He looks like a sprite: boyish, handsome in his black Hugo Boss T-shirt and blue jeans. He reminds some of Tintin, the eternally young comic-book hero of so many childhood adventures.
Once again, the NYT shows their fact-checking and appallingly low journalistic standards. This time it doesn’t actually have directly to do with their domestic political opponents, or taking “their fight” to their enemy... which is to say their fellow citizens.
Their “boyish sprite” is 34.
No, this time they fell in thrall of France’s too-old-to-believe Marxist boy-wonder and aging child, Olivier Besancenot, a man who’s made a meal-ticket out of parading a fake working-class cred for himself. In a poll last month by the firm CSA, 49 percent of respondents said Mr. Besancenot was currently Mr. Sarkozy’s leading opponent, behind the Socialist mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë (54 percent), but ahead of other Socialists like Martine Aubry (36 percent) and Ms. Royal (32 percent).
The fact that this would represent a chilling abuse of political power, and finds the acts of dictatorships benign by virtue of example is not even hinted at.
Mr. Besancenot is a postman, a member of the working class, who delivers the mail part time in the wealthy Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine.
But he is also the leader of the Communist Revolutionary League, and in a long interview here, in party offices above a printing factory in this racially mixed city just east of Paris — where cheap clothing stores abut shops selling North African and Middle Eastern spices and take-out food — he describes himself without blushing as a revolutionary.
But given the travesties of the past, from the bureaucratic savagery of Soviet Communism to the chaos of Mao, he said, “revolution needs to be reinvented, for no revolutionary experiment has ever succeeded. ”They have only been betrayed, either crushed by an armed elite or destroyed by “bureaucratic counter-revolution,” he said, adding, “We are trying to strike that balance of taking power without being taken by power.”
Oddly enough, 5 Years Later, we here at ¡No Pasarán! have done a significantly better job to inform French and American readers readers alike about this man than the NYT or even some of the players in the France’s own press have about “lunch bucket” Olivier. We often wondered if the factor Aggravant still working? To this question, the candidate Besancenot spoke of his monthly salary of less than €1200 as a Postal worker. Blessed are the believers, because the reality is somewhat different. He’s paid mainly by the party. For example, he very regularly got compensation as a European parliamentary assistant when Alain Krivine was an MEP, in amount considerably above the monthly €5000.
He is a liar. He is a fake, a venal user of the sympathy of his followers, and extremely skilled in living off of make-work commissions and off of the public’s money while trying to tout a veneer of honesty. In short, he’s a subsidized elitist of the sort one only finds in either western Europe or the parts of the underdeveloped world where attention to graft can be obscured.
What is his provenance? To this question, Olivier Besancenot speaks with modesty of a small studio in the 18th arrondissement. The journalist would have had much to see - a really good size apartment in the neighborhood of Sacre Coeur in Montmartre - the most expensive part of the 18th, one of the most sought after by Parisian Bobos. Of course, he owns it... something impossible on a postal worker’s salary, but who’s saying...
But the NYT finds this unworthy of their report, if not a cute ‘human interest’ item that I’m sure many of their employees wish vicariously in him something for themselves.
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