricocheted from a fire hydrant into a noise-protection wall, against a tree and then bounced back on to the road about 100 metres farther along. Claudia has always denied rumours that her mercurial husband, the father of her two daughters, was gay and doubts many of the other details.

Interestingly, the story does not appear to have been reported at all by the English-language Austrian Times.  It might also be interesting to know who owns that publication, and whether Herr Wisnewski’s thesis has been reported by other national media in Austria.

A fissure appears to be opening between the views of some national governments in Europe struggling with recession and those of the more detached and strategically-inclined EU Commission.  Among others, Greece, France, Spain and now Italy have adopted some strict measures to discourage immigration.  But Italy’s populist center-right coalition, which includes the Northern Leagues, has gone a good deal further than the others, even criminalising those who house illegals.  On Thursday the senate, Italy’s upper parliamentary chamber, endorsed a vote in May by the lower house.  Unmoved by the left’s inevitable comparison with Mussolini’s racial purity laws, and by criticism from human rights groups and the Vatican, the senate voted 157 in favour and 124 against to bring the package of measures into force.

They include:

1. Illegal immigration becomes a criminal offence punishable by a fine of between 5,000 and 10,000 euros and immediate expulsion.

2. Anyone caught housing an illegal immigrant could face jail.

3. Unarmed citizens patrols will assist the police by mounting patrols on the lookout for public order offences.

4. Parents will have to prove their legal status by presenting their passport or residency permit when they declare the birth of a child.

The European Commission, meanwhile, is looking for ways to strike at least some of these provisions down.  It has announced that it will examine the new law to determine whether it complies with EU norms.  “Automatic expulsion rules for entire categories are not acceptable,” it says.  The Commission is probably miffed because it has only recently opened the first of several African migration offices, this one in Bamoko, the capital of Mali.  The plan is to bring in 50,000,000 + Africans over the next few decades to counter the ageing European demographic.

If national governments will only now address the ageing issue, the Commission’s race-replacement scheme could be in terminal difficulty.

This is an outgrowth of the Luton anti-Islamist protest from two months back - itself a result of the al Muhajiroun protest in Luton during the homecoming parade of the Royal Anglian Regiment in March.

More details of the Birmingham protest here.

By way of some background on the general immigrant situation in Birmingham, the Ken Livingstone supporter and pudgy-faced Guardian blogger Simon Fletcher put up an anti-BNP piece today about the party’s claims of anti-white bias in the provision of council (or social) housing.  One commenter named zacsmith had the drop on him, however.  This was his comment:

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by David Hamilton

Conservative philosopher Roger Scruton has written that “ an ideology needs an enemy”.  In the West that is us - “whites”.  The chosen method is to dehumanise the enemy so that it can be persecuted or even assassinated without conscience.  They think it will fool the public when they try to outlaw the BNP’s racial admission rules, despite leaving the various black and Asian groups to operate their own racial membership policies.

These comments show the Ideological Caste’s dehumanisation of its enemies in language they would otherwise eagerly attribute to Nazis:

Trevor Phillips: “The BNP should be treated as less than human”.
Nick Bourne - Welsh Tory MP: “The BNP are subhuman”

The voice of whites in Britain is the BNP and the whole establishment is conspiring to de-humanise them with a level of incitement that is unprecedented.  If this type of hate campaign was against another ethnic group they would be facing a seven year jail sentence.  The whole Establishment has shown itself to be the same type of hate-filled ideologues that dehumanised Jews in Nazi Germany.  It is an ideology of hate like those in Soviet Russia, Mao’s China and Cambodia against a particular group.

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A few thoughts about an imaginary problem

“Identity” is not a word that need ever pass our lips - not if we have zero respect for the liberal analysis, and wish to be free of its formative power.  For this is a word of the left, and like all words of the left it pressages on us a modern conception of Man which is fatally light and relativistic.

How so?  Well, shouldn’t it be a grave and weighty responsibility for a man to define who and what he is?  After all, modernity places the highest possible value on the individual, denying all bonds, all blood their primacy.  To use the Schmittian formulation, “None but the individual shall dispose of the life of the individual.”  Surely, then, that life should be sufficiently valued by its owner to imbue the exercise with a high seriousness and a desire for some specificity.  Yet in practice the reverse is the case.  We live in the Age of the Left.  It is an age when realization of the Self, once the preserve of the religious and Chivalric orders, has been democratized and, in democratization, has been relativised.  When the measure of a life is mere personal taste all claims are equal.  There is salience but there is no depth.  There is “progress” but there is no movement.  Something vital, something authentic and original has fallen out of the equation.

In the sociological sense what remains is the modern us and the meaning of us.  For well over a century nationalist and traditionalist thinkers have judged that meaning in historical terms and found it wanting.  The ineluctable conclusion is that we are moving away from our truth as men, and putting on the cloth of an increasingly artificial self.  And we are doing this, most of us, because we are ignorant of politics and of ourselves, and we are weak and suggestible.

Artificiality in the modern conception of Man (modern in the context of an industrialised and, later, consumerised society) is precisely a sign of lost being.  It seems improbable, somehow, that the men and women of pre-industrial European societies, filled as those societies were with brothers to the ox, with men listed in the Orange and the Blue, and their widows in the pews, and the widows of the sea, would have had any reference point at all to the narcissism of a self-ascribed “identity”.  Geoffrey Chaucer’s pilgrims assuredly did not define themselves according to their fascinations with the Self.  They were fixed by their relation to kin, to the soil and the seasons or the tides and the wind, to the economy as manor, town or village, to Nature and to God.  These were givers of riches aplenty for all but the high elites of the Court and Barony, of the Church, and of learning.

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by DanielJ

From the Preface to this work, Rieff quoting two historians’ summary of his work:

“If the dominant character type of the twentieth century is really what Rieff calls ‘psychological man,’ the consequences for western society are quite incalculable.”

This is certainly true. If man is a psychological creature than we must use the weapons of psychology to turn him to toward the defensive weaponry of Christianity, ethnic solidarity, epistemology, etc. Simply concentrating on Van Tillian presuppositionalism will do no good when men are no longer motivated by philosophies, but by psychologies.

From the Introduction:

Literature and sociology have long supplied eloquent and knowing professional mourners at the wake for Christian culture. After Matthew Arnold, much of modern poetry [he quotes Yeats in the very beginning of the Intoduction] constitutes an elegiac farewell ... to the religious culture of the West. After Auguste Comte, much of modern sociology has struggled for diagnostic ideas refined and yet wide enough to encompass the spectacle of a death so great in magnitude and subtlety. Now the dissolution of a unitary system of common belief, accompanied, as it must be, by a certain disorganization of personality, may have run its course.

Rieff seems to be stating in this passage that the central crisis of our time - this dissolution of personhood and entropy of personality - is a culture war where the combatants are fighting to “organize” (this has the faint smell of technocratic and bureaucratic totalitarianism parading itself as scientific management with disinterested and rationalized dispassionate concern only for the psychological well being of mankind) the human psyche.

He goes on to state that the:

...long period of deconversion, which first broke the surface of political history at the time of the French Revolution, appears all but ended.

and that:

several systems of belief (are) competing for primacy in the task of organizing personality in the West.

Hence, the “culture war.” The “cult” is the cult of personality.

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