The French cut the cheese again

One interesting aspect of French politics is that, in any election, about 40% of their electorate votes for either a Communist or a Nazi. You can't really blame the voters, both extremes are impossible to distinguish most of the time.

On the Nazi side of the house, French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen has raised many a hackle for his past Hitler-apologist comments. Most recently, he said the Holocaust was "not particularly inhumane". For the record, note "inhumane" and "inhuman" are not necessarily the same thing. In any case, besides being a stupid thing to say, it may well be criminal as well. In France, that is.

As a warning to our home-grown leftists who cannot admire the French enough, it happens to be illegal in France to deny the Holocaust. Yes, that's correct. The right to deny the official history of those who themselves denied others of their rights is itself denied.

It's a "denial non-denial" policy from a country whose greatest contribution to civilization was the idea that you might improve a food by letting it get moldy. Such is the logic of the French. So, le Pen may be in trouble again.

Of course, that is not to say you cannot approve of genocide, and anti-semitism in general, so Chirac himself appears to be safe. You will recall the warm praise Chirac lavished on Yasser Arafat after the Nobel Prize-winning terrorist finally bit the dust in a Paris hospital, "I came to bow before President Yasser Arafat and pay him a final homage."

But, whatever the insane contradictions French "logic" presents, nothing can top the irony of the legal denial of free speech as regards the very system of government that itself denied all freedoms, spoken and otherwise. The Third Reich was only surpassed by Communism in its destruction of humanity, so you would think the society that defeated that evil empire would be particularly careful to protect free speech, however stupid such speech might be.

Oh wait-- the guys who defeated the Nazis do protect free speech. It's the cheese-eating surrender monkeys who deny that right.

Now it all makes perfect sense.