A French Bush Supporter: "I Learned What It Is Like to Get Insulted in the Street, Threats on the Telephone, I Felt Very Alone"

One of my the best things I have ever read about America from a Frenchman came before the end of the Clinton era (proving, incidentally, that the "it is all and only about Bush" mantra and the supposed love affair with the Democrat president is little else but the result of self-deception).

In Europe, there exists a group of knee-jerk critics for whom, said Pascal Bruckner,

the worst crime of [a dictator like] Milosevic … can never equal the fundamental crime of America — simply existing.

That says it all in a nutshell, and therefore the quote features prominently in La bannière étalée, my upcoming book. It was without surprise that during the Iraq crisis, I learned that the author sided with the "hawks" wanting to remove Saddam Hussein by force.

That was in from 2002, with the support continuing through the spring and summer of 2003.

Then, slowly, Bruckner started to change. He started to be more critical of the administration. More and more. He would intervene, saying that Bush had made terrible errors in Iraq, and demanding from his interlocutors that surely they could at least admit that. (As I have pointed out numerous times, the reason this is not the innocent banter it seems to be offhand is that it is based on double standards: admitting to mistakes and engaging in self-criticism is never demanded of those opposed to America, nor is the same amount of invective directed at the leaders of and policymakers in, say, Russia, China, Iran, Zimbabwe, and Ivory Coast — not to speak of Saddam Hussein himself.) Truth be told, Bruckner seemed to have become a Bush-basher.

As I have written before,

Faced with the constant barrage of news proving Americans' backwardness in all things worthwhile, along with constant pressure from their French friends, co-workers, and acquaintances (snorts, snickers, guffaws, tch-tchs, nose curls, head shakes, and dirty looks accompanied by "mais certainement vous pouvez admettre que Bush a commis des erreurs/a raconté des mensonges", "pourquoi vous êtes en France si vous pensez ainsi?"), foreigners and other American friends (whether consciously or otherwise) cave in, not wanting to face the heat and not wanting to rock the boat…

A stunning example was the one concerning the editor of Paris Match.

And a February issue of Le Monde 2 features a piece in which Pascal Bruckner confirms this, telling of the travails he went through for supporting the Iraq War in France, making sure he ends his confession with the statement that… he hates Bush!

I learned what it is to get insulted in the street, threats on the telephone. My North African friends told me, "You have brain damage", those of the Esprit review dropped me. … I felt very alone. I asked myself: "Have I made a huge blunder?"

Truly it is nice to hear how open and tolerant the generous, avant-garde humanists are towards the free debate and understanding discussion they are always championing, n'est-ce pas? Unfortunately, Bruckner (who has an American, "strongly anti-Bush" wife) apparently couldn't stand the heat, he did not answer Non to the question he asked himself, and it is truly disappointing to hear how he has back-pedalled, in order to conform to the usual hems and haws of the bien-pensants, and issuing the usual batch of hedges and disclaimers:

I am not ready to engage myself for such causes again.

Historical action is something that [only] occurs in America. Unfortunately.

I gave the impression that I was championing a guy like Bush, whom in the final analysis I hate.

Taking stock.

Elizabeth Bryant in a UPI item identifies a change in attitude of the garden-variety French citizen about the war in Iraq. Especially now that it's over in any substancial way, the outcome was good, and no-one will ask anything of them:

«Anonymous callers threatened him by phone. Strangers insulted him on the street. Friends and colleagues told Bruckner, a prominent French novelist and intellectual, that he had taken a gutsy but mistaken stance against the mighty antiwar tide in France. Two years later, 56-year-old Bruckner is hearing very different reactions." People are saying that even if Americans are making a lot of mistakes, they are changing things," said Bruckner, who supported ousting Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein but is sharply critical of the Bush administration and its handling of the conflict, "while Europe -- and especially France -- remains terribly conservative. We're the world champions of the status quo."»

Described as both a deep thinker and still a radical, his own words indicate quite boldly that the wet blanket of middle-mind types won't muzzle him. In Dissent Magazine he wrote:

«For the last half century, Europe has been haunted by the demons of repentance. Ruminating over its past crimes-slavery, imperialism, fascism, communism-it has seen its history as nothing but a long litany of murder and rapine culminating in two world wars. The typical European man or woman is a sensitive creature always prepared to feel pity for the sufferings of the world and to assume responsibility for them, always asking what the North can do for the South rather than what the South can do for itself. By the evening of September 11, a majority of our citizens, despite their obvious sympathy for the victims, were telling themselves that the Americans had it coming.»

«Make no mistake: the same argument would have been made if the terrorists had destroyed the Eiffel Tower or Notre Dame. Sensitive souls on both right and left would have urged us to flagellate ourselves: we've been attacked, so we're guilty. Our attackers are really poor people protesting against our insolent wealth and our western lifestyle. We Europeans spontaneously agree with our enemies in the way we judge ourselves, and we take shelter from the furies of the age by focusing on everyday economic and social problems.»

To think those who disagreed with him would actually threaten him. When facts challenge their precious little weltanschauung, they suddenly feel psychologically threatened and try to project that hatred on a free-spirit... Amazing.

"This idea of thinking Left or Right is a sin against the spirit and an illusion"

André Glucksmann, one of the most prominent of the French “New Philosophers,” a group of former radicals who broke with Marxism in the 1970s and became an intellectual counterweight to France’s political left, [has died] in Paris

writes William Grimes in his New York Times obituary.

André Glucksmann on No Pasarán:
• The anti-capitalist vituperation, says Glucksman, is what led to the communist and fascist political strategies which “dragged humanity into hell”
• Bin Laden Is Gone, Not The Strategy of Radical Hatred Without Quarter
• Sleeping soundly is the slogan of every cowardice
• The "Absolute Crime": For "the Battle of His Life" —the Fight Against the Kremlin's Rule— André Glucksmann Is Hated By His Fellow French Intellectuals

Mr. Glucksmann came to prominence in May 1968, when, as a teacher and militant Marxist at the Sorbonne, he publicly cheered on the student revolt both there and, a year later, at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes, where he and the philosopher Michel Foucault led the intellectual charge.

He joined the Proletarian Left, a Maoist group, in the early 1970s, but soon became disenchanted with revolutionary politics. He was dismayed when the group kidnapped a Renault executive and, as a Jew, was shocked when radical Palestinians murdered 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich.

The turning point came with the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago,” a work that transformed him into an implacable enemy of the Soviet Union and all ideologies.

In 1975, in “The Cook and the Cannibal,” Mr. Glucksmann subjected Marxism to a scalding critique. Two years later, he broadened his attack in his most influential work, “The Master Thinkers,” which drew a direct line from the philosophies of Marx, Hegel, Fichte and Nietzsche to the enormities of Nazism and Soviet Communism. It was they, he wrote in his conclusion, who “erected the mental apparatus which is indispensable for launching the grand final solutions of the 20th century.”

An instant best seller, the book put him in the company of several like-minded former radicals, notably Bernard-Henri Lévy and Pascal Bruckner. Known as the nouveaux philosophes, a term coined by Mr. Lévy, they became some of France’s most prominent public intellectuals, somewhat analogous to the neoconservatives in the United States, but with a lingering leftist orientation.

Their apostasy sent shock waves through French intellectual life, and onward to Moscow, which depended on the cachet afforded by Jean-Paul Sartre and other leftist philosophers.

“It was André Glucksmann who dealt the decisive blow to Communism in France,” Mr. Bruckner told French radio on Tuesday.

 … “In the West, he presented the anti-totalitarian case more starkly and more passionately than anyone else in modern times,” said Paul Berman, who wrote extensively about Mr. Glucksmann in his books “A Tale of Two Utopias” and “Power and the Idealists.”

“He was a passionate defender of the superoppressed, whether it was the prisoners of the Gulag, the Bosnians and Kosovars, gays during the height of the AIDS crisis, the Chechens under Putin or the Iraqis under Saddam,” he said. “When he turned against Communism, it was because he realized that Communists were not on the same side.”

 … At 13, while a high school student, he joined the Communist Party, but he was expelled after criticizing the Soviet Union’s suppression of the revolt in Hungary. In a 2006 memoir, “A Child’s Rage,” he chronicled his parents’ lives and his early upbringing.

After earning the teaching degree known as an agrégation from the École Normale Supérieure de Saint-Cloud in 1961, Mr. Glucksmann enrolled in the National Center for Scientific Research to pursue a doctorate under Raymond Aron — an odd matchup because Aron was France’s leading anti-Marxist intellectual.

 … His subsequent turn away from Marxism made him a reviled figure on the left, and former comrades looked on aghast as he became one of France’s most outspoken defenders of the United States. He argued for President Ronald Reagan’s policy of nuclear deterrence toward the Soviet Union, intervention in the Balkans and both American invasions of Iraq. In 2007, he supported the candidacy of Nicolas Sarkozy for the French presidency.

“There is the Glucksmann who was right and the Glucksmann who could — with the same fervor, the same feeling of being in the right — be wrong,” Mr. Lévy wrote in a posthumous appreciation for Le Monde. “What set him apart from others under such circumstances is that he would admit his error, and when he came around he was fanatical about studying his mistake, mulling it over, understanding it.”

 … “I think thought is an individual action, not one of a party,” Mr. Glucksmann told The Chicago Tribune in 1991. “First you think. And if that corresponds with the Left, then you are of the Left; if Right, then you are of the Right. But this idea of thinking Left or Right is a sin against the spirit and an illusion.”

France’s voodoo doll

When Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested in New York on sexual assault charges, 57 percent of the French said he was the victim of a plot, according to a poll by four Paris media groups. Who set him up? A separate description of public opinion pointed to Nicolas Sarkozy. … The contributors’ list [on a website for the news magazine l’Express] of suspected instigators began … with the president, followed by “the Americans.”

In the International Herald Tribune, John Vinocur takes on the président described by Franz-Olivier Giesbert, author of M. le President, as “a man from nowhere” and “a little tyrant,” in love with money and rich people.

This reaction in French public opinion looks like another turn in what appears increasingly as Mr. Sarkozy’s demonization. …

But in France, a segment of the French was reported imagining Mr. Sarkozy’s hand in the fall of the probable Socialist candidate.

Why? There are, by unscientific count, three books out now, all explaining how the president inspires or is portrayed as inspiring hatred. They contain rationalizations, defenses, prejudices and varying examples of meanness (from both the authors and their subject) that provide no single answer — while leaving Mr. Sarkozy, in the phrase of essayist Pascal Bruckner, as “France’s voodoo doll.”

Explanations abound for his negative performance rating of 72 percent. There’s the obvious stuff: 9.6 percent unemployment last month, the nonappearance of a promised “buying power presidency,” and a sense among a meaningful slice of voters that French specificity is drowning in a globalized world.

But how does this add up to rage, hysteria, or indeed to what Mr. Bruckner has called “this hatred, out of all proportion, against him”?

… Dominique Wolton, a French academic and media critic, has since described a type of relationship between “a little caste of columnists and star journalists” and many French politicians as “intolerable collusion.”

Is it not strange that migrants from Syria and Iraq move to places like Germany and Sweden instead of to neighbors like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait?

An interview with Daniel Pipes was republished by the German website Achse des Guten.

Mr. Pipes, You have written that Angela Merkel's decision to open the border to over a million migrants in 2015 "will likely be seen as a turning point in European history." You are a historian, so, what do you mean by this expression?

I expect that when the evolution of European civilization is studied in the future, August 2015 will be seen as a key moment. The decision to allow unlimited immigration into Germany has had profound implications for Europe by raising this issue in a more acute way than ever before, creating divisions both among native Europeans who are for and against large-scale immigration and between native and new Europeans.

 … Why are relations between Europeans and Muslim immigrants so fraught with tension?

They are fraught because Islam is an imperialist faith and many Muslim immigrants want to replace existing European civilization with Islam. Exacerbating matters, Europeans and Muslims are opposites on several key issues: Europeans have a low birthrate, Muslim immigrants have a high one. Europeans have a weak religious identity, Muslims have a strong one. Europeans feel guilty for their historical sins; immigrants have boisterous confidence in the superiority of their civilization.

Many Germans argue that as a rich nation, they morally must open their doors to people in need.

I admire that humanitarian impulse but it is unrealistic. Can Germany take in, say, 2 billion people? If not, how does it morally pick the tiny percentage it does allow in?

What, then, is the answer?

Practically speaking, see the world in terms of cultural and geographic zones: Westerners in need should stay in the West, Middle Easterners should stay in the Middle East, and so forth around the globe. Is it not strange that migrants from Syria and Iraq move to places like Germany and Sweden? They would be better off going to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, where the climate, the language, the religion, and the mores are all like their own; plus, these countries are much closer to Syria.

 … Many Muslims of immigrant origins point to discrimination as a factor hindering them from fully integrating into German society.

Yes, discrimination is a problem. I would not want to be named Muhammad and look for a job in Hamburg. But that supports my argument that it is better to be named Muhammad in Saudi Arabia or Kuwait. Why push together peoples who, as the last 55 years have shown, cannot live easily together? As Thilo Sarrazin has showed, the experiment of Muslim immigration has failed; continuing it will increase tensions.

 … How do you view Europe's response to Islamism?

Compared to 20 years ago, a great leap in awareness has occurred – but not enough yet to make a difference in policy. Virtually everywhere in Europe, political parties exist that make immigration and Islamism a priority, but almost none of them has been in power because these groups tend to be staffed by amateurs, contain too many extremists, and are ostracized. As a result, they cannot reach 51 percent.

 … Asked in 2015 to address the German fear of Islamization, Chancellor Merkel suggested that instead of fearing Islam, Christian Germans should learn more about their own religious roots and go to church more often. Your response?

Merkel's infuriating reply is typical of the elites in western (not eastern) Europe who remain defiantly unaware of the problems that Muslim immigration creates. The reasons are several-fold: guilty feelings, living in a bubble, looking for votes, political correctness, and fear of being called "Islamophobic."

 … Why guilty feelings?

The cover of Pascal Bruckner's "The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism."

Because, as French novelist and essayist Pascal Bruckner explained in his 2006 book, La tyrannie de la pénitence, many Europeans feel deep personal remorse about the trio of imperialism, fascism, and racism, even when they themselves are not implicated in those evils. For some Europeans, white skin itself signals guilt. Accordingly, they feel compelled to show unlimited tolerance and goodwill to non-Westerners. The fact that non-Western peoples also sin does not register – which implies a certain arrogance, even racism: only white sins count.

This sense of guilt is the more striking considering Europe's great advances. I remember visiting Finland in 1987 and thinking as I walked its streets: "This prosperity, freedom, rule of law, and democracy is what humanity has always worked toward and now it's been achieved." How strange that a Europe which attained such success today drowns in guilt, has too few children, and chooses not to protect itself from a rival civilization. As an historian, I say: Such weakness has no precedent.

Sheikh Yassin, False Martyr, Real Malefactor, by Pascal Bruckner, Iannis Iannanakis and Michèle Tribalat

LE MONDE | 03.04.04 | 15:23  •  UPDATED 03.04.04 | 19:56

While our president was at the sides of Madrid's victims at a solemn gathering, how were we to understand why his representative at the United Nations Security Council was authorized to vote for a resolution proposed the next day to condemn the assassination of sheikh Yassin by Israel? One might have thought, after Madrid, that Europe would grasp the scale of the terrorist war declared on September 11, 2001.

However, far from leading to an awakening of the conscience, this event reassured our diplomats in the conviction that this act of terrorism visited on the one of the pillars of the American coalition was the inevitable sanctioning of an unjust war.

The doubled contempt of Europe that refuses to see this as a new provocation of democracies, whichever they may be, and that commits the same error as George W. Bush in linking terrorism to Iraq. Thus the victim is once more responsible for his lot: the West is necessarily guilty and, convinced of being so, deserved it!

The death of a terrorist leader who called for the murder of "the Jews," who manipulated a national struggle (itself legitimate), who, without the least moral objection, urged his own children to commit suicide in order to kill other children and who diverted charitable donations to fund his all out war, has been transformed in official European parlance into an "unacceptable and unjustified" (Jack Straw) murder of a spiritual leader of a movement some described as "political." Miguel Angel Moratinos, the future head of Spanish diplomacy, said that, at this rate, "there will be no more Palestinian interlocutors."

Did Sheikh Yassin — the charter of whose movement calls for the "total destruction of the Zionist entity" and not for a simple retreat to the 1967 borders — ever participate in a single negotiation? Do we in Europe desire a democratic Palestinian state or an Islamic republic from the river Jordan to the sea? One can wonder with good reason about the European goal of a pacified Middle East. In the heaven of "spiritual leaders," can one believe that the "paraplegic old man" will join the ranks of Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King? He will rather go to his strange heaven, that of the shahid, those "phony matyrs" that he armed spiritually...

It is striking and worrisome to observe that in Europe compassion for victims, fed by post-colonial guilt, has lead to an equalizing martyrology that, in the same sincere lamentations, confuses the victims and their murderers. A few exceptions are nevertheless noteworthy: tears dry up for the Israeli victims, the soldierly American woman or her Iraqi "collaborators"...

In his time, Spinoza enlightened us about the perverse duo, remorse and resentment. The Islamists have succeeded in deriving political and cultural gains from the European propensity to self indictment. Convinced that it must make amends for a mistake, Europe turns the other cheek. It does not see that such resentment has only fed hatred for a model of society — albeit imperfect — in which freedom and equality among citizens are established. This declaration, death to its essence, has not been heard, and we can even fear that, the more it is struck, the more Europe will be convinced that it's its own fault.

This is why Europe must "attack the roots of Evil" that are "injustice, resentment and frustration" (Dominique de Villepin), not combat but "seek to understand" the enemy, for "to understand the other is fundamental" and "the use of force leads nowhere" (Mario Soares). This effort to seek out the rational in criminal deliria continues to obsess Europe despite the lesson of the totalitarianisms taught in its midst.

So what are the foundations of our collective memory? What of history have we retained today to see war criminals portrayed as political actors? Is this to prepare the pacifist public opinions of democracies for a new, bipolar order? Is the contemporary world, united under American ægis, so anathema to us that sharing our planet with a new totalitarianism would be preferable? First the Zhdanov doctrine and nuclear deterrence, then the charia revised and corrected by jihadis and the deterrence of indiscriminate terrorism? But is "peaceful coexistence" with the devout enemies of life desirable?

The insuperable strength of our democratic model is the genuine political power of its public opinion. Citizens have the power and the duty to lead their elected representatives and to take stock of a reality that sometimes eludes diplomats. And when terrorism strikes, in stead of accusing our leaders of being the "real guilty parties," it is urgent that we unite to avert the worst: the collapse of our system under the effect of violent internal and external pressures.

Pascal Bruckner is a writer. Iannis Iannanakis is a political scientist and Michèle Tribalat is a demographer.

• ARTICLE PUBLISHED IN THE 04.04.04 EDITION

The "Absolute Crime": For "the Battle of His Life" —the Fight Against the Kremlin's Rule— André Glucksmann Is Hated By His Fellow French Intellectuals

Marie-Pierre Subtil has an article on André Glucksmann, the French intellectual loathed by French intellectuals (and much of the French public) for "the battle of his life", the fight against the Kremlin's hegemony, coupled, naturally, with its corollary, i.e., support for Russia's biggest adversary, Uncle Sam, and, more recently, his backing George W Bush in the Iraq War.

Needless to say, Le Monde's readers join in castigating the man who committed the "absolute crime".

Son ami Pascal Bruckner : "Il a accompli la transgression qui est un crime absolu pour les intellectuels en France, le passage de l'extrême gauche à la droite. Il doit y trouver un certain plaisir."

Il ne s'en cache pas : "Ça me satisfait assez de décevoir des gens qui m'avaient collé une étiquette que je n'avais pas choisie." Ce qui le surprend, c'est l'"exécration" dont il a fait l'objet. Le rejet a été plus fort que lorsqu'au milieu des années 1970 il s'était fait le chantre d'Alexandre Soljenitsyne. Plus fort que lorsqu'il avait pris position contre François Mitterrand, coupable d'avoir été le ministre de l'intérieur du gouvernement qui a fait la guerre en Algérie. Plus fort que lorsqu'en 2003 il s'était engagé derrière les Etats-Unis partant en guerre contre Saddam Hussein. "On me faisait endosser de gré ou de force le costume de l'intellectuel de gauche", sourit-il. Un temps, puis : "Je ne me considère pas comme un intellectuel de droite."

Ni gauche ni droite. Tel est son credo depuis qu'il a lu Soljenitsyne, assure son fils. Raphaël Glucksmann a gardé des dîners de son enfance le souvenir de grandes tablées où moudjahidin afghans, féministes algériennes, dissidents soviétiques et opposants sud-américains "s'engueulaient mais avaient un fonds commun, la révolte contre l'ordre établi". Dans la famille Glucksmann, "une sorte de PME militante", dit un proche, il y a la mère, Françoise, dite "Fanfan", qui joue "un rôle moteur" d'après tous les amis, le père, André, pourvoyeur du carnet d'adresses, et Raphaël, 30 ans, héritier des causes du couple, installé à Tbilissi où, salarié d'une fondation estonienne, il conseille le président géorgien Mikheïl Saakachvili.

Dans les années 1990, il y a eu la Bosnie, le Rwanda, le Kosovo, la Tchétchénie, l'Afghanistan. Aujourd'hui, c'est l'Ukraine, et surtout la Géorgie. De sa lutte contre l'hégémonie du Kremlin, Glucksmann dit : "C'est la bataille de ma vie." Pour l'enfant de communistes autrichiens, né à Boulogne-Billancourt en 1937, Vladimir Poutine incarne le mal.

…Ses détracteurs lui reprochent sa vision binaire du monde, ses indignations "de rente", voire "sélectives" : pourquoi les Tchétchènes et pas les Palestiniens ? Réponse en trois temps. Un : pourquoi le monde se mobilise-t-il pour les Palestiniens et pas pour les Tchétchènes ? Deux : sur 1 million de Tchétchènes, 200 000 au moins ont été tués, beaucoup plus, proportionnellement, que de Palestiniens. Trois : "La question laisse entendre qu'il y a un fort et un faible, or, au Proche-Orient, Israël est le faible." Cette position expliquerait-elle son attitude vis-à-vis de Nicolas Sarkozy ? "Son ralliement était en fait motivé par l'espoir d'un abandon de la politique arabe de la France", estime Pascal Boniface, le directeur de l'Institut de relations internationales et stratégiques.

A couple of rare Le Monde readers set the others straight:

• Il faudrait souligner, qu'en général, le conformisme des "intellectuels critiques" français rappelle beaucoup la sainte inquisition de l'église catholique.

• L'unanimité en France depuis 20 ans (en résumé: pro-palestinienne, anti-israélienne, pro-russe, anti-US, anti-GB) est étouffante, elle ne rend pas compte de la complexité du monde. C'est pourquoi une voix discordante telle que celle d'André Glucksmann est rafraîchissante, même si elle est minoritaire. Mais la gauche française, et la France en général, détient le monopole mondial de l'intelligence: du moins est-il bien confortable de le croire. Le reste du monde, lui, reste sceptique.

Pays de merde

While on his death bead in a Paris hospital, neo-Stalinist rag Marianne paid freelance hit-woman sadistic-hit-bitch Stéphanie Marteau to execute Rita Mitsouko guitarist Frédéric Chichin for his crimes: admitting a fondness for American culture, reading Maurice G. Dantec, reading Pascal Bruckner, rejecting the French musically correct, and expressing an implicit support for Sarkozy.

Are the "Opinions" of 11-Year-Olds Evidence of Their Own (Freely-Arrived-At) Anti-Americanism or of That of French Adults Coupled with Indoctrination?

"Damn it, you're doing stupid things that could screw up my world!"

THE ANTI-AMERICANS (a hate/love relationship) examines the complicated mixture of envy, pride, admiration, and cultural misunderstanding that characterizes European views. It’s a situation that has led some commentators to say that “Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus.”

This film examines the current status of European attitudes towards America in three very different places: France, the United Kingdom, and Poland. Freely mixing humor with provocative commentary, the program shows how Old World attitudes can be both nuanced and simplistic at the same time – sometimes contradictory, sometimes predictable, but always worthy of our interest.

It may be that people such as Pascal Bruckner, Boris Johnson, and Agnieszka Graff are included in the new documentary in which PBS purports to examine anti-Americanism in a neutral, objective light, but offhand, one is wont to ask if the directors and producers have not wondered about the negative (not to mention preposterous) "opinions" of French 11-year-olds regarding America(ns) and how these may have something to do with the adults in whose trust they are (in school as well as at home, where they live with parents who went through the same schooling system), coupled with no little amount of indoctrination…

Update: "La version anglophone de ce dessin animé est fréquemment utilisée comme outil pédagogique par les professeurs d’anglais dans les collèges et lycées français."

Les Lumières ont tendance à s'éteindre par ici

Pascal Bruckner blasts multiculturalism back to the stone age in a devastating essay (français / English).

Where the Elite Meet to Bleat

On Arte, yet another “expert” that no-one has ever heard of plausits aloud during a program discussing whether or not deposed dictator Saddam Hussein will be executed. The audience is entertained with the usual flair or talking in circles, but one wonders if it has sunk in to John and Jane Public that the Moustachioed Mass Murder was actually found guilty. I guess so, they immediately wanted to deny the Iraqis the catharsis of getting on with their lives when the general consensus of the all knowing was to demand that he not be executed. Now Pinochet [!!!], that would be another story...

Cosmic ray diversionary chaff being deployed now, Captain!

M6 wonders: What? He risks being a lame duck, like every other president at the end of his term?

To quote a reader:

You'd think he was going to be kicked out of the White House or burnt alive on the White house lawn.

At least they didn’t commit the usual media error of calling him “Georges”

I swear, their media is ”the gift that keeps on giving” in oh, so many ways.



'La valeur Europe n'existe plus...” said Pascal Bruckner on the program, who used the US as a counter-example saying that one scandal in Abu Ghreib doesn't mean everything about what is happening in the Near East is bad or that all Americans are bad. The remainder of the program was consumed by the toxic and childish theme which might just might bring readers closer to the realization that behaviour is neither genetic nor racial so that they might grow comfortable into the 1970s. The theme tonight: Are whites responsible for all the world's ills?

Amusing, really, since the entire culture likes to blame a multi-racial America for all everything it sees wrong with the world, yet imagines the United States to be even more white-bread and rhythmically challenged than they are, and always more brutal.

The program rounded out with some “indigenous” looking South American who surely found a new venue in France now that Marxist fantasies are back on the Vaudeville circuit. Much as is usual Es ist zum kotzen.

Translation of article linked from “Dessine-moi un lâche”

From ¡No Pasarán!: Dessine-moi un lâche we linked the following in Libération:

“Two blasphemies”

Pascal Bruckner

The extremists appear to have won. From Jakarta to Teheran, and not to forget Gaza, Beirut, Damascus furious crowds were ready to kill, express their anger, and vandalize any symbols of the west comparable to the mass riots of the 1930s. In London, demonstrators wanting to display the tolerance of Islam, held up signs saying: "to hell with freedom" , "Prepare for the real Holocaust" , "Exterminate anyone who insults Islam" , and "Europe, your 11 September is coming" . In Strasbourg, Mohammed Latrèche showed an allegiance with all terrorists, and integrated islamists. In Bangkok, an Imam interviewed on CNN made death threats to the caricaturist, or failing that the amputation of their hands as the only condition of a possible apology. In Pakistan, a religious brotherhood proposed a million dollars plus a car as a bounty to anyone who would kill one of the accused cartoonists.

One then expected Europe’s usual minimum of dignity - a graceful gesture: she sends out her ambassadors, temporarily suspends aid to the Palestinians who threatened to kill our diplomats, and expel the Imams which provoked much the outrage by propagating the drawings everywhere. Europe then made a solemn sounding warning to the governments which allowed the defacing and destruction of the Danish and Norwegian missions. Europe chose to sit it out: having seen little support of any kind, the Danes had to make painful excuses. Our leaders played Pontius Pilate. The churches condemned the sacrilege, and French supermarket companies in the Middle East put up small posters saying "We are not Danish." Javier Solana, which once boldly faced off with the Serbs changed his tone with the Arab governments like an apologetic messenger. The jittery holy alliance made notice of this. Curiously, except for a few Europeans press outlets, the only people with any bravery came mainly from North Africa or Southeast Asia. Among them were Jordanians, Yemenis, Malasian, and Algerian journalists who were thrown in prison for having the audacity to publish the 12 caricatures. Hamadi Redissi, a professor at the university of Tunis urged them: "You should not give up the freedom to criticize. If you yield, it will be be gone."

The mobs we managed using an air of panic, and a hovering sense of terror. After all, it’s now known that the outrage was entirely fabricated. The rage is only the symptom of something obvious and intolerable: even the killers want to hide behind a mask of virtue. This business has been truly revealing because the caricatures in question, far from being poor, got to the root of the matter. There are two kinds of blasphemy: one is an indirect homage to the faith which one claims to trample, the other a salutary damage. "To live the divine dream in one’s actions" (Sade), to insult the name of God in the way one shows one’s love for him, "to curse strong in the intoxication of the pleasure" , like the Austrian Oskar Panizza, in “The Council of Love” (1894) represented the pope and the cardinals as being lost in an orgies and fornication, still shows a form of worship that revolts, even if it comes at the price of its freedom, its life, or its’ mental health. The profaning is a recognition of the negative nature of the masses. It is another form of impiety which shocks and raises disturbing questions.

The only thing which one can see in these drawings is not their bad taste, but their truth. They are not so much caricatures than they are portraits of a prophet who was also a warlord, whipping and killing without scruple in the name of the true faith. In their brutality, these sketches insist on the ambiguity of the message of the Koran and present a paradox: up to which point does have one the right of objectify a religion to put it at the service of a policy of violence, murder, and extermination? If all Muslims are not terrorists, a majority of terrorists claim Islam and ruin the reputation of their co-religionists, drag their religion through the mud, blood, massacres and bring terrible confusion. The "blasphemy", in fact, in its brutality, obliges the faithful them to set aside their piety of the impure vision of fanaticism and to reinterpret the canon itself. A taboo was broken. The offence was not useless. God bless the kingdom of Denmark and Charlie Hebdo!

Dealing with these drawings by calling for the respect of religion doesn’t have a point. Why is it that in Europe, there is the right to criticize Judeo-Christianity (it’s even become a national sport in France), to make fun of Buddhism, even of the hinduism, but never of Islam under the penalty of being called a racist? Why the double standard? Why does only one religion escape examination, pluralism, irony, sarcasm, and the anti-clericalism which characterizes our nation? Christianity did not have anything sizeable when, in the name of the love and of the Lord Jesus, it hung, burned, tortured, and destroyed heretics, witches, pagans, Indians, and Muslims. It took centuries of engagements, including inside the Churches, and the council of the Vatican II to make it conform with the message of the Gospel and regains its’ nobility. Islam, to find itself again must be reformed, purged of its’ verses against Jews, Christians, and homosexuals. It must proscribe the cruel habit of stoning, repudiation, and polygamy. It’s a tabula rasa that relates to all of humanity: that, of many intellectuals and enlightened Moslem clerics know it and proclaim it. But these men and these women of all professions, all nationalities, are a minority: insulated, worried, even condemned to death like the Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen or the Dutchwoman of Somali origin Hayaan Hirsi Ali. They need our help just as the dissidents of Eastern Europe did at the time of the Soviet empire.

It is urgent to form a network of assistance to all the rebels of the Arab-Muslim world: the moderates, non-believers, libertines, atheists, apostates, the indifferent, and the schismatic. If Europe wants to build secular Islam inside its’ borders, it should encourage these divergent voices, and bring its talents, its financial, moral, and political support to them. There is no more noble or serious a cause, one which must be engaged for the harmony of the future generations. But with a suicidal lack or self-awareness our continent kneels in front of the insane ones of God and muzzles or ignores the free-thinkers. How long will it take the spirit of penitence to strangle the spirit of resistance here at home?

End of text.

Dessine-moi un lâche

Pascal Bruckner commente sur le lamentable comportement des zéropéens et leur manque de solidarité avec les danois.

The World Seen From Le Monde 2

How would the French react if a play likening Jacques Chirac to a mass murdering thug opened in various French cities and it turned out that one of the sponsors was… the American embassy in Paris?

They wouldn't just scoff at the clumsy, unsuave Americans, they would scream bloody murder. And with reason. As not only would the Bush administration's opponents in America join in the fracas, but a good number of its (strongest) allies would as well.

But that's basically what the French embassy in Washington was doing a few months back, Le Monde 2 informs us, until it decided that it was perhaps not a good idea, and backed out. And the way issue 63 of Le Monde's weekly keeps us informed of Michel Vinaver's 11 September 2001 is not through self-criticism, nor by pointing out the double standards (it is unimaginable that a French embassy in Moscow, Beijing, Harare, or Saddam's Baghdad would have done the same), but because the French in America chickened out and engaged in "censorship". What a pity, tut-tuts the top editor at France's newspaper of reference.

Head over to Le Monde Watch as we continue our in-depth coverage of Le Monde 2.

Here are a few excerpts:

In issue 54, a French writer-philosopher tells of how he got lambasted (including by his American wife) for being one of the lone voices that supported the war in Iraq: "I learned what it is to get insulted in the street, threats on the telephone. My North African friends told me, 'You have brain damage', those of the Esprit review dropped me. … I felt very alone." Could Pascal Bruckner stand the heat?…

The post-election issue (# 39) had Edwy Plenel explaining that Dubya's election victory was due, basically, to Americans being frightened and/or bamboozled by Karl Rove and his ilk, comparing the discourse on moral values with the speeches of Nazi-collaborator Philippe Pétain. (When Bush isn't being compared to Hitler, he is being compared to a Stalinist or a fascist sympathizer…) The issue also features an interview with Elton John, who calls his election "one of the greatest tragedies of all time" and an American reporter (the International Herald Tribune's William Pfaff) who compares the American way of life to communist totalitarianism.

Then there is the portrait of Paul Newman in issue 48, in which the journalist of the independent newspaper recounts the actor's militancy, and starts to dream of how much the world would be in better shape had Paul Newman been elected to the White House in the 1980s. (Imagine: no Ronald Reagan!…)

Head over to Le Monde Watch now.

The Face of Tribalism — in the Middle East and in Europe

A Sunni grandmother watched the first day of Saddam Hussein's trial on television and scoffed that he should be charged at all. "I felt sorry," she told The Washington Post, "I almost cried. Every country in the world has terrorism. All the presidents in this region torture their people. Why, of all the countries, do they come after us?"

That is the face of tribalism -- pride in one's own trumps every other consideration -- most definitely including morality, compassion and a love of justice. Saddam is a Sunni Arab who committed the most brutal crimes against the Shiite majority and the Kurdish minority in Iraq. Estimates of the number he murdered range from 300,000 to over 1 million if those who died in his aggressive wars against Iran and Kuwait are included.

But in the tribal world of the Middle East, being a mass murderer, torturer, liar and supporter of terrorists does not guarantee a bad reputation. It depends whom you ask.

As his trial opened (and then abruptly adjourned for 40 days), Sunni Arabs expressed disquiet. "Saddam doesn't deserve all this," Ahmad Muhammad, a Mosul taxi driver complained to The New York Times. …

Read the rest of Mona Charen's article. Meanwhile, Robert Tracinski (who has noticed the same NYT article) points out that

The trial of Saddam Hussein is going to have a big impact across the Arab world, an impact assessed in two items … from Washington Post blogger (or quasi-blogger, since he's part of the dreaded MSM) Jefferson Morley. The story in the Lebanon Daily Star …which links Saddam's trial with the Hariri investigation in Syria, is definitely worth reading.

What is amusing is the "unease" Saddam's trial creates among all of the supporters of Arab tyranny--as it should, if the example of holding leaders accountable for their actions catches on. Meanwhile, the New York Times covers the trial with its usual impartiality by trolling Baghdad for Saddam's few remaining fans

There are two lessons here — one in each article — and, unfortunately, they both apply to France.

First of all, "the unease Saddam's trial creates among all of the supporters of Arab tyranny" — this also applies outside of the Arab world, of course. For the past month, France's MSM has been covering the Saddam trial with also its usual impartiality. The country has been replete with scorn for the kangaroo court, admiration for the "high and mighty" dictator (and his "rendez-vous with destiny"), indulgence for terrorist sympathizers, complete and terminal dismissal of the constitution, and, yes, the hunt for Saddam fans (notice how the first testimony against Saddam is actually a back-handed slap at Americans).

Oh, and here is the lesson regarding the Iraq war that Le Nouvel Observateur's Claude Perdriel would have the students of Paris's Journalism Training Centre learn: "the American press was intoxicated by a disinformation operation without precedent". (Still don't understand what the Oil-for-Food scandal tells you about the "peace camp's" choices during the crisis, do you, Monsieur Perdriel, or the failure of the French press in covering that beyond the usual token articles?)

All of this is linked to the second lesson : tribalism.

Information is never neutral. Positive news about the "other" tribe must always be placed into doubt. Negative news about one's own tribe must always be given a positive spin.

And those who don't ascribe to that positive spin — whether fellow tribe members or foreigners (certain webmasters come to mind) — must undergo pressure, be castigated, be submitted to ridicule, and threatened with banishment unless they relent.

It is taken for granted that opinions are a communal trait, not an individual one: e.g., if an American even wants to put some facts about Bush into perspective, laconic smiles appear, along with words such as: C'est normal qu'il pense comme ça, il est américain. That, even if the American voted against Bush! This is not the type of atmosphere that invites debate or encourages open discussion. Unless the surrounding pressure, or the individual's personal inclination, forces him to agree with the pervading viewpoint, he is assaulted with ridicule, with anger, with spite and finally invited (in less subtle language) to leave the country.

Nationality doesn't matter. Remember only what happened to French war-supporter Pascal Bruckner:

I learned what it is to get insulted in the street, threats on the telephone. My North African friends told me, "You have brain damage", those of the Esprit review dropped me. … I felt very alone.

In a Canal + TV show, the democratization in Eastern Europe is given a bad name simply because it allegedly happened under the helm of Washington.

"Imposing demoracy"; "the American brand"; "A real marketing of the revolution with its codes, its colors, its slogans"; "a green revolution, the dollar revolution"; and finally a word from the filmmaker (described as seeing with "a citizen-like, a humane, a sensitive look"): "all those we met were so persuaded of being on the right side of history [suggesting that they obviously were not so] that they let us film them with no problems" (suggesting, in turn, that the filmmakers were far from forthcoming about their partisan intentions). The humane and sensitive citizen Manon Loizeau (who spent seven years in Russia) goes on:

At first, I thought I was making a movie about an American plot … But today, I wonder. Why is Europe absent? To what degree will the Americans succeed in imposing their ideology of democracy?

Guillaume Fraissard's article ends with the sentence, "Manon Loizeau hopes to be able to soon return to those countries in order to verify, with hindsight, if the promised democracy was really achieved." In other words, unless a lucid paternalistic French(wo)man verifies it, la démocratie ain't worth m•rde.

Now do you see why the French are impressed by thuggish dictators? Now do you see why they think of all of America's allies, democrats or otherwise, as poodles and lapdogs? Now do you see why they thought Iraq was better off under Saddam Hussein? Now do you understand their country's policies?

While Canal + is preparing a second airing of its show on the Saddam "trial you will not see" (already in October 2004 the powers-that-be were preparing the citizenry for the perfidy of the trial), Guillaume Fraissard and Daniel Psenny inform us that a decision to clamp down on its investigation programs

occurred a couple of weeks after the broadcast of a report with exclusive video on French soldiers shooting on the crowd in front of the Hôtel Ivoire in Abijan on November 6, 2004. A shooting that resulted in several deaths. The scenes broadcast on Canal + irritated France's defence ministry who, after the shooting, affirmed that the soldiers had fired in "self-defense".

To quote Mona Charen again:

That is the face of tribalism -- pride in one's own trumps every other consideration -- most definitely including morality, compassion and a love of justice.

And I would add, it trumps even the desire to be informed and to have one's fellow countrymen be informed.

The Death Penalty and International Opinion: Whether They Are Against It Depends on the Country Applying It

In declaring (by a 5-4 margin) that it is unconstitutional to impose the death penalty on convicts who were younger than 18 when they committed their crimes, the Supreme Court invoked "the overwhelming weight of international opinion".

Truth be told, I have no strong feelings or opinions on the death penalty either way. What does get me going (as some of our readers have realized by now) is international "opinion" and double standards.

As you know, one of the principles the ever-so-humanistic Europeans are known for is their opposition to the death penalty. Indeed, Le Monde wasted no time in penning an editorial praising the "change" that allows for "taking into account international opinion" while warning that "the battle for the abolition" of "the most barbarous punishment" and "its fundamental injustice" is not yet won.

Most (if not all) EU states have outlawed it (I am positive it is a condition for being admitted to the EU), and all use their fight against it as a reason to castigate Uncle Sam and to sniff how reactionary America is and how backward it is compared with avant-garde European states. (Incidentally, Isabelle Mandraud recently penned a portrait of Robert Badinter, the French justice minister who was the main force behind the abolition of the guillotine in 1981.)

They are so snooty about this that they have refused to help Americans — and Iraqis — in their search for evidence in Iraq's killing fields, since that might help convict Saddam Hussein and his henchmen, and bring them, or some of them, the death penalty.

So it may come as a surprize that the Europeans never take China much to the task on the matter, although that country (notwithstanding the millions of people murdered during the Cultural Revolution) has in the recent past executed an average of 100 people a week! "At least 650 executions reported … in the months of December and January alone" amounts to about the same amount that have been executed in America since the death penalty was reinstated …three decades ago. If those figures are taken as an average, they amount to an execution rate 150 times that of the U.S. (25 years x 6 two-month periods) and that for a country that is only four to five times as populous! (I.e., if the populations were equal, the Chinese execution rate would still be 30 times that of the U.S.)

In any case, the estimate is far too low, notes Bruno Philip, since they are based only on official Chinese figures.

In 2004 alone, 10,000 people were executed, according to a Chonquing representative, i.e., more than five times the combined total of all the other executions in the world. By comparison, the United States features (and correct me if I am wrong — indeed, correct me if you have the exact statistics, please) 800 executions over 25 years.

In fact, not only do the Europeans not attack China on this matter (or even mention it, beyond a few token articles, such as those linked above), but when a French weekly magazine planned to make a big stink about American executions a few years ago, and one member (Pascal Bruckner) proposed that China be added to the list of countries castigated about the matter, he was turned down: No country but America would bear the brunt of the castigation.

This is not dissimilar to European hand-wrenching with regards to the capitalist economy, coupled with complete silence regarding working conditions in Chinese society.

It's called principles. Of the European kind.

Isn't it good to know that Europeans always have their heads on their shoulders and their priorities straight?

Update: Read about the prison treatment of Qin Yanhong…

It's not what the West does or doesn't do that infuriates the Muslim world's fanatics…

Paul Greenberg on the Nature of Terror:

Those two French journalists are still missing in Iraq, where they're being held by still another band of terrorists. Following Spain's lead after Madrid's rail system was bombed and scores of innocents killed, the French will now doubtless seek to appease the kidnappers by announcing that French troops will be withdrawn from Iraq at once.

Oops. Unlike the Spanish, the French never sent any troops to Iraq in the first place. There are none there to withdraw.

Indeed, the French have done their best to undermine coalition efforts in Iraq. So why would these terrorists do anything to embarrass France?

Even to ask such a question is to misunderstand the nature of terrorism. It is to assume that terrorists need a reason to terrorize.

If terrorists were rational, of course French citizens would be immune to such attacks. Few countries were as supportive of Saddam Hussein's regime as France. It was one of Saddam Hussein's major trading partners, money lenders, and arms suppliers, even building him a nuclear reactor — the one the Israelis took out in 1981. French officials helped undermine the economic sanctions against Saddam's regime, and they played a leading role in the United Nations' oil-for-food scam. Even after that regime was toppled and Saddam himself jailed, the French have held back from the coalition trying to build a stable, democratic Iraq.

What could these kidnappers demand that the French have not freely given them? To quote the New York Times' correspondent in Paris, who sounds as if she's got this thing figured out, "what animates the French and their Islamic adversaries is not a battle over the future of Iraq. The Muslim militants make no distinctions in their war against the West."

…Whether in Baghdad or Beslan, there doesn't have to be any reason for the terrorists to act, only victims ready to be slaughtered. In a part of the world where fanaticism rules, the most fanatic tend to win out, and so the pressure is on to commit ever more outrageous atrocities.

By now suicide bombings have become old hat. So we get attacks on schools full of children and beheadings in front of the cameras. Each new outrage trumps the last in this grisly competition for the allegiance of the hate-filled street. Every time you believe terrorists have done the unthinkable, they think of something else.

The moral of the story: It's not what the West does or doesn't do, or any policy it does or doesn't adopt, that infuriates the Muslim world's fanatics, but that the West dares exist. Which is why France, a nation that has opposed American policy in Iraq, is still considered fair prey. [Emphasis added]

…Yes, the kidnapping of the French journalists, and the wide variety of responses to it, offer all kinds of lessons about where appeasement leads, but it's unlikely Paris will learn them. In charming, picturesque Old Europe, it's still 1938.

(Thanks to Joe N)

For some reason, what Paul Greenberg said about Muslim fanatics reminds me, in turn, of what Pascal Bruckner said about a group of knee-jerk critics in Europe: for them, “the worst crime of [a dictator like] Milosevic … can never equal the fundamental crime of America — simply existing”.

(Or, extrapolating in order to paraphrase Greenberg: The moral of the story: It's not what the United States does or doesn't do, or any policy it does or doesn't adopt, that infuriates the European world's humanists, but that the United States dares exist.)

Chiraq

It is worth remembering that on Chirac's last visit to Algeria in March of last year, the first by any French president since Algerian independence in 1962, he was met by a cheering crowd of somewhere between 500,000 and 1.5 million people (last November, I attended a lecture by Pascal Bruckner at NYU's maison française: he said the people in the crowd were really shouting, "Visa! Visa!").

Commentators largely attributed his newfound popularity to his opposition to American plans to go to war with Saddam. Indeed, the day after Chirac's visit, president Bouteflika told radio station Europe 1 Chirac deserved the Nobel peace prize for his opposition to war. Among Chirac's critics, was the heroic Cynon Valley (Wales) MP Anne Clwyd (who is also chair of Indict). She wrote wrote that Bouteflika "was perhaps persuaded of the merit of the nomination during a meeting he had in September 2002 with Ali Hassan al-Majid, also known as Chemical Ali, the man responsible for the slaughter of thousands of innocent Iraqis. As the French would say, 'plus ça change.'"

Last October, Sa'ad Zaki, a Cairo date seller who and the main supplier to the city's grocery stores, told the AFP that the "the surprise of this Ramadan will the be the Chirac date," which sold for 20 Egyptian pounds ($3.20) per kilo. (The prophet is believed to have broken his Ramadan fast by eating dates and drinking goat's milk). The Chirac was being sold alongside the worst dates which had the same names as last year: the Sharon (10¢ per kilo) and the Bush (15¢). The Chirac was popular, Zaki said, because "the Arabs feel positions taken by Chirac on Iraq and the Palestinian cause are the most moderate." On Iraq, "France opposed the United States, the world superpower." The second highest quality date was the Yasser Arafat (70¢ to $1.50 per kilo).

This was a glaring illustration of France's politique arabe (or "Arab policy"). France has long sought to protect it's strategic, diplomatic and financial interests by adopting Arab causes and Jacques Chirac has been at the central to this strategy since his first days in national politics. On coming to power in 1981, François Mitterrand was desperate to prevent the withdrawal of Arab deposits from French banks. His repeated promises to end the sale of weapons to Iraq and his support for Israel irritated wealthy Arabs and their heads of state who had largely supported his opponent... Jacques Chirac. As it gathered speed, the capital flight risked devaluing the franc itself and Mitterrand was forced to go back on his campaign pledges.

France's famous beneficence toward Saddam wasn't simply a matter of securing Iraqi petrodollars (though that had a lot to do with it). Nor is France's outspoken, and sometimes scandalous, bias in favor of the Palestinian cause. Rather, both arise out of the strategic desire to court the entire Arab world.

During the Iran-Iraq war, France was way out in front of every other Western nation in its support for Saddam against the Iranian mullahs. In 1982, France made considerable sacrifices in order to lend Saddam five (5) fighter jets (from its own operational stocks!). But it wasn't long before they expected something in return. On page 128 of the investigative history Notre allié Saddam, Claude Angeli and Stéphanie Mesnier write

[Defense minister Charles] Hernu and [prime minister Claude] Cheysson then begin a series of visits to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Kuwait, accompanied by a few colleagues and by François Gutmann, secretary general the ministry of Foreign Affairs. The French are delighted by the improvement in their image among Arab nations. In 1982, three quarters of French weapons exports were sent to Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

"All the Arabs we met were asking us to give Iraq the Super-Etendard," said one of the diplomats present. "Our policy was informed and well thought-out. Besides, by the end of 1983, after the delivery of those five [Mirage fighter] planes, Cheysson went on a triumphal tour of the Gulf. The principal was the following: to cash in on the credit we had earned in the region. It rained contracts."

This policy lives on to this day, as Jonathan's translation below makes clear. From April 21 to 26, Defense minister Michèle Alliot-Marie will be touring the midde-east, visiting the UAE, Oman, Qatar and Jordan.

Since the passage of the ban on the hidjab, France's position in the Arab world has deterioated somewhat.

But I digress: the article Jonathan translates below is revealing, given the current context. Mohamed Benchicou, editor in chief of the Algerian daily Le Matin, and author of Bouteflika: an Algerian fraud, recently said the following during a live chat on lemonde.fr:

Libre: Isn't Jacques Chirac's trip to Algeria an absolute endorsement of the results of the presidential election? In a wider sense, what is the relationship between president Bouteflika and France?

Mohamed Benchicou: President Chirac's brutal visit to Algeria has surprised the Algerians and particularly Algerian democrats, who do indeed see a kind of endorsement in this, not only of president Bouteflika, but of the fraud the returned him to office. Algerian republicans hope still hope that president Chirac's trip to Algiers will serve to relay a message to Bouteflika on the respect for his commitment to democracy, pluralism, and freedom of the press, and [to urge him] to avoid the temptation of Stalinist hegemony that returned him 85% of the vote in the first round of voting and the complete annihilation of the opposition. Let's hope that this message will be borne by president Chirac. As for Franco-Algerian relations, it is obvious that, in diplomatic and political terms, they've seen a fantastic rise, because, over the last five years, president Bouteflika has visited France seven times and President Chirac has visited Algeria twice, which is remarkable and which has brought diplomatic relations to a level heretofore unseen. But such good relations have remained strictly diplomatic. Algerians saw nothing of it. They have had no economic or commercial results, no new investments, nor have they seen the return of French companies to Algeria or the lifting of strict requirements for Algerians obtaining visas. There's just been a recrudescence of relations, of state visits and diplomatic ones.

France's Beacon Dimmed by Racism

In his Politicus column for the International Herald Tribune this week, John Vinocur discusses hard days for La France Universelle. (Do bear in mind that one of the events discussed in the past few days has since turned out to be false.)

Tomorrow is Bastille Day, and if France still represents some kind of universal message, it is having a miserable time matching the dim wattage of its current beacon with that of its luminescent past.

If this were a country with a more circumscribed self-description of its own worth to humanity, a cheery Denmark, or an exuberant but problematic Brazil, nothing horribly cosmic might be made of France's current corrosive reality of anti-Arab racism, hundreds of no-go communities penetrated by Islamic fundamentalism, or anti-Semitism that has gotten out of hand. But France defines itself, with historical legitimacy going back to July 14, 1789, as a vector of values for everyone, a universal proposition of intelligence and reason, offering assimilation for seekers of citizenship or psychic belonging for admirers of its good sense. Skipping over the pretense of grandeur, a serious argument could be made that alongside America's more pragmatic projection as the world's indispensable power, France kept in the game through the postwar years as a worthy adjunct, committed to freedom, human rights and fairness in its own brilliantly self-interested way.

These days, both the Republic's notion of itself as an inspirational force and example, and the affection of some of its friends — "To live like God in France," goes a German phrase describing a universal ambition for the good life — are hard put by events.

Last week, a sociologist, Pierre-André Taguieff, director of research at the state-sponsored National Center for Scientific Research, talking in an interview for a series of articles in Le Figaro called "What it is to be French today," described racism here as so lethal now that the French live in a fractured republic that no longer merits the label "one and indivisible."

After all, the day before, the government's internal intelligence service, les Renseignements Généraux, furnished the corroborative details, reporting that 300 "troubled neighborhoods" nationwide, grouping about 1.8 million residents, had become communities "in retreat." Decoded, this meant that a substantial part of the country's Arab population of five to seven million live in areas submerged in separatist-like situations involving what the Renseignements Généraux indicated were Islamic fundamentalist preachers, contempt for France and the West, anti-Semitism, and violence. Le Monde described the Renseignements Généraux's analysts as deeply pessimistic about circumstances they called "difficult to halt." Acknowledging the substantial failure of a system of assimilation which stops with brotherhood and equality in word only, this went to the heart of the notion of a universal French beacon. In terms of reality, verbal theory had never coincided with equal opportunity for France's Arabs or what the French-Arab community considers it merits in terms of respect from the state or the French themselves.

It is this jagged gap in France's relationship with Arab immigrants at home, paradoxically exacerbated by a continuous French message of pro-Arab sentiment to the Middle East, that appears to be a central element in deflecting the French-Arab community's anger toward French Jews.

Beyond attacks by Arab youths on Jews … and what Taguieff says is a demonization of Israel in France, the sociologist indentifies the presence of a new "judeophobia" here. While Taguieff says this is not the policy of the state, he believes it has entered the tissue of national life with the French "majority looking on as indifferent or complaisant spectators."

Running after events, but getting consciously ahead of the self-celebratory aspects of Bastille Day, Jacques Chirac, certainly no racist or anti-Semite, for the second time in a year pledged last week to put a stop to the problem. Unlike Taguieff, he insisted "the nation" shared the victims' pain. But Chirac offered no names, no responsible parties, just confirmation of a disgraceful but, in his formulation, near-virtual situation in which la France Universelle remained essentially blameless. In the same manner that Charles de Gaulle considered the Nazi collaborationist Vichy government illegitimate, and its crimes not those of France, specific official acknowledgment of discrimination in France against its Arabs, or that the hoodlums attacking Jews essentially come from the French Arab community, appeared too much in conflict with France's universalist aspirations to get spelled out by Chirac.

"In trying at any price to avoid stigmatizing certain segments of the French population," Taguieff explained, "we don't dare anymore to call anything by its right name or to describe it unequivocally."

This, in turn, seems mirrored in France's refusal to modify or fine-tune its approach to the world. Pascal Bruckner, the writer, talked years ago of the inflexibility growing out of his country's "unique mixture of arrogance and self-hatred." And this awkward French place between pretension and reality affects its current politics internationally.

If France weren't wedded to a desire for global resonance, its seriously challenged handhold on a share of leadership in Europe and its attempts to mark international affairs with its own stamp could be scribbled off in its private accounts as a bad run in day-trading on the global geopolitical bourse.

But because they treat leadership in Europe as a national birthright, France's politicians have now moved into the embarrassing position of not knowing whether they want to stage a referendum on the European Union's new constitution, or, ultimately, be for or against it — although the treaty is substantially the oeuvre of a Frenchman, former President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing.

The unspoken reason is that the constitution holds out no palpable, specific advantages for France. As a result, its political caste, across factions left and right, has atomized into groups weighing out potential gain by the gram of support or opposition on a scale of domestic political positioning. This has zero to do with Europe's interests or the greatness of the French example.

The situation came as a piece with Chirac's behavior two weeks earlier at a NATO summit in Istanbul as the Alliance offered up minimalist support for a mission to train the armed forces of the new Iraqi regime. A participant recounted later that after France raised no objections in a closed-door session with the entire membership, Chirac proceeded to trash the plan in front of the press.

It was a glaring moment of French unilateralism, with Le Monde, in a departure from its usual portrayal of French wisdom, describing Chirac as "isolated" and "in the role of eternal complainer and killjoy."

As the flags and the brass bands come down the Champs-Elysées on Wednesday, it would not be reasonable to expect a national expression of newfound humility to be included in the president's traditional television interview. All the same, taken together on Bastille Day, French life and politics in 2004 suggest a universal proposition that for the moment is one of considerable modesty.