Liberté, égalité, fraternité…et la victoire de l’unité? Mais oui! Le voici…
Pardonnez mon anglais, but DAMN. That’s some real beauté right there!
I was biting my nails on the first round, when it looked like Nazism was going to be making a comeback in France after nearly 80 years of freedom. Marine Le Pen, for those unaware, is the nepo baby of a man who had no problem associating with the old (and defeated) Nazis, after all. She’s a neo-Nazi in all but name, because these nouveaux fascistes are cowardly little shits who haven’t got the guts to wear their swastikas out in the open and take their fessées for it. She really has been making an effort to get in under the radar and turn France into something no decent person would even recognize. She may not be her party’s official head, but she is its driving force. So her party’s strong showing on the first ballot was a disturbing wake-up call.
Fortunately, the French have ears like lynxes for that sort of thing. This is the country that guillotined its last king, after all. And it is still the country that most frequently grinds to a halt when mass social discontent takes hold.
So what did the French left do to stop the next Nazi takeover of their land? What leftists everywhere should do but too often don’t — namely, put aside their partisan ideological quibbles and band together as a broad front to defeat fascism. (This is, incidentally, the very thing the German left also neglected to do in the 1930s. Anyone could have foreseen how THAT would end, but everyone was just running around with eyes shut and fingers in ears. And Germans have been paying for it, literally as well as figuratively, ever since.)
You can’t imagine how much I wish this broad-front left unity would happen in more countries, including my home and native land. We, too, are facing a fascist backlash right now. We’ve got pundits proclaiming a Toronto by-election (in a wealthy riding, which is the detail they keep glossing over) to be “a referendum on the Trudeau Liberals”, which in fact it is not. And the drums are now beating for a new election call, one in which a weaselly little con man who has been seen shaking hands with actual neo-Nazis would win.
I’m sick of our media’s blatant right-wing sympathies, and also of holding my nose and voting for the increasingly disappointing Liberals just because the NDP has never won my riding. I would really like to see a new progressive coalition kick this whole mess to the curb before a modern Hitler does to Canada what the OG monster did to my ancestral Germany, with the media seal-clapping its approval all the way.
Anyhow, blah blah blah: Catastrophe averted, at least in France. We can all breathe again. Tomorrow, we need to buckle down and learn from the French example. It would behoove us to be a bit less British, and a lot more French.
Oh, and maestro? A little musique, s’il vous plaît.
