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…
So which model will it be? Korea or Vietnam? Commitment or abandonment?Investor's Business Daily agrees with Christopher Cook: in Korea, "We did not cut and run."
Using Norman Podhoretz's "World War IV" as material, Mona Charen has more…Communism's initial thrust had been blunted, but the threat wasn't over. Today, a half-century later, U.S. troops remain in South Korea, and our commitment to the democracy we saved at great cost remains firm. We did not cut and run.
South Korea is now a strong ally, a vibrant democracy and an economic dynamo. If we hadn't stuck around, it might have sunk into the North Korean abyss long ago. Would the world be a safer place today if we had walked away, as the Democrats want us to do in Iraq, saying "defend yourselves" and "good luck"?
Benjamin Franklin once said that if we didn't all hang together, we'd hang separately. That was the rationale behind the formation of NATO. After we liberated Europe from the Nazis, we didn't just throw it under the bus, saying we did our part and now Europeans had to defend themselves against the Soviet Union on their own.
Bush [aka the alleged nincompoop] understands these lessons of history.
…In a recent speech at the National Press Club, Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., said: "Many have threatened that there will be chaos, a bloodbath, when the United States redeploys from Iraq, and this in fact may be the case." But, he added, "if they continue to choose to spill blood, it will not be on the conscience of the United States."At least it won't be on the conscience of the surrender caucus of a Democratic Party that time and again has demonstrated a distinct lack of conscience. The model of today's Democrats is not Korea, but Vietnam in 1975, when they cut off aid and barred any U.S. support, making the killing fields possible and inevitable.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has also mentioned Korea, saying that the way we handled that situation, by maintaining a presence, was a lot wiser than how we handled Vietnam, "where we just left lock, stock and barrel."
So which model will it be? Korea or Vietnam? Commitment or abandonment? Bush has made his choice and, we think, the right one.
Le statut d'icone de Che Guevara est une construction post-mortem, raconte Jacobo Machover dans son livre, La Face cachée du Che (gracias para Mathieu Naville). Deux types de personnes y ont contribué. Castro lui-même, qui en a fait un héros presque surhumain, un grand penseur et un humaniste, et les intellectuels du monde entier, en particulier français, qui le considèrent, comme l'a affirmé Sartre, comme «l'homme le plus complet de notre temps». … Sa légende est une entreprise de mystification collective.
Comment l'expliquez-vous [son image]?
J'hésite entre l'ignorance et la complicité. On a du mal à comprendre, surtout pour les familles des victimes. Mais je penche plutôt pour la complicité.
…pour nous, une bonne partie des Cubains, Che Guevara est le symbole et la réalité de l'oppression à Cuba. J'espère une démocratie qui ne soit ni romantique, ni héroïque. Juste une démocratie banale, mais qui permet de rétablir la vérité sur les victimes du régime castriste et sur le Che.
Christopher Cook trumpets the fact that We're never leaving Iraq.He is serious. And he notes that that part of Dubya's speech was not picked up by the MSM — although the president said that very thing, in so many words. And Cook agrees with him (look especially at his fifth point):
Ever.
I think the freest, best, most powerful, most prosperous, most pluralistic country---the country that has done more to liberate oppressed humanity than any other entity in human history---needs and DESERVES to have bases all over the world.Update: Investor's Business Daily agrees: in Korea, "We did not cut and run."
So which model will it be? Korea or Vietnam? Commitment or abandonment? Bush has made his choice and, we think, the right one.
[Simply] because he didn't deliver the dismal appraisal of the Iraq War they had wantedwrites Benjamin Duffy as he debunks the New York Times' (in)famous "defeat at all costs" ad,
MoveOn.org and company called a patriotic man with nearly thirty years of military service a "traitor"
A correspondent writes:
”The Hidden Face of the Liberators” - (rerun) A documentary by Patrick Cabouat. According to ciminologist Robert J. Lilly, liberators who were meant to liberate Europe from Nazism raped or killed French, British, and German citizens in 1944 and 45. The recent opening of legal archives permitted us to see something that would otherwise remain a secret.
Our view: this documentary is a poignant testimony of the acts of atrocities of soldier welcomed as liberators.
- with thanks to Kevin
One poor loser to another: Ségolène Royal said that if she was Joan of Arc, then she was burned at the stake. Rue 89 aims it at Lionel Jospin who called her the candidate least likely to succeed which isn’t quite true. She came ahead of the band of Marxist Bozos, Neo-fascists, a hunter’s party, the neo-druid José Bové, and Bay-roo who appears not to believe in anything.
To boot, on Monday Royal called Jospin a racist and a sexist. Watch out for that magic wand, Casper.
It’s all there – it’s more or less the minor features found in the shadows of the U.S. presidential election of 1984: baiting with religious imagery, white people accusing each other of racism and sexism... twenty 3 years later. Now if their minds would only catch up with the idea that Communism failed 20 years ago, they might get somewhere. For now we can enjoy the cage match.
Never mind the boozy mid-day meal on the way to being rude to co-workers, or the divinity of “slow food” argument (not the practice) which we're supposed to believe is a “movement”. Charles Bremner finds that they just KNOW what every last American is like. A ministry of Tourism brochure distributed to retaurants in time for the Rugby World Cup indicated that:With all foreigners, French restaurateurs are advised to explain when a dish comes from offal or includes meat with blood still visible. "Americans like their meat de-animalised," it says. "Its origin with a living animal must not be visible. Offal dishes, frogs' legs and snails disgust them.
As these dishes disgust most of the French, but that's beside the point. Pretending that their perpetually bland diets are noble and challenging, would they know what to do with a serving of Rocky Mountain Oysters? Methinks not.Americans spend all day eating -- ingesting food on 20 different occasions -- and they are obsessed with not getting fat, the Ministry tells the restaurateurs.
Okay – got it! We'de like to hate the Americans we meet, but they aren't as bad as we hope, but take heart! The REAL ones are much, MUCH WORSE!
But it advises them to forget their clichés about Americans being devoted to hamburgers and French fries. "American tourists in France come from a high social level and they like to visit and tour regions that are rich with history. They are very open and enthusiastic people who appreciate conviviality and personalised service."
United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour said on Monday that bigotry and prejudice, especially in regard to Muslims, were common in Europe and called on governments to tackle the issue. […] Europeans "are shocked at times when it is pointed out that bigotry, prejudice and stereotyping is still sometimes very present in their attitude to others," she said.Don't forget to overcompensate for your flaws! That's always panned out really nicely in EUtopia.
One argument after another, one “but why one place and not another” after another, one demand to talk with your enemies from a position of weakness after another: that’s what the emotionally insulated global left, the ones stuck somewhere between the denialists of the “Truther” movement and those with some common sense would say.
But with whom and how? There are an abundance of precedents that showed that French, German, and Italian leniency with the Red terrorists of the 70’s and 80’s didn’t do anything other that lower the threshold of decency, and allowed the RAF, Red Brigades, the Bader-Meinhof types and their sympathists in the street deepen and widen their connections with Mideast terror and the intelligence operations of the Communist block.
However, most everything is forgiven when it comes to lefty violence, because even the natives let themselves believe the fairy-tale villain narrative about capitalism.
That it provided cover for murderers and people who wanted to tear western society apart didn’t seem to matter a great deal.Now, almost two decades later, German police, prosecutors and other security officials have focused on a new suspect: the East German secret police, known as the Stasi. Long fodder for spy novelists like John le Carré, the shadowy Stasi controlled every aspect of East German life through imprisonment, intimidation and the use of informants -- even placing a spy at one point in the office of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt.
It’s relevance to today? It’s the cookbook that the Syrians have been operating under for a decade as the Libyans did before they were contained, and on a much larger scale, how the Iranians have been operating in large parts of the near-east.
According to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, the murders of Mr. Herrhausen and others attributed to the Red Army Faction bear striking resemblance to methods and tactics pioneered by a special unit of the Stasi. The unit reported to Stasi boss Erich Mielke and actively sought in the waning years of the communist regime to imitate the Red Army Faction to mask their own attacks against prominent people in Western Germany and destabilize the country.Police acknowledge that part of the reason for their focus on possible Stasi involvement was that all other leads had dried up. But they say they also knew that over the years the Stasi had worked with and given explosives to other terrorists, including "Carlos the Jackal" and the Basque group ETA in Spain. And in 2001 to 2003, an undercover police officer met with a man who claimed he had been a killer for the Stasi operating in Western Germany, although police were never able to tie him to specific murders.
When a bomb goes off in Beirut, or in a western city for that matter, and there is no evidence, you don’t just need to ask yourself where the technology, techniques, and money came from, but wonder why they nebulously show signs of being somewhat attributable to “a few people,” “just a cell,” or “a few malcontents,” and not imagine that there aren’t state actors involved in it somehow.
Worse still, when the people who want to combat terror with talk, or police-work, or by negotiating silently by sending signals through the leniency of the defenders, what are they really doing that hasn’t been done before and failed? All it does is prove to an enemy that not only would our magnanimity offer them new opportunities, but prove to the potential victim that in a Politically Correct War on Terror, that the blood of the innocent is cheap.
Unlike the chants of the pot-banging idiots (no different than the 68ers,) that truly is the state letting it happen on purpose (LIHOP), and creating a climate of fear.
Not many mainstream outlets (in France or abroad) seem to have reported on it (hm! I wonder why that would be…), but on a trip back to his native Hungary (or to his father's native Hungary), Nicolas Sarkozy said he had come to lever un malentendu. Il n'y a pas, pour la France, une vieille Europe et une nouvelle Europe. Il n'y a pas dans mon esprit, des pays majeurs et des pays mineurs. Pour tout dire, il n'y a pas ceux qui ont droit à la parole et ceux qui n'ont que le droit de se taire. Il y a des pays égaux en droits et en devoirs.
Thousands of protesters marched through the streets of Washington today, from near the White House to the Capitol, where they staged a "die-in" to demonstrate their fervent opposition to the war in Iraq.
- WaPo Organisers said 100,000 people attended Saturday's protest, but police did not confirm the figure.
- Al Jazeera
The recent “Die-In” in Washington, DC which was staged by the likes of Code Pink and International (I don’t have an) A.N.S.W.E.R. is just a dress rehearsal for the genocide that come if the U.S. does what they wish and abandon the Iraqi people.
At least it will resolve that demand, and they can go back to the “you break it, you bought it” argument which will last them for years after a withdrawal, because it will allow them to demand something else that just as insoluble. So just like the boat people, and Pol Pot’s body count, it doesn’t matter how many will have to die to prop up the loony left’s world view.
As for the “hundred thousand” protestors that newspapers far and wide, but certainly not local are referring to, I have to ask: “thousands of WHAT ?” They barely stopped traffic around the Capitol.
In the mean time, I think this sport has potential as a really crowd-pleasing new Olympic event.
Any way you shake it, it isn't just belittling, it doesn't work.Of course, guess what's to blame? Just watch.
- from E-nough
