It would be a misreading of Europe's elites to see anti-American complaints as isolated gripes which can be overcome through patient dialogue

Karl Zinsmeister adds (emphasis mine):

Unlike some forms of bigotry, anti-Americanism is most virulent among Europe's elites. Everyday Germans and Brits and Italians tend to be more appreciative of American culture, economic achievement, and government than their political lords. But ordinary Europeans have relatively little influence on the direction of their societies. The thing about European governance most striking to American eyes today is its comparatively undemocratic nature. In much of the continent, elections mean little, unaccountable bureaucracies and elites commandeer the most important decisions, the same people hang onto power endlessly, and policies that would not survive the test of popular opinion are simply instituted by administrative fiat. To cite just one example, direct election of mayors has been blocked in many localities, with national authorities insisting on appointing local leaders themselves.

Because of this unrepresentative politics, lots of ideas supported by a majority of the European public--like the death penalty--have no chance of becoming law. The tradition of a peasantry ruled by its "betters" endures in numerous ways. Many of these habits are actually being deepened by the European Union, where decision making is dominated by unrecallable mandarins serving appointments in Brussels, who regularly ram through laws that could never pass by popular referendum.

… An irresponsible preference for moral dudgeon over useful solutions is now a hallmark of European foreign affairs, argues Charles Krauthammer:

“A leftist judge in Spain orders the arrest of a pathetic, near-senile General Augusto Pinochet eight years after he’s left office, and becomes a human rights hero... Yet for the victims of contemporary monsters still actively killing and oppressing—Khomeini and his successors, the Assads of Syria, and until yesterday Hussein and his sons— nothing. No sympathy. No action. Indeed, virulent hostility to America’s courageous and dangerous attempt at rescue.”

Krauthammer's conclusion is that the European Left's "concern for human rights turns out to be nothing more than a useful weapon for its anti-Americanism."

For evidence that obstruction of the U.S. is more important to many European elites than making progress in the world’s most dangerous flashpoints, look no farther than Afghanistan. …

Truth be told, continental Europeans have been making themselves scarce during times of crisis for more than two generations. Their current claim is that lack of a U.N. mandate is what has prevented Europe from standing shoulder to shoulder with the U.S. since the 9/11 attacks. But the Old World’s failure to make any proportionate contribution to the war on terror is actually part of a long historical pattern. Consider their response the last time a large U.N.-commanded force went to war—in Korea.

After North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950, the U.N. responded militarily. Of the 340,000 troops sent under U.N. control, how many of these do you suppose were European? About 5 percent. In the crunch, only Britain provided meaningful help, sending 14,198 soldiers at the Korean War’s peak. The next biggest European contribution? Greece, with 1,263. France followed, providing all of 1,119 troops.

The U.S., meanwhile, provided more than 300,000 fighters. Do the math and you’ll see something interesting: The Korean War alliance included 16 nations, and America supplied 88 percent of the military manpower. The Iraq War coalition included 32 nations, and 85 percent of the G.I.s were Americans. (Poland, Holland, and the Ukraine each contributed more soldiers to the Iraq War coalition than the French did to the Korean War.) See a pattern?

…Some considerable part of today’s European hostility toward the U.S. is born of frustration over their own failures, and jealousy of American success. …

Unfortunately, a combination of ideological stubbornness and blind anti-Americanism makes many Europeans resist the economic modernizations they desperately need. It’s as if, updating the old slogan, they’d rather be economically dead than red (if we use red in the Election 2000 sense to symbolize Reagan-Bush-style economics). The French have long caricatured the American economy as a free-market jungle, where fatcats prey and the weak perish. Recently, leftists in other European countries have adopted the French stereotype and sought to distance themselves from what they call “Anglo Saxon capitalism.”

The irony is that for all their insistence on portraying the U.S. as a land of fired workers, poverty, and economic insecurity, it is now Europe where unemployment is twice as high and four times as deep, where immigrants and the young have far fewer openings, where the ladder of upward mobility has fallen to pieces. In terms of spending power, home ownership, educational opportunities, and so forth, even relatively low income Americans are now demonstrably better off than typical Europeans …

It is not the first time that Zinsmeister has detailed his personal observances of "the whole panoply of Eurocharacters," along with their "vehemence and envy and certitude" and their "animus, jealousy, and willful spite":

Many of the economic choices, cultural initiatives, and foreign policy decisions being made in Europe today are animated by simple competitive envy.

… "It would be a misreading of Europe's political elites to see anti-American complaints as isolated gripes which can be overcome, one by one, through patient dialogue," warned Michael Gove, a perceptive editorialist for London's Times, when I visited his office. "Europe is not begging to differ in particulars, but beginning to diverge in fundamentals."

… We have conventionally thought of Europe as having about the same standard of living as Americans. This is less and less true. For the European Union as a whole, GDP per capita is presently less than two thirds of U.S. levels. America's poorest sub-groups, like African Americans, now have higher average income levels than the typical European.

[A] telling indicator of economic stagnation in Europe is the fact that many or most immigrants to that continent end up on welfare. In the U.S., almost all immigrants grab entry-level jobs, frequently more than one, and work their way up the economic ladder. The easy availability of work--indeed, our economy's insatiable hunger for additional laborers--is the main force that attracts immigrants to the U.S. in the first place.

Even corners of Europe that have resisted excessive government manipulation of the economy are now being dragged toward the statist norm by E.U. rules. Recently the European Court of Justice ruled that British employers must give all part-time workers four weeks of paid vacation, to align their policies with the rest of the European Union. In an effort to guarantee the "good life" by government edict, French, German, Dutch, and other continental finaglers have mandated short work weeks, long vacations, and fat social services, which has driven all dynamism out of their economies.

If no visible alternative loomed, citizens might not realize that better ways of achieving prosperity exist. But any European with eyes can observe that the United States makes very different economic choices, with very different results. Here is one root of the resentment felt by European elites, who would otherwise have a free hand to mold their societies according to their own visions. "The anti-American alliance," noted Michael Gove in the London Times earlier this year, "resents American economic success because it reminds them that their preferred cocktails of protectionism, state regulation, subsidy, and intervention constrict growth. America's practical success is a standing rebuke to their abstract beliefs."

A second divergence splitting Europe from America is defense strategy. When it comes to guarding the peace, current European leaders put all their faith in the endless talk, commissioneering, and resolution-writing of collective diplomacy--what they call "multilateralism" (a term nearly as feeble as the concept). Given Europe's history with the Treaty of Versailles, Neville Chamberlain's Munich Agreement, a biological weapons "ban" secretly violated with impunity by the Soviets and scads of other signatories, plus many more recent failures of "let's pretend" diplomacy in places ranging from Iraq to Rwanda to Bosnia, it's inexplicable that Europeans would bet all future peace on the security of parchment walls. But that's exactly what they're doing.

Charles Krauthammer diagnoses the problem this way: "After half a century under the American umbrella, West Europeans have come to believe that their freedom is self-generated. It is by now, they feel, a simple birthright, as natural as the air they breathe. When they see the United States slaying dragons abroad--yesterday Afghanistan, today Iraq, tomorrow who knows who--they see a cowboy whose enthusiasms threaten to disturb the perfect order of things, best symbolized by the hushed paper-shuffling at the International Criminal Court."

… American military spending now totals more than the next nine largest national defense budgets combined. Even more significantly, the U.S. now pays for almost 80 percent of the world's military R & D.

Without admitting it, the Europeans have essentially decided to rely on the U.S. to keep them safe. … Contrary to Euro myth, America isn't strong because it buys guns instead of butter. Military spending represents only 3 percent of U.S. GDP today. That's down from nearly 7 percent in the 1980s, a level we could return to almost instantly if any serious threat required that. America is powerful militarily simply because it is a highly productive nation, and utterly devoted to defense of its homeland.

… Wishful thinking will not man and equip a carrier battle group, build a missile shield, or otherwise instill the necessary awe in the world's tyrants.

Of course, most European elites deny such measures are necessary. To quote my British friend Mr. Gove again: "Europe's leaders seek to manage conflict through the international therapy of peace processes, the buying off of aggression with the danegeld of aid or the erection of a paper palisade of global law, which the unscrupulous always punch through. Europeans may convince themselves that these developments are the innovations of a continent in the van of progress, but they are really the withered autumn fruits of a civilization in decline."

A final, crushing, structural divergence separating America and Europe is demography. … Europe's disinterest in childbearing is a crisis of confidence and optimism. It is a spiritual indicator, reflecting millions of individual decisions to pursue self interest and material well-being instead of participating in the human future. These individual decisions will have profound collective effects.

… It's quite possible that in coming decades the European Union could simply lock up. The wrong-headed pressures toward centralization and state bureaucracy, the sheer cumbersomeness of its political mechanisms, the wide cultural gaps papered over by the union, could eventually lead to meltdown. How such a collapse might unfold is anybody's guess, but the possibilities are worrisome.

To American eyes, the most striking aspect of the European Union is its undemocratic nature. The E.U. apparatus is exceedingly closed and secretive. Relatively few of the confederation's important decisions are currently made by democratically accountable officials. On front after front, bureaucratic mandarins are deciding how everyday Europeans will live ….

Many Europeans, in a way Americans find impossible to understand, are willing to let their elites lead them by the nose. There is a kind of peasant mentality under which their "betters" are allowed to make the important national judgments for them. "Europe's leaders see themselves as wise parents, and their citizens as children," explains journalist and Briton Clive Crook. "In France, Germany, and the institutions of the European Union, elites take major political decisions and impose them on the voters without consulting them," summarizes John O'Sullivan. "Political elites feel that the people have no right to obstruct the realization of the European dream."

What happens to such a system of governance if things go wrong and popular unrest bubbles up is not clear. But the history of earlier multinational collectives in Europe, like the Hapsburg and Tsarist empires, Napoleonic France, the Third Reich, the Soviet Union, and the former Yugoslavia, is not soothing. And even if ethnic blow-ups could be avoided, a withered Europe would not be a good thing. Among other effects, "a weakened Europe is likely to grow more resentful toward America," warned British journalist Charles Moore in a lecture to the New Atlantic Initiative last year, "rather than blaming themselves."

Meriting Deconstruction: books on unconsidered themes prove a great attraction to the French since they are about their favorite subject — themselves

It turns out yet again that we have got the French all wrong

writes Mary Blume.

Take Sunday luncheon, which we imagine all lively chat and lovely food, adorably buttery grandparents, Papa expertly carving the roast, rosy-cheeked Maman with her casserole of steaming purée, children straight-backed and scraping their plates clean.

Dream on. A family meal is a social construct more complicated than the tasks involved would suggest, says the sociologist Jean-Claude Kaufmann, and its study is back where sexuality was before Freud. In fact, Kaufmann reminds us, historically there have been more taboos concerning food than sex.

In his latest book, Casseroles, amour et crises (published by Armand Colin), Kaufmann explains that the crises are existential and adds that in our secular society the sacrificial altar has become the kitchen stove. "Cuisine is sacrifice. There may be joy but there is also pain," Kaufmann said by telephone from Brittany, where he was planning his family's Saturday night dinner. …

Each meal these days is a test of whether family members have anything to say to one another, Kaufmann says, and the answer is usually no: one French family out of two watches television during meals. This may be just as well since table talk carries the risk of opening a Pandora's box of hidden resentments. Usually, Kaufmann says, the lid is left just ajar.

… A sociologist who wrote on such worthy subjects as life in housing projects, Kaufmann hit pay dirt, so to speak, in 1992 when he published a book on French attitudes to daily tasks such as ironing and emptying the trash. This was followed by books on similarly unconsidered themes which proved a great attraction to the French since they were about their favorite subject, themselves. The Latest Kaufmann, as headlines put it, now gains as much space in Paris newspapers and weeklies as a contender for the Prix Goncourt.

"I work in the ordinary and the banal," Kaufmann says. "It interests me and it interests more and more readers." He had thought that mealtimes would provide a droll light subject but found it complex and grave instead.

The complexity lies in the fact that French housewives dream that cooking will bring them happiness and love.

… the answer to a question that Kaufmann appended to his list during the study was surprisingly revealing: What would be your greatest dream? To give up cooking, most of them replied.

… There may be a bit of narcissism there, notes Kaufmann, who adds that cooking is not all virtue and grace.

Proud to Be a Danish American

This flag is supposed to show smugness, condescension, and scorn with regards to Copenhagen's presence in the coalition of the willing besides the Danes' American brothers-in-arms, but never mind; as someone who is proud of Danish foreign policy in regard to the war against terrorism, I like Staffan Sommelius's banner anyway and intend to view it, and to take it, as I see fit…

Designer bomb belts coming soon

French urban fashion by Anticon.

The Broken Country Effect

The "broken window effect," in policing, is the idea that failure to enforce minor crimes emboldens more serious criminals

Robert Tracinski reminds us.

I have argued for the "broken country effect": failure to oppose rogue authoritarian regimes that start out as minor annoyances--such as Zimbabwe and Venezuela [and Syria]--leads to much worse consequences later.

The consequence of the US failure to back Venezuela's political opposition in 2002, when they briefly ousted strongman Hugo Chavez, is causing no end of trouble across Central and South America, from Chavez's support for leftist rebels in Columbia--to the threat of a new Sandinista coup in Nicaragua, which our diplomats are now scrambling to prevent.

Read also Frank J Gaffney's
War for the free world

Is a late admission better than none?

In the European press, the truth does come out - right after the political types spoon feeding them their stories have had a chance to make sure most of the public has forgotten about the original problem.

5 October - Karen McVeigh writing in The Scotsman reports on the UN's findings that their efforts in the aftermath of the tsunami left a great deal to be desired:

The United Nations failed to adequately co-ordinate the relief effort in the wake of the Boxing Day tsunami, according to a report commissioned by the International Federation of the Red Cross.

There is even s glimmer of awareness of the righteous indignation which the "world community" evacuated from its' bowels in the days and weeks following the landfall of a certain notable disaster which befell the US:

Matthias Schmale, the UN's international director, said: "We share the concerns of the report. Is the UN playing an effective role in rehabilitation? It would be foolish of me not to acknowledge that there are serious challenges." He said that after the sheer scale of a disaster such as the tsunami or Hurricane Katrina, "chaos is automatically what follows. There is no intentional bad practice, but it is part of an initial response."

Were this information aired or even the sentiment permitted to be discussed at the time, the difficulties after the disaster would have been far less severe. Unfortunately image and appearances trump reality in virtually everything the UN touches.

French rappers use 9-11 to peddle their tunes

La zik' de la caillera pour faire gigoter cette sale vermine du 9-3.
The CD is called "Rap Attack 3" and the poster shows the Twin Towers under siege. The notice states "in stores on 9-11 2005" with a reference to 8:52 AM.

Dessine-moi une nation de moutons

The French are ruffled over intelligent design, even more so because it's popping up, without secular benediction, in their own school system.

My very existence is proof of intelligent design ...

We joke, but perhaps shouldn't laugh too hard

Burnin' down the house

The debt burden and budget deficit are two different things altogether. People get them confused, especially economies that are having a hard time waking up in the middle of a boom going on around them. That's the polite way of saying that they're sucking wind.

All the while, the socialists (let's call them the peasants for the sake of argument,) are out in the streets with pitchforks demanding more, more, more of what's killing them, and has been obvious for a long time.

The only politically acceptable option in a France afraid of change and challenge remains borrowing at the worst time. In effect, this is like busting up the furniture to stay warm, something long discredited, and long abandoned by the best and the brightest.

Hngh! I pity the fool.

Fight for your right (To party)

Nail French union thugs with messy cream pies while dodging for the bricks, the hammers and the sickles.

Elections Schmelections: "May the government once again become an area of invention and of decision"

Il surprenait par sa franchise et par son charme, mais plus encore par une énergie singulière, que j'apparentais à une sorte d'enthousiasme révolutionnaire, que ne modérait pas un attachement conservateur aux principes de notre Histoire et de l'Etat. … un calme inédit … [un] sphinx … un manteau de mystères … une mission de la dernière chance … Il entretient avec [ses collaborateurs] un dialogue de chaque instant … parmi lesquels [il] compte de nombreux amis … A chacun, il montre la même détermination, tempérée par la vitesse du sourire et le précis des phrases, sans arrogance. Sa décontraction chaleureuse range prudents et rieurs de son côté. … il était impatient de rencontrer la vérité des Français, et la sienne aussi, face à ce déclin qu'il récuse. …"Que chacun prenne ses responsabilités. Les jeux de rôle ne suffiront pas à nous sortir de la nasse." Il se prépare pour demain et promet des surprises. Il n'oublie pas que ce sont les événements qui emploient les hommes. … [Le marathonien] me confia : "Jamais je n'aurais imaginé que ce à quoi je m'étais préparé toute ma vie soit confronté à un tel choc de la réalité."

Two full pages! Two complete pages in the independent newspaper for "Villepin l'imaginatif", an article which is nothing if not a hagiography to France's prime minister. (The society that sees nothing wrong with allowing a marathon article of unparalleled length to be written by one single admirer who has followed the article's subject for 10 years, is the same society whose members scoff at the American journalists who put their lives at risk by being "embedded" — the charge carries a subtext of prostitution, willing or not — in combat units of the U.S. Army in Iraq.)

…le nouveau Villepin, son obsession de l'emploi, créent la surprise, et les événements semblent s'organiser pour le servir. Il touche les premiers dividendes de sa préparation, de ses méthodes de travail collectif, du style de sa communication (jamais de petites phrases, une conférence de presse mensuelle).

Pearls of wisdom from the "gaulliste ascendant Bonaparte" in the newspaper of reference:

Je lui dis que certains le trouvent un peu... Il m'interrompt : "... Un peu besogneux. Oui, je suis besogneux. Et humble. Je ne veux pas gâcher les deux ans que j'ai devant moi. La démocratie, ce n'est pas attendre sempiternellement les prochaines élections."… Il lève les bras au ciel …"Je voudrais prouver que le pouvoir n'est pas forcément le refuge du cynisme, du scepticisme et de l'inaction." … Les Français, tentés de vivre en arrière, dans une quiétude provinciale, s'enferment avec leurs plaintes, s'adonnent à la peur et au repentir, sans savoir qu'ils sont enviés, leur volonté trébuche. "Notre démocratie est complètement bloquée, dit Villepin. Je ne peux réformer que par surprise, en restant dans l'équilibre, la vraie nature française, dans la justice, qui n'est pas l'égalité, et dans le mouvement. C'est seulement parce que c'est difficile que je peux réussir."

Let's end the article on Nero with five excerpts of note:

Il savoure ce calme sans illusions, s'inquiétant de voir de grands Etats (les Etats-Unis, la Chine, l'Inde, l'Iran) s'organiser pour défendre leurs intérêts nationaux et leur souveraineté, et donne tous ses soins aux concepts de patriotisme économique et de croissance sociale.

Yes, you got that right. The only nation which is not defending its national interests is France. (Or, if you prefer, the only nation whose national interests happen to be in symbiosis with the common good of mankind — where patriotism is a good thing — is la France.)

Quelques vieux kroumirs se montrent alors oublieux des règles de la morale publique. Villepin purge notre diplomatie de ces réseaux parallèles où prospèrent les bacilles de la corruption.

Really? Seems like one germ of corruption that the guardian of public morale seemed to forget to purge France's diplomatic halls of was the Saddam connection. Here, indeed, is how Daniel Rondeau evokes post-911 America and the Iraq crisis, "cette guerre pour la paix":

L'Amérique, traumatisée par le 11-Septembre, cherche à entraîner la communauté internationale dans une embuscade diplomatique à l'ONU contre l'Irak, pays désarmé dont elle prétend qu'il menace la paix mondiale. Le 14 février 2003, Villepin porte la parole française à l'ONU. Son discours est applaudi dans l'enceinte des Nations unies. En France, il provoque un frisson à droite comme à gauche. Le pouvoir est aussi une question d'incarnation. Villepin a incarné, ce jour-là, une certaine idée de la France. En Amérique du Sud, où les télévisions diffusent alors quotidiennement ses interviews en espagnol, dans les pays arabes et musulmans, en Afrique, il est devenu l'homme qui résiste à George W. Bush. Ce sont les événements qui fabriquent les hommes. Villepin est en phase avec l'idée qu'il s'est toujours faite de la vocation universelle de notre pays : il fonce.

Needless to say, a wise and visionary Frenchman "without arrogance" is up to the shenanigans of the Anglo-Saxons, who (because of the innate duplicity of their system, probably) cannot admit that they actually agree, to some degree, with France's ever-wise and humanitarian position.

L'un de ses soucis était alors de garder le contact avec les deux chefs de la diplomatie anglo-saxonne, Jack Straw et Colin Powell, moins éloignés des positions françaises qu'ils ne pouvaient l'avouer. Il arrivait qu'il les rudoie. … Powell vivait alors avec la "tâche" du mensonge sur son uniforme de général. Il encaisse en silence, son interlocuteur éclate de rire.

Finally, Daniel Rondeau not only seems to make a plea against elections, equating democracy with a lethargic "system on its last legs" (!), but finds entirely normal that the admirer of Napoleon bases that vision on the history of the end of communism in Eastern Europe (!!).

Mais le président envisageait de finir son quinquennat avec Raffarin. C'était pour lui un confort politique et personnel. Par qui voudriez-vous le remplacer, disaient ses interlocuteurs (dont Alain Juppé) ? Villepin ? Votre ancien secrétaire général ? Surtout pas. La politique est un métier et, au coeur de ce métier, il y a l'élection.

Villepin lui a forcé la main. Un soir de l'été 2004, chez Claude Perdriel, industriel et homme de presse, la précision de ces phrases vaut condamnation d'un système à bout de souffle : "Regardons les pays qui sortent de soixante-dix ans de communisme ! Pour la première fois depuis longtemps, ils ont le sentiment d'avoir rendez-vous avec l'Histoire. Quittons notre léthargie ! Et que le pouvoir redevienne un espace d'invention et de décision."

"May the government once again become an area of invention and of decision"! The French never seem to wonder how their view of their leaders (and of the world and of history, domestic and international) are seen abroad (in America or elsewhere), taking it for granted that their self-serving views are shared throughout the globe (at least, by the avant-garde bien-pensants). (Here, for the record, is a different view of Dominique de Villepin and French diplomacy.)

Delusional

Here is a statement which basically declares that Europe should get off of its lazy ass, start pulling its weight, and get around to assuming some political and military responsability (in other words: change everything now because this is Europe's last chance). Libération PropagandaStaffel gets its grimy hands on this and runs the story 'The United States rediscovers Europe' with the spin being that American neocons are crawling back to embrace a relationship with Europe.

France flushes the EU down a Turkish toilet

The French hate Europe. La Fwance : xénophobe, globophobe, et dorénavant europhobe.

Trouduc

Implacable logique de pédaloïde sidaïque. "J'étais devenu officiellement 'polyvalent commercial'" , dit-il. "En clair, bouche-trou, ...". Abruti, tu l'as chopé en te faisant boucher le trou.

Sous la table, Vile-pine balance sa purée

In the course of the same week, Villepin patted a cow on the ass and shaked Bush's hand -- Chiraq: Which was more difficult?

Hate speech

Even Libération PropagandaStaffel is obliged to backpeddle and admit that the news coverage perpetrated by MSM in the aftermath of Katrina was nothing more than a pack of vicious lies born of an extreme hatred of America and George Bush.
Rumeurs également colportée par les chemise brunes syphilitiques de la blogosphere fwançaise, véritable fange boueuse à l'esprit sidaïsé qui avançait, parmi d'autres conneries, qu'il ne fallait pas critiquer le maire de la Nouvelle-Orléans, non parce qu'il avait fait du bon boulot (manifestement, ce n'était point le cas), mais parce qu'il est démocrate et noir. Il n'y a que la haine et le racisme anti-blancs qui reste à ces pôv' gôchistes.

We messed up in Iraq. You've lost New Orleans, but I promise you ... the moon!

Ignorance + arrogance = a dead society

This is the notion they have of the US, down at the level of the lowest common denomnator, which is where things always end up in France. Telling yourself that you know better than anyone else on earth helps get you there a lot quicker.

Hatred is the fig leaf used to conceal the self-absorption, hubris, and madness caused by intellectual incest.

The one "Arab street" that Paris will NOT listen to

Or bow down to, or bend over for. Why are Iraqis treated like sub-humans by the French press? Guy Millière asks the tough question.

Contre un cancer virulent

Une chimio carabinée.

The blame lies clearly with Dr. Allende and those of his followers who persistently overrode the Constitution

While Dominique Dhombres shows some healthy skepticism towards the figure of Saint Guevara, do not forget that the muffled tone bears no comparison to the shrillness the Le Monde journalist uses when America and/or Bush are involved…

Elsewhere in Latin America, José Piñera, armed with evidence including "the momentous Agreement of 23 August 1973 … widely unknown outside Chile", opines that because

President Allende became a tyrant when he broke his solemn oath to respect the Constitution and the Chilean laws [and because] his government [had] fomented the creation of armed militias … the origin of the Pinochet government is that of any revolutionary one, in which only the use of force was left in order to remove a tyrant [and to] "put immediate end" to these constitutional violations. It must be agreed that this was, in fact, an unequivocal call to remove by force the President who had initiated the use of force with the purpose of imposing a communist dictatorship.

…the truth demands recognition that former President Pinochet led a legitimate rebellion against tyranny and that the origin of Chile's civil war --and its victims-- lies with former President Allende and his marxist Socialist party. … The Economist said it clearly at the time: "The temporary death of democracy in Chile will be regrettable, but the blame lies clearly with Dr. Allende and those of his followers who persistently overrode the Constitution" (September 15, 1973).

Regarding Allende's purported suicide, Eduardo Mackenzie and the Politic have advice for Venezuela's Hugo Chávez…

A Difference in Noise Levels

When a French accident inquiry concluded in December that the prime cause of the fatal July 2000 crash of a Concorde jetliner near Paris was a titanium strip which had fallen off a US Continental Airlines plane on to the runway, the French media kicked up a huge fuss.

Now that a former head of the Concorde division at France's Aerospatiale has been placed under judicial investigation over the same issue, the commotion in the French press is far less loud and replete with far more, shall we say, nuance…

President Royal?

…when [Ségolène] Royal, 52, said last week that she was considering running for president in 2007, she unleashed an onslaught of attacks and ridicule from her own camp

writes Katrin Bennhold as the International Herald Tribune considers a French equivalent of a 2008 Hillary Clinton-Condi Rice race.

"Who will look after the children?" scoffed Laurent Fabius, a former prime minister with presidential ambitions himself. "The presidential race is not a beauty contest," sniffed Jack Lang, a former education and culture minister, who also wants to run in 2007.

In her sunswept office on the third floor of the Parliament building this week, Royal struck a defiant tone.

"With comments like that they only disqualify themselves and hurt their own credibility," she said, flashing a combative smile. "If, in 2007, I am the best placed to win for my camp, I should run."

Then her face turned somber. If she had been black and a man, she said, "They would never have dared to say these things. Am I not allowed to talk about this possibility just because I am a woman?"

… The squabbling over Royal's potential candidacy highlights the internal rivalries in a party still reeling from its humiliating defeat in the last presidential election, in 2002 [check out this up-to-date web page here], and the divisive referendum on the European constitution in May. But it also speaks loudly about attitudes toward women among leading members of the French political class.

It was telling that the only politician publicly defending Royal's presidential bid was Roselyne Bachelot, a lawmaker from the governing center-right party.

More than two centuries after the French revolution, women are conspicuously absent from the top echelons of political life in the country.

… Oddly, given the description by the sociologist Janine Mossuz-Lavau of French politics as "one big male club," Royal may face an adversary from a different party but the same sex. Michèle Alliot-Marie, the ambitious defense minister, published a book with her vision of France's future this week — and said she planned to play "a frontline role in the presidential election in 2007."

War Heroes in the Media, Then and Now

While Hired to Make Powdered Milk for Iraqi Children, French Arms Company Built a Chemical Weapons Factory for Saddam

Michel Josserand was fired from Thalès (formerly Thomson) in 2004

explains Hervé to non-French speakers as he comments a TF1 news article.

He now accuses his former company of having installed a vast corruption system in France and abroad. He talks about a Thalès lawyer who validated a vast bribery system in a lot of countries. "There are 2 kind of countries: those where bribery is unavoidable (Africa, Korea, Greece, Italy) and those where you can do business without tampering (several European countries, North America, Australia, NZ). And France? It depends on local and national political interests."

In foreign countries, he relates Operation Miksa, a bribery system in order to deliver security devices to Saudi Arabia. But this system was diverted in order to deliver chemical weapons to Saddam as Iraq suffered the UN the embargo of Oil-for-food program.

According to Weaselistan, the opposition to Iraq liberation was, as Shiraq said, "because a good friend has to tell when you're wrong. There are no WMD..." etc.

Banana Republic? Who said Banana Republic?! I want names!

Here is an excerpt from the the TF1 article:

A l'étranger, il cite l'opération Miksa de fournitures de matériels de sécurité à l'Arabie Saoudite, "un pays où il n'est pas possible de faire des affaires autrement" que par le recours aux montages financiers et aux intermédiaires, soutient-il. Michel Josserand soutient que son ancien employeur [fabricant d'éléments de bombes à fragmentation] "a détourné le programme en livrant des munitions chimiques" à Saddam Hussein alors que l'Irak était soumis à un embargo décrété par l'ONU dans le cadre de l'opération "Pétrole contre nourriture".

Meanwhile, Gérard Davet and Fabrice Lhomme write in Le Monde that

M. Josserand, qui a aussi dénoncé une fraude aux fonds européens, un contrat suspect passé avec la direction générale de l'armement (DGA) et des malversations dans le cadre de programmes d'aide au développement au Cambodge et au Togo, affirme également que Thales a contourné l'embargo onusien pour livrer du matériel militaire à Saddam Hussein. Le groupe, via sa filiale THEC, aurait permis au régime irakien de s'approvisionner en armes chimiques à la fin des années 1990.

As for a factory officially designed to make powdered milk for Iraqi children, it really served to build chemical weapons for the Ba'ath party.

Now what is it, among other things, that members of French society (at all levels, from top leaders to common citizens) have been bashing America and/or members of the Bush administration for all along?

• For not putting (enough) faith in the United Nations, in multilateralism, and in the international community
• For imposing an embargo which, in and of itself (no other possibile causes, such as a régime involved in the murder of hundreds of thousands of its own people [and whose ministry of information (sic), incidentally, released the information in the last part of the present sentence]), caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children (thank god for European-built factories designed to make, among other things, powdered milk for Iraqi children)
• For believing (how silly they are, what treacherous liars they are) that Saddam was involved with weapons of mass destruction (such as chemical weapons)

That is what members of the French élite said, praising the nation's inborn lucidité as well as its natural propensity for peace (indeed, castigating the war for being about hidden interests while lauding themselves for principles of the highest, and the most praiseworthy, order), and that is what members of the society parroted, celebrating Dominique de Villepin and often adding comments such as

Je n'aime pas Chirac, mais au moins il a eu les couilles de tenir tête à Deubeliou

Ignoring the facts that their leaders did not similarly have the balls to resist (i.e., they kowtowed to) the Beijing dictatorship (the matter of resistance was never raised, let alone entertained) and that their fellow principled pacifists have been trying to trying to resume weapon sales to same (having, truth to tell, no interest in opposing China at all) — is it unfair to say that "les Français ont tenu tête aux Américains but they gave head to the Chinese"? — the French (of all levels, from top leaders to common citizens) will dismiss this as très certainement a deplorable matter but one which should not put the basic tenets of their country's policy into doubt.

And their response (their automatic response, unfortunately) to this news item will be silence or character assassination (why are you putting so much importance in this matter?) or how the sins of Uncle Sam are, in any case (and always), worse.

And then they wonder why we don't believe that it's all (and only) about Bush and that the double standards can hardly be indicative of anything but anti-Americanism.

Mothers in America

This Is Garbage

Almost everything that has worked in the recovery operation along the U.S. Gulf Coast has been military and National Guard

writes David Warren from the Great White North.

Within a few days, under several commands, finally consolidated under the remarkable Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, it was once again the U.S. military, efficiently cobbling together a recovery operation on a scale beyond the capacity of any other earthly institution.

We hardly have a military up here. We have elected one feckless government after another, who have cut corners until there is nothing substantial left. We don't have the ability even to transport and equip our few soldiers. Should disaster strike at home, on a big scale, we become a Third World country. At which point, our national smugness is of no avail.

From Democrats and the American Left -- the U.S. equivalent to the people who run Canada [and France and Germany and the EU] -- we are still hearing that the disaster in New Orleans showed a heartless, white Republican America had abandoned its underclass.

This is garbage. The great majority of those not evacuated lived in assisted housing, receive food stamps and prescription medicine and government support through many other programmes. Many have, all their lives, expected someone to lift them to safety, sans input from themselves. And the demagogic mayor they elected left, quite literally, hundreds of transit and school buses parked in rows to be lost in the flood, that could have driven them out of town.

His Master's Voice

Al-Qaeda claims they didn't lose their number 2 honcho in Iraq so the AFP treats Al-Qaeda like any other news 'source' and relays the information. They're just doing their job propping up the morale of the boys in the 19th arrondissement of Paris. LCI French cable TV news ran the headline across the bottom of the screen all morning making sure the news got out to anxious French youth.

See?

If you choose a peaceful outlook and opt for respect and dialog and do not join in the attack of atrocious dictatorships foreign regimes, your nationals won't get kidnapped, your metros won't get bombed, your spies won't come to harm, and generally your country won't be attacked…

That's how to avoid (merci à hervé) becoming enemy nº 1…

How Many Markers for the Other Side?

Nos très sincères condoléances à tous les fwançais membres de la filière du 19ème arrondissement

Et qu'ils connaissent TOUS le même sort d'ici peu.

"A Weakened Man" to Be Tried By a "Judicial UFO"

Tonight, Arte is broadcasting a "documentary" portraying Saddam Hussein as a victim, ridiculing the "kangaroo" court that will try him, and pouring scorn on the American "occupiers" and on any and all Iraqis who have worked with them (as I had predicted).

After starting out with the usual hems and haws in the very first sentences of his article in Le Monde's TV guide (of course the "vast majority of Iraqis" agree that the "ignoble and bloody character … deserves the rope or the shooting squad 1,000 times over"), Patrice Claude tempers the description with the information that Iraqis are

submerged in the chaos of a brutal military occupation, of a barbaric state of terrorism, and of a coming bloody civil war.

(This state of affairs, by contrast, was neither barbaric nor bloody nor a state of chaos.) By the fourth sentence Claude (who wears his initials well) is in full BUT mode and will continue that way for the next page and a half, saying basically (if not outright) that, as bad as Saddam was, his dictatorship was nothing in comparison with the terrible injustices and the mess created by the Americans. (In that the article is in full symbiosis with the independent daily's usual Iraq coverage.)

Except for a handful of irreductible "Saddamists", and part of his enlarged family, the tyrant's announced death will disturb noone. Many, however, will feel a profound sadness [une immense tristesse] regarding the coming kangaroo trial

(Note that the all-wise, paternalistic French are still speaking for the Iraqis, as France 2 did after Saddam's arrest, when it said that his treatment amounted to a humiliation for every Iraqi citizen.) While Americans are referred to as "the occupier"; while various Iraqis (Ahmad Chalabi, Iyad Allawi) are referred to by such descriptions as "a 'client' of the CIA" and "another patented Iraqi 'client' of the CIA"; while the 2003 invasion is presented as "illegal … in view of international law", we are informed that the trial to take place "won't be any less so".

Kofi Annan is praised for refusing to let the UN's "judicial experts legitimize the all too 'special' court" and scorn is heaped on the Bush administration for not sending the prisoner to that "indisputable international" court in the Hague ("whose very existence it still is fighting", obviously another infamy).

Indeed, we are informed that the Iraqi court planning to try Saddam is "that judicial UFO"; that its 49 members are filled with politicians and with lawyers "often" (nice specifics, n'est-ce pas?) without the necessary experience, some of whom, "in their career", have had "the experience of a theft, maybe of a murder" (more nice specifics); and that it is preparing a "ridiculous spectacle" (spectacle grand-guignolesque), in "the shadows" of which Americans (who "neither speak nor read Arabic") are depicted as pulling all the strings in secret. ("But they are the true masters of the trial".)

The Jean-Pierre Krief "documentary" continues with a long line of legal experts, American and other (Cherif Bassiouni, Michael Scharf), who cast doubt and/or scorn upon the proceedings. (The legal line of "indisputable masters of international law" who got together to form and advise the court after Kofi's refusal do not seem to realize, Claude intones, that after 30 years of dictatorship, the "Iraqi judicial system … has lost the habit of justice and lost any spirit of independence". Good thing they have a French member of the élite to tell them that.)

By the last column, Claude has managed to find a character to show some empathy with: This man is now "a weakened man. At 69, the former dictator seems resigned". One thing the reporter seems to find impressive is "Saddam Hussein's surprising combativity", pointing out that "the former dictator has a law degree" and "he knows how to fight".

The bottom line? Once more, French people claim the objectivity and the lucidity and the amplified "vigilance" and the appropriate distance ("un étonnant travail de mise à distance", crows Catherine Humblot) to be able to judge and to condemn and to paternalize.

Oh, one more thing: a disgusted Claude says that one reason that the trial is to take place in Iraq is that "America's new Iraqi allies" did not want their dirty laundry unfolded in the Hague or in front of the world's cameras.

Of course, not a word about food-for-oil or France's participation in the greatest scam of all time. In fact… hmmmm… Mightn't this be a reason that the French-and-German-state-owned TV channel, in conjunction with France's independent newspaper, is pulling out all the stops to demonize the Americans and the Iraqi democrats? That is not anything the average Frenchman will think much about when faced with so much evidence of Yankee knavery…

Update: Nostalgia for a poor old man named Hussein (the documentary described)

Giving up the ghost

The "powers that be were" declare European construction dead in its tracks and Barroso throws a shitload of Eurotrash into the crapper. European Soft Power (©Emmanuel Todd) on full display in all its impressive glory.

University presidents' first allegiance ought to be to honesty and truth, not campus orthodoxy masquerading as intellectual bravery

…we have lost sight of what university presidents are supposed to be

writes Victor Davis Hanson.

Their first allegiance ought to be to honesty and truth, not campus orthodoxy masquerading as intellectual bravery amid a supposedly reactionary society. …

The signs of erosion on our campuses are undeniable, whether we examine declining test scores, spiraling costs, or college graduates' ignorance of basic facts and ideas. In response, our academic leadership is not talking about a more competitive curriculum, higher standards of academic accomplishment, or the critical need freely to debate important issues. Instead, it remains obsessed with a racial, ideological, and sexual spoils system called "diversity." Even as the airline industry was deregulated in the 1970s, and Wall Street now has come under long-overdue scrutiny, it is time for Americans, if we are to ensure our privileged future, to re-examine our era's politicized university.

"It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds"

Today is the birthday of Samuel Adams (1722-1803), the founding father who said

He who is void of virtuous attachments in private life is, or very soon will be, void of all regard for his country. There is seldom an instance of a man guilty of betraying his country, who had not before lost the feeling of moral obligations in his private connections.

How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words!

It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.

Mankind are governed more by their feelings than by reason.

The Constitution shall never be construed... to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms.

The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on Earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but only to have the law of nature for his rule.

Lovers of paralysis unite!

To give you a sense of just how vulgar the press is, take a look at the AFP picture below compete with “road bumps” sign, along with the wishful thinking of the BBC which kept calling it narrow, even when the CDU/CSU had a 10 point lead:

Never mind the convenient misogyny that leftist will permit themselves when they aren’t badgering people for being sexist, the amazingly hateful sticker stuck on the Merkel posters says “Honecker’s Revenge”, referring to the East German Communist dictator Erich Honecker.

Amazing – a glimmer of hope for personal freedom on the right being compared to Honecker who led the repressive state that the far left still admires. Not only is the beeb with their ideas of harmless fun, going to feign shock soon. The domestic press is sure to look back on their history of accuracy, reporting of a Schröder on the ‘comeback trail’ or possibly pretend it never happened.

You see, kidnapping in the name of demanding more socialism is okay, but boobs in the Bundestag isn’t, at least when they aren’t the chattel property of the leftist politics. With roots like this, what do you expect? That they’ll live by their painful whinging?




But the view that people will believe anything has migrated elsewhere as well. Here we find the battle cry of the weasel - inventing issues and ignoring real ones, and thinking the public is dumb enough to eat up any platform that will propogate the laziness gene. A typical turn is the call for deeee-luxe leftism for almost everyone – the ones who want to be more equal than others. Same old schtick: everything in life is FREE FREE FREE, and no-one really needs to work!

On to the German media, the provisional wing of the SPD, even on DW-World broadcasting to non voters the desk anchor for their special election night newscast was decked out in a red (SPD) dress, while two of the reporters "on the scene" were wearing red ties. Does this even ring a bell with them? I also wonder if even the outliers on the left, the Greens and Die Linke/PSD find this DDR era SED behaviour odd in any way...

The Ugly Tone of Gratuitous Contempt

Some French commentators have been dismayed by the tone of the media coverage concerning the destruction across the Atlantic

writes Sebastian Rotella in the L.A. Times (merci a Duff).

Some prominent people in the French press and politics, they believe, have eagerly turned the catastrophe into an all-purpose symbol of American ills, real or imagined.

"If the United States didn't exist, it would have to be invented so that elsewhere we can reassure ourselves, as if to better hide our own defects and incoherencies," warned a recent editorial in Le Figaro newspaper. "It's easy to ramble on about the decline of the American empire. Some even see the difficulties encountered by the U.S. as the work of a vengeful hand from the beyond…. Derision and demonizing are out of place."

The extensive coverage has tended to paint the picture of a superpower brought down by economic inequality, racial conflict and neglectful government. A recent Nouvel Observateur cover summed up this stark view: "America Stripped Naked: The cyclone reveals the wounds of the every-man-for-himself society."

Marianne, a left-leaning newsmagazine, declared: "The American giant folds beneath the weight of its failures and struggles to enforce an order that it wanted to impose on the world."

Marianne's take typified the profound disdain for President Bush in evidence here. A special issue titled "The Fall of the Pyromaniac Fireman" blamed Bush for a planetary flash fire of crises — from Iraq to global warming — that, in the magazine's view, discredit an entire free-market-driven, militaristic "Anglo-Saxon model" of governance.

In the newspaper Liberation, Gerard Dupuy accused the Bush administration of "contempt for victims who without a doubt were doubly at fault for being both poor and black." He concluded that the neoconservative "crusade," which was "already mired in the Mesopotamian marshes" of Iraq, had "foundered in the Louisiana bayou."

The U.S. media has also been tough on the administration for its response to the hurricane. But the invective here has been particularly harsh and grows partly out of an "old anti-American undercurrent reawakened by the war in Iraq," columnist Laurent Joffrin wrote in Nouvel Observateur.

In the past, the anger about Iraq sometimes distorted reality, some analysts say. In 2003, author Alain [Hertoghe] undertook a day-by-day analysis of French media accounts of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and compiled his findings in a book titled "The War of Outrages." His study focused exclusively on the three-week invasion, not the unproven prior allegations about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction or the insurgency that began after Saddam Hussein fell.

Herthogue [sic] asserted that the French media consistently, and erroneously, gave the impression that the military operation was about to collapse even as tanks rumbled into Baghdad.

French criticism of the Katrina crisis also shows fundamental differences in the role of the state in France and the U.S.

The French national government controls everything from law enforcement to healthcare to transportation. City and regional officials have more limited powers and duties than their U.S. counterparts, especially when it comes to disaster response. So New Orleans' woes appear to confirm suspicions that Washington leaves Americans at the mercy of the forces of nature as well as markets.

Some pundits predict that Americans will now want a more muscular, "French" approach to government. But others suggest that it's best not to point fingers. They recall the heat wave two years ago that killed about 15,000 people in France.

In that tragedy, many elderly people perished in hospitals and nursing homes that lacked air conditioning. Thousands of corpses were discovered in sweltering apartments as the death toll escalated and French leaders, as well as some relatives of the dead, were criticized for remaining on summer vacation.

"The denigrators have rushed to condemn the 'American model,' " wrote Ivan Rioufol in Le Figaro. "But have they looked at the state of their own country? The Third World, exposed in the [American] South, exists in French housing projects…. The indifference to the marooned corpses recalls the 15,000 elderly, dead and abandoned in the 2003 heat wave…. It's indecent to suggest, in this jubilation at describing a humiliated superpower, that France would have fared better."

In a recent letter to this newspaper's Paris Bureau from the southwestern town of Frejus, a retired contractor named Cesar Orefice complained that the media coverage of Katrina had been "absurdly triumphant" and gleefully anti-American.

It "leaves me disillusioned, overwhelmed, heartbroken by the simplistic anti-Americanism served to us like a dish a thousand times warmed-over," wrote Orefice, 71. "We talk about these events essentially to criticize with a few accompanying giggles the incapacity of the American administration to react…. I wonder what efficiency we would have seen if a city like Lille, Lyon or Bordeaux had been wiped off the map."

Read also Nidra Poller's France Passes Judgment on Katrina (thanks to e-nough):

As for George Bush, who should have been there while the wind was tearing the place apart, and should have shipped in the troops if he hadn’t already sent them to make trouble in Iraq, [and should have refrained from shipping in the troops instead of rescue personnel,] and shouldn’t have come to Biloxi when the real mess was in New Orleans, and has a nerve coming to New Orleans, not once but three times, just to get his picture taken. With Blacks! As if everyone didn’t know that the reason the hurricane hit New Orleans is because America is a racist, capitalist, warrior state.

French viewers (and radio listeners, and newspaper and magazine readers) were invited to tisk tisk and cluck cluck over this stuck-up country that thinks it’s rich and high tech, and can’t even eradicate poverty or protect itself from a “cyclone.” Why do French media want to call our hurricanes “cyclones”? It’s just one more item in a long list of distortions designed to misappropriate our reality. By depriving the hurricane of its specificity, you deprive the experience of its high-end intensity, you bring it down to size, to French size, to the size of things that any person in his right mind should know how to handle.

Nidra Poller then shows a typical example of the double standards existing in French society:

A terrible airplane crash killed 152 Martinique-French citizens recently. Overall coverage of the accident, the aftermath, the grieving relatives, the touching ceremonies came close to the time subsequently devoted to Katrina. The difference is stunning.

… press coverage focused on sorrow. Beautiful dignified sorrow: a priest crying as he read out the names of the victims, children crying for their parents, brothers crying for their sisters, the entire island of Martinique crying for its loved ones, and tears welling up in the eyes of a lovely French newscaster snug in the studio, reporting on the events. No indignation against the travel agency that booked seats on the rotten airline. No outrage at government agencies that are supposed to regulate air safety. No rebukes against French society that is failing citizens on more than one count. And of course no one asking President Chirac to resign because he couldn’t bring a planeload of Martiniquais back from Panama.

He did go to the memorial service. But that’s another story.

The gratuitous contempt for the victims of Katrina has no better comparison than the obsessive, hypocritical, vomiting contempt for Jews…in France…in the 1930s. The words slime and sleaze are appropriate to this particular kind of hatred that covers everything, sticks to the smallest detail, can’t be removed. Not one word, not one image of Katrina was fair and honest. Whatever the subject — the damage, the overwhelming logistical problems, the inadequate responses, the time elapsed, the number of victims — it had to be nasty, virulently anti-American, pointedly anti-Bush. But not in the way of political rivals, even low down cheating rivals. No, in the way of Jew-haters. A hatred that comes from deep dark sources.

…To sum it up, Katrina, seen from over here, was not a natural disaster. It was a pre-programmed event and, as it happens, a test case of American ineptitude. As a result, any American claim to world leadership is automatically rejected. Further, if one had any doubts about the wisdom of Bush’s intervention in Iraq, it is now clear that it was a disaster. He should have intervened in the weather instead of fooling around in distant countries and creating terrorism out of whole cloth. Any one in his right mind would have known that this cyclone would destroy the levees, that the levees should have been reinforced, that the population should have been evacuated under the personal direction of the US president, that people who wanted to stay should have been provided with all the necessities, that Biloxi was right next to New Orleans, that no one should be poor in fair weather and all the more so in foul and doubly so if they are poor and black. When white rescue workers come to the aid of poor black victims it proves that the United States is racist all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.

What more do you need?

The State of America's Race Relations and Its Lack of Social Harmony Are a Disgrace

Clueless and criminal Americans, give up your pretentions at solving the problems of your capitalist society…

Let France's lesson-givers take over the task…

More reasons to listen to the French…

A Fiasco in Denmark and a Total Rout in Italy and France

At the antiwar rally in Washington on Saturday, vast numbers of protesters from around the United States poured onto the lawns behind the White House, pointedly directing their anger at President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney

wrote the mainstream media in America.

Thousands of antiwar protesters also marched through London on Saturday to demand that Britain pull its troops out of Iraq. There were also smaller antiwar rallies in Copenhagen, Damascus, Helsinki, Paris, Rome and Seoul. In the United State [sic], antiwar marches were also held in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle.

Even Le Monde couldn't abide that one.

La mobilisation s'est en revanche soldée par un fiasco au Danemark, et une déroute totale en Italie et en France : de 1 500 à 2 000 personnes ont défilé contre la guerre dans les rues de Copenhague. 200 se sont rassemblées devant l'ambassade américaine à Rome. A Paris enfin, seulement une soixantaine de personnes étaient présentes sur la place de la Concorde, proche de la représentation américaine.

Incidentally, Corine Lesnes has a fawning article on Cindy Sheehan while Leef Smith and Jonathan Abel have an article on the war supporters' rally.

"I believe in what they're doing," Antia Grater said. "A man over there," she said gesturing, "has a sign that says 'Stop the War.' Well, that's what our troops are doing. They're stopping the war on terror at the source."

French literature 101: Strategic Yogurt Production as a plotline

This ridiculous piece of shit, titled "Pension Fund", appeared in today's Le Monde Al-Jazeera on the Seine and is supposedly inspired by the current Hewlett-Packard uproar. It could have just as easily been titled "Pay-as-you-go-pension-scheme" or better yet "French-politicians-riding-on-the-backs-of-taxpayers", but I digress. France's foaming-at-the-mouth hatred for the American pension fund system was illustrated by the success of 99F, novel written by Frédéric Beigbeder, which contains a scene where a Florida retiree is beaten to death by two French ad executives and an actress on location in Florida to shot a TV ad for Madone Yogurt (any similarity to the strategic yogurt production commissioned to Danone is completely coincidental).

-- WE SAVED YOUR ASS IN '44! MY HUSBAND DIED IN NORFUCKINGMANDY!! Look, jerk-off, the picture of MY HUSBAND who died in YOUR COUNTRY on D-DAY!! ... -- Listen lady. Let's not throw our dead back and forth all night. That war, you waged it to export more Coca-Cola. IT'S COCA-COLA WHO KILLED YOUR HUSBAND! Me, my father committed suicide because he was fired by his company in order to boost profits. I found him hanged, you get it, bitch? YOU KILLED MY FATHER! He was smacking her a bit too hard. The old bag was bleeding from the nose. I swear I tried to stop him but the alcohol had increased his strength. He pummeled her with blows, aiming for her eyes with his fists, breaking a beer bottle across her nose, popping out her dentures and stuffing them up her pussy, anyway, let's just say that he decided to shorten a life that was already full of suffering, and in any case, a life that was almost finished. I guess you could call that a slip up. In any case, after five minutes (which is a long time - for example, a round in a boxing match is shorter) Mrs. Ward was no longer breathing and the room filled with the smell of shit. The Versace couch cover would have to go to the dry cleaner. Note: Italics in English in the orignal text.

-- WE SAVED YOUR ASS IN '44! MY HUSBAND DIED IN NORFUCKINGMANDY!! Regarde, CONNARD, le photo de MON MARI morte CHEZ VOUS à la D DAY!! ... -- Ecoute, la Miss. On va pas se balancer nos morts à la figure toute la soirée. Cette guerre, vous ne l'avez faite que pour exporter Coca-Cola. IT'S COCA-COLA WHO KILLED YOUR HUSBAND! Moi, mon père s'est sucidé parce qu'on l'avait viré de sa boîte pour augmenter ses bénéfices. Je l'a retrouvé pendu, tu comprends ça, salope? YOU KILLED MY FATHER! Il la giflait un peu trop. La vieille saignait du nez. Je vous jure que j'ai essayé de le retenir mais l'alcool décuplait ses forces. Il la rouait de coups, visait les yeux avec ses poings, a cassé une boutelle de bière sur son nez, a fait sauter son dentier et l'a introduit dans sa chatte, enfin bon, nous pourrions aussi considerer qu'il décida d'abréger une existence pleine de souffrance, et, de toute façon, presque arrivée à son terme, mais il me semble qu'on peut aussi appeler cela un dérapage. Bref, au bout de cinq minutes (ce qui est très long - par exemple, un round de boxe dure moins longtemps), Mrs Ward ne respirait plus et une odeur de merde a envahi la pièce. La housse Versace serait bonne pour le pressing. © 2000 Editions Grasset -- copied without permission

If Slaughterhouses Had Glass Walls…

Saturday was the birthday of Linda Eastman McCartney (1942-1998), the US photographer and Beatle widow who said that

If slaughterhouses had glass walls the whole world would be vegetarian.

Of course, if Saddam's jails had had glass walls the whole world would have supported the war in Iraq, but that's not anything activists make much of these days, do they (and indeed, have they ever)?

The Flight Attendant Who Doesn't Like Violence

Saturday, I spoke to a French flight attendant.

• Everyday Meetings with Common Europeans

Quickly, the discussion turned to traveling, and then to America. Within a couple of seconds, she had to let the following slip in:

Ah, j'adore l'Amérique, mais pas leur président.

"Oh really", I asked disarmingly. "But the Iraqis, they like le président americain." Dubious look:

Ah ça j'en doute, avec tous leurs massacres!

Because I hear so many doubts and cynicism about the average Iraqi's point of view — due to the MSM press's usage of emotionally-charged words of the superlative kind, such as les massacres, le chaos, and l'horreur (and la misère as a description of America's capitalistic society in general), it is practically impossible to touch on positive aspects of the United States (and certainly on the presence of its troops in Iraq) in the country of le débat et le dialogue, without being treated to snickers, snorts, harrumphs, and eye-rolling — I have taken to carry a handful of copies of the Le Monde piece (unfortunately, a token article) in which its Baghdad correspondant, instead of relying on his media's usual emotionally-charged words, went around instead and questioned Iraqi citizens.

In his unguarded moment, not only did Rémy Ourdan report that the pretty much unanimous response to the invasion was that it was the best thing to happen to Iraq in the past 30 years, but Iraqi voices just as overwhelmingly heaped scorn upon the French position concerning their opposition to the American decision to invade (indirectly castigating the position of all "peace camp" members, the position of Bush's opponents, the film of Michael Moore, etc, etc, etc), in the process casting doubt on the true intentions of Paris (doubts of a kind usually reserved for Dubya).

When faced with cynics, I don't even bother arguing with them anymore. Instead of wasting my time, I just fish out a photocopy of Ourdan's article and hand it to them.

That's what I did Saturday with my flight attendant. Reading the title (La politique de la France reste très vivement critiquée par les Irakiens), she immediately said:

Oui, mais il y a d'autres opinions.

There may be other opinions, I replied, but there don't seem to be too many of them. "Presque impossible", I would say that's 95% of the general consensus, or above…

She looked it over quickly, saying

Yes, but it was a war for oil.

I asked, "Wasn't the position of the Saddam supporters equally based on oil?"

Hein? she went.

The people who were against the war, didn't they do it for Iraq's oil? And what's worse, for the oil of a dictator.

Suddenly the flight attendant said she had to go.

But take the article with you, I invited.

Ah non, je ne veux rien lire sur la violence.

She doesn't want to read anything about violence, she claimed, but

1. the article is/was not about violence,
2. she was the one who brought up the (general) subject, and (ergo:)
3. apparently, violence as a subject is fine as long as it can be used to bash Bush and America and as long as it cannot, in any way, be turned against France and other humanist members of "the peace camp".

And I have not even started to address the fact that for the generous, tolerant, visionary, solidaristic bon vivants (for whom le débat et le dialogue is a matter of faith), the point of view of the Iraqis themselves — unless it happens to match that of France — does not seem to matter much…