"It is spine-chilling," spouted The Economist magazine last week in its cover story entitled "France's Shame,"[pay archive] "for Europeans across the continent who fear that the success of the odious Jean-Marie Le Pen may inspire voters elsewhere to follow suit."

Well, not exactly. What's spine-chilling is that within a week after this and similar avalanches of name-calling hit the news stands, the Dutch political counter-part to Mr. Le Pen lay dead in a pool of his own blood, spilled by a left-wing assassin apparently driven to violence by the very sort of demonization that the Atlantic ruling class unleashed on Mr. Le Pen and similar foes of mass immigration.

French voters, crowed the Washington Post after Mr. Le Pen won only 18 percent of the vote in the presidential elections on May 5, "from across the political spectrum responded in huge numbers to calls from politicians, the media, business leaders, unions and the Roman Catholic Church for a massive protest vote against what they called Le Pen's racist and xenophobic positions."[French Extremist Loses Big Washington Post, May 5, 2002, Page A01]

If it's "hate crimes" you're looking for, put all of the above in the prisoner's dock, because it was the very hatred they spewed at Mr. Le Pen and similar leaders all over Europe that inspired the murderer of Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands one day later. What Mr. Fortuyn's death tells us is how far the ruling class is prepared to go to stop the opponents of mass immigration from gaining power: It will go as far as necessary, including incitements to murder.

Yet despite the victory of crooked "conservative" Jacques Chirac, Mr. Le Pen did not do so badly. He won more votes than ever before, raised his percentage of the national vote from 15 to 18 percent and substantially improved the chances of his Front National in future elections. No leader of the populist right in either Europe or the United States has done as well since the 1968 candidacy of George Wallace, who won a bit less than 14 percent of the popular vote. If nothing else, Mr. Le Pen's efforts may have put immigration control on the European political map.

Then again, so what? The demonization inflicted on him and his allies across Europe not only contributed to the murder of Mr. Fortuyn but also effectively frightened millions of other voters from voting for him at all. Since otherwise more-or-less reliable media kept calling Mr. Le Pen a "fascist," a "racist," and an "anti-Semite," suggesting he would build concentration camps for immigrants and had "denied the Holocaust," it's perhaps understandable that so few supported him. Indeed, if any of these smears were true, it would be entirely understandable why many Frenchmen might want to shoot him dead. That is probably what the ruling class was privately hoping for.

Yet even if the calculated demonization campaigns won't always work in the sense of frightening voters or inspiring free-floating crackpots to commit murder, the ruling class has other means to stop the swelling anti-immigration tide. Both pro- and anti-Le Pen spokesmen have suggested that Third World immigration into European nations has indeed gone a bit too far and that some reforms are in order. After all, when global terrorism is being plotted by Muslim fanatics in places like Hamburg and Rotterdam, you really don't have to be a fascist to support some reduction.

But any such measures will be either rhetorical or purely cosmetic, just as they have been in this country since Sept. 11, where the open borders lobby has altered its agenda not one jot or tittle. In 1978, Margaret Thatcher, faced with a revolt on her right from Britain's anti-immigration National Front, made a few noises about cutting back on immigration. That was all her mainstream conservative supporters asked for. Once in power, she did and said nothing more about the issue. She didn't have to.

The fact is that the Atlantic ruling class now depends on mass immigration. It needs immigrants for cheap votes. and cheap labor, to replenish failed institutions like churches, unions and schools where unborn European children never sit. It needs immigration to create a new underclass to justify all the ruling class's social engineering and reconstruction policies.

Most of all, it needs mass immigration to break down the racial, cultural and national barriers that stand in the way of the global political and economic integration that is at the top of the elite's agenda.

Mr. Le Pen may well have begun forcing European politics to turn a corner the ruling class doesn't want to turn.

But the blood spilled in the Netherlands this week may be merely the first, as the foes of mass immigration begin to grasp just how far their enemies will go to stop that corner from being turned at all.

COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

May 09, 2002