Dalrymple reports that Jean-Luc Mélenchon recently spoke to a crowd demonstrating against Emmanuel Macron’s proposed changes to labour laws, and
recited the fact (if it was a fact) that France had more millionaires than any other country in Europe.
This was, Dalrymple points out,
an appeal to envy and hatred—the kind of envy and hatred that has provoked at least as much mass murder as racial hatred.
Indeed, Dalrymple notes,
the two have often been closely associated, for what anti-Semite ever fails to draw attention to the economic success of Jews?
The word ‘millionaire’ as Mélenchon — himself a millionaire, of course — uttered it was intended to evoke,
by a Pavlovian reflex, an exploitative, parasitic, fat, lazy, cynical, privileged, dishonest, heartless and undeservedly lucky person, possibly still wearing a black tail coat and silk top hat, with a cigar stuck firmly between his fat and sybaritic lips.
