Leadership Quote by Jean-Marie Le Pen

Le Pen’s line is engineered to land like a slap: the “surprise” isn’t torture, but who opposed it. That rhetorical pivot is the whole trick. By treating anti-torture activism as anomalous when it comes from “communists,” he smuggles in two insinuations at once: first, that torture was a normal or understandable instrument of the state in the context he’s invoking; second, that moral clarity is suspicious when it comes from ideological enemies. The barb isn’t aimed at torturers so much as at the people trying to delegitimize torture.

The likely backdrop is France’s postwar reckoning with colonial violence, especially the Algerian War, where torture became a national scandal and a political fault line. Le Pen, a far-right politician long associated with hardline nationalism and a combative relationship to that history, flips the moral hierarchy. He reframes communists not as principled critics but as opportunists accidentally doing the right thing, as if their opposition can be dismissed as partisan theater.

It also serves a domestic strategic purpose: laundering the far right’s proximity to state violence by relocating the emotional focus to an old Cold War script. If communists are the ones waving the “human rights” banner, the banner itself becomes tainted. The subtext is a warning to his audience: don’t let the language of ethics be monopolized by your enemies. It’s cynical, yes, but also revealing - a politics that treats cruelty as debatable and empathy as a factional pose.