November 12, 2005
Le Pen
Wanting to do some primary research on the political situation in France and seeing how the different parties are responding to the crisis, I went to Le Pen's National Front web site and there are a few interesting points about the site:
- The opening page of the site has a clip from an commercial for the EU elections from 1999. From a propaganda point of view, it is unbelievably funny, I actually burst out laughing. Leni Riefenstahl would be proud. My reaction is probably how much of the world sees clips of jingoistic American patriot acts, so this helped me better empathize with them. But Le Pen's is so over the top, it's laughable. It is a video-game style simulation of burned out streets of French cities, with a ray of light (blue, white and red rays of light, actually) shining through with the image of a man coming to save the sities, and then spreading the blue/white/red light across all of Europe.
- This burned out cities clip was in 1999. And he was already going wild about the burned out cities. Over the last few years, it has gotten much worse, not to mention, the last two weeks. (I mean, 80 cars have been burned per night in 2005, before the riots began!). The fact that he got 20% of the vote in the last election, and that this was clearly a prominent part of his campaign, is more evidence that the situation was already pretty bad then, and that people were angry then.
- Le Pen's site is a blog! (Written, supposedly, by the various guys running the party.) Funny how blogs are being used for every political purpose!
- They actually have normal blog-like entries on their blogs. Not just formal press releases. For example, they have an interesting entry about how Sarkozy's party (UMP) has taken out advertisements on Google (for words like "incivilite" and "banlieue")! It's not obvious to me if the UMP doing this is a good, bad, or neutral thing: I'm trying to imagine the Republican party taking out ads on Google so that if you search for "Iraq" it goes to one of their pages.
- Le Pen's daughter has a blog entry from Tuesday, which I found funny and will quote:
Ce slogan est depuis 20 ans celui du Front National qui avec plus de politesse réclamait :
« La France aimez-la ou quittez-la ! »
That is, the National Front's slogan for 20 years has been, "France: Love It or Leave It!". Um, I've heard an almost identical phrase before! It was just really funny for me to hear the identical phrase and verbiage used, in France, in regards to France.
- I remember from going to France in high school how everyone would write their last name in capital letters. It's funny to see how formal and official of a convention this is: everyone's last name (except for public personalities mentioned in news articles) is capitalized. This ranks up their with the German capitalization of the first letters of nouns as a small but interesting universe of capitalization differences between the different languages.
- They list their Propositions of what they will do when elected (the platform) and, unlike those of mainstream American parties -- and I consider the National Front a mainstream party, since they got 20% of the vote and were the finalist and runner up in the last election -- their platform is clear, concise, and unambiguous. One advantage of being an extremist is that you don't have to deal in the language of ambiguity. It's also noteworthy how so many of the issues there are the same as the issues debated here and use the identical language as well (the very first item on their list is, "Inscrire le droit à la vie dans la Constitution" - to put the right to life in the Constitution.)
Posted by Morgan at 01:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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