In
class last Thursday, I was pretty overwhelmed by the similarities between the statements of current French populist candidate, Marine Le Pen, and the immediate “get out
of jail free card” that American Exceptionalism brings to discussions of crimes
against humanity. Why is it okay in the United States to slaughter a group of
people and still claim that it’s the “home of the free”? In France, one
politician is claiming a similar thing.
Le
Pen is famous for being xenophobic and racist, and she comes from the Front
National, the far-right extremist party. Her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, once
said that the Holocaust was only a “small detail of history,” and despite
efforts to clean up the FN’s public image, Le Pen showed her true colors. A
couple of weeks ago, Le Pen said to the French press that the Vichy government’s
role in the Holocaust was not actually France, despite heaps of evidence in the
contrary. In a horrific display of Nazi collaboration, the Vichy government used
French city buses to round up and imprison 13,000 Jewish men, women, and
children in a stadium called the Velodrome. After three days of heat and
torture, they were shipped out of the country to be exterminated in the
concentration camps. For Le Pen to deny French responsibility for le Velodrome
d’Hiver parallels the United States’ ability to simply pretend that it is not responsible
for the genocide of 15,000,000 African Americans during slavery – and now.
Basically,
my point is that there is a continuing tradition of nationalist exceptionalism
that allows people in government to say that crimes against humanity are not
the responsibility of the nation because they are a blip in history. That part of history doesn’t reflect who
we are, they say. We read in “We Charge Genocide” that to contend with the
injustice of genocide and tragedy is a nationalist act that resides in the
fabric of what it means to be American. The Civil Rights Congress pointed
fingers at every part of the American government in petitioning the UN for
relief because the crimes against African Americans in the United States equaled
the magnitude of the Holocaust. 15,000,000 people died.
The
hypocrisy behind the mentality of American Exceptionalism, and I guess you
could call it French Exceptionalism, fuels the fires of hateful groups like the
Front National. Moreover, it allows for the presence of a messed-up dichotomy of
freedom being defined by un-freedom on the home front. Just in case you’re
curious, Le Pen’s polls took a hit, but here we are waiting for her to face off
against Macron for the second round of French presidential elections on May 7th.
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