Politics & Power Quote by Jean-Marie Le Pen

Le Pen reaches for Algeria because it lets him do two things at once: claim the authority of experience and smuggle a moral equivalence past the reader’s defenses. The line is built like a warning from an old soldier, but it’s really a political weapon. By saying “what we experienced,” he invites a French audience to relive a conflicted national memory in which “terrorism” and “counterterror” blurred, and where the state’s violence ultimately became the more legible, more condemnable story.

The key move is the asymmetry of visibility. “Victim of terrorist activity” is framed as a government’s self-description, almost a PR posture, while “military strikes” are presented as undeniable, on-screen reality. Le Pen isn’t simply noting that bombs make better footage than clandestine attacks; he’s arguing that perception will govern judgment. If violence by non-state actors is “less visible,” then the state’s retaliation becomes the headline crime, even when it’s presented as response. The subtext is resentment at moral scrutiny: democracies, in this framing, get punished for being seen.

Context matters because Algeria isn’t a neutral analogy in France; it’s an open wound tied to colonial collapse, torture scandals, and the far right’s mythology of betrayal. Le Pen, a figure long associated with that era’s hardline instincts, repurposes the lesson: public sympathy is not a function of who started it, but of who looks worse doing it. That’s not empathy for victims so much as strategy for surviving condemnation.