We just learned that right-wing French politician Marine Le Pen shared genuine, undoctored images of ISIS atrocities. Actually, she didn’t leak them. She just took photos of ISIS torturing and murdering people which those terrorists had posted proudly. She retweeted them, with comments. And now Le Pen is in trouble for it.

The Soviet Union perverted psychiatry to punish and silence dissidents.

The French establishment is desperate to contain populist movements like hers that are skeptical of Islam. In 2017, the mayor of Beziers, a small French town overwhelmed with Muslim immigrants, got in trouble. He’d expressed concern over the “great replacement” of Frenchmen with Muslim Arabs. As BBC reported: “On 5 September [Mayor Robert] Menard said on LCI television: ‘In a class in the city centre of my town, 91% of the children are Muslims. Obviously, this is a problem. There are limits to tolerance.’” Instead of arguing with him, authorities prosecuted him. According to BBC,

[Menard] was fined 2,000 euros for inciting hatred. … French law prohibits data based on people’s religious beliefs or ethnicity.

Menard defended his comments, saying: “I just described the situation in my town. It is not a value judgement, it’s a fact. It’s what I can see.”
In addition to the fine, a Paris court awarded €1,000 (£850; $1,100) in court costs to anti-racist groups that had brought the case.

But this time the authorities didn’t slap Le Pen with a fine. No, they suggested that she might be mentally ill. ZeroHedge reports:

[A] French court has ruled that Marine Le Pen, the leader of the party formerly known as the National Front (now National Rally) and runner-up in last year’s French presidential vote, must undergo a psychiatric evaluation to determine whether “she is capable of understanding remarks and answering questions.”

In other words, the court is treating Le Pen as if being conservative is a mental illness.

Straight from the Soviet Playbook

Historians have exhaustively documented how the Soviet Union perverted psychiatry to punish and silence dissidents. In the 1970s, when it wasn’t so hip anymore to openly torture and murder citizens for their political opinions, the sage Marxists in Moscow came up with another idea. “Dissidents aren’t wicked capitalists, Tsarist revisionists, fascist agents or Trotskyite saboteurs. Instead, they are mentally ill! How else could someone look around at our great socialist experiment in transforming human nature, and oppose it?”

Indeed. The Soviets’ pet psychiatrists duly invented a list of “illnesses” with which to diagnose dissidents, religious Christians, or recalcitrant Zionist Jews. These sicknesses included “philosophical intoxication” and “sluggish schizophrenia.” Those who suffered from such syndromes would disappear into mental hospitals run eerily like prisons. Many would never emerge. Others would come out broken, after brutal attempts at “treatment.”

Islam and Its Phobia

In America, we often hear about a comparable mental “illness,” Islamophobia. (It was invented as a propaganda talking point by the Muslim Brotherhood front group the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).) Except that nobody treats it like an illness. It doesn’t win you sympathy, as alcoholism might. Instead, elites treat this “syndrome,” the way we used to treat “perversions.” That’s okay though, because now we treat sex delusions such as gender dysphoria as real (“transgender identity”). Dissenters now suffer from “transphobia.” So at least we’re keeping things even. For each real disease we normalize, we’ll pathologize something normal.

But let’s not be too hard on the French authorities, or the Muslim Brotherhood. As you know, I’m all about empathy, about walking an extra mile in the other person’s Guccis.

So let’s attempt to empathize with the French judge who’s treating Marion Le Pen as a possible lunatic, a threat to herself and others. Here’s a thought experiment. Try it at home. It requires no special equipment.

How to See the Emperor’s New Clothes

Do you have a worldview which won’t stand up to scrutiny? Do you believe things regardless of evidence? Or even in the teeth of convincing proof that you’re wrong? Let’s turn up the heat, and say that you don’t just treasure these ideas in the warmth of your parents’ basement. You can’t just trade Facebook posts with fellow true believers about (for instance) the alien “Reptilians” who’ve secretly run the earth since the time of Neanderthal Man. No, you are a leader. You work in politics.

You butter your bread by convincing thousands, or millions, of people to follow in your footsteps. You’ve got to keep them in the habit of doing the following things:

• Accepting a theory that claims to explain the world, though few or no facts bear it out.
• Disseminating arguments for your theory that are warm, reassuring, and circular. So they cannot be refuted, once someone has made the act of faith.
• Conditioning people to filter out a constant flow of evidence that could disprove your theory.
• Making the public dismissive, contemptuous, or angry toward those who dare to mention such evidence.
• If that stops working, then actively intimidating, silencing, or prosecuting dissenters — while maintaining public support, and making the contrarian seem like bullies, censors, and thugs.
• Do that by convincing the public that dissidents are evil, sick, or crazy. Maybe a nasty blend of all three.

Please, don’t get me wrong. I’m not here to criticize you for doing all this. As Pope Francis famously said of the priest who manages his house, who was caught with male prostitutes, “Who am I to judge?” Or as Jesus said, “Now don’t be judgmental, guys, ok? Not cool.” (1 Gibran: 7, or something)

Spreading Delusions for Fun and Profit

You’ve got a set of beliefs which you’ve decided are beneficial. Maybe they give your life meaning. Or they set you apart from the kind of people you disapprove of. Grubby people who dress funny, who went to second-rate schools and drive their junky little cars too slowly in front of you as you try to whiz home from work.

Perhaps they get you elected, and marginalize your enemies. Possibly, they’re vehicles for you to avenge yourself on folks whom you resent. For instance, if you’re deeply ashamed of your parents, grand-parents, and the rest of your ancestors. You’ve learned that most of your nation’s heritage was shameful. The good part of its history began, in fact, pretty recently: right around the time you were born. And so, like President Obama, what you want for your country is a “fundamental transformation.” It must shed its wicked past, its grimy identity, and remake itself in a bright new image — for instance, the one you see every few hours in the mirror!

The World Turned Upside Down

Don’t knock this method till you’ve tried it. It worked for the Soviets for decades. Anyone who dared to point out the manifest failure of socialism, or the bankruptcy of Marxism, the emptiness of atheism. … He clearly needed a course or two of electroshock.

And it’s working, for now, in Europe. There, parties that point to the epidemic of rape, the wave of anti-Semitic attacks, the blatant demands for sharia by Islamist demagogues … get written off as crazies. Or Nazis. Or vulgar, ignorant relics of an evil, intolerant past. (In the U.S., elites paint populists like Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, or their supporters with the same broad, slanderous brush.)

There’s a reason more people than ever have started calling the EU “the European Soviet Union.” It uses similar methods, in pursuit of an equally implausible utopia. And God help its leaders (like Merkel and Macron) if their tactics ever stop working. They will spend their last moments on earth looking at a world turned upside down — like Benito Mussolini, dangling from a lamp post.