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Written by Eric Zuesse.
Marine Le Pen has continued her gradual political rise in France so that in the French political polling she now stands as the likeliest to succeed the man who beat her in 2017, Emmanuel Macron. If she does that, then she will probably bring bigger changes to international relations than any national leader has done ever since U.S. President Harry S. Truman started the Cold War on 25 July 1945.
She is the daughter of the far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen, but after taking over leadership of the far-right Party that he had founded, she expelled him from it, and has made increasingly clear, since then, that she is a progressive (including a passionate opposition to any imperialism) — so much so that now the Wikipedia article on her, in its section “Political Positions”, presents political viewpoints that would be hard to distinguish from those of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders in America, and of Jeremy Corbyn in UK. The biggest difference, perhaps, between her and those other progressives, is simply that whereas in U.S. and UK the dominant political ideology is imperialist-fascist (springing from the Englishman Cecil Rhodes in the late 19th Century), that’s not so in France. (Twentieth Century France had nothing like Cecil Rhodes — a leading and impassioned champion of racist aristocratic rule.) Consequently, French public opinion isn’t as hostile toward progressivism as is the case in U.S. and UK. (Progressivism is the exact opposite ideology to imperialistic fascism.) So, a larger percentage of the French are willing to consider voting for a progressive candidate. A larger percentage in U.S. and UK are closed-minded, refusing even to consider a progressive, but instead vote only for regressive candidates. Therefore, France, today, is less imperialist-fascist (less pro-aristocratic) than are U.S. and UK, both of which are more controlled by billionaires, in both of the country’s main Parties, than is the case in France.
An argument could be made that Le Pen is an opportunist who sees better prospects for herself by separating herself from her father’s views; and this argument might be true, but she has won more support with progressive views than proponents of those (progressive) views have had in a long time; and French progressive voters have no other realistic chance of getting a progressive Government than by voting for her.
In addition: on 17 April 2017, after the Republican Donald Trump reversed himself 180 degrees on NATO (which he had vigorously opposed while campaigning in 2016 for the U.S. Presidency), CNN headlined “Le Pen criticizes Trump’s new found NATO stance” and reported:
“Undeniably he is in contradiction with the commitments he had made,” Le Pen said in an interview with France Info radio. “I am coherent, I don’t change my mind in a few days. He had said he would not be the policeman of the world, that he would be the president of the United States and would not be the policeman of the world, but it seems today that he has changed his mind.”
Her comments come just two days after Trump hosted NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg at the White House and declared that the military alliance is no longer outdated, which had been a frequent refrain of his during the 2016 campaign.
She has, in fact, spoken out far more forcefully against U.S. imperialism, and against NATO in particular, than Bernie Sanders did when he was running for the U.S. Presidency in 2016. This is extraordinary. A French progressive has a possibility of getting a progressive President by voting for her, but none, at all, by voting for any other candidate. Apparently, the proponents of U.S. imperialism want anyone but her to win.
The American imperialist-fascist Michael Bloomberg published on April 11th a ‘news’-report, which stated that,
The Ifop-Fiducial poll showed Macron getting 23%-28% of votes in the first round, against 25%-27% for Le Pen, meaning he would come first in only one scenario. The president was seen beating Le Pen in most cases tested by the pollster last October. The French presidential vote sees a wide field of candidates whittled down to a final two in the second round.
Two other potential rivals, former health minister and president of the working class northern region of Hauts-de-France Xavier Bertrand, plus Paris region president Valerie Pecresse, were also seen winning against Le Pen if they reached the second round against her, with 59% and 55% of votes respectively.
However, that was extremely deceptive ‘reporting’, because in Politico’s aggregate of polls (and this is a far more reliable indicator than is any one poll), the percentages are Le Pen 26%, Macron 25%, Bertrand 15%, Melanchon 11%, Jadot 6%, Hidalgo 6%, Dupont-Aignan 5%, Poutou 1%, Asselineau 1%, Arthaud 1%, Lassalle 1%, and Chaminade 1%. Consequently, the Bloomberg-reported mere speculation, that Bertrand and Pecresse “were also seen [by nobody except that single poll] as winning against Le Pen if they reached the second round against her” (meaning if either of those two candidates were to score a higher percentage than Macron in the first round, which is obviously not going to happen) was published by him only so as to deceive his readers to think that Le Pen is vastly less popular in France than she actually is. Even to have published the possibility that Pecresse would be among the top two contenders in the first round was irresponsible and highly deceptive ‘news’-reporting — unprofessional ‘journalism’ at best, and propagandistic at worst: designed to make Le Pen’s Presidential prospects seem (to the ignorant) to be far less than they actually are. The imperialist-fascists in the United States and in UK (which group includes all of those two countries’ billionaires) would dread that Le Pen become leader of France. They were able to destroy Corbyn, and to prevent Sanders from winning America’s Presidency, but at present the likelihood is that (if the coming French electoral counts will be accurate) Marine Le Pen will probably become elected on 13 May 2022 (or in a second-round contest thereafter, between the top two first-round contenders) as France’s President.
That would be the biggest historical event in global affairs since at least 1945. The corpse of Cecil Rhodes (the UK’s founder of U.S.-UK global imperialism) would then be twisting in its grave — not just dead, but gone. The possibility of FDR’s vision and hope for the global future, of a democratic global order under international law that is set and enforced by the United Nations (not by any one country, the U.S. or any other), would again be possible. The post-1945 nightmare of Truman’s repudiation of that vision and replacement of it by a reach for American rule over the entire planet, would then be effectively ended.
The biggest single threat to the international policies of Joe Biden and of Boris Johnson (Rhodes’s vision, which has been the world’s reality since 1945) would be a French President Marine Le Pen. Anglo-American imperialism (including yet more subversions, sanctions, coups, and invasions — such as against Afghanistan 2001-, Iraq 2003-, Syria 2011-, Ukraine 2014-, Yemen 2015-, and Venezuela 2015-) would possibly even collapse altogether. An election of Marine Le Pen could become the biggest single event to end the U.S. empire — an empire which had started on 25 July 1945 in the mind of U.S. President Harry S. Truman.
Consequently, the billionaires are very opposed to Le Pen, and their ‘news’-media consequently focus on every argument to dissuade voters from voting for her. On April 29th, America’s Politico ‘news’-site bannered “After Marine Le Pen: As the far-right leader heads for yet another likely loss, some in her party are already looking past next year’s presidential election.” Its basic argument is that her Party’s disgruntled far-rightists, the people who had built the Party, are opposed to her and want to replace Le Pen as the Party’s leader, and so how can she bring the country together if she can’t even bring her Party together? Here’s an excerpt:
“We all have the same conviction that Marine Le Pen won’t win the next elections,” says one participant of the call and a member of the National Council, a 120-member committee that decides on the party’s policies.
“We need to find a new candidate,” said the participant, who asked not be quoted by name for fear of being sidelined.
The group of discontents, a mix of National Council members, regional heavyweights and local representatives, meet online on Fridays.
This argument is similar to what was used in America’s Democratic Party in 2016 and 2020 when the progressive Bernie Sanders was running for that Party’s Presidential nomination, against Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. Both times, he lost that contest for the nomination, and the main reason which the Party’s Old Guard presented against him is the same main reason that Le Pen’s Party and America’s billionaires are presenting now — through Politico and other ‘news’-media — why that Party’s voters shouldn’t give her the nomination: she’s ‘not electable’. The polls indicate otherwise, but most of any Party’s loyalists listen far more to what the opinions of that Party’s Establishment are saying.
However, if Le Pen will become elected on May 13th as France’s President, then German voters could still give a big boost to U.S. imperialism by electing the Green Party’s candidate, Annalena Baerbock as their next Chancellor on September 26th. She is now favored in the polls to win, and is a strong supporter of U.S. imperialism. Her Party have policy-positions that are most similar to the views of America’s Democratic Party, which is to say liberal fascist, big on centralized control by billionaires, but favoring the high-tech billionaires over the fossil-fuels billionaires. Baerbock is a strong supporter of America’s NATO, and would even be called a neoconservative in America, because she is such a strong supporter of control over the entire planet by the United States Government. She’s not a German Nazi, but an American one. By contrast, the progressive Le Pen wants NATO to be replaced if not ended altogether, and wants Europe’s subordination to U.S. interests to be definitely terminated altogether. Furthermore, on April 17th, Baerbock said that if the Russian natural gas pipeline to Europe, Nord Stream 2, will be allowed to be completed and go into service, then “Europe will be destroyed.” The U.S. Government has been demanding that Europe buy U.S. fracked, containerized and shipped liquefied natural gas, and not Russia’s pipelined gas, which is vastly less expensive; and Baerbock is a big champion of that very costly American ‘proposal’, for Europe. The color of Germany’s Green Party is actually blood red, like that of Germany’s Nazi Party was. They’re out for a global fight, not for a global peace. But, this time, the Master ‘race’ is American, not German. In other words: they want America’s billionaires, not Germany’s ones, to be the world’s masters. They call that “Green.” After all, it’s 1984, in 2021. “Ignorance is strength.”
Pepe Escobar was correct, on April 23rd, when he headlined “Putin Rewrites The Law Of The Geopolitical Jungle” and he said:
As far as “red lines” are concerned, Putin’s implicit message remains the same: a NATO base on Russia’s western flank simply won’t be tolerated. Paris and Berlin know it [but if Baerbock replaces Merkel, then ‘Berlin’ suddenly won’t ‘know’ it any longer].
The EU is in denial. NATO will always refuse to admit it.
We always come back to the same crucial issue: whether Putin will be able, against all odds, to pull a combined Bismarck-Sun Tzu move and build a lasting German-Russian entente cordiale (and that’s quite far from an “alliance”). Nord Stream 2 is an essential cog in the wheel – and that’s what’s driving Washington hawks crazy.
Whatever happens next, for all practical purposes Iron Curtain 2.0 is now on, and it simply won’t go away.
However, if Le Pen becomes elected in France, and Baerbock doesn’t become elected in Germany, then it probably will “go away.”
Consequently, one may reasonably expect the Rhodes group — particularly the billionaires of U.S. and UK — to employ all of their vast skills at international subversion, coups, and the like (via CIA, MI6, etc.), to prevent Le Pen winning in France, and to insure Baerbock winning in Germany. Can they do it? Or will Russia stop them? In either case, is this “democracy”? Or: is it instead democracy only if the publics in France and in Germany get to know the truth, and will vote on the basis of it? Russia’s Government doesn’t have any need to deceive the Russian public in order to retain their support for fighting back against the Rhodesists, but the U.S.-and-allied side does need to deceive their publics in order to retain their support for continuing Rhodesist aggressions. The fact that there are two sides in a war doesn’t mean that both sides need to lie in order to win it. 1984 won’t necessarily be the permanent situation. The “news” won’t necessarily always be Newspeak in the U.S.-and-allied countries. But, if the Rhodes group (billionaires in U.S. and UK) succeeds both in France and in Germany, then it could become virtually permanent. Europeans will decide the world’s future, but will America’s and UK’s billionaires decide what that decision will be?
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
Jargon alert! Progressives, Sandersistas, Johnsonists, imperialist-fascists, Nazis, Rhodesiasts, Greens, far-rightists, take cover!
She’s not going to change Francefrica either.
‘Madam’ Le Pen(is)-the dick, is a Drag…Your welcome, Cheers!