The French colonial experience in Algeria, marked by warfare, terrorism and torture, is a wound that never quite seems to close. Anger and guilt about Algeria infuse some of the anxiety today about the heavily immigrant and Muslim banlieues, or suburbs, about the French concern with national identity, radical Islam and veiled women.

Thus Steven Erlanger starts his New York Times article, which is heavy on the blanket condemnation of colonialism.

Lately, France has been moved and angered by two films about Algeria and the French confrontation with its colonial past. The films could not be more different: one, made by Rachid Bouchareb, a Frenchman of Algerian descent, is a raging historical fiction about the Algerian fight for independence; the other, made by Xavier Beauvois, is suffused with religious belief and saintliness.

…One film features Algerian martyrs and the other French martyrs. Both are remarkably unbalanced, and both use the “other” as puppets in a historical drama. One glorifies criminality and terrorism in the name of Algerian freedom and justice, while the other, set in the mid-1990s, looks on horrified as religion mixed with Algerian politics seeks to justify murder and terrorism.

Yet both films have been chosen by their respective countries, France and Algeria, to represent them for the foreign-language Academy Award, which will be presented on Feb. 27.

…For [Benjamin Stora, one of France’s best historians of Algeria and French colonialism], the films make various arguments about politics, sacrifice and faith. But in both films, he said, “Algeria is absent.”

Algeria is not France’s Vietnam, he said, but something more ingrained. “It is much more complicated to exorcise it here, and then on top of that we have the pieds noirs and the harkis,” he said. “France is now getting slightly more involved in this part of its history,” with more documentaries on television. “But the French can’t, for now, see their tragedy on the big screen.”

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Justice is not easily secured anywhere in the world

writes Mary Anastasia O'Grady (gracias para Fausta) as the Wall Street Journal journalist quotes Big Brother's party slogan in George Orwell's "1984" (Those who control the past, control the future: who controls the present controls the past).

But in Argentina today it is off limits to even mention in public the victims of the country's left-wing terrorism in the 1970s, let alone make an effort to win them or their surviving kin a day in court.

Try it and you are likely to be tarred by the Argentine left as a fascist friend of the former military government. The politically correct know that those who were brutalized by the guerrillas that Juan Perón once called "marvelous youth" are supposed to be erased from the national memory.

…Everyone knows the story of how the Argentine military took over the government in 1976 and proceeded to crush subversive movements ruthlessly. Its abuses of power are legion, and in 1983 it finally stepped aside in the midst of hyperinflation and economic chaos.

But Argentina lived another tragedy prior to, and for some time after, the military seized power. It was a wave of carnage and destruction brought on by bands of Castro-inspired guerrillas who sought to take power by terrorizing the nation. Their actions provoked chaos on a national scale that led to the military coup.

Yet because of the military government's ignominious demise, terrorists and their sympathizers have succeeded in rewriting this history, describing only the crimes of their uniformed enemy. Some current or former members of the Kirchner government, others who are in Congress, and others who work in the media were well-known members of subversive organizations.

In an interview in Buenos Aires in November, [Argentine lawyer and human-rights advocate Victoria Villarruel] told me that even opposition politicians don't speak up for the terrorists' victims because it has become "taboo" to do so. The state, she said [from her Center for the Legal Study of Terrorism and its Victims], treats them "as if they were never born."

One result is that a generation of Argentines has grown up with no awareness of the full story of that time of terror.

…It is interesting to note that the number of court cases filed against the military government charging abuses of power totals less than 9,000. Meanwhile the Kirchner government's justification for writing off the victims of left-wing terrorism is a claim that they were victims of ordinary crimes and that their perpetrators are now exempted from liability by the statute of limitations.

Elsewhere (needless to say), the leftists' (self-serving) narrative is working as, in typical fashion, Le Monde readers react with anger at a Jean-Pierre Langellier report from Caracas stating that of 16,094 homicides committed in 2009, 93% remain unpunished, four times more than before Hugo Chávez's rise to the presidency, the outraged Le Monde readers stating that in neighboring Columbia, the situation is (allegedly) worse and blaming (who else?) America and the CIA…

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The next step, of course, if for the Neo-Soviet Russian strongman to appear in a gold lamé unitard.

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Of all Europe’s great and present miseries, the one receiving the most uncertain remedies is the failing integration of its increasingly large and alienated Muslim communities

warns John Vinocur in his article With Muslims, Europe Sees No Problem, and That's the Problem.

Valentine's Day Banned in Iran
by Plantu in Le Monde
— Here, sweetheart, a brand-new Koran!
— Oh you shouldn't have!

…denial is [the Europeans'] standard metric: That bomb didn’t go off here, our national soccer team is full of Muslim players, and we haven’t elected any anti-immigrant parties to Parliament, or if we have, they’re ultimately manageable. The less we talk about this stuff the better.

Then something happens. A conflict comes into focus that, beyond its particulars, raises the question of the ultimate compatibility of Islamic communities in Western environments. An issue that, most comfortably, is kept vague, suddenly demands that Europe — in this case, the Netherlands — draw the line. But where is the line?

What has taken place here is that Frits Bolkestein, the former leader of the Liberal Party, which now heads the Dutch government, has advised “recognizable Jews, orthodox Jews” that their children should emigrate from the Netherlands to Israel or the United States. He said, “I see no future for them here because of anti-Semitism, above all among the Moroccan Dutch, whose numbers continue to grow.”

The remark last month twice shocked the Netherlands.

…Concerning the harassment of orthodox Jews in public places, Mr. Bolkestein, who is not Jewish, says that it is an “outrage” and “a tragedy” and that he sees similar circumstances existing in France and Sweden.

…Population growth that is faster than the native population’s, extremists’ murderous plots, sharp-edged disaffection for their adopted countries among third-generation Muslim males, and societies where large segments of the ethnic majority insist they feel increasingly less at home — what should the Netherlands, and by extrapolation Europe, do?

Revert to a kind of multiculturalism that Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, at least, insists is dead?

In fact, the School of Acquiescence and Denial has its followers. … Frits Bolkestein, whose father was a Buchenwald inmate, described Mr. Cohen’s vision of reality [the Labor Party's Job Cohen jabbering on about "Muslim suffering and exclusion from European society"] to me as “cultural masochism.”

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After World War I, virtually every town in France had its Rue or Avenue Pétain

recounts John Tagliabue. Among the French towns was tiny Tremblois, a village on the edge of the Ardennes Forest across the border from Belgium which

has only three streets, and they are named for three French heroes of World War I: Marshals Ferdinand Foch, Joseph Joffre and Philippe Pétain.

The problem is that Marshal Pétain had a second act as head of state during World War II, when his administration in the unoccupied part of the country that was known as Vichy France collaborated with Nazi Germany in eliminating its enemies, notably the Jews.

So under pressure from the national government, veterans and Jewish groups, the council voted unanimously to drop the name Pétain from a little street about 600 feet long, renaming it Rue de la Belle-Croix, for a chapel that stands in a wood at its foot.

…But when the signs here change this month, the last street in France bearing his name will have disappeared. Not everyone is happy with the decision. [Said a journalist, Guillaume Lévy:] “it got all polemical.”…

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If you don’t think the European ‘sense of self’ requires an irrational hatred of the US, then read this article. Don’t read it for the content – read it for the authors' forgone conclusion, and (what are likely the editors') specious, unrelated comments.

Reeking of retrograde supremacism, the author laments that Europe being ‘only’ 10% of global GDP where it was once 20% requires an ignorance of what is taking place in the world: the percentage of the world living poverty is shrinking, and no-one sought Europe’s permission for that to take place.

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Miss ‘em? I don’t.

However, with ‘Wikileaks’ shaking the tree, it’s easy to see which nuts fall out: anyone who has a sort of ‘passionate’ and reflexive need to defend their actions.

Target? Your false consciousness! Fill it with perfect (approved) knowledge like this!:

Campus Watch is a Philadelphia based organization. It is essentially a neo-McCarthyite attempt to intimidate US college professors into toeing the Likud Party line whenever they talk about Israel and Palestine. A project of the extreme Zionist Middle East Forum, it claims that "it reviews and critiques Middle East studies in North America with an aim to improving them."[1] However, the agenda has little to do with America as professors are singled out for 'their views and teachings on Palestinian issues and Islam'

...because THEIR propaganda and operant conditioning on campuses is SACRED! Otherwsie, an resemblance they have to bored Troofers in needs of something new to get gastrically disfunctional about – is mere COINCIDENCE.

Even though they believe that there ARE NO coincidences. To think of all the risks they’re taking knowing that the cabal is after them!

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…you’re probably stumbling over corpses on sidewalks since, according to the surgeon general, exposure even to second-hand smoke can cause immediate disease, including heart attacks

warns David Bozeman.

One takes scant pleasure in defending the tobacco industry, but the pertinent question, now more than ever, is how much latitude will a freedom-loving people grant its government to tax, regulate, demonize, harass and suck the life out of a sector of our economy that is still legal?

…If the government believed that its concerns were valid about the public health of children and bystanders that they claim are subject to immediate disease and death — then why are they not arguing for an all-out cigarette ban? It sounds as if the cause of big government is better served by a living, breathing monolithic boogeyman worth billions of dollars to sate the gluttonous appetites of public do-gooders?

The amount of revenue generated by tobacco taxes at federal. state and local levels is practically incalculable. Anti-smoking advocates claim that making the habit more expensive actually discourages smoking and saves lives and billions in medical costs. Some even consider higher taxes a “user fee,” but, in fact, smokers, who typically die younger, are funding health care for older citizens, whose medical and personal care needs increase with the onset of old age. Government-funded health care? More like health care courtesy of your neighbor.

The anti-smoking crusade fuels what author Jacob Sullum called in 1998 “the tyranny of public health.” … Banning menthol and mandating graphic warning labels may well decrease consumption of cigarettes, but the Big Government mentality will never kill the golden goose. By stigmatizing a bad habit, do-gooders have granted themselves leverage to extract freedom and money from a health-conscious population. Public health is a noble cause, so we are to believe, but the health the current state is obsessing over is clearly its own.

Don't miss the Finalists for 2010 Lie of the Year Award

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It may not exactly be jihad or the imposition of sharia, deliberately or otherwise (or is it?!), but the Muslims' "Wild West weddings" — with their attendant "incivilities", including convoys of "youths" sitting on cars' hoods honking foghorns and often waving Algerian flags, and drivers engaging in gymkhana-style competitions — has proven enough for the town hall of Roubaix and led the mayor to vow no more civil weddings on Saturdays from January 1st on. Needless to say, MSM reporter Geoffroy Deffrennes sides with the poor, down-trodden Muslims (victims of racism, of course), but Le Monde readers still manage to get a feel for the problem.

Si la mairie de Roubaix ne revient pas sur sa décision, à partir du 1^er janvier, sauf autorisation exceptionnelle, on ne convolera plus le samedi après-midi sur son impressionnant perron. René Vandierendonck, le maire (PS) de la ville, souhaite mettre fin aux gymkhanas de voitures accompagnés de cornes de brume. Les agents municipaux se disent excédés par les incivilités lors des mariages.

…Des forums locaux, sur Internet, pointent "la stigmatisation" de la communauté musulmane. Celle-ci est très loin de se reconnaître dans ces débordements, comme dans la poignée de drapeaux déployés par des jeunes assis sur les capots.

…Depuis 2008, ces quelques mariages au style Far West fâchaient [Arnaud Verspieren, l'adjoint MoDem chargé du développement économique]. L'élu centriste a présidé une commission chargée de régler le problème... Une interdiction du samedi après-midi a été mise à l'essai durant l'été.

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I've established the precise moment when civilization reached a dead end:



CPO Sharkey meets the strangest person ever to be deported from a Communist country.

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When freedom is called “freedom”, Markets are simply called in generalization to be called “capitalism”, and anti-campitalism is called “democracy”...

You see where this is going. While it’s cropped up many times before, the recipients of the message grew no more intelligent. The “leading lights” of the culture are using a fake global-warming crisis to rationalize individual will and democratic freedoms away.

It’s because without it, there would be no forum for anyone to disagree with them.

The debate about imposing authoritarian restrictions on basic human rights in order to safeguard the survival of the planet is fuelled by doubts about whether parliamentary democracies can provide answers to questions of ecological survival. The facts suggest they can’t: the US, the foremost proponent of democracy and the market economy, is among the world’s leading polluters. The cumbersome UN won’t be able to ward off the climate catastrophe. Even Germany, a self-appointed paragon of climate protection and environmental technology, is hardly making any headway.

No, authoritarianism is embraced by European elites whenever there is even the slightest possibility of them not getting away with shoving their egotistical, extremist notions on populations. Period. “Eco”-this and that is only this decades’ vain sales-tag.

The global community will be watching very closely to see who puts forth the best answer to the question of prosperity, stability and liberty: will it be unbridled capitalism made in the USA, the Chinese blend of state socialism and rampant capitalism, or an authoritarian raw materials-based regime à la russe? Europe, in contrast, could put forward a politico-economic export hit that might appeal to aspiring democracies like India, South Africa or Brazil.

Or not. Despite the writer’s notion that democracy is ‘just some sort of option’ worth expending when the going gets tough, it’s (basic notion of freedom of speech which some democracies still actually protect) in fact the tool by which such a foolish notion can be entertained. Advocating de facto smiley-face autocracy calling itself a free society for ANY purpose, as European “culture” has advocated persistently for the past century, has been a failure, and has always ended in tears and blood-bathes.

From Marburg in northern Hessen to the deluxe spa resort of Cancun, it’s about 8,600 km as the crow flies. The two places are a 12-hour flight and worlds apart. But they have one thing in common these days: they’re both grappling with the question how much freedom or constraint is needed to ensure our survival on the planet Earth. The question is whether we are heading towards an environmental autocracy.

No. Speak for yourself, asshole. You aren’t all of humanity, no matter how much the meeting look like the “It’s a Small World” ride at Disney World.

Knowing the moral turpitude and wrongness about calling for a suspension of people’s individual rights, they’re taking the passive-aggressive approach against by trying to redefine it as a desiccated form of its’ former self. It’s a clue: the ultimately don’t get it, or individual will, OR tolerance for others’ reasoning, OR what is genuinely regarded as diversity. They prefer the forced march, the one, the put-upon are told, is for the good of mankind, or in this case for the good of the planet because thinking people no longer buy the crypto-Troskyite rationalization for having things thrust upon them.

The question remains: is this issue even real, and why is there a class of intellectual ciphers pretending that man’s responsibility to a non-science – one whose “cure” could murder millions with privation – is “ours”.

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