"Mon coeur est français, mais mon cul est international"

In an article in Le Monde about French actresses and celebrities who took German officers, if not Nazi ones, as lovers during World War II, Frédéric Lemaître praises one of them — Arletty — for anticipating the sexual revolution and — in Klaus Harpprecht's words — as a patriot ("in her own way") for seeing the German occupants "as human beings like all others", all the while tipping his (Lemaître's) hat to the German author for his World War II paean to 1940s France.

Malgré ses 84 ans, Klaus Harpprecht se souvient encore parfaitement de l'effet ressenti en 1947 lors de la projection à Stuttgart du chef-d'oeuvre de Marcel Carné Les Enfants du paradis, tourné pendant l'Occupation. La magnificence des décors ne pouvait que subjuguer les spectateurs qui vivaient au milieu des ruines. Mais surtout, comment résister à Arletty ? "Ses grands yeux sombres, (...) ses épaules soyeuses, son décolleté, le jeu amusé de la commissure de ses lèvres." Il n'en fallait pas plus à ce jeune homme qui avait déjà dévoré (en allemand) Le Rouge et le Noir pour tomber définitivement amoureux de l'actrice et de la France. Un amour qui, avec le recul, ne devait rien au hasard.

… Depuis une dizaine d'années, Klaus Harpprecht est revenu à son amour de jeunesse. Le fruit de ses recherches vient de paraître sous le titre : Arletty und ihr deutscher Offizier, eine Liebe in Zeiten des Krieges ("Arletty et son officier allemand, un amour en temps de guerre") (éd. S. Fischer). Si la liaison d'Arletty avec Hans Jürgen Soehring, officier de la Luftwaffe, est connue des Français (notamment en raison de la célèbre justification donnée par l'actrice elle-même : "Mon coeur est français, mais mon cul est international", nombre d'Allemands la découvrent grâce à Klaus Harpprecht. Mais au-delà de cette relation, qui a valu à Arletty d'être incarcérée puis placée en résidence surveillée pour "transmission d'informations à l'ennemi", c'est une véritable fresque sur la vie culturelle et artistique sous l'Occupation que l'auteur propose à ses lecteurs. De Jean-Paul Sartre à Sacha Guitry, de Céline à Simone Signoret ou Danielle Darrieux, Klaus Harpprecht dresse une impressionnante galerie de portraits.

… Sous sa plume, Arletty préfigure la révolution sexuelle à venir. Signe que le temps a - heureusement - produit ses effets, Klaus Harpprecht se permet même de juger qu'"à sa façon Arletty était bel et bien une patriote. Elle était fière de la culture française. Elle aimait le pays et ses habitants. Mais elle ne voyait pas pourquoi elle ne devrait aimer que ses compatriotes. Pour elle, les Allemands, qui, dans leur majorité, ne faisaient pas la guerre de leur plein gré, étaient des êtres humains comme les autres".

Les librairies allemandes regorgent de livres sur la seconde guerre mondiale. … Mais rares sont ceux qui se lisent avec un tel plaisir ou qui, à travers les lignes, témoignent d'un tel amour pour la France.

More Communist Gaiety

It's Another New High for European Culture



Don’t think for a second that she isn't into pegging him every night.

Love for Sale

Austria, Belgium, the Czech republic, Greece, Italy and the UK made more nuanced statements but were broadly-speaking in the French camp. The UK said only that diplomats should study implications for regional stability before making the move.

EUobserver reports on the usual policy-by-scrum going on in EUtopia. It reads like the racing form.

While the method of dialog tends to make ones’ eyes glassy, you have to stay awake to notice that they’re talking about arms sales to China.

It reads rather typically of any sort of subject in the “political union”, and is largely undifferentiated from events: for one thing, China has been aggressive in the waters around her, ramping up the hostility to Vietnam and Taiwan, and sending smoke signals about war to the US.

France, the strongest pro-China advocate, said "the embargo is anachronistic and must go" and showed "zero flexibility" on asking Beijing to make reforms in return for lifting the embargo, arguing that "China would not accept human rights conditionality."

Which is to say that they found a way to rationalize their way around the “human rights policy” that they like to think makes them the only residents in heaven.

Wen arrived in London to meet his British counterpart David Cameron. At a joint press conference, Cameron cited late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping's most famous quote - "It doesn't matter if the cat is black or white as long as it catches the mice" - to express his attitude on Britain's introduction of Chinese-made high-speed trains.

So life goes on in totally unlinked, dissociative fashion. Naturally, the Europeans will sell them weapons. It comes on the heels of the Chinese leadership touring Europe and lavishing them with bailout money and deposits to backstop their banks.

Wen began the first leg of his tour on June 24 in Budapest, the first visit to Hungary by a Chinese premier in 24 years. He signed a number of cooperative deals with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, and announced that China was ready to purchase Hungarian government bonds and extend 1 billion euros (US$1.4 billion) in credit. The purchase of Hungarian treasury bonds was hailed by Orban as "historic help" for Hungary.

And vice versa, even at the cost of selling their only real ally and security guarantor up the river.

It calls for Soviet era sounding statements and declarations that sound as if they could be about “the thrilling tractor production quotas being not just met, but beaten!” and ‘new eras in international relations and world peace’:

"The wide range of topics up for discussion and the substantial achievements are all pioneering work in the history of Sino-German relations and Sino-EU relations," Wen said during a press conference with Merkel.

French Health System: A Casebook History of the Unintended Consequences of Government Intervention

While the French are busy bragging to the clueless Yanks about their (France's) second-to-none health care system, Emmanuel Vigneron tells Laetitia Clavreul in a Le Monde interview that the French system is beset with failures, such as excess fees (honoraires libres) and medical "deserts" in various regions of France, not to mention pointless operations (such as 90,000 appendectomies instead of the 65,000 that are truly necessary).

On parle beaucoup des déserts médicaux. La relation de cause à effet entre nombre de médecins et santé n'est pas établie, mais il y a suspicion. Il est donc largement temps de poser la question, d'autant plus que ces inégalités territoriales se conjuguent avec les inégalités sociales, sous l'effet du coût du foncier qui pousse les classes les moins aisées à s'éloigner des zones urbaines, et ainsi des professionnels de santé.

Meanwhile, more and more French doctors are choosing to be paid in excess fees, adds Le Monde's Laetitia Clavreul, with the attendant overrun ratings constantly rising, in a system that is getting "deeply anchored in the French health system." Needless to say, neither the writer nor the Le Monde readers seem to notice it, but it turns out to be a case history of the unintended consequences of government intervention, with more and more rules being laid out (more reforms! more reforms!) to make up for the shortcomings of each previous generation of rules…

Lancé en 1980, pour éviter à la Sécurité sociale d'augmenter les tarifs des consultations tout en permettant une hausse de la rémunération des médecins, le secteur 2 a remporté un tel succès que face à la difficulté, déjà, de trouver un praticien au tarif de base, il a été décidé d'en limiter l'accès en 1990.

…Mais vingt ans plus tard, après une baisse des effectifs de praticiens en tarif libre, ce sont désormais des niveaux de 1990, voire bien au-dessus, que l'on retrouve dans certaines spécialités, comme les chirurgiens, les anesthésistes ou les gynécologues.

…La barre des 50% est souvent dépassée, par exemple chez les ORL, les ophtalmologues ou les gynécologues, et surtout les chirurgiens, qui atteignent désormais les 85% !

…L'essor des dépassements favorise donc bien la médecine à deux vitesses. Les médecins, qui préfèrent parler de "compléments d'honoraires", refusent cependant d'être jugés responsables, rappelant à l'envi que la hausse est due au fait que les tarifs de base, si peu augmentés par l'Assurance-maladie, ne permettent plus d'exercer.

The result of multiculturalism gone tragically wrong through ignorant immigration policies

What we have witnessed in Oslo and on Utoya Island, and what we risk experiencing in future copycat atrocities elsewhere,

writes Karl H. Pagac,

is the result of multiculturalism gone tragically wrong through ignorant immigration policies — politically correct but naïve interpretations of democratic values — and an idealistic view of a free, open and tolerant Europe.

The Takers Eat the Makers

George Handerly’s comments on sovereign debt may be directed at Europe, but apply equally well to the United States:

Sovereign debt and the Euro. This chaos of the global economy is not caused by its participants’ inability to offer goods in a quality and for a price for which there is a demand. That (private) part of the economy that produces and consumes is in good shape. The tumor is located in the political direction of the economy. The crisis is one of confidence. No wonder. The Western pillars of the world economy have governments that are in debt because their clientism forces them to misspend the community’s funds. These indebted governments are run by leaders who, being blinded by their “eurocratic” doctrine, extend loans to broken systems. These national economies have no chance to climb back up on the greased flagpole on which they have slid down.

I would rather think it should be called political venality rather than clientism, but the point is clear. Decades of vote-buying by way of pet projects dressed up as social experimentation and intervention lead finally to the state destroying the private affairs of the governed and their ability to function, employ, and build.

Those who would impose just one more eenie-weeny unproductive burden on us don’t get it. The good that they see in the world as a gift they want to give themselves and others isn’t made by them.

This is said as I find myself dealing with a LEED consultant who know less about that unproductive burden than I do, but still feels compelled to “get something else out of the owner” for what he thinks to be the sake of the planet. Knowing this, I doubt this owner will ever build again.

On "the right side of history" regarding Syria? At the UN, the Obama administration has not issued a peep

In dealing with the Middle East’s political eruptions, the United States, credibly or not, has made standing on the right side of history its operative watchword

notes John Vinocur in the International Herald Tribune.

Backing a French-British resolution condemning the Syrian regime for its brutal repression of opposition demonstrators, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan E. Rice, reached for the moral prop: “We will be on the right side of history if and when this comes to a vote. If others are unable to, or are unwilling to, then that will be their responsibility to bear.”

Now, with deaths in Syria reported to have risen to 1,400 over four months of clashes, there has been no U.N. condemnation, and no U.S. calling-out by name those countries blocking the measure and supplying Syria with its arms and financial wherewithal.

With Syria’s dictatorship killing daily with impunity, Ms. Rice’s line, five weeks later, has less the look of a U.S. government acting on history’s right side than one comfortable with indignation minus consequences.

As it turns out, the West is doing very little to transform the outrage of Syrian citizens into effective penalties against the regime of Bashar al-Assad and its suppliers, or into active outside support for a best-case scenario — ending Damascus’s symbiotic relationship with Iran, stopping Syria’s promotion of terrorism and isolating Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The language of moral commitment remains: President Barack Obama has said the United States is “using all the diplomatic, economic and strategic tools at our disposal” to support democratic transition and “block the path of murder.” But evidence of that action — or anything resembling results — isn’t shining through.

…for the Americans, moral impeccability, with the Security Council action floundering, relates in the short term to whether the United States considers the Russians and the Chinese too big to assail concerning Syria.

…how do you not exert pressure on Moscow now when tanks and helicopters — Pieter D. Wezeman of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimates Russia to be the essential source of the Syrian military’s heavy equipment — mass near a Syrian town where soldiers have defected?

Two despairing answers:

One, according to a European diplomat, is that the European Union, without specific U.N. cover, could never achieve the consensus necessary to call out Moscow or penalize it for providing the hardware involved in Syria’s ongoing massacres.

The other is that for the Obama administration, the task of confronting Syria’s supply chain with sanctions would savage the basic Russia-is-manageable premise of the president’s so-called reset with Moscow.

They Spoke Out

Thanks to the art of Neal Adams, among other contributors, Disney provides us with the series They Spoke Out (American Voices Against the Holocaust).

Anniversary of an Apologist’s Birth

"When I am dead, I hope it may be said:
'His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.'"

- Joseph Hilaire Pierre Belloc,
Born this day in 1870

How’d That Work Out for Ya?

27 July 1961:

East Berlin to be Rebuilt Into Red Super-Metropolis

BERLIN (NANA) – East Germany plans to rebuild Communist East Berlin as the showcase capital of the German Communist state and an architectural counter-attraction to West Berlin.
Walter Ulbricht, the East German leader, revealed that cornerstones for a complex of government buildings at Marx-Engels Square as a feature of signing ceremonies for a Soviet-East German peace treaty.

East Germany has conducted an architectural competition for the designing of the “ultra modern socialist metropolis.” Professor Max Hensermann, the architect in charge, says East Germany decided against imitating Moscow architecture.
“There are many forms of functional socialist architecture, and we will choose those forms best suited to East Berlin,” Henselmann said.

In 1953 East Germany began construction of the Stalin Allee, a gaudy boulevard designed as a propaganda façade for the rubble and ramshackle structures which make East Berlin and eyesore.
This avenue of “Moscow Modern” apartment buildings and luxury shops now stretches for nearly a mile along the pre-war Frankfurter Allee. It is to be extended to the Alexanderplatz.
But future new construction will deviate sharply from the Rococo and gingerbread of “Moscow Modern.” Henselmann indicated that the east Germans have decided on a modified Le Corbusier functional architecture with flowing lines.

The Marx-Engels Square, the pre-Communist Lustgarten, will house government offices, in effect replacing the pre-war Wilhelmstrasse and Leipzigerstrasse.
Foreign embassies will again be concentrated at the western end of Unter Den Linden, the famous Linden tree-lined avenue containing Humboldt (Berlin) University, the State Opera, and principal museums.
Since the war the Soviets have built a mammoth embassy near the former site of the U.S., British, and French embassies. The East German regime has now reserved a large tract in this area which will be subdivided and sold for embassy sites to countries recognizing East Germany.

COMMUNIST GAIETY

The opposite end of Unter Den Linden, bordering on the old Lustgarten, will be developed as East Berlin’s center of elegance. It will contain large department stores, cafes and restaurants, and even night clubs. Henselmann remarked, “who says there’s anything against gaiety in Communism?”

Freiedrichstrasse, pre-war Berlin’s amusement area, will retain the same character under the Communist reconstruction plans. A 200-bed hotel is to be constructed near the Friedrichstrasse railway station.

Hanselmann estimates that the major buildings in the program including Friedrichstrasse Hotel, will be completed by 1967. “The exact date depends upon the establishemtn of priorities for this program as compared with our general industrial development,” he explained.
“But we can promise this: By 1965 you will no longer recognize the city you see today.”

USA Number One!

America's Debt,
by Plantu:
$14,300 billion
• Barack Obama:
We Are the Champions!

To “Save the Planet” You could also Eat your Young

Via Tim Blair, we find the bottom-of-the-barrel, desperate, throwing-spaghetti-at-the-walls sort of stuff that economically and technologically deaf eco-ravers resort to. Today some of them suggesting that we all do every winter what we would if one were trying to stave of hypothermia in a disaster or massive civic utility failure: sleep with our pets.

This isn’t great news for the tropical fish population. Bee-keepers, too, may be at a loss to make use of the directive.

Conservative Blogs — Again — Called "Extreme Right" and "Fascistic" in Le Monde

In his Le Monde report on the content of France's conservative blogs in the wake of Anders Behring Breivik's Norwegian terror attack, Samuel Laurent refers to them as the extreme right and as fascistic while Le Monde brings out its its old graph (one that reminds One More Middle Aged Guy of a Jackson Pollock creation) designed to summarize the entire problem. How? As the Fascist Sphere (la fachosphère).

La thèse est la même sur le blog du collectif Riposte Laïque, les organisateurs des "apéros saucisson pinard", qui établissent dans une longue note une comptabilité des attentats commis par des fondamentalistes musulmans depuis 2011 (un rapport d'Europol en 2010 attribuait aux "islamistes" 0,4% des attentats commis sur le sol européen l'année précédente).

Christine Tasin, l'une des fondatrice du mouvement, s'insurge dans un billet contre "l'amalgame commode entre Anders Behring Breivik et tous les islamophobes". Agitant elle aussi la théorie du complot, elle juge que "l'attentat d'Oslo tombe bien, au moment où les hommes et les partis qui s'opposent à l'immigration et au développement préoccupant de l'islam se voient plébiscités par les électeurs" .

Plus Ça Change… And Who Might Have Been the Main Butt of Jokes of the Ancient Greeks?

If any leftist tells you how much more intelligent and how much more compassionate our generation is (i.e., the left's current generation is), you need to tell him or her about the people who lived in Greece 2500 years ago. With a summer batch of articles in Le Monde devoted to humor through the ages, it is refreshing to hear from Macha Séry that the main butt of jokes of the ancient Greeks were — already then — the intellectuals.

…les principales têtes de Turc des Grecs sont les scholasticos, autrement dit les intellectuels, présentés comme des crânes d'oeuf, des naïfs dépourvus de logique, exempts de sens pratique, qui comprennent tout de travers. Exemple : « C'est un intellectuel qui a perdu l'un de ses livres. Après plusieurs jours de recherches infructueuses, alors qu'il est en train de manger une salade, il tourne la tête et aperçoit son livre qui traîne dans un coin. Plus tard, il rencontre un de ses amis qui se plaint d'avoir perdu toute sa garde-robe. «Ne t'inquiète pas, lui dit-il, va t'acheter une salade, mange-la, tourne la tête et regarde dans le coin, tu vas la retrouver.» »

... The main butts of Greek jokes turn out to be the scholasticos, i.e., the intellectuals, presented as eggheads, naive beings devoid of logic, bereft of any type of common sense, who understand everything widely off the mark. Example [from the Philogelos (The Friend of Laughter in ancient Greek), a compendium of 265 jokes]: "There's this intellectual who's lost one of his books. After several days of fruitless search, while eating a salad, he happens to turn his head and spot the book in a corner. Later, he meets a friend who complains of having lost his entire wardrobe. 'Do not worry,' he tells the friend, 'go buy yourself a salad, eat it, turn your head, look in the corner, and there you'll find it'."

• Grèce antique et blagues modernes de Macha Séry

• Les goliards, les rigolards du Moyen Age de Macha Séry

• Tribunal des flagrants délires sous Louis XIII de Macha Séry

• Rire sous la Terreur (French Revolution) de Macha Séry

• Les Arts incohérents, sérieux s'abstenir de Macha Séry

• C'est l'histoire de mecs et de nanas... (Coluche) de Macha Séry

Maybe he just Sees the Concept of a “Donation” Differently

See if you can find out what the political affiliation is of this politician accused of bunga-bunga with the 18 year old daughter of a campaign donor. He also has had quite a history, despite the social machine’s bogus rah-rah-ing him for being politically useful for his little more than his ethnicity, since there is no evidence of him ever having had any kind of platform outside of seeking earmarks.

A trace of the illusions, dreams, and ambitions that have dominated German thinking about Russia over the centuries can be seen in Merkel’s stance

How does the leader of an admirably democratic country offer a seeming endorsement to a presidential hopeful from an authoritarian state

asks John Vinocur (the most conservative commentator working for the New York Times) in the International Herald Tribune

— all the while knowing its top job will be decided privately and in advance?

Ask Angela Merkel. The chancellor let on at a German-Russian symposium in Hanover this week that her man in the Russian election next March is President Dmitri A. Medvedev.

At an annual event whose persistent coziness and lack of vigorous exchange — call it a tone of connivance — gets frequently targeted by the German news media, the Russian president was talking about academic titles when the word “candidate” popped into his remarks.

Mrs. Merkel snatched it up. No artful or subtle mention of the barriers to real political expression in Russia followed. Rather, the chancellor said, “Candidate — that’s lovely to hear.”

The meeting’s participants, according to one newspaper, grinned in unison. When it comes to how Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Mr. Medvedev decide between themselves who will be the Russian president, (they have said the country prefers a single candidate), the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote: “Merkel’s favorite’s name is Medvedev. Anyone who observed the chancellor relating to her guest couldn’t miss it.”

Or, with a little close reading, couldn’t overlook how very aware the Merkel government is of the embarrassing aspects of seeming to tighten links to Russia at a time when Moscow is about to demonstrate how far in the last decade it has retreated from democracy.

…there’s no immediately visible yield in backing Mr. Medvedev.

The chancellor seems to think he is a modernizer, but Mr. Putin is widely regarded as the most likely future president.

In all of this, the arguably greatest error in terms of international reality would be Mrs. Merkel’s appearing to suppose there is some major strategic differentiation between the two Russian leaders, and to cast Mr. Medvedev as a relatively benevolent force.

Is there a difference? While Mr. Medvedev was president, Russia invaded Georgia and, shortly afterward, he proclaimed the countries along Russian borders, in the manner of the Brezhnev doctrine, to be of vital “strategic interest.”

Under Mr. Medvedev’s leadership, Russia also designated NATO as the single greatest threat to its security, menaced eastern Europe with new missiles, and has refused to negotiate reducing Russian supremacy in tactical nuclear weapons in Europe.

A trace of the illusions, dreams and ambitions that have frequently dominated German thinking about Russia over the centuries could well be present in Mrs. Merkel’s current positioning.

An excellent book (not for beach reading), Der Russland-Komplex, looks into these issues. Its author, Gerd Koenen, has warned of recurring German delusions concerning Russia and said Germany was again an object of Russia’s “refreshed world ambitions.”

As a former East German, Mrs. Merkel’s personal view of Russia has been hard to track.

Since the Summer of 2010, Marseille Has Seen One Homicide After Another

Les policiers dépêchés sur les lieux du crime … ont trouvé son cadavre gisant sur le trottoir, le corps criblé d'une dizaine de balles, aux jambes, dans le dos et à la tête.

As the ever-lucid French keep giving lessons to the ever-clueless Yanks on the perils of owning guns and on the benefits of following the ever-visionary Europeans in their quest for an ever-vaster gun-free zone, Le Monde's Ariane Chemin looks into the story of a trophy wife who asked her lover (another politician's bodyguard) to hire a hitman (a counter-spy with France's secret service) to shoot her UMP husband (she finally had to try and do it herself) while Yves Bordenave reports in the French daily about how a gangster — yet another one — was gunned down in France's second-largest city.

Criminalité organisée

En l'espace de sept mois, Roland Gaben est le sixième malfrat abattu à Marseille, et le troisième lié à la criminalité organisée au cours des trois derniers mois. Avant lui, en avril, Saïd Tir, 60 ans - "le parrain des quartiers nord" -, et, début juillet, l'un de ses lieutenants, Akim Grabsi, 42 ans, avaient eux aussi été abattus dans des conditions à peu près similaires. Notoirement connus des policiers pour leur proximité avec l'ancien caïd Farid Berrhama, assassiné par des Corses en octobre 2007 au Bar des Maronniers, Saïd Tir et Akim Grabsi étaient, comme Berrhama, originaire de la région de l'étang de Berre.

Depuis l'été 2010, les homicides se succèdent dans la deuxième ville de France. Marseille semble être le théâtre de plusieurs guerres : celle sans répit auquel se livrent les voyous des cités pour le commerce de la drogue ; et une autre, celle du milieu traditionnel, dont Roland Gaben vient d'être victime, qui porte la marque du grand banditisme. A tous les coups, l'on meurt.

A Marseille, au cours des dix-huit derniers mois, 39 personnes, plus ou moins impliquées dans des trafics, ont subi le même sort que Roland Gaben.