Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…
While the mainstream media commemorates the 40th anniversary of the death of Che Guevara, members of La Baf, who are fed up with seeing his face all over the place, celebrates El Barbudo's death with a speech, an ode to Felix Rodriguez, a song, and (last but not least) a reconstitution thereof in a Paris park.
In spite of his shades, one of your webmasters is recognized in the Rue de Rivoli, and a pesky fan of No Pasarán asks to have his picture snapped with him.
Nicolas Bourcier treats Le Monde's readers to a typically hagiographic piece on Aleida Guevara, the daughter of Che Guevara.
The new French "firmness" begins with a terminological overhaulwrites André Glucksman.
It rejects euphemisms and linguistic taboos. If there is a risk of war, it should not be euphemized. Rather, it should be clearly stated and talked about, precisely to stop any escalation, before reaching the "catastrophic alternative."Speaking of "the implacable strategy of the scorched population", Glucksman goes on to point out that
… Essentially, Kouchner has invited the Europeans to go beyond Moscow's stalling maneuvers at the UN, if necessary. It is said that when the wise man points to the moon, imbeciles only see his finger. When Kouchner talks about "war," many Europeans feel that it is a dirty word fired like a handgun into the subdued atmosphere of respectful negotiations.
We think we know what we are talking about when we speak of "insurgents" and "Iraqization," but we err.
The Spanish guerrilla war against Napoleon, the resistance against Hitler and the anti-colonial insurgencies were first and foremost directed against a foreign army, secondly against "collaborators" and lastly and only sporadically against the people in order to mobilize them by intimidation.
In Iraq, the order of the targets is inversed. American troops are no longer the priority targets. The Americans lost 3,700 of their own in four years. During each of the "hot months" though, over 3,000 Iraqis lost their lives, mainly women and children, blown to pieces not by Americans but by the so-called insurgents. The Americans' frustration is due to the fact that they are facing an adversary who can kill as many of their own as they like, indefinitely, true to the motto "the more of our own we kill, the more you loose."
…Today, homicidal and suicidal bombers are creating the implacable strategy of the scorched population. This is neither a resistance against an invader nor even a civil war, but, more diabolically, a war against the civilian population.None of this moves the Iranian mullahs, who, through the "moderate" former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, have declared themselves willing to sacrifice 15 million of their own for the theological glory of eradicating the Zionist entity, the necessary sine qua non for the universal hunting down of all crusaders and infidels.
The sacrifice of one's own and oneself, the systematic self destruction of a whole people, are not a new and unknown pathology in history. However, none of these butchers, in their fury, had our modern nuclear toys at their disposal.
To recognize this reality is to recognize why Kouchner was right to talk of war.
I demand a two-state solution:Geneva - Racism in France is "alive, pernicious and most of its victims are French citizens from visible minorities, not immigrants," the UN's independent expert on minority issues said on Monday.
"Because of the colour of their skin, their religion, their surname or their address, these young people in France see no chance of social mobility" said Gay J McDougall, after a ten-day visit to the country.
Marco Martinez explains the five reasons why he supports the war in Iraq. (They are good enough for me…) Liberals often like to say that "violence is senseless."
That’s wrong.
Violence isn't senseless. Senseless violence is senseless.
The Normandy bridges linking Ranville to Bénouville were the objective of the British 6th Airborne glider infantry, six of whose gliders landed noiselessly shortly after midnight on D-Day, i.e., six to seven hours before the actual seaborne landings started on June 6, 1944.
Un nouvel extrait de Général Leonardo, Tome II :
Publié aux Éditions Paquet, Croisade vers la Terre Sainte (Général Leonardo, Tome II) est mise en dessins par with le talent exceptionnel de Dan Greenberg, secondé par les couleurs magiques de Fred Vigneau (See the cover in real size and order the book from Amazon)…Ségolène Royal publishes an op-ed article in Le Monde.Au fond, seul le rapprochement avec Washington donne à la diplomatie de Nicolas Sarkozy un semblant de cohérence. A l'heure où l'Amérique remet en cause ses choix de politique étrangère, à l'heure où le rapport Baker prône une nouvelle approche fondée sur le dialogue plutôt que sur le rapport de force militaire, à l'heure où même nos amis britanniques marquent leurs distances, Nicolas Sarkozy fait le choix de l'atlantisme. C'est une décision lourde de conséquence et pourtant, là encore, nulle explication, aucun débat au Parlement.
Le président de la République serait bien avisé de se ressaisir et de s'inspirer de cette sage recommandation du rapport Védrine : amis, alliés mais pas alignés. C'est en ne cédant pas à la tentation des surenchères et de la politique spectacle que la France, dont la crédibilité est indispensable à la paix du monde, disposera d'une diplomatie forte et écoutée, avant qu'il ne soit trop tard.
Remember Hurricane Katrina?
Now that the news concerns alleged racism and racial discrimination (within Louisiana as opposed to from without, i.e., by Bush's federal government) — relating to the Jena 6 — suddenly Annick Cojean reverts to "the South" and to "Southern justice" in the process of spending an entire page assuring us that nothing less than "America's" racism is at work here while using less than half a sentence to write about the arrest (emphasis mine) "of six black high school kids, accused of beating up a white male".
Just when Airbus looked to be finally flying high with a new management structure and a new order from British Airways, dark clouds began to gather Wednesday with the opening stages of a major insider trading investigation.Et encore avec le winky-winky, there are sure to be mentions of it having "shades of Enron", but definately not the fact that even before there was an Enron and for time immemorial, European business executives would steal anything that wasn't bolted down, no matter what harm it did to the economy, and the very society they lived in.
the investigation will focus on 21 executives across the three companies involved, who apparently sold EADS shares with insider knowledge that mounting delays and manufacturing problems in 2005 were becoming insurmountable. When the damage became public in mid-June 2006, after the executives had allegedly completed their stock sales, it caused EADS' share price to fall 26% in one day.The irony is that the people who are screwed by this are mainly small investors and retirees in Europe, and that more than half the reporting on this item comes from outside the "magical kingdom of Shengen."
The next time you hear some Euro-oration about how different they are that the Americans, accept the fact that it’s true:Retired general Romeo Dallaire slammed France today during testimony at a landmark war crimes trial, saying the country helped those responsible for Rwanda's genocide escape to freedom.
Everybody now, sing it! We are the world! We are the children!Testifying at the trial of Desire Munyaneza, a failed refugee claimant on trial for participating in the genocide, Dallaire said the French "push-back" force ended up helping the killers escape into neighbouring Congo.
Meanwhile, back in charming Quebec, a Frenchman meets the welcome wagon which also has yet to do with anything in the US, but then again France Duh, and France Cinq have yet to report air it as the daily feel-good story at the end of the news.
Every time someone allows the perfect to be the enemy of the good, they do the cause they espouse damage,writes Christopher Cook.
It has been credibly estimated that when the Bush drunk-driving story broke on the weekend before the 2000 election, some four to eight million evangelicals stayed home. Rather than stopping to think clearly about what a Gore presidency would mean in its totality, they just picked up their marbles and went home over that one issue. They were thinking more about their personal status vis-a-vis sin than they were the good of the country. They were thinking, I can't support someone who would sin in that way. I judge his actions to be sinful. My vote would be an endorsement of such behavior. How would that look for me before God? I, me, my. Me me me.
Next great, whacky, and over-the-top European theory about the US soon to be formed.
From Sight and Sound: Frankfurter Rundschau 21.09.2007
Let’s set aside the disingenuousness of the statement and test the comparison’s trying to be made here: 1.6 million people were killed at Auschwitz, while no-one was killed at Abu Greib since the days of Saddam Hussein.
Arno Widmann reflects on the 116 newly discovered photos showing Auschwitz SS guards at rest on display at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in New York: "These aren't Abu Ghraib photos. The Auschwitz staff didn't photograph each other lashing out at the inmates, or while they were being murdered. Perhaps such photos will yet appear. But these images are even more horrible. Here we come close to the perpetrators. And with them, their deeds. The Abu Ghraib photos show us what people are capable of. The Auschwitz photos show nothing, they give us a sense of what we are capable of. In front of them we start to think about the circumstances that make murderers of neighbours."
Ant the people in the pictures Arno “Winkler” Widmann is talking about appear to be enjoying themselves in a manner beneath the humanity of anyone who would be aware of what’s going in. With great Euro-élan, they once again make it look effortless. While being entirely unaware of how little change has been seen in the temperament and excitability of the garden variety European, the matter of the 150 million dead resulting from the European concepts of Marxism, Fascism, and other evolved forms of dictatorship and Fin De Ciècle public madness is blotted out of the mind, having never passed the unaware and unhealed soul.
So indeed, those fetishising the 3 weeks and 20-odd criminals abused at Abu-Greib very much need to put on a happy face while the comparisons flow, if they need that to diminish their confusion. To reiterate: we KNOW ABOUT THIS because the Army BUSTED THEY PEOPLE THAT DID IT. On the other hand, the German government and a large part of the society willfully constructed the concentration camps and protected their knowledge of them for as long as possible.
Even to this day there are people engaging in verbal contortions to convince others that Auschwitz was A-O-TAY.
Want a really apt comparison? Compare the European denial and willful ignorance of the abuse that minorities face in the radical, socialist-arab-nationalist, and areas where religious law dominates people – with the contented look on the faces of the photographed cited in Frankfurter Rundschau.
Really want to know what horrors people are capable of? No need to cite 3 weeks in an Iraqi Prison. One merely need look at European history within living memory, and in their desperate and paranoiac need to accuse others of something when it took them millennia to open up their borders even to one another across a patchwork of miniscule fortresses of “culture” on their own patch.
The second album of the adventures of Leonardo da Vinci (in bookstores on October 2) has the reluctant inventor of war-machines (gliders, tanks, scorpion vessels, etc…) forced to ship aboard the armada sailing for the Holy Land.
A battle of massive proportions looms. But the Baronessa Terranova is acting oddly and treachery is lurking…
After three decades, the Democrats had finally found a way to burnish their image on military matterswrites Christopher Cook from Hollywood:
Pick a veteran who agrees with them on the substance of a military issue, and then play up the fact of his service as cover for that position.
…after three decades … the post-Clinton Democrats finally came up with a solution: Continue to oppose military spending, military deployments, and the development of military equipment, but tell everyone how much you love and support the troops.
…The Hollywood left (which, having lived and worked in Hollywood, I can tell you is mostly left) is pumping out more and more brazen examples of the standard military-slurring films. In the last few years, however, they've also begun departing from their regular fare of "supporting" the troops by portraying them as dysfunctional, broken, war-addled victims to making films that directly portray them as war criminals.
…For many months now, I have been pointing these things out, and each time, I have said, don't believe their "we support the troops but not their mission" drivel---it's just a smokescreen, and it won't last. And sure enough, that is coming to pass.
What the hell is wrong with this country?asks David Kahane (thanks to Christopher Cook), aping the thoughts of Hollywood bigwigs after their films ("movies, lots of ‘em, each with a stronger antigun, antiwar, anti-Rethuglican message than the next") bomb at the box office.
We support the troops, showing them as the dysfunctional, murdering, drug-addicted, red-state crypto-rapists in need of psychoanalysis we all know they really are. Hey — even the Marine officer in Alan Ball’s award-winning American Beauty a few years back was humanized by making him a sadist and a closet queen. And this is the thanks we get?
[For all the difficulty of finding a job] you might tell me – that there is such a thing as temping. Of course I pursued that line of thought conscious of my handicaps after several years away from France. The whole thing turned into a joke. Thus, while presenting to me, I told the recruiter that I seek all types of work, even if they don’t have much to do with my qualifications because I’m in a pinch. In general, your interlocutor either raises their eyebrows, does not quite understand what you’re saying, given your CV, or you looks at you like you’re an idiot, as if you were '' disturbed '' (no, really!). At the end of the day, you come away with the despairing feeling that you’ve been talking to a tree.Must be tough running the best, most flexible, most you name it economy in the world.
Another thing we spoke about was working abroad using my English speaking skills. His advice and posture repeated any one of the many assets listed in my CV, just to get through it quickly. Because in reality, if you did not follow the traditional path, the recruiter will get flummoxed and loses his frame of reference. You just dropped off of his radar. No good! Come again later after you’ve '' reintegrated".
Gee, thanks...
Dans le même temps, me direz-vous, il y a l'intérim. Bien sûr que j'ai regardé de ce côté conscient de mes handicaps après plusieurs années hors de l'Hexagone. Le parcours tourne parfois à la farce. Ainsi, en me présentant, j'explique que je recherche tous types de mission, même sans rapport avec mes qualifications car je suis dans l'urgence. En général, votre interlocuteur soit fronce les sourcils car ne comprend pas votre requête au regard de votre CV soit vous regarde en oeil de pigeon, comme si vous étiez ''dérangé'' (certainement !). Au bout du compte, il en ressort un dialogue de sourd plutôt désespérant.
Autre élément dont ont nous parle : l'ouverture sur l'international, des expériences à l'étranger et la maîtrise de l'anglais. Autant d'atouts dans son CV. Des mots, des discours et des postures. Pour faire vite du flanc. Car, dans la réalité, si vous n'avez pas suivi les rails classiques, le recruteur est déstabilisé, perd ses repères. Vous n'entrez plus dans sa grille de lecture. Pas bon ! Repassez plus tard quand vous vous serez ''réintégrez". Merci.
Soaring food prices, driven in part by demand for ethanol made from corn, have helped slash the amount of food aid the government buys to its lowest level in a decade, possibly resulting in more hungry people around the world this year.See? There’s that blessed cautionary principle at work again! Hopefully the lefties feel just as good about themselves in their guilt-free green existence which only has good consequences.
The United States, the world’s dominant donor, has purchased less than half the amount of food aid this year that it did in 2000, according to new data from the Department of Agriculture.
Beyond the eternal confidence in it’s own superior wisdom and humanism, the European public will march, whine, berate any passer-by, and buy anything that says “America out of Iraq”... or “America out of ___”... for that matter.
The reality of the “love of stability” lies elsewhere. It’s provided to you courtesy of none other than Georges Boosh. A Berlin based think-tank found European analysts who think that unlike America’s angry left, and Europe’s adolescent-level thinking mush middle, that the US must stay in Iraq. For Europe’s sake. Against Troop Withdrawal
They are, however, no less distracted by the press’ blame and dwell approach to affairs in Iraq:
While the American public and policy debate revolves largely around exit strategies and “redeployment,” there is apparent consensus among European policy analysts that American troops should remain in Iraq for the foreseeable future. In contrast to both European media opinion and the prevailing views of American liberals, our respondents supported sustained troop levels. Many consider the announcement of a timetable for withdrawal to be counter-productive and even outright dangerous, saying that lack of American involvement would drive Iraq into further chaos.Dr. Reidar Visser, a research fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs who also runs the Iraq website Historiae, observed that the “main problem [with the current strategy] is the heavy emphasis on security instead of creative political initiatives to encourage national reconciliation.”
As if that wasn’t really happening. Besides, the stock international functionalry-types’ thinking might not think of the approach being taken in Iraq: letting the Iraqis call as much of the tune of political control as possible. “Creative” solutions from abroad would be just that, and of all Saddam’s problems, the biggest one was that he was a dictator. It gave him the means to suppress, kill, declare random wars, meddle in the affairs of numerous Arab states, and so on.
Why is it the same kind of people who always oppose wars that are meant to end dictatorial rule and mass murder? The new RSL became the British affiliate of the newly formed Fourth International. They maintained the Militant Labour League as an united front for those members who were involved in Labor Party entryism and published The Militant.
How is it that it reads like the minutes of a British Trade Union Congress meeting from the 70s, or any event in the present day where Code Pink is involved. Some things never change.
The position of the WIL was swiftly vindicated when the Revolutionary Socialist Party left, most of the leadership joining the Independent Labour Party while younger members joined the Workers International League (WIL).
The group adopted a defeatist policy during World War II, which they modelled on Lenins Revolutionary defeatist tactics of the 1914-18 war but which was seen by their rivals in the WIL as being pacifist, and had some initial successes when the Shop Assistants' Union (later USDAW) adopted their position in 1940. This led the Labour Party to ban the Militant Labour League. In addition, the group became increasingly inactive as many younger members were conscripted into the British Army.
More importantly the group's position opposing the war became a major cause of factional strife both within the group and between it and the WIL. Three major positions developed which help to explicate the ensuing factional divisions outlined below. Firstly a Left Fraction formed which opposed the war on a basis all other factions described as pacifist. Secondly the leadership faction around D D Harber held a position that opposed the Proletarian Military Policy (PMP) of the WIL and was described by its opponents as semi-pacifist. Finally the WIL and tendencies leaving the RSL at different times adhered to the aforementioned PMP.
In the Mean time, I’m still waiting for Europeans to treat home-grown Jihadist that way they treat their home-grown neo-Nazis.
I know that Finland is a nice place, but it’s a bit of a stretch to call it some sort of heaven on earth. Yes, being born in Finland is like wining the lottery! Although I wonder if things privacy, purchasing power, conscription, immigration, xenophobia and racism are factors in this survey?
Then again it’s based on a U.N. Human Development and Sustainability index. By that measure, lacking development and rapidly losing most of the features of a modern, functioning society, Zimbabwe would top the chart. The irony is that young people obsessed with aid donation of one kind or another will assume that societies like this are “given” or something you’re born with, and not built.
- via Phil
Why is it that employers are scared of the Board of Health, and afraid to violate child labor laws, but hire illegal aliens without fear of legal consequences?asks Ben Duffy in his column on illegal immigration.
It's because legal consequences are so seldom brought to bear on them. This problem is not difficult to solve, and we certainly don't need to grant amnesty to every illegal alien to do it. We simply need to enforce the laws we have now. Without that, we will never have true immigration "reform."He adds that
American liberals are far too quick to throw up their hands and declare the problem so daunting that we shouldn't even bother enforcing the law. … As Robert Frost once quipped, "A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel."
Croisade vers la Terre Sainte
(Éditions Paquet, Genève 2007)
Scénario Erik Svane, dessins Dan Greenberg
(Order the book on Amazon)
Few liberal activist groups tell the truth. Not because their members are liars -- in private life they may well be as honest as anyone else -- but because whatever the left advocates it deems more important than truth.Dennis Prager concludes:
when the left ceaselessly repeats the mantra "Bush lied," it may simply be projecting onto George W. Bush what comes quite naturally to the left — when it offers false Iraqi death statistics, false homeless data, false rape statistics, false secondhand smoke statistics, false claims about the percentage of gays in the population, and false claims of just about everything else the left cares about.
In his Sept. 11 speech to France's summer "Defense University," attended by many of the key decision-makers involved in formulating French defense policy, writes John Rosenthal, French Defense Minister Hervé Morin criticized French behavior in NATO in remarkably vivid language, observing that "we are too often those [in NATO] who quibble and vacillate."
Can the world no longer afford it? Or is the world better off without France trying to live its’ old international ways?
Dominique Moïsi noted in a recent essay:France is not Italy—namely a country in which a government can fall because of its foreign policy. In fact, in France it is more likely that foreign policy does not even play a role in election campaigns. In the case of the recent elections, this fact sheds light on a paradoxic continuity. Our country is traditionally proud of its international status. Does France’s national identity not at least partially depend on its international identity? Was not the slogan “I am involved, therefore I am” for decades an expression of France’s relationship to international issues?
Some would rather say: Vive la Trance.
France’s citizens, however, have been emboldened through a campaign that more than ever has stressed individual demands (“What will France do for me?”) over collective ambitions (“What could we do for France?”). The international challenges of the day are increasingly brushed aside.
By all means, Fidel. Send Chavez more doctores: CARACAS (Reuters) - A Venezuelan man who had been declared dead woke up in the morgue in excruciating pain after medical examiners began their autopsy.
Meanwhile, back on the moldy sofa at “we want failed Marxism in America HQ”, this, or anything Wal-Mart does better than any other large employer of common-skilled labor does, just won’t do:Wal-Mart said it would give each employee or family that signs up for coverage a grant of $100 to $500 to defray health expenses while charging premiums as low as $5 a month. It will eliminate expensive hospital deductibles and make 2,400 generic drugs available to employees for $4 a prescription — about 1,000 more than it sells to customers at that price.
In other words, they monthly cost is less than a patient’s co-pay would be in blessed EUtopia. Of course that isn’t enough though. Gee kids, lookit... capitalism works.
Wal-Mart Watch, a group long critical of the company, said yesterday that “these plans are still unaffordable due to low wages or inaccessible due to waiting periods.”
- H/T to Georges
Serge Schmemann's article A visit with Putin (Views, Sept. 17) presents a view of Vladimir Putin that reflects the public image Putin strives to project, but it is not an accurate portrayal of the Russian presidency.As an IHT reader indirectly points out, the mainstream media is as enamored of foreign strongmen and as willing to fall for their self-serving propaganda as ever.
According to Schmemann, the "enormously popular" Putin has led Russia "from bankruptcy and despair to enormous wealth and power." Russians, he tells us, "are suddenly living better than they ever have."
To be sure, the Russian president enjoys a popularity rating that any Western leader would envy. But polls reflect the constant barrage of pro-Putin propaganda in the Kremlin-controlled media and the traditional Russian craving for a strong state that assures stability, rather than an improvement in the lives of ordinary Russians. With the average hourly wage in Russia at around $3 an hour, only a tiny minority of Russians (many of whom are corrupt oligarchs favored by Putin) enjoy the fruits of Russia's oil-based prosperity. Social welfare benefits, including health care, have been steadily eroding since Putin came to power, and the crime rate has been rising, with violent crime more than doubling between 1998 and 2006.
Although Schmemann acknowledges that Russians will not be able choose their political leader when (and if) Putin steps down, he seems to dismiss this as insignificant in view of the fact that "stores are overflowing" and that Russians enjoy unprecedented "personal freedoms."
But what does personal freedom really mean, when people are denied the right to have democratic elections?
Surprisingly, given that Schmemann is himself a journalist, he ignores the tragedy that has befallen his profession in Russia, where the independent media are under constant siege by the Kremlin. Instead, he lauds Putin for bringing stability to Russia, despite the fact that more than 20 journalists have been murdered there since Putin came to power.
Meanwhile, another reader states that Michael Schwirtz's article on the Sovetsky Islands in Russia's White Sea (An uneasy mix: Religion, tourism and history, Sept. 19) missed out on the horrors of the White Sea itself, as recounted by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
During the Soviet-induced famine in Ukraine in the 1930s when at least 14.5 million people died, according to the historian Robert Conquest, many millions of Ukrainians were marched by foot to the White Sea, where they were loaded on to barges to be towed out to sea. Soviet gunboats then blasted them out of the water. No one knows how many millions perished. They too deserve mention and our memories.
A Swedish doctor who was fired from his job in Norway for using a controversial 'anal massage' technique to cure various kinds of pain has resurfaced in Denmark where he has been working at a psychiatric ward in a Copenhagen hospital.
Funny, isn’t it, that the more you see any nation or society socializing things out of the public realm and into the hands of the government, the more it’s rationed? The other thing you see is people turning to “alternative” and non-scientific solutions, and hiring on marginal services and loony practitioners due to that very same overvaluing of the thing they’ve just “given to the people”?"Problematic doctors have been given free rein in Europe. We are currently working hard to change this situation," she added.
Alas, pity him, you brutes! He’s got poop chutes to violate in the interest of mental hygiene.
In April last year a council in the Nord-Tröndelag area of Norway dismissed the doctor after only two weeks, when they realized that he was the same man who hit the headlines a year earlier when another local authority fired him.
The man described his dismissal in Norway as part of a witch-hunt against him,The Norwegian counterpart to HSAN also had cause to warn the man after he told Swedish jokes to a group of Norwegians who were mourning a death.
Oppressed, in need of sympathy, and, according to himself:brilliant!
The man said at the time that he considered himself misunderstood.
"I have a personality disorder, or rather a syndrome, a form of Aspergers. Just like Bill Gates or Einstein, for example," he told Aftonbladet."I have made it impossible for myself within the healthcare sector because I behave childishly sometimes. I am different, but cleverer."
I’ll wish you all one simple thing: be well.
So which model will it be? Korea or Vietnam? Commitment or abandonment?Investor's Business Daily agrees with Christopher Cook: in Korea, "We did not cut and run."
Using Norman Podhoretz's "World War IV" as material, Mona Charen has more…Communism's initial thrust had been blunted, but the threat wasn't over. Today, a half-century later, U.S. troops remain in South Korea, and our commitment to the democracy we saved at great cost remains firm. We did not cut and run.
South Korea is now a strong ally, a vibrant democracy and an economic dynamo. If we hadn't stuck around, it might have sunk into the North Korean abyss long ago. Would the world be a safer place today if we had walked away, as the Democrats want us to do in Iraq, saying "defend yourselves" and "good luck"?
Benjamin Franklin once said that if we didn't all hang together, we'd hang separately. That was the rationale behind the formation of NATO. After we liberated Europe from the Nazis, we didn't just throw it under the bus, saying we did our part and now Europeans had to defend themselves against the Soviet Union on their own.
Bush [aka the alleged nincompoop] understands these lessons of history.
…In a recent speech at the National Press Club, Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., said: "Many have threatened that there will be chaos, a bloodbath, when the United States redeploys from Iraq, and this in fact may be the case." But, he added, "if they continue to choose to spill blood, it will not be on the conscience of the United States."At least it won't be on the conscience of the surrender caucus of a Democratic Party that time and again has demonstrated a distinct lack of conscience. The model of today's Democrats is not Korea, but Vietnam in 1975, when they cut off aid and barred any U.S. support, making the killing fields possible and inevitable.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has also mentioned Korea, saying that the way we handled that situation, by maintaining a presence, was a lot wiser than how we handled Vietnam, "where we just left lock, stock and barrel."
So which model will it be? Korea or Vietnam? Commitment or abandonment? Bush has made his choice and, we think, the right one.
Le statut d'icone de Che Guevara est une construction post-mortem, raconte Jacobo Machover dans son livre, La Face cachée du Che (gracias para Mathieu Naville). Deux types de personnes y ont contribué. Castro lui-même, qui en a fait un héros presque surhumain, un grand penseur et un humaniste, et les intellectuels du monde entier, en particulier français, qui le considèrent, comme l'a affirmé Sartre, comme «l'homme le plus complet de notre temps». … Sa légende est une entreprise de mystification collective.
Comment l'expliquez-vous [son image]?
J'hésite entre l'ignorance et la complicité. On a du mal à comprendre, surtout pour les familles des victimes. Mais je penche plutôt pour la complicité.
…pour nous, une bonne partie des Cubains, Che Guevara est le symbole et la réalité de l'oppression à Cuba. J'espère une démocratie qui ne soit ni romantique, ni héroïque. Juste une démocratie banale, mais qui permet de rétablir la vérité sur les victimes du régime castriste et sur le Che.
Christopher Cook trumpets the fact that We're never leaving Iraq.He is serious. And he notes that that part of Dubya's speech was not picked up by the MSM — although the president said that very thing, in so many words. And Cook agrees with him (look especially at his fifth point):
Ever.
I think the freest, best, most powerful, most prosperous, most pluralistic country---the country that has done more to liberate oppressed humanity than any other entity in human history---needs and DESERVES to have bases all over the world.Update: Investor's Business Daily agrees: in Korea, "We did not cut and run."
So which model will it be? Korea or Vietnam? Commitment or abandonment? Bush has made his choice and, we think, the right one.
[Simply] because he didn't deliver the dismal appraisal of the Iraq War they had wantedwrites Benjamin Duffy as he debunks the New York Times' (in)famous "defeat at all costs" ad,
MoveOn.org and company called a patriotic man with nearly thirty years of military service a "traitor"
A correspondent writes:
”The Hidden Face of the Liberators” - (rerun) A documentary by Patrick Cabouat. According to ciminologist Robert J. Lilly, liberators who were meant to liberate Europe from Nazism raped or killed French, British, and German citizens in 1944 and 45. The recent opening of legal archives permitted us to see something that would otherwise remain a secret.
Our view: this documentary is a poignant testimony of the acts of atrocities of soldier welcomed as liberators.
- with thanks to Kevin
One poor loser to another: Ségolène Royal said that if she was Joan of Arc, then she was burned at the stake. Rue 89 aims it at Lionel Jospin who called her the candidate least likely to succeed which isn’t quite true. She came ahead of the band of Marxist Bozos, Neo-fascists, a hunter’s party, the neo-druid José Bové, and Bay-roo who appears not to believe in anything.
To boot, on Monday Royal called Jospin a racist and a sexist. Watch out for that magic wand, Casper.
It’s all there – it’s more or less the minor features found in the shadows of the U.S. presidential election of 1984: baiting with religious imagery, white people accusing each other of racism and sexism... twenty 3 years later. Now if their minds would only catch up with the idea that Communism failed 20 years ago, they might get somewhere. For now we can enjoy the cage match.
Never mind the boozy mid-day meal on the way to being rude to co-workers, or the divinity of “slow food” argument (not the practice) which we're supposed to believe is a “movement”. Charles Bremner finds that they just KNOW what every last American is like. A ministry of Tourism brochure distributed to retaurants in time for the Rugby World Cup indicated that:With all foreigners, French restaurateurs are advised to explain when a dish comes from offal or includes meat with blood still visible. "Americans like their meat de-animalised," it says. "Its origin with a living animal must not be visible. Offal dishes, frogs' legs and snails disgust them.
As these dishes disgust most of the French, but that's beside the point. Pretending that their perpetually bland diets are noble and challenging, would they know what to do with a serving of Rocky Mountain Oysters? Methinks not.Americans spend all day eating -- ingesting food on 20 different occasions -- and they are obsessed with not getting fat, the Ministry tells the restaurateurs.
Okay – got it! We'de like to hate the Americans we meet, but they aren't as bad as we hope, but take heart! The REAL ones are much, MUCH WORSE!
But it advises them to forget their clichés about Americans being devoted to hamburgers and French fries. "American tourists in France come from a high social level and they like to visit and tour regions that are rich with history. They are very open and enthusiastic people who appreciate conviviality and personalised service."
United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour said on Monday that bigotry and prejudice, especially in regard to Muslims, were common in Europe and called on governments to tackle the issue. […] Europeans "are shocked at times when it is pointed out that bigotry, prejudice and stereotyping is still sometimes very present in their attitude to others," she said.Don't forget to overcompensate for your flaws! That's always panned out really nicely in EUtopia.
One argument after another, one “but why one place and not another” after another, one demand to talk with your enemies from a position of weakness after another: that’s what the emotionally insulated global left, the ones stuck somewhere between the denialists of the “Truther” movement and those with some common sense would say.
But with whom and how? There are an abundance of precedents that showed that French, German, and Italian leniency with the Red terrorists of the 70’s and 80’s didn’t do anything other that lower the threshold of decency, and allowed the RAF, Red Brigades, the Bader-Meinhof types and their sympathists in the street deepen and widen their connections with Mideast terror and the intelligence operations of the Communist block.
However, most everything is forgiven when it comes to lefty violence, because even the natives let themselves believe the fairy-tale villain narrative about capitalism.
That it provided cover for murderers and people who wanted to tear western society apart didn’t seem to matter a great deal.Now, almost two decades later, German police, prosecutors and other security officials have focused on a new suspect: the East German secret police, known as the Stasi. Long fodder for spy novelists like John le Carré, the shadowy Stasi controlled every aspect of East German life through imprisonment, intimidation and the use of informants -- even placing a spy at one point in the office of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt.
It’s relevance to today? It’s the cookbook that the Syrians have been operating under for a decade as the Libyans did before they were contained, and on a much larger scale, how the Iranians have been operating in large parts of the near-east.
According to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, the murders of Mr. Herrhausen and others attributed to the Red Army Faction bear striking resemblance to methods and tactics pioneered by a special unit of the Stasi. The unit reported to Stasi boss Erich Mielke and actively sought in the waning years of the communist regime to imitate the Red Army Faction to mask their own attacks against prominent people in Western Germany and destabilize the country.Police acknowledge that part of the reason for their focus on possible Stasi involvement was that all other leads had dried up. But they say they also knew that over the years the Stasi had worked with and given explosives to other terrorists, including "Carlos the Jackal" and the Basque group ETA in Spain. And in 2001 to 2003, an undercover police officer met with a man who claimed he had been a killer for the Stasi operating in Western Germany, although police were never able to tie him to specific murders.
When a bomb goes off in Beirut, or in a western city for that matter, and there is no evidence, you don’t just need to ask yourself where the technology, techniques, and money came from, but wonder why they nebulously show signs of being somewhat attributable to “a few people,” “just a cell,” or “a few malcontents,” and not imagine that there aren’t state actors involved in it somehow.
Worse still, when the people who want to combat terror with talk, or police-work, or by negotiating silently by sending signals through the leniency of the defenders, what are they really doing that hasn’t been done before and failed? All it does is prove to an enemy that not only would our magnanimity offer them new opportunities, but prove to the potential victim that in a Politically Correct War on Terror, that the blood of the innocent is cheap.
Unlike the chants of the pot-banging idiots (no different than the 68ers,) that truly is the state letting it happen on purpose (LIHOP), and creating a climate of fear.
Not many mainstream outlets (in France or abroad) seem to have reported on it (hm! I wonder why that would be…), but on a trip back to his native Hungary (or to his father's native Hungary), Nicolas Sarkozy said he had come to lever un malentendu. Il n'y a pas, pour la France, une vieille Europe et une nouvelle Europe. Il n'y a pas dans mon esprit, des pays majeurs et des pays mineurs. Pour tout dire, il n'y a pas ceux qui ont droit à la parole et ceux qui n'ont que le droit de se taire. Il y a des pays égaux en droits et en devoirs.
Thousands of protesters marched through the streets of Washington today, from near the White House to the Capitol, where they staged a "die-in" to demonstrate their fervent opposition to the war in Iraq.
- WaPo Organisers said 100,000 people attended Saturday's protest, but police did not confirm the figure.
- Al Jazeera
The recent “Die-In” in Washington, DC which was staged by the likes of Code Pink and International (I don’t have an) A.N.S.W.E.R. is just a dress rehearsal for the genocide that come if the U.S. does what they wish and abandon the Iraqi people.
At least it will resolve that demand, and they can go back to the “you break it, you bought it” argument which will last them for years after a withdrawal, because it will allow them to demand something else that just as insoluble. So just like the boat people, and Pol Pot’s body count, it doesn’t matter how many will have to die to prop up the loony left’s world view.
As for the “hundred thousand” protestors that newspapers far and wide, but certainly not local are referring to, I have to ask: “thousands of WHAT ?” They barely stopped traffic around the Capitol.
In the mean time, I think this sport has potential as a really crowd-pleasing new Olympic event.
Any way you shake it, it isn't just belittling, it doesn't work.Of course, guess what's to blame? Just watch.
- from E-nough
Stephen Pollard writing in The Times (London) describes perfectly the tone and demeanor that the BBC reserves for the United States. Meet Matt “Stir” Frei:On Monday afternoon I watched General David Petraeus testify before Congress. I listened as he went through the facts of the military action in Iraq. I learnt as he outlined the improvements brought about in recent months.
I heard the same reporting and felt the same buzz, but this is the thing: as skeptical as I am of the BBC’s coverage of news in the U.S. is, I’ve grown used to expecting nothing else. It is typical, unremarkable, and for all the irresponsible invention of conclusions and selectivity, I find it pointless to get angry. Through the water torture of repetition of hypocrisy, I no longer notice it. Surely those not looking closely at the UK’s state broadcaster’s coverage of the U.S. would not need to take a gulp of the kool-aid. They have been given it daily in an eyedropper from birth.
But it wasn’t until I heard Frei’s take on General Petraeus’s words that I realised what had really been going on. The BBC Washington correspondent told us that he had listened “very carefully” – as opposed to his usual half-cocked approach, perhaps? – and gleaned what was actually being said: “Having tried to resist the fragmentation, the creeping partition, ethnic cleansing, the White House now seems to have bowed to that.”
Forget the reams of pages and the hours of testimony about military strategy and dealing with terrorists. The real story of the general’s report is that the White House is to start ethnically cleansing Iraqis. One should not be surprised by Frei’s warped take. His reports from Washington drip with condescension towards Americans and, most of all, Republicans. He recently called the contest for the Republican nomination – a race that is rather more intriguing than usual – a “panic-stricken hunt”. Given his penchant for such creative contempt for the people among whom he lives, it’s no wonder that he has been nicknamed Stir Frei.
Indeed the irony is that what this once dependable and venerable news organization does is no longer the coverage of news at all. They do not report the news for the sake of making information available, they do much, MUCH less. They simply follow up with further coverage, rewrites, and tales retold to them through the press releases of ‘pressure groups’ and the like to cover the doings of a short list of issues.
Awful as Frei may be, he fits the BBC’s editorial agenda perfectly. The lead report on Monday’s Ten O’Clock News, by the corporation’s world affairs editor, John Simpson, went two minutes without mentioning anything said by General Petraeus, offering instead clips of opponents of the war attacking the report. Simpson then sneered that President Bush cares not a jot what is actually happening in Iraq, caring only how US voters perceive it.
Even at that, it is an ideologically driven exercise in the manner of Gramsci: by the eyedropper, until the viewers and listeners themselves can be selectively employed to produce for them a levee-break of the stuff and no cost to them. So yesterday’s Victoria Derbyshire phone-in on BBC 5 Live was par for the course. The question of the day was: “Do you believe the Americans? Are things improving in Iraq?” For the first half-hour, every single caller informed us that Petraeus was lying about military progress. And don’t think the airing of such biased calls was anything other than an editorial decision. I called in to suggest that it was unlikely that the entire US military high command was engaged in a conspiracy to lie to the world. And was I put on air? Of course not.
- neer-do’ well and man about
town Stephen Pollard’s marathon
blogging can be found at stephenpollard.net
While some frothing conspiracy theory lovers try to argue that French TV didn't show the WTC 9/11 attacks, others can't cite them often enough. Either way, don't they think that there's such a thing as cable TV or satellite, or heaven forbid, people in France may actually watch the non-french channels found on it?Well, as Thierry Meyssan revealed it (The Pentagate), when transponder are cut, it automatically triggers an alert in control towers and jets are scrambled to see what is happening.
No they don't. Not before 9/11, and necessarily since. Not that truth ever got in a “truther's” way.
Just like with the Al-Dura affair's Charles Enderlin, however, a French media outlet does nothing about the scandal but present the reporter as nothing more than a poor innocent martyred victim and his critics as nothing less than shameless, treacherous, envious (!), and "extremely virulent". (In fact, here, too, Le Monde builds up readers' emotions, starting with a non-committal "envied job", going on to a more judgmental "not always kind criticism", and ending with a frankly castigating "attacks of an extreme virulence" as well as, later, "these signs of defiance against his profession" (italics mine!).)Ce poste envié a aussi exposé son travail à une critique nourrie et pas toujours bienveillante. En 2006, pendant l'offensive israélienne au Liban sud, une série de photos prises à Tyr a fait l'objet d'attaques d'une virulence extrême. Pendant des mois, les blogueurs l'ont accusé de manipulations et de mises en scène visant à diaboliser l'armée israélienne. "Il y avait eu une erreur de légende, qui n'était pas de mon fait. Elle a été très vite corrigée, mais le mal était fait. Tout s'est emballé."
"L'Europe de la défense ne progressera pas si nous ne changeons pas de comportement politique au sein de l'OTAN"
To the criticism of the socialists, France is considering a full reintegration of NATO, write Laurent Zecchini and Dominique Gallois — albeit with conditions, needless to say — while defense minister Hervé Morin has some criticism to offer for previous French attitudes of confrontation towards the organization as well as for a number of French weapon systems.La France, a expliqué M. Morin, est l'un des meilleurs élèves de l'OTAN, mais "trop souvent, nous sommes ceux qui chipotent et qui barguignent, comme si nous voulions donner le sentiment de vouloir empêcher l'OTAN de se transformer"
Dominique de Villepin est-il crédible dans ce rôle d'alternative à droite ?
ominique de Villepin, embroiled in the Clearstream affair, "wounded" by some of Nicolas Sarkozy's words at Dakar in Africa, and using the maxim of his favorite hero, Napoléon ("la meilleure défense, c'est l'attaque"), wants to become the leader of the majority's opposition to the president, writes Christophe Jakubyszyn…
A bit hard to do, though, as général Philippe Rondot has just confirmed that Villepin was the scandal's "mousquetaire" (as the plot's insiders called the prime minister at the time).
More revealing than anything, though — especially in view of all the ways that Bush and the members of his administration have been dragged through the mud as liars by everybody in France, from common citizens to élites and journalists — is the fact that not only are the friends of the "musketeer" allowed to present his lying in a positive light (in Ariane Chemin's story of Villepin's tumultous summer), but that Le Monde lets them get away with it, unchallenged. Là-dedans, allez savoir ce qui est vrai ou faux, soupire un autre [ami]. Dominique n'est pas un personnage qui ment, c'est un personnage de vérités successives. Peut-être que son bras droit ignore ce que fait son bras gauche. Il est tout le temps dans ses paradoxes.
So with an American, we have treachery of the highest degree, deliberate and malicious lies, and evidence that is damning to the fullest; with a Frenchman (or an internationalist of any nationality), we get the high-falutin' psychological "explanation" from his "sighing" friends (see, these wizened friends are trying to show indulgence although they know the poor man hardly deserves it) that he "is not a person who lies; he is a character of successive truths. Maybe his right arm ignores what his left arm is doing. He is always inside his own paradoxes."
If a Le Monde article is to celebrate a South American leader, as the Marie Delcas portrait of Piedad Cordoba does, naturally it has to be an adversaries of an ally of Uncle Sam who doubles as an admirer of Hugo Chávez… Although the French interest is in the liberation of the FARC guerillas' hostages (especially Ingrid Betancourt), it is suggested that Alvaro Uribe is nothing but a political wheeler-dealer, that her view of the president's politics (as "inadmissable compromises with the Mafia and criminals") are nothing but the truth (in a region where the "progressive governments of Latin America", including that of Chávez, deserve little else but admiration), and that "Cordoba la Noire's" adversaries are nothing but racists.
