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…
The 80’s revival rages on. Transnational economic turf-warfare, greed, and meddling in business lead straight to Airbust: Union officials, who were informed of the proposals earlier on Wednesday, expressed anger at the scale of the cuts. "We totally oppose the closure of any site and we won't accept any firings," said European Metalworkers Federation head Peter Scherrer.
- with thanks to George
A few more of the “Zionist spies” of one of our, intemperate troll commenters. A tragedy was avoided on Sunday after a smoke bomb, thrown through a window of a Jewish kindergarten in Berlin, failed to ignite.
Targeting a place where these "dangerous" 4 and 5 year olds play. Perhaps to induce fear, but more likely because the people who did it have had their revusive reflex trained out of them with ideology, only to be replaced by some notion of "social justice" as an excuse. The new form youthful idealism takes is little more than loutish repugnance.
However, the school, located in a northwest neighborhood of the German capital, was not spared by the spray painting of swastikas, other Nazi symbols and anti-Semitic phrases, such as “Auschwitz,” “Juden Raus” (Jews, get out) and “Sieg Heil”, on its outer walls, as well as on toys that had been lying around in the school’s playground.
Time, perhaps, for “Altermonidialist” types to take a personal inventory. I’ll leave the colorful phrases found in the image to individual translation, but it needs to be said that the part of Berlin in question (Wedding, I believe) is by no means poor or “immigrant”, it’s a pleasant, wooded area free of the tension used to explain away this hatefulness which is actually old hat
Once again, the idiotic potbanging by the agitational left is founded on a lie. The “16 words” that the left are so cranked up about came from British intelligence that knew full well what France gave Saddam. This reassuring assumption
[that Mitterand had limited nuclear fuel shipments to Iraq], however, is massively belied by the contents of a 1987 letter from none other than current French President Jacques Chirac to Saddam Hussein. By 1987, Chirac was again French Prime Minister. His letter was leaked to the French press and widely interpreted at the time as a thinly veiled offer to rebuild Osirak. Waxing nearly rhapsodic in his praise of French-Iraqi relations, Chirac refers in the letter to "the cooperation begun over 12 years ago on our joint personal initiative in a domain that is essential for the sovereignty, independence and security of your country" (my emphasis - JR). (The full letter from Chirac to Saddam Hussein, dated June 24, 1987, is reproduced in Claude Angeli and Stéphanie Mesnier, "Notre Allié Saddam" [Oliver Orban, 1992], annexe VII.) The allusion to Iraqi security concerns is especially notable, since it suggests that Chirac was fully aware of the military significance of the Osirak project.People don’t discuss “sovereignty” when it comes to electricity generation or worst still in the present date, the euphemism “right to technology". The goal was to give Saddam nukes. Nothing more.
It’s got all the usual ingredients: fighting over nothing, a “declaration” named after a city, and a bunch of characters with no depth. The end product is a non-news story worthy of the gossip page.A grand statement - the Berlin declaration - is planned next month to commemorate the founding in 1957 of what is now the EU, but the 27 member states are increasingly divided about what to celebrate.
It sounds like the start of a bad joke: “A German and a Frenchman are stuck in a rowboat...” Nonetheless, the usual subtext is always there:
Luxembourg is pushing for a prominent mention of the euro as one of Europe's greatest achievements.Former Iron Curtain countries are growing increasingly concerned that their experience under communism will be airbrushed out.
The people who say (reasonably enough) that Serbia proper was not guilty of the enormous crime of genocide are the same who find it not at all abnormal to say America deserved 9-11 because of September 11, 1973. (Or America deserved 9-11 just because of what America is. Or because of what it was. Or because of what it has done. Or because of what it hasn't done. Or because of…)
In Sunday’s Telegraph, Niall Ferguson continues to flog his notion that present day America can be compared to the British Empire, on that he’s admitted is different because it is not an empire. One of the fantastic differences between the Telegraph and pathological nature of the BBC’s editorial ideology is that the Telegraph invites comments far more directly and without making a show of “letting you” Have Your Say, albeit with heavy editing by beeboids.
“The usual” view is always present. It has this vision of the world being a playground where all the children need to be equal for their own good despite the fact that some have given the world a reason to be on the “time out bench.” For the likes of these folks, even the Darfur genocide doesn’t get you an off-side whistle while “the good” in the world spend years on end trying to define the meaning of genocide anew. Maybe it's because they are ignorant, arrogant, parochial and jingoistic.
As ever, the implied self-as-high-culture tries to form comparisons to American low culture. Low-culture to low-culture are quite typically strenuously avoided for the reason that they might produce some actual empathy. However, the matter of low-brow behavior cant be entirely hidden:
Maybe it's because they have either invaded or forced regime change in more than 200 countries, many with democratically elected goverments.
Maybe it's because they would rather spend their time watching non-stop 'news' of such luminaries as Britney Spears and Anna Nicole Smith, than to bother to discover what their own government is doing to them and to other populations of the world.I am an American living in Britain and I have been abused many times by British people trying to get their jabs in at Americans. Mostly from teachers, believe it or not!
Believe me, I know. The inability to dislodge the prejudice for a person and a nation is a telling and ubiquitous feature of American dealing with Europeans’ lectures on a daily basis.
The difference is refreshing and enormous, and show a great breadth missing at the BBC. Between the highly predictable notes left by readers are those like the following: As I see it, having visited the United States, the great advantage it's citizens possess is the ability to succeed, should they so wish. There is no class culture, consequently those who are successful are admired and indeed encouraged to achieve more. Envy and jealousy simply do not exist. It is something the rest of the world cannot understand and this is manifested by the so called "hatred" expressed against a country which is totally different to the class system which dominates all other nations.
Well, there’s always a “root cause” argument to be made too. People hate America because they want the romance of the hammer and sickle, or the romance of a martyr.
...
The truth is it's not the US that's arrogant, it's the romantics that want a cause that exaults humanity into some kind of superman, when what is actually being offered is the chance to be ordinary.
"Our servicemen were not politically motivated. We were fighting for our country. There is no comparison between terrorists and the RAF."At least he’s honest. Euros wetting their beds over “Germania” is nothing new.
Although renowned for his extreme views, Mr Le Pen remains one of the most influential politicians in France.
Maybe it’s the divine illumination they give us that makes them completely unremarkable ...in Britain, where 76 per cent of respondents ticked off the response "I don't know any of these candidates," though the country is just across the Channel from France.
All of which is a sign of tremendous wisdom rather than apathy since all trends point to their leadership not mattering a great deal anyway:
In Germany, 62 per cent said they were not familiar with any of the four candidates, while the figure was 47 per cent in Spain and 43 per cent for Italy....of la vie française (such as myself) need to stand back. In 1979, the British were 20 per cent poorer than the French, as measured by GDP per head. We are now 5 per cent richer, and the outlook is for that gap to widen further. The general economic background is a major part of this - the French economy has crawled along at a growth rate that has averaged half that of the UK's in recent years. Unemployment is stubbornly high, and even after a recent recovery, remains nearly twice the UK's.
The term “sick man of Europe” used to be used for places like Albania, now it’s used to point out those who used to point the “sick man” out. The common thread is obvious: socialism is necrotizing. It sounds like someone needs some peristroyka for the global public to pay attention to them.
-With gratitude to Hervé.
