Leadership Quote by Jean-Marie Le Pen

Le Pen’s line isn’t primarily about the Gulag. It’s about establishing a moral yardstick he controls, one calibrated to dwarf whatever crime is being discussed in the room. The phrase “much greater crimes” functions like a rhetorical bulldozer: it flattens nuance and forces the listener to make a comparative judgment rather than a specific one. By stressing “over decades” and “millions of lives,” he adds bureaucratic scale to moral outrage, turning atrocity into an accounting exercise where the biggest number wins.

The intent is strategic deflection. In European memory politics, invoking Soviet terror often serves as a solvent for uncomfortable conversations about fascism, collaboration, or contemporary far-right lineage. Le Pen, a politician whose career has repeatedly brushed up against the boundaries of historical revisionism, uses the Gulag as a kind of counterweight: if communist crimes are framed as larger, then criticism of the far right can be cast as selective, hypocritical, or politically motivated. The subtext reads: your moral indignation is biased; your history is incomplete; your present-day opponents are the real censors.

What makes it work, politically, is that it borrows legitimacy from truth (the Gulag’s vast brutality) while redirecting that truth toward a partisan end. It’s not denial so much as rerouting: a move from remembrance to rivalry, from mourning to scorekeeping. In that frame, history becomes less a warning than a weapon.