by Paul Craig Roberts
January 12, 2025 - Two themes to which I return are the difficulty of effecting change and the disappearance of ethnic nations in the West. What is going on right now in France is a story of both together.
Marine Le Pen’s political Party, National Rally (formerly National Front), is the largest French Party, but it is kept from office by all other political Parties combining against it. Le Pen’s Party has stood for French ethnicity as opposed to a diverse Tower of Babel. In Europe, an ethnic-based national state has become associated with Hitler’s Third Reich. Consequently, the French establishment has branded the National Rally racist and even Nazi. By branding the National Rally in this way, the French establishment endeavors to make Le Pen’s Party, not immigrant-invaders, the main threat to France. The French establishment and French Left-wing have equated hating Le Pen with resisting fascism.
But it is not working. Native French are awakening to the fact that their civilization and their culture are being transformed by waves of immigrant-invaders and that France is ceasing to be French. The French establishment has focused on Marine Le Pen herself with the lawfare made famous in Amerika with false indictments of Donald Trump. Le Pen faces the prospect of a devastating prison sentence plus five years of political ineligibility on the charge that she used European Parliament funds where she is represented to pay for National Front employees. All political Parties do the same thing, but the investigation was limited to Marine Le Pen. We are witnessing the French establishment’s selective use of law to eliminate a perceived threat.
On January 7, Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie, the founder of the Party, passed away. The French Left-wing, or perhaps it was the Establishment, celebrated his death with fireworks on the Place de la Republique. French Establishment commitment to diversity, the EU and globalism requires the death of a French patriot to be celebrated.
I keep waiting for the day that every member of the French Legion of Honor is arrested for being a patriot.
One would think that the insult to Jean-Marie and the sentencing of Marine Le Pen would strengthen Le Pen’s Party as France’s only representative. But according to an article by Pierre Levy, the National Rally’s new leader, Jordan Bardella, craves respectability. He has succumbed to the temptation of gaining office by making the National Front acceptable to the establishment.
The question in my mind is: will Donald Trump also choose to become respectable?
When change is desperately required, dictatorships are more easily overthrown than democracies. In democracies, the system permits well-financed interest groups to dominate the country’s political, legal, media, entertainment and educational institutions. A ruling establishment becomes institutionalized in the country’s institutions.
Attempts to bring governance back to service to the people from service to the establishment requires the equivalent of a religious revival or the blood of a Leninist revolution, the consequences of which can be worse than what was overthrown.
Over the course of my lifetime, I have witnessed the dissolution of the belief system that is Western civilization. The voices that have attempted to defend civilization have been weak. The very definition of civilization has changed. Are Western people sufficiently aware and educated to face this challenge?