Late Stage Fascism
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“…where he went into towns and dropped them down to innocent in the middle of towns.”
It would appear that he speaks English As A Foreign Concept.
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This is worth more than a like. It’s not pithy enough for a bumper sticker, but this is a message that needs to be widely disseminated.
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completely off-topic: I think it’s funny that often English abbreviations work as French ones, just read them right to left.
EU → UE
UNO → ONU
NATO → OTAN
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And NF -> FN
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No no no. As any Trump supporter can tell you it’s the liberals who are the real Nazis! The fact that all the actual swastika-waving white supremacists in both the U.S. and Europe vocally support far right parties instead of progressives is just some kind of misunderstanding. Probably they just missed that clever “Hitlery” meme.
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I concur with his (and your) view. It’s still relevant today. That’s why “I didn’t vote for him”-arguments won’t fly with me.
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And he’s the cream of the trump press secretary crop, too, which HAS GOT to be insulting to almost all prior press secretaries. Almost.*
*How do you spell “Ron Ziegler”?
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Yeah, Potou mentioned it in a debate and caught Le Pen off-guard:
I’m sure this could (and possibly will) be spun as “hey they took their money from our pockets in the first place, we’re just taking it back.”
It reminds me of people who say we should get rid of Social Security, except that they’re going to collect what’s theirs.
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Which runs up against the difficulty that claiming the legitimacy and the legacy of the Vichy collaboration was a central rationale for the existence of the National Front.
Le Pen directed the 1965 presidential campaign of far-right candidate Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, who obtained 5.19% of the votes. He insisted on the rehabilitation of the Collaborationists, declaring that:
“Was General de Gaulle more brave than Marshal Pétain in the occupied zone? This isn’t sure. It was much easier to resist in London than to resist in France.”[7]
In 1972, Le Pen founded the Front National (FN) party, along with former OAS member Jacques Bompard, former Collaborationist Roland Gaucher and others nostalgics of Vichy France, neo-Nazi pagans, Traditionalist Catholics, and others.[7]
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Normally when I watch the news I skip over any bits where Spicer is talking, but I had to rewind and actually listen to his words for that one. Holy … living … fuck.
Spicer: Hitler didn’t use chemical weapons.
Media: Uhhhh… do you want to clarify that?
Spicer: Hitler didn’t use chemical weapons on innocent people.
I brought this up in the Trump the Chump thread. I think Spicer is deeply stupid. He was using the rhetorical device “worse than Hitler,” without realizing that when you do that in the white house instead of on 4chan people actually dig into that statement to figure out what you mean.
What he meant was, “Praise the president for shooting missiles at Syria! PRAISE HIM!” Instead, somehow he ended up saying that Jews deserved to die in the holocaust. I need a lot of faith in his incompetence to attribute that to anything but Nazi sympathies.
I get what you are saying and why it’s so mind-boggling to see Jews vote for Nazis, but I think in a way it’s kind of disrespectful to Jews, who are just a human, and therefore just as capable of thinking a bunch of bizarre shit, as anyone else. It’s mystifying that people who were going to have their land expropriated for the border wall voted for Trump, or that people who lived in Flint voted for the state government that poisoned their water. We can look at those people and think: you should have known better, but I don’t think we have any reason to think their reasons for voting for these assholes are any worse than anyone else’s reason. We should all know better. Why the hell is anyone voting for these assholes?
I don’t know, I think calling concentration camps, “holocaust centers” isn’t something a holocaust denier would do. It’s something a total dumbass who doesn’t know shit about the holocaust would do. But that’s not to absolve Spicer. I never assume malice when incompetence explains the situation, but you can’t just say “whoops!” if you deny the holocaust. You need to apologize for real if not resign.
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I’m not quite sure why it’s “disrespectful” to point out why individual members of a group historically persecuted by right-wing populist parties might be considered particularly stupid for supporting, making common cause with, or downplaying the actions of such noxious parties. I’d consider it more disrespectful to ignore the fact that they’re humans with the special history of persecution that the Jewish people have faced across the millennia (a history that millions of them across the globe recalled just the other night).
Pretty much everyone ignored the holocaust in the postwar period. It really was years of work on the part of the Israeli government and the Jewish diaspora, and people sympathetic, who cared about their fellow human beings, that got the Holocaust understood as we understand it today.
Besides, in France, Chirac changed that. What’s you’re point? That because the post-war governments refused to accept responsibility, that it’s all fine?
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Disrespectful isn’t the right word. It rubs me the wrong way. In a world full of people supporting Nazis, I don’t like to single out Jews who support Nazis.
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I don’t mind doing so, as it provides a vivid example of how stupid and short-sighted humans in general can be. In this case, the exemplars happen to be Jewish, but I’d say the same thing about anyone waving his “Chickens for Colonel Sanders” campaign sign whether he was Jewish or not.
My point was that Marine Le Pen was actually following the official line on Vichy.
Until Chirac, yes, that’s true. That doesn’t make it historically accurate or morally defensible.
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Heard back from 5 of my Jews in Paris. So far none of em have a problem with the actual words Marine Le Pen used. These 5 also are not going to vote for her in the next round. Have not heard back from Jews who have said they were planning to vote FN this time, they may be on vacation for Passover.
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