Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…
As the blogosphere rallies in support of ¡No Pasarán!'s restoration to the Internet, some commenters have misunderstood the very title of the blog, going as far as to wonder whether, based on its title (“They shall not pass” or "None shall pass", aligned with the Left during the Spanish Civil War), ¡No Pasarán! isn't a pro-communist blog or even a communist blog.
The short answer is No (or, in Spanish, "¡No!") — not at all. On the contrary: thumbing its nose at leftists — by appropriating their battle cry — the blog's raison d'être is to denounce anti-Americans of all stripes — domestic as well as foreign.
Certainly, if you are familiar with the blog's banner, you would agree that it is highly unlikely that a (pro-)communist would ridicule the famous photo of Che Guevara by having El Che (or, as we
called the Dissident Frogman's doctored photo, Mi-Che) wear Mickey Mouse
ears on the top of his noggin.
In keeping with the cheeky and irreverent element, recall that "None shall pass" is also the motto of the black knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (although we hope to have been more successful than John Cleese).
The blog was born in 2004 — when a number of ex-pats living in France (mainly Paris), most of them on the right, one single left-leaning member, grew increasingly outraged over the amount of anti-Americanism in French media and French society rising in spite of (or because of) the
horrendous attacks on 911; and continuing with the George W Bush decision to invade Iraq in order to remove Saddam Hussein. They adopted the slogan: This (i.e., this anti-Americanism, French or other) will not go unanswered.
Having said that, here is some historical background: Although best remembered as the war cry of the Spanish republicans (sic — a misnomer if there ever was one; actually a mix of socialists and communists) against Franco’s army during the Civil War in the 1930s, the origin of “They shall not pass” or "None shall pass" actually has nothing to do with communism or any political leaning.
It was purely military, originating a generation earlier when the French poilus in World War I made a vow regarding the German invaders, notably at Verdun: “Ils ne passeront pas!”
And No Pasarán has never shied from telling the atrocious truth about leftists, in Spain, in France, in America, or anywhere else. (Indeed, that is (was?) the blog's raison d'être.) As Paul Johnson put it,
Throughout the Spanish war, Stalinism was assisted not only by superb public relations but by naivety, gullibility and, it must also be said, the mendacity and corruption of Western intellectuals.
Messages anti-Charlie Kirk: pour Philippe Karsenty, porte-parole du comité (Trump France), "c'est de l'apologie du terrorisme" pic.twitter.com/moHVMvNDc7
In the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Philippe Karsenty joined the guests of a BFMTV debate, where he heard the usual platitudes about right-wing censorship of free speech.
"I have been hearing about such things as 'insensitivity' towards simple 'detractors'," said the Frenchman, who went on to illustrate his points by making comparisons with the original "Je suis Charlie" motto, i.e., the machine-gunning of Charlie Hebdo personnel in 2015. "It has strictly nothing to do with free speech; it is the glorification of terrorism" (the best excerpt on X).
Moreover, when asked if the founder of TPUSA should not be considered "a martyr of the far right", the spokesman of le Comité Trump France answered No — since it was too reminiscent of the voices considering the perpetrators of the Charlie Hebdo bloodbath as martyrs (as Muslim martyrs, in that case) — and that, besides, the husband of Erika Kirk had been "a conservative, not a reactionary."
Charlie Kirk: "Il était conservateur, pas réactionnaire", assure Philippe Karsenty, porte-parole du comité "Trump France"
Charlie
Kirk, 31 ans, a été assassiné par balle mercredi lors d'une réunion
publique en plein air dans une université de l'Utah, dans l'ouest des
États-Unis. Un suspect a été identifié et interpellé, ont annoncé les
autorités ce vendredi.
Messages anti-Charlie Kirk: pour Philippe Karsenty, porte-parole du comité (Trump France), "c'est de l'apologie du terrorisme"
pic.twitter.com/moHVMvNDc7
The day prior to the assassination, Philippe Karsenty appeared (misspelled) on the Qualita TV channel where he spoke of the far left and wokism, in Israel and America as well as in France.
Les institutions juives de France mettent en danger les juifs de France - L'invité du 9 Sept 2025
Philippe Karsenti, porte-parole Trump-France, qui explique la position du président américain face à Israël et critique l'attitude hostile d'Emmanuel Macron envers l'Etat hébreu ainsi que le comportement trop complaisant selon lui des institutions juives communautaires en France: "Les Juifs de France ne sont pas défendus par leurs institutions. Au contraire, celles-ci les mettent en danger.
If there is one historical quote that could be used in every single post of this blog and of No Pasarán for the past 21 years, it is that of a French writer who traveled through America two centuries ago:
It is easier for the world to accept a simple lie than a complex truth — Alexis de Tocqueville
That also applies in the present post addressing the Left's contention that Charlie Kirk "had it coming" due to his "insensitive" declarations in favor of that "repulsive" Second Amendment. I would like to start with a question for those, foreign as well as American — not a few of them among my social media contacts — making jokes about, laughing about, or otherwise celebrating the Charlie Kirk assassination:
Besides the fact that your attitude is heinous, how — how on Earth — do you propose to convince a sizable of citizens in future elections — not just Republicans but also Independents and even your own fellow Leftists (Democrats, Socialist Democrats, outright Communists, etc) — that a would-be leader supported by somebody like yourself (by somebody as childish and as vile as yourself) deserves to be elected to office and be put in charge of the well-being and the welfare of the country and its population?!
Incidentally, I will add that I am not in favor of Elon Musk taking down these videos on X/Twitter — I think that all people should know exactly the childish, the wicked, and the abhorrent attitudes of the "tolerant" locofocos on the Left.
In that perspective, I will add a message to those — again, foreign as well as American — who seem (slightly) less partisan and more thoughtful, "simply" calling the founder of TPUSA (or his speeches) hateful. As many others have pointed out, if you call Charlie Kirk odious and the perpetrator of hate speech — the epitome of a conservative seeking an honest debate — then there is no hope for what you claim to seek, a bridge to connect with any of you.
In addition, your homilies about a "divided America" — when Charlie Kirk did nothing but try to engage in dignified debate with you and, indeed, try to unify America — are nothing but a deliberately passive description of a rift that is entirely caused by you yourselves and by your (by the postmodern left's) own pedantic didacticism and depravity.
1) Two Basic Attitudes of Liberals That They Are Totally Oblivious About
Let us examine the holding that Charlie Kirk deserved to die because of his statements. One in particular stands out: The speech claimed to be the most controversial is that in which he is described as allegedly ignorant or uncaring about the country's murder rate, specifically school shootings of kids.
"I think it's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths
every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect
our other God-given rights."
As usual, with the Left, it can only be described as a lie: they omit the entire context, which ends by addressing the very school shootings that CK was supposed to be criminally ignorant and/or repulsively uncaring about. (This will be examined in detail at the end of this post.)
Having said that: has it occurred to you that, first of all, you are engaging in superstition? You people of the Left don't believe in religion, you claim, and you instead prefer rationality — pure rationality. Then in the very next breath, the drama queens that you are claim that some so-called invisible force in the universe — whether it is (some type of) God or karma or whatever — that, like a deity from a pagan religion, unleashes his (or her) wrath on people and reigns down injustice on evil capitalists (see also 9-11 and Gaia and tsunamis along with various other natural catastrophes).
As a general remark, it should be pointed out . Take the Canadians: when Donald Trump made abour, the karma remark is suddenly nowhere to be found
A more general observation about karma (and superstition) is the extent to which the charge proves too often to be remarkably one-sided and the source of double standards. For instance, when Canadians vowed to boycott U.S. products because of Donald Trump's controversial comments about their
country last winter, leftists and anti-Americans the world over cheered, saying that the conservative Yankee president was getting his just desserts. Now
that populations the world over, not least the Canadians,
are holding memorials for a conservative Yank — even singing America's
national anthem! — the karma aspect is suddenly nowhere to be seen.
Second of all, ask yourselves this, Leftists: what are we doing, exactly, by pursuing this line of thought?
Think about it…
Aren't you validating the need for the very Second Amendment that Charlie Kirk defended?!
There are millions of people who, rightly or wrongly, hold the same opinions and viewpoints as the husband of Erika Kirk. If
you say that the founder of TPUSA deserved to die, then millions of
other Americans presumably also deserve to die — by being gunned down or by any other means. Well, guess what: since we disagree with you (rather vehemently) about this, I would suggest that this makes our desire for weaponry rather more rational than (as you claim) irrational. Indeed, if one of you were to (God forbid) be elevated to a position of power in this country, how — how on earth — are we to trust you to be in any way benevolent towards us (i.e., towards that part of the population that does not agree with you)?!
In any case, your attitude about karma proves nothing less than — get this — the very necessity of private citizens to own and bear arms.
But the Left is ignoring (and the mainstream media never covers) the numerous instances of mass shootings where only two or three people died. (And for the sake of brevity, let's not get into the many instances of killings that the MSM refrains from covering because they don't further the Left's narratives — see, e.g., Iryna Zarutska.) And here you are bound to ask: If only two or three people were killed, why should the media, American or foreign, cover it?
And, besides: why would anyone call it a "mass shooting" in the first place?
Because the "mass" part of the shooting was prevented by an armed citizen (aka as "a good guy with a gun") who subdued and neutralized the shooter (either by killing him outright or by holding him in check).
Think of another mass shooting unreported
in America and across the globe, the one in December 2019 where only three
people were killed in Texas. Hold on, you ask: Three people? Certainly a tragedy,
but why, then, call the West Freeway Church of
Christ event a "mass" shooting? Well, because that low figure was due
only to one parishioner pulling out his weapon and gunning down the
(would-be) mass shootist. Jack Wilson is what we call "a good guy with a
gun."
In the comments section of a Herschel Smith piece, a person named David writes that
The other factor here is when a concealed carry holder intervenes
it often means the number of victims is not as high as waiting for
police. In that situation it doesn’t make the list of “mass shootings”.
I saw another analysis that said if you look at just the incidents
that don’t occur in gun-free zones, 46% of mass shootings end because of
intervention by a civilians.
As for Gary Griffiths, he goes on to note to what extent the logic is skewered (bold and italics by myself):
Part of the problem is, it is impossible for an armed citizen to
stop a mass shooting. Here’s why: If the shooter is stopped before
three victims are shot, it is, by definition, not a mass shooting. If
the shooter is not stopped before three victims are shot, then by
definition, the citizen did not stop the mass shooting. Liberal logic
at it’s finest!
How
many mass shootings did NOT happen because of someone with a legal
firearm? How many crimes and of what kind prevented by someone with a
legal firearm - if they only threaten to use it and do not shoot?
Police/FBI do not keep any statistics on this, but the NRA publishes a
page full of such incidents every month in their magazine.
Events like this one happen every day in America, but
because they don’t fit the narrative of liberal gun control activists,
they rarely get the attention mass shootings do. Instead of advocating
for ways by which citizens can empower themselves, rather than wait
around as sitting ducks for the police to show up, the left-wing media
habitually uses tragic events as a political platform by which to
trumpet for more gun control. Stories of armed citizens brandishing
their weapons to deter a criminal are also not as sensational as a mass
gunman killing innocent people, and, to borrow an analogy from crime prevention researcher John Lott, “Airplane crashes get news coverage, while successful take-offs and landings do not.”
An armed civilian doesn’t have to fire his weapon to stop a tragedy.
Many shootings or mass shootings have been prevented by an armed citizen
brandishing a weapon or simply revealing it to someone threatening
others. No shots were fired. There was no need. This is far more common
and just as heroic as the actions taken by Mr. Dicken.
3) Wouldn't Gun Control, European-Style, End Shootings in the First Place?
But all of this hardly addresses the call to imitate Europe and the contention that with gun control of the European type, there would be no shootings, and certainly no mass shootings, to begin with.
On May 25, 2022, I was on a train to Switzerland that morning when I was called back to Paris to participate in a debate on the BFMTV channel after the atrocious Uvalde school shooting.
That evening, naturally, I was the first guest asked to speak, in response to the question, "shouldn't Americans change their views on the 2nd Amendment?" or on the free sale of firearms, a question that they didn't think any person could answer other than Yes.
I responded as follows (slightly redacted):
Every time there is a shooting, we are told — both by Europeans and by Democrats in America — that these American neanderthals ought to imitate the rational Europeans, and notably they are told that they ought to imitate those nice countries like the ones in Scandinavia, a country like Denmark or Norway — Norway, where in 2011, a person gunned down 77 people, most of them teen-agers. Therefore, European-type legislation, i.e., gun control, did nothing to save the children of Utøya.
Then I went on to try to ask a question, indeed two questions: Wouldn't it have been a good thing if someone on the Oslo island had had a gun and shot back at Anders Breivik (perhaps not to kill him, but at the very least to get him to seek cover, thereby interrupting his killing spree)? Furthermore — to take on a different progressive talking point — didn't Breivik deserve the death penalty?
All of which was an expansion of what I wrote in my response to a New York Times gun control editorial ten years ago:
It is easy for leftists, American as well as foreign, to tout the success of the gun control laws in the rest of the Western world … when you (deliberately or otherwise) ignore:
the 1996 massacre of 16 children at a Scottish primary school; the 2000 killing of eight kids in Japan; the 2002 deaths of eight people in Nanterre, France; the 2002 killing of 16 kids in Erfurt, Germany; the 2007 shootings to death of eight people in Tuusula, Finland; the killing of 10 people at a Finnish university less than a year later; the 2009 killing of 15 people in Winnenden, Germany; and, needless to say, Anders Breivik's 2011 mass murder of 77 Norwegians, most of them teenagers.
Is it unreasonable (or perhaps politically incorrect) to wonder whether the death tolls might have been lower in any of those places — or in the Bataclan concert hall in 2015 (137 dead) — had a few of the adults (or some of the eldest teens) carried a weapon and tried to shoot back at the respective killers?
In the 18th century — the century at the end of which the Second
Amendment was being passed in the newly-born United States — the biggest
problem for the majority of the world's population was not the right to keep and bear arms.
It was the lack of the right to keep and bear arms.
In the 19th century, likewise, the greatest problem for most people on this planet was not the absence of gun control.
It was the presence of gun control.
In the 20th century, most people did not suffer from the right to keep and bear arms.
They suffered from the lack of the right to keep and bear arms.
As can be attested by the victims (assuming they could talk) of the likes of Hitler, Lenin, Stalin,
Pol Pot, and Milosevic, along with the Hutus…
As an aside, one of the first measures taken by each of the
aforementioned (ahem) leaders after coming to power — for the good of
the people, needless to say — was to impose or to tighten arms control.
And it is no different today.
Look at Saddam's Iraq, at Khadaffi's Libya, at the Assads' Syria…
(Would not the average Iraqi citizen, the average Libyan citizen, the
average Syrian citizen over the past 30 to 40 years have been better off
with the right to keep and bear arms?)
And all of this brings us back, full circle, to Charlie Kirk's "controversial" statement, with locofocos and fire-eaters falling over themselves and going ballistic with regards to school shootings — which he is accused of (carelessly) ignoring or (despicably) minimizing. Except that his reply is far less controversial if you take the TPUSA founder's full reply (tak til Thomas Petersen) into context, not least the issue of school shootings, the most important part of which he addresses forthrightly in his conclusion, notably the final paragraph's final sentence (duly emboldened below + video at very bottom of this post):
Yeah, it's a great question. Thank you. So, I'm a big Second Amendment
fan but I think most politicians are cowards when it comes to defending
why we have a Second Amendment. This is why I would not be a good
politician, or maybe I would, I don't know, because I actually speak my
mind.
The Second Amendment is not about hunting. I love hunting. The Second
Amendment is not even about personal defense. That is important. The
Second Amendment is there, God forbid, so that you can defend yourself
against a tyrannical government. And if that talk scares you — "wow,
that's radical, Charlie, I don't know about that" — well then, you have
not really read any of the literature of our Founding Fathers. Number
two, you've not read any 20th-century history. You're just living in
Narnia. By the way, if you're actually living in Narnia, you would be
wiser than wherever you're living, because C.S. Lewis was really smart.
So I don't know what alternative universe you're living in. You just
don't want to face reality that governments tend to get tyrannical and
that if people need an ability to protect themselves and their
communities and their families.
Now, we must also be real. We must be honest with the population. Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty.
Driving comes with a price. 50,000, 50,000, 50,000 people die on the
road every year. That's a price. You get rid of driving, you'd have
50,000 less auto fatalities. But we have decided that the benefit of
driving — speed, accessibility, mobility, having products, services — is
worth the cost of 50,000 people dying on the road. So we need to be
very clear that you're not going to get gun deaths to zero. It will not
happen. You could significantly reduce them through having more fathers
in the home, by having more armed guards in front of schools. We should
have a honest and clear reductionist view of gun violence, but we should
not have a utopian one.
You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and
you won't have a single gun death. That is nonsense. It's drivel. But I
am, I, I — I think it's worth it. I think it's worth to have a cost
of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have
the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe.
So then, how do you reduce? Very simple. People say, oh, Charlie, how do
you stop school shootings? I don't know. How did we stop shootings at
baseball games? Because we have armed guards outside of baseball games.
That's why. How did we stop all the shootings at airports? We have armed
guards outside of airports. How do we stop all the shootings at banks?
We have armed guards outside of banks. How did we stop all the shootings
at gun shows? Notice there's not a lot of mass shootings at gun shows,
there's all these guns. Because everyone's armed. If our money and our sporting events and our airplanes have armed guards, why don't our children?
