French election

We begin our abbreviated coverage of the French election with today's un-abbreviated comment from moi. While I don't like to be reflexively pro- or anti- anything, I am anti-Le Pen, and I'm beginning to fall in with the anti-Europe crowd. Here's why:

Europe -- you guys suck. In fact, you've always sucked. Two thousand years ago, most of Europe (save Rome and Greece) was a backwater filled with savages, barbarians, and other unsavoury characters who couldn't create anything close to decent civilization. After the Western Empire fell, you Europeans decided that some good Christendom was in order -- but failed at creating it, instead electing to sink into seven centuries of stasis and Jew-hatred. After a brief period of classicism, rebirth, renaissance, and Jew-hatred, it became clear that the Lord wanted you to "colonize the brown people" -- steal their land, poach their natural resources, infect them with disease, and shackle them for transport across oceans to be enslaved. Amidst more Jew-hatred, now manifesting itself as enlightened "anti-Semitism," you folks decided that killing everyone, which Europe had taken a liking to, was stupid. In the late 1940s, after allowing everyone to go to war with everyone and gas innocent civilians, you Enlightened Europeans elected to create a Union which would dissolve all enmities. When the Berlin Wall fell, the US became more of a hegemon which needed to be balanced than a close friend who had your back. So you decided to piss on us. Thanks. We appreciate it.

As Mark Steyn puts it in the Spectator, Europeans (not Britons) seem to have a penchant for hypocrisy. Jorg Haider, leader of the Austrian Freedom Party and Gestapo admirer, won 29% of the vote two years ago in a national election. The FNP's Jean-Marie Le Pen won 17%, as we all know, in leftist France last week. Throughout Europe -- in Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, Portugal -- rightists are triumphant. The closest thing we have to a rightist candidate in the US is Pat Buchanan, who won .42% of the vote in 2000. In a highly ironic twist, half of those votes came from Holocaust survivors.

According to Steyn, "for Goran Persson, the Prime Minister of Sweden, the point of the EU is that it can be a counterbalance, a ‘moderating’ influence on those wacky Americans. But, for a moderating influence, it’s remarkably immoderate. If you look at that first round of French presidential voting, between Le Pen, the guy who broke away from Le Pen, the Trot, the other Trot and the rest of the cranks, the zany fringe candidates drew about 45 per cent of the vote. No wonder that big Chirac landslide is looking wobblier by the hour. Europe is not the lovely utopia it is made out to be. It's time the Europeans realized that despite our tragically immoral practices (death penalty, lack of gay rights, marijuana criminalization, etc.) they're not the ones who should be lecturing us. It's funny, but there weren't 100 anti-Semitic attacks in the United States last week.

I am ranting, and I do, of course, apologize for the unorganized nature of this post. But the situation in Europe worries me. Le Pen may break a threshold on Sunday, and regardless, he has made a statement. In Germany and the Netherlands, upcoming elections are expected to lead to impressive right-wing showings. Will Europe continue a spiral down to anti-immigrant, anti-Jewish, anti-social sentiment? Or will it remember that it is the bastard child, and behave correctly towards its allies, friends, and people.