Part Two: “How”

You can see this sort of thing in less economically free and democratically developed parts of the world. Same methods. Same results. When I hear about things like this I’m deeply saddened, and sympathetic to the ordinary French man and woman – especially those who love liberty and want to see it restored as one of their guiding principles, and not just let the words sit blithely on a plaque and the coins.

Below is an email from the fellow who tipped me off to the plight of the Gaulist in Part One.

«Given the SAC history, it's revealing, and it's a real cloak and dagger one too. La Mite [Mitterand] had his own intelligence apparatus, so I wonder what Chirac has?

What's really worrying is the big picture : the LEN law, the structural symbiosis of the manipulated and manipulators, between the power and the mainstream media, France siding with dictatorship to bring the internet under UN spell (thank God, that this has apparently failed), the emergency state and the chape de plomb over the news reports, Copé lecturing the foreign media with the approval of the press, Sarko preventing the publishing of a book about his wife (a pure act of censorship and strong-arming), Everyone around Chirac is corrupt anyway. Its’ basis are in the françafrique and the Arab policy, and all the money flowing back from them.

Add to that the duel between de Villepin and Sarko in a context of quasi-insurrection and toothless power diseased with infighting.
[ . . . ]
It’s truly is the ultimate rotting state - a "controlled" democracy, a weak power on the defensive which can only hide the symptoms, there undemocratic forces at work (a revolutionary left allied with revolutionary Islam), powerful levers for theses forces (public sector unions blocking all reforms, leftist lobbies controlling intellectual life, suburban rabble successfully confronting the police), a catastrophic financial situation, an apathic majority paving the way for an active minority, and racial tensions since at least a decade culminating in a permanent low-intensity intifada.

Chirac is a terrible, terrible man. He’s the posterboy of the technocracy/oligarcy which has seized power and ruined France in just two generations.»

This is not the first account of this type on the state of affairs that we’ve gotten. In fact it’s quite typical. The same things offend people the most greatly: the unavoidable opacity in the air. The dishonesty, the loss of a great ideal. The weight it puts on people’s hearts, and the destruction of optimism.

It might be the very thing that drives people to accept global utopian fantasies which are totalitarian at their core. There might come a point in the psychology of all of this, that people who otherwise accept things broadly secretly start to accept the idea of evil, authoritarian traits if it would only seem benevolent to them, or at the very least, leave them be and let people have a life inside a smaller frame – a protective boundary.

Accepting that paves the way to things that could only get worse.