ANIMAL CRACKERS
Mark Almond explores the link
between fascism and zoophilia
THE Greens may be languishing in British opinion polls here, but taking up the cause of the environment and endangered species is the in-thing among the politically upwardly mobile in the francophone world. Hot on the heels of the announce- ment by the Khmer Rouge that Pol Pot's men in the Cambodian jungle were going to show no mercy towards anyone who was cruel to animals, or disregarded the rights of any of Kampuchea's species, flora as well as fauna — (with one obvious excep- tion) — comes the news of the greening of
Jean-Marie Le Pen and the Front national.
At a time when every other political party in the Fifth Republic is trying to steal his anti-immigrant clothes, the would-be saviour of France is not at a loss for an issue to rally even more Frenchmen to the 19 per cent who endorse him in the polls. After tentatively putting his hobnailed boots into the water of environmental con- cern over the last few years, Le Pen's movement has now organised a fully fledged conference to enunciate its con- cern for the national Frenchman's fellow
creatures and its opposition to 'unnatural' scientific research.
Although Le Pen insisted that his aim was to 'rescue' environmentalism and ani- mal rights from the clutches of the Left, much of what he says echoes radical Green anti-Western rhetoric. Le Pen's usual anti- African views have suddenly taken second Place to his anti-American animus. Taking uP a long-exposed Soviet canard, he assured his audience that 'Aids was not the result of relations between an African lady and a green monkey, but of an American laboratory and certainly of a military labo- ratory.'
Even if he is wilfully wrong about the source of Aids, for once Le Pen's claims about the roots of animal welfare are not misleading rhetoric. It was the Marxist Left which traditionally despised the natu- ral world and Marx celebrated the bour- geoisie's conquest of nature in The Communist Manifesto. He looked forward to a world-wide landscape of smokestacks and the disappearance of reactionary rain- forests along with their outdated inhabi- tants. It was the most radical anti-Marxists who took up the opposite cause. Hitler made immediate use of his dicta- torial powers in 1933 to rescue lobsters from the misery of boiling pots of water and went on to ban the picking of edel- weiss along with trade unions and political oPposition. Hitler's vegetarianism and non-smoking teetotalism was not an aber- ration. He could claim respectable intel- lectual forebears like Schopenhauer and Wagner who combined anti-Semitism and animal rights into a potent ideological cocktail, which had its French proponents in people such as the deaf future collabo- rator, Charles Maurras.
Neo-Nazi freaks like the British Nation- al Front and its off-shoots have tried to Present themselves in recent years as nature's friend just as 15 years ago they Played up the 'socialist' element in their ragbag of ideas in the hope of pulling in alienated voters. So far their attempts to give anti-Semitism a new lease of life in Britain by using the anti-fur trade cam- paign as its vehicle, and by protesting against the cruelty of the ritual slaughter of animals for consumption by Jews (as well as Muslims), have not succeeded. In Paris, it was striking how far Le Pen went to avoid invoking openly racialist stereotypes to promote the welfare of French animals although he approved the appeal of one of his colleagues in the European Parliament, Jacques Tauran, for a special colloquium on ritual slaughter. But Le Pen quickly passed on to the hor- rors of anabolic steroids in cattle intended for human (i.e. French) consumption. Going green is a high risk strategy for Le Pen since, whatever the genealogy of Green ideas, most modern Frenchmen associate them with the Left. The numer- ous and ferociously well-organised hunters and fishermen of France have provided many voters for Le Pen in the past, but they might be scared off by too much sen- timentalism. They are the descendants of a different type of French racialist, Vacher de Lapouge, who argued 100 years ago in
his book, The Aryan, that because man was just another animal and part of nature's ceaseless struggle for survival, human rights existed no more than did 'rights of the armadillo'!
Of course, there were hunting Nazis too, led by Hermann Goering, who preferred to see his hobby as natural, but had little mercy for scientific researchers. Like the Front's many huntsmen today, Goering used the argument that his quest for prey meant that habitats were saved and wildlife fostered. In any case, when he wasn't pre- serving Europe's last bison for his own hunt, Goering threatened scientists who inflicted cruelty on animals with a taste of their own medicine in one of his camps.
If evidence were needed of Le Pen's pen- chant for fascism, despite his many mal- adroit efforts to distance himself from the consequences of his own gaffes in the past, then his very public sentimentality about animals ought to be thrown in the scales. Every would-be national strongman identi- fies with his favoured pet: Hitler had his Alsatians: M. Le Pen has 'a white rat which I kiss every day on the lips.' This should help him win the vote of Brigitte Bardot, that barometer of French opinion, who remarked — after her return from a trip to the Canadian Arctic, where she suggested to the Eskimos that they renounce whale meat in favour of fresh vegetables — that the most animal-loving presidential candi- date would be the one to get her vote.
Since the collapse of communism, the question has constantly been raised: with what folly will the fellow travellers next identify? To be the real thing, the object of worship must combine maximum propa- ganda about its benevolence with the great- est possible inflicting of human suffering. The new-look 'Khmers Verts' of the extremes of the political spectrum are suffi- ciently absurd to fit the bill.
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