Le Pen visit cancelled

Melancholicus feels vindicated. The authorities have acted in precisely the fashion he predicted they would.

So what is this about?

Remember, gentle reader, that back in October we were talking about the socialists having their little meet to venerate the memory of Saint Che, martyr?

At the time Melancholicus sourly complained about the fact that nobody seems to mind the socialists organising public meetings to eulogise mass murderers, so long as those murderers committed their crimes in the service of left-wing politics. Being on the left, it seems, is sufficient to render their atrocities palatable, at least socially if not quite morally.

Melancholicus then predicted what would happen if someone were to organise a public meeting venerating the legacies of right-wing murderers, such as Reinhard Heydrich or Adolf Eichmann.

Well, this has actually happened! And the predictions that Melancholicus made at the time have been fulfilled almost to the letter.

Well, not quite — but almost. A student society at the institution where Melancholicus earns his living has invited a prominent figure of the European right to participate in a debate on the Treaty of Lisbon. This person is not actually a Nazi (at least not in the same league as Heydrich or Eichmann), but he is viewed as such by the left and by their hangers-on in the media. He is Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right National Front.

Now Monsieur Le Pen was not invited to this institiution to commemorate murderers of any stripe. The sole purpose of his being here was to debate the Lisbon Treaty. The visit was due to take place in March or April of this year, and Monsieur Le Pen was to be accompanied by his colleague, Bruno Gollnisch MEP. However, the visit was cancelled almost as soon as it was announced.

The hue and cry that erupted after Monsieur Le Pen’s proposed visit had become public knowledge was annoyingly predictable; people will get upset over a right-wing politician like Le Pen, but not over a left-wing murderous psychopath like Guevara. The same people who festooned the walls of the university with flyers celebrating Guevara’s bloodstained career as well as the excesses of the Russian revolution immediately flooded the halls with posters denouncing the visit of the fascist Le Pen. Fascist is a pejorative they love to throw around with alacrity. Anyone who disagrees with the politics of these people is in their eyes a counter-revolutionary and a capitalist; disagree with them strongly enough and you become a fascist.

The college authorities, sensing the danger and the possible political fallout from the proposed visit, immediately moved to quash the invitation, and so Monsieur Le Pen will not now be invited to visit these shores. Melancholicus is relieved at the outcome—not so much that the “fascist” has been banned, but that the university where he works will be spared the turbulence and upheaval of such an event; Melancholicus does not care for riots and student demonstrations and threats of violence and uncontrolled passions and anarchist thugs shouting and people’s cars being overturned and set on fire and barricades being erected and the presence of the police being required to restrain the mob in order that people might not be killed. The campus can do without these things, and on that account he is glad that Monsieur Le Pen will not be coming.

That Monsieur Le Pen should have been invited in the first place, and that by a student society is a source of wonderment to Melancholicus. Students are notorious the world over for their hard-left views.

But as for the socialists, let me see... they hold public meetings glorifying the careers of the dictatorial thug Hugo Chavez, as well as murderers like Ernesto Guevara, Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and at the same time they deny basic freedom of speech to Jean-Marie Le Pen, who never killed anyone.

Is there not a double standard in operation here?

Those pathetic loons.