French Far Right Candidate Eric Zemmour Faces Lawsuit for Denying Nazi Deportation of Gays

I found this on France 24. Eric Zemmour, the far right candidate for the French presidential elections, is facing being sued by a number of gay rights groups, who claim that he denied that gays were rounded up in France and deported to the concentration camps during the Nazi occupation. The report runs

‘Far-right candidate Éric Zemmour faces yet another lawsuit in the run-up to France’s presidential election, this time filed by gay rights groups who say he denied that homosexuals were rounded up and deported during the country’s wartime Nazi occupation.

Six gay rights associations told AFP on Wednesday that their criminal complaint for “denial of crimes against humanity” stemmed from Zemmour‘s latest book, “France has not said its final word”, published in September.

Zemmour, a writer and talk show pundit known for his polarising attacks on Muslims and immigrants, is currently polling in fourth position, at around 11 percent, ahead of the first round of France’s presidential election on April 10. 

In his book, the far-right candidate agreed with another politician who argued that deportations of homosexuals to concentration camps were a “myth”. Such a claim “distorts history to support [Zemmour’s] homophobic positions”, the associations alleged in their complaint.

The candidate’s entourage retorted that “it is not Zemmour’s words that are cited in the book”. They called the legal move a smear attempt ahead of the first round of voting in the presidential election on April 10.

Gay-rights groups feared the candidate’s stance against “propaganda in our schools”, Zemmour’s team added, referring to the former pundit’s claims that children are exposed to “anti-racist and pro-LGBT propaganda” in French schools.’ See

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/far-right-zemmour-faces-lawsuit-for-denying-nazi-deportation-of-homosexuals/ar-AAVpWHc?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531

I don’t know what happened in France, but the Nazis certainly did put gay men in concentration camps, where many died. Decades ago one of the great gay British thesps – I think it might have been Sir Ian MacKellan – was in a play, Bent, about the Nazi persecution of gays. My guess is that they were almost certainly rounded up and deported to the camps in France as well, along with Jews and everyone else the Nazis decided was subhuman.

Zemmour has got many other grotty views, mostly about race and Muslims. I think a month or so ago he was accused of something similar by French Jews. I think he was caught saying that Jews weren’t deported to the camps under the Vichy Republic. Now it seems he’s made a similar claim about French gays during the Second World War. But the Sargon of Gasbag, the man who broke UKIP and his fellow Lotus Eaters put up a post praising him on YouTube. Which shows how squalid some of their views are.

Given how horrific the Nazi persecutions were, it’s about time somebody sued him. If he really denied the deportations, then the gays are quite right to sue him.

Alt-Right Meeting Celebrates Trump Victory with Cries of ‘Hail Trump’

As the Alt-Right starts settling into a position of power through their links to Trump, any pretense that they’re remotely mainstream is rapidly coming off, and their true Fascist face is coming through. In this piece from Sam Seder’s Majority Report, Michael Brooks comments on an Alt-Right meeting at the weekend in which the movement’s leader, Richard Spencer, laid bare the movement as White Nationalism. He declared that White people were the children of the sun, a race of conquerors and creators, who had been marginalised in contemporary America. At the end of the speech, a group of three of his stormtroopers cried ‘Hail Trump’ and ‘Sieg Heil’, with Nazi salutes.

Brooks comments that there are three components to the Alt-Right. One could be described as neo-Fascist, neo-Nazi or neo-Dixiecrat. Another section was people clustered around computer games. And then there was this, which was simply Fascist or Nazi.

He goes on to say that he would like to have Scott Atran on the programme. Atran’s an anthropologist, who conducted research interviewing terrorists, exploring what attracted people to it, and particularly what attracted young men. He’d like to ask him what was attracting young American men to the Alt-Right. He states that some of it is the sense of meaninglessness prevalent in late stage capitalism. He can see how this would attract young people to terrorism in the Middle East and North Africa. It’s more obscure in North America, but nevertheless it’s still a factor.

He also notes the role of sexual frustration. He states that he is not making this comment out of snark, but these men are putting all their emotional and sexual frustration and projecting it on to society. He notes that one of the two men in the photo has ‘hover hands’, the gesture some men make, who would like to touch their female companion, but are afraid to do so. Fascists are afraid of everyone, including women.

This last comment is very accurate. A large section of the Alt-Right seems to be Men’s Rights activists, who are bitterly anti-feminist. And many of them seem to resent the female gender simply because women don’t fancy them. Kevin Logan in his series of vlogs ‘The Descent of the Manosphere’ covers these individuals. Each of his vlog posts is on an individual denizen of the manosphere, who, in his view, is trying to drag our species back into the sea. The series now includes more than 30 posts. Not all of these men are misogynists through sexual frustration, but it accounts for a fair number.

The Nazi and Fascist movements considered themselves to be male, anti-feminist movements. They appealed to men of extreme right-wing views, who felt threatened by feminism. The Futurists, an artistic movement of militantly techno-Fascists, which celebrated the car, the aeroplane, the new machine age, speed and violence, declared in their manifesto that they advocated ‘scorn for women’. Ludwig Theweleit, a German historian, has gone further in the case of Nazism, arguing in his book, Male Fantasies, that it had a very strong homosexual component. This has been taken up in its turn by the American Right, who have argued that Nazism was militantly gay. 75 per cent of the SA were homosexual, but they were wiped out by Hitler during the internal purge of the Night of the Long Knives, and male homosexuals were interned in the concentration camps during the Third Reich. I think Sir Ian MacKellen acted in play about the imprisonment of gays by the Nazis in the 1980s, called Bent. In the case of the American Right and the Republican party, the homosexual element in the Nazi party is used to smear gays and the gay rights movement. The argument seems to be a simple syllogism: the Nazis were all gay, therefore, all gays are Nazis, or gay rights is a Nazi plot. It’s specious rubbish, like most of the stuff the Right spouts. Nevertheless, it’s believed.

Regardless of their sexuality, the Alt-Right is now a growing menace in America, and their potential to harm millions of people, and empower similar movements on this side of the Pond, is immense and terrifying. We need to stop them. Now.

Vox Political: Cameron Planning Internment Camp for British Radicals

This is a really scary piece Mike’s reblogged from the Canary. Apparently, Cameron and Gove are planning to isolate Muslim extremists in special secure unit to stop Muslim radicalisation in prison. This has been compared to Guantanamo Bay in America. Mike instead in his comments asks the extremely pertinent question of whether it’s actually instead something like a Nazi concentration camp, especially with the government’s establishment of secret courts. See http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/02/17/cameron-wants-to-lock-radicals-in-a-single-place-like-a-nazi-concentration-camp/

Mike and so many, many others, like the Angry Yorkshireman, have blogged about the serious dangers these iniquitous courts pose to British justice and liberty. Under this system of, for want of a better term, special justice, the established standards of legal process may waived in the interests of ‘national security’. You may not see the evidence against you, nor know who your accuser is. Indeed, you may not be told what offence you have been charged. It tramples all over Magna Carta, and is exactly like something straight out of Kafka’s novels, The Trial and The Castle.

The motivation here appears to be the very rapid spread of Islam through the prison system through what looks like a very aggressive strategy of dawah, Islamic evangelisation. However alarmed some might feel about the spread of Islam in prisons, this proposal is should be more alarming. Firstly, there is difference between Islam and Islamism, and conversion to Islam does not necessarily lead to converts being set on an automatic path to extremism, at the end of which is ISIS or al-Qaeda. Indeed, the piece Mike’s reproduced from the Canary article states that the idea behind this special prison seems to be that Islamism is like an infectious disease, which isn’t the case.

The model for this special prison seems to be Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay. This was extensively criticised because of the illegality of the vast majority of the incarcerations their. The majority of those imprisoned would simply not have been convicted in ordinary courts of law because of the lack of evidence against them. With the addition of the Patriot Act, which provided for the arrest of anybody George Dubya and his cronies thought wasn’t sufficiently patriotic as a potential terrorist, the system’s critics saw Gitmo very much as the thin end of a totalitarian, Nazi wedge. Conservatives, like the right-wing Canadian cable/web TV host, Michael Koren and the British/Irish journalist Mark Steyn, resident in New Hampshire, have tried to justify Gitmo by arguing that normal standards of justice cannot apply in war. The conditions of battle are just too confused, they argue, for the same standards of reasonable proof to apply when assessing whether or not a suspect is guilty. The men and women interned at Gitmo are nevertheless extremely dangerous, and present a real threat to the public security if they are released. Hence their incarceration of what may be inadequate or flimsy legal grounds is justified. Despite this argument, the majority of those imprisoned at Gitmo have been released, and those still remaining seem to be there out of sheer bloody-mindedness by the authorities rather than any convincing legal reason.

I’m also worried about this, because it points to a long tradition of authoritarianism in the Tory Right. I’ve got a feeling Lobster ran pieces in the 1980s about Tory plans for internment camps in Northern Ireland, to be used against the IRA, modelled on the system of concentration camps the French had used in their campaigns against the indigenous peoples fighting for their freedom in what used to be Indo-China, out of which came the Vietnam War. These were dropped because whatever the threat of paramilitary violence in Ulster, it was felt that the British people would not tolerate other White Brits being rounded up and herded into concentration camps like Black Kenyans during the Mao Mao rebellion.

And the Tory need to incarcerate political and social ‘deviants’ raised its hideous physiognomy again when AIDS appeared in the 1980s. At the time there was a real fear that AIDS was so infectious and deadly, that it would wipe out the world’s population exactly as the population of Europe and Muslim North Africa had been decimated by the Black Death in the 14th century. In five years, that disease killed perhaps somewhere between a third and quarter of the European population, and a similar proportion North Africans in what is now the countries of Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya and Algeria. Radical measures were being mooted to combat the disease. And this included the isolation of its victims. I can remember being chilled by an article in the Sunday Express that announced that the Swedes were considering building an ‘AIDS Island’ to isolate and treat the victims of the disease. British ministers were looking into the possibility of doing the same. Gay sex between men had only been legal since 1969, and much of society was extremely prejudiced against homosexuals, particularly the Tory party and the police. James Anderton, the extremely right-wing head of Manchester police force, stated that he believed that AIDS was God’s punishment for gays, and described homosexuality as a cesspool, or something similarly offensive. Margaret Thatcher passed legislation intended to ban the teaching that homosexuality was at all normal or acceptable in schools. In this environment, even at the time I wondered if this was an attempt to construct a secure medical facility, like the leper hospitals that were deliberately built on islands to isolate the victims of that terrible disease. Or if instead it was a prison camp to lock up gays, just as the Nazis had done during the Third Reich. Homosexuals were then sent to the concentration camps, and identified by pink triangles placed on their prison pyjamas. This part of the persecution of gays by the Nazis was portrayed in the harrowing play, Bent, starring one of the great gay British thesps. I’ve got a feeling it was Sir Ian Mackellan in the title role, but I could be mistaken.

This strikes me as being pretty much the same squalid, authoritarian instincts rising to the Tory surface yet again. If, indeed, it ever really went away. And the danger here is that once the Tories do it to once section of the community and get away with it, they’ll do it to all of us. Muslim radicals will be the first. Then it could be others suspected of terrorism, like radical nationalists – Irish Republican splinter groups, say. And then it’ll be extended to illegal asylum-seekers, trade unionists, Socialists, Anarchists and Communists. Same as it always has been. Just like Trump in America similarly threatens to introduce real Fascism if he wins the election. This has got to be very carefully watched indeed, if not banned altogether before it even begins.

And if they are considering a round-up of Islamist radicals and other suspects, when should we expect them to stage their own fake attack on parliament to justify it all, like the Reichstag fire?