Marie Le Pen’s Rive Gauche

Rachel Marsden of the Chicago Tribune recently wrote an interesting article on the pending French presidential elections focusing on what she perceives to be a deficiency in Emmanuel Macron’s pro-immigration policies.[1]  To me however, the article’s most important aspect involved an unacknowledged admission concerning Mr. Macron’s adversary, Marie Le Pen.

Ms. Marsden approves of the fact that Mr. Macron is a full-fledged neoliberal – neoconservative (a linguistically strange but logically consistent confluence) bought and paid for by the international financial community but bemoans the fact that he is a strong supporter of the entry of immigrants and refugees into France.  Evidently, Ms. Marsden’s ideal candidate would combine the worst policies of both candidates.

In passing, Ms. Marsden alludes briefly to Ms. Le Pen, admitting what the mainstream media studiously ignores: that while Ms. Le Pen is an obvious xenophobe and probable racist, she is also a progressive on economic matters (“So Le Pen … risks losing with a nanny-state leftist economic platform.”).  Ms. Marsden does not touch on the reality that a great deal of the opposition against Ms. Le Pen in the mainstream media is really premised on her opposition to military intervention abroad and aspiration for non-confrontational relations with Russia but that information is available in mainstream media broadsides accusing her of being another Putin puppet and Manchurian candidate.

As can be expected, the world-wide mainstream media portrays a mere caricature of Ms. La Pen based on her anti-immigrant and France–first postures, ignoring her positive progressive economic and international positions.  That pretty much mirrors its bias against President Trump, although he’s evidently “seen the light”, not on the many social and economic issues on which I and many others personally oppose him, but on his now former opposition to Deep State neoconservative belligerency.

Some of us, I among them, believe that the greatest threats to democracy and world peace come, not from flawed politicians like President Trump and Ms. La Pen, but from a mainstream media to which the truth has become less than irrelevant and for which hypocrisy is a quotidian tool in the service of their masters among the amoral one percent.

Something to think about.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2017; all rights reserved

[1] Rachel Marsden: “French presidential candidate Macron has only one major flaw”, Chicago Tribune, April 25, 2017, available at http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/sns-201704251333–tms–amvoicesctnav-b20170425-20170425-column.html.