Merde in French

Contemporary French chick-lit.

Enough with the propaganda, already.

Below is a quick translation of an article by Yves Roucaute which ran in Le Figaro on 7-June-2006:

Yves Roucaute - Guantanamo: enough with the anti-American propaganda.

In a full out world war against terrorism, “the Guantanamo affair” is serious. Instead of supporting those who are on the front line in this new type of war with the cruel forces out against civilization, the poison of anti-Americanism is breaking the morale of our nations.

Anti-American propaganda instructs us to turn our gaze toward Cuba. Not the Cuban reality of Castro who, after having killed more than 100 000 Cubans in his half-century rule, has dominated by terror. Not the Castroists repugnant prisons where several thousands of political prisoners stagnate (336 officially). But in the tourist program of the politically correct, “The Gulag of our time” is American.

Guantanamo, Guantanamo. Propaganda denounces isolation prisoners there and the secrecy. There were those who made claims against it in the American courts, invented prisoners held without cause, imagines tortures, and the rape of individuals’ rights.

Insulation and distance? You don’t have to look hard for precedents which were never disputed. When on June 22, 1940, Hitler launched an unprovoked air against England, Winston Churchill got the Canadian government to detain 3 000 German soldiers captured by the British army, and kept them in complete secrecy in isolated camps in northern Ontario and at Kananaskis in the Rockies. There were three reasons for this: so the prisoners could not return to combat in the event of escape, and prohibited the passing of information within the camps, and prohibited the Nazi prisoners from forming networks. When one sees the way in which the Islamist networks are organized today in French and British prisons, isn’t isolation a mild response to the asymmetrical warfare carried out by the terrorist networks with have propagated worldwide?

The secret? It makes it possible to obtain information without the enemy not suspecting it, not knowing which is taken, nor when. It allows infiltrations, substitutions of people, revealings of complicities, plays of misinformation. Provisional, this type of imprisonment does not remain strategic about it. And it saves thousands of lives.

Court intervention? By what strange, tortuous view would this be necessarily? As in any war, internment of captured enemy does not enter the courts, and is done to prevent them from fighting and to keep them for information. Admittedly, after a while the secrecy of the capture is out. When the information is no longer valuable they can still take up arms. This is why the Americans released prisoners little by little. With regard to the current disputes, after the decision of the supreme Court (June 2004, Rasul v. Bush) and the Detainee Treatment Act of December 2005, the legal debate continues, but no judicious person wants to see the dangerous prisoners of Guantanamo free or to assemble networks in ordinary prisons.

Conditions of detention? Democracies are not without their obligations. As Kant showed, they are entirely different from tyrannies in what violations of human dignity the punished may endure. By forgetting that, a soldier commits a double felony: he violates a natural law and sabotages the moral underpinnings of his country. This always seems to be left out of the propaganda that these sanctimonious hypocrites put out to confuse and control others. The American courts answer this moral concern: they imposed punishment following the revelation of Abu Ghreïb and nowhere did anyone thank Allah for that.

But where is the evidence of torture at Guantanamo? The famous UN Commission on Human Rights Report (of February 2005) on which these anti-Americans lean proves nothing. This commission, which counts among it’s members communist China, Castro’s Cuba and, Saudi Arabia… had found the military authorities that didn’t trust in them improper by accepting their arrival but not letting them question the prisoners. Consequently, they refused to put a foot in the camp and drew up his report thanks in particular to testimony of captive Islamists who were released.

What’s the latest form of propaganda? Poor “a documentary-fiction”, The Road to Guantanamo, with won the golden bear at the Festival of Berlin, with lines so large which they make put Sergeï Eisenstein and Leni Riefenstahl to shame. Was there really no reason to suspect why the three heroes of film were prisoners at Guantanamo? Can you really take them at their world when they say they underwent torture which leaves no marks? Victims of bad luck, they left for Pakistan to attend a wedding in Karachi, the disembarking point for the world’s Islamists on their way to Afghanistan. Then, they go another 1.200 kilometers to Kandahar, the center of Al-Qaida command. They continued to Kabul where many Taliban reinforcements arrived at the same time. During the Allied intervention our heroes are found at the Pakistani border with the Islamists. Fleeing, their bad luck continued when they are stopped by the Northern Alliance with armed members of the Taliban, who hand them over to the American authorities.

Each day anti-Americanism appears more and more like the new opiate of the masses. It is the heart of a world without a heart, where morality is excluded, the strange reference point for the consciences lost by the fall of the Berlin Wall. If the true force of a republic lies in virtue, as Montesquieu said, then virtue is measured by courage one has to fight for it. Guantanamo, it is this courage.


Yves Roucaute is a professor of philosophy and political science at Paris-X Nanterre University and the author of “Le néo-conservatisme est un humanisme” (Neoconservatism is a form of Humanism.)

With thanks to Carine for posting on the original.

... and the fact that Zarqawi was alive and knew that the GIs got him is just too much humiliation for any French kid to handle.

With their number one poster boy permanently out of commission, French newsrooms try to find the meaning of it all. For Le Monde Al Jazeera on the Seine, Zarqawi is the winner, and Libération PropagandaStaffel regrets that it's a win-win situation for the Americans.

The broad strata of French pussy-fication

Phoney right wing French newspaper Le Figaro complains about the Hollywoodisation of geopolitics committed by those hamfisted, naive, 'Murcans. Oh, and, the media event around nailing Zaqarwi is only going to create more terrorists ... bla, bla, bla.

Psycho Beach Party

Party till you drop. Dead. Pali Psycho Death Cult©® militia hit at their beach location. Libération PropagandaStaffel forgets the loss of Zarqawi to rail against Jews. Le Monde Al-Jazeera on the Seine reports on Hamas' attempt at firing back with roman candles.

Surfs up!

Truffaut? Godard? Who really supplied the French dream factory with video content?

They're crying in the French suburbs and they're crying in French newsrooms. Tonight the French pay tribute to their fallen idol. French State TV changes its Saturday night programming to re-broadcast a documentary about Zarqawi who was the single greatest producer of video content for the cellphones of French kids -- the executions of Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg being on top of the charts in French suburbs.

Coincidence?

We report, you decide.

From the fever swamp of Islington

...does not bathing become worthy of discussion.

I didn't know until today that Matthew Parris, the former MP turned pundit, stopped washing his hair 10 years ago after failing to find a Boots or a Sainsbury's Local deep in the jungle. I know now because Andrew Marr, another pillar of the punditry industry, told Daily Mail readers he has started doing the same.

We talked about it at the morning conference in the Guardian office this morning where trivia of this kind can arouse almost as much interest as the merits of selling our main airports.

Especially on an island where in most years, fresh water is so abundant, that it’s nearly a pollutant.

Adults too, for that matter. Last year Mrs White decided that showering every day wasn't a good idea for her skin. She now indulges on alternate days. When the hosepipe ban loomed in our part of the country this spring I decided to follow her example. It's a small sacrifice, but every litre helps.

But that really isn’t the subject. We’re talking about the Guardian here, where a writer’s subject is usually oneself.

The fuse is lit!

The commie orgasmatron

a.k.a. back breaking labor:

In an attempt to reduce personal relationships to social functions, Soviet literature has always kept silent on the subject of sex. A family has been considered the primary cell of society, where good workers and citizens are fashioned, or as a factory producing the happy generations of the future. The only sexual motifs to be found in many Soviet classics are those implanted in scenes of labor.

In Boris Gorbatov's novel Donbass, the coal miner Victor Abrosimov descends into the mine in order to experience the piercing enjoyment of drilling:

He got down on his knees before the wall of coal and switched on his hammer. A familiar tremor of joy rolled over his hands and then embraced all his body... His dream came true and the body of coal lay before him submissively as the miner was free to let himself go. The solid wall of untouched black forest moved excitingly close to him, enticing and luring him. Suddenly Viktor Abrosimov felt his muscles fill with daring, previously unknown force, his heart was consumed with bold courage, and he believed that he would be able to do everything, to overcome everything, and to achieve everything this night.

This is why it’s impossible to take seriously the fantasy communism of university students, 23 percent of a certain large European state which should know better, or even actual graduates. It’s forgotten legacy is the emotional enslavement as well as the physical. The truism that there will eventually be nothing left to distribute includes happiness and material comfort.

…when the individual controls his own property, he can dispense it or overcome it, in order to achieve self-transcendence and reach the heights of self-perfection. When nothing of one's own is available or even imaginable, then the process works backwards, and the individual descends to the realm of self-abasement, experienced as an inability to control even oneself. The path from one's own thing leads to one's own soul, but from a thing not one's own, the path leads to someone else's soul, to the soul of a robot that slams its sledge or wedge into whatever object is placed before it. In Russia, we say that this kind of person works as if he has been "wound up" (kak zavedennyi).

Such labor is a convenient way of blinding oneself, satisfying a maniacal need to do something, to be occupied; it is a formula for self-depletion. The individual is not in control, but in thrall to the devil of labor who instructs him: "smash, slash, chop" or "fry, shred, season." The more physically debilitating the work, the easier it is to forget yourself in it, to chase away importunate thoughts of death, to kill exhausting blocks of time. Labor becomes a wonderful means of self-abnegation, the truest desire of a despairing soul. Through intercourse with an object our tormenting humanity is forgotten.

The fuse is lit!

"No, Not MRAP, Say Ahhhh"

Marianne goes to see her doctor on Chat Borgne to find a remedy to what is ailing her, i.e., France…

The Political Situation Is Really Alarming

"Au cas où vous ne l'auriez pas remarqué, nous sommes désormais craints et haïs dans le monde entier comme l'étaient autrefois les nazis."

Et avec raison."

Railing against George W Bush and comparing Americans ("rightly") to Nazis, Kurt Vonnegut tells Josyane Savigneau how indignant he is to see what kind of country he lives in. No wonder, then, that Le Monde gives the Slaughterhouse 5 author a full page article inside its pages.

He who is without sin will cast the first gin bottle

Dick “Dick” Marty’s obvious emotional stability leaves civilization few options. His evident brilliance in repeating a bundle of uncorroborated slams on the US government and the various European states who want their thugs back leave the White House embarrassed and with a rather chapped tukhus. As such they may:

1. In the spirit of all good conservation measures, if any terror conspirators were transported from or through Council of Europe paradises, they should be released into the wild where they were found.
2. The US should stop cooperating with Council of Europe states in this matter of taking these schmucks off of their hands, and perhaps even avail them with small arms manufactured in Dick’s beloved Switzerland under Social Security mental disability program. Surely that would prove therapeutic to the little darlings.
3.Police in those states should deliver any further conspirators and collaborators to terror directly to Marty’s home where their freedom can be assured. I doubt that they’ll raid his bar.
4. Return them to their nations of origin where their safety will be assured.

So many choices. That notwithstanding, the it’s hard to question the solidity of a report that buries this little gem deep in the middle:

There is no formal evidence at this stage of the existence of secret CIA detention centres in Poland, Romania or other Council of Europe member states, even though serious indications continue to exist and grow stronger. Nevertheless, it is clear that an unspecified number of persons, deemed to be members or accomplices of terrorist movements, were arbitrarily and unlawfully arrested and/or detained and transported under the supervision of services acting in the name, or on behalf, of the American authorities. These incidents took place in airports and in European airspace, and were made possible either by seriously negligent monitoring or by the more or less active participation of one or more government departments of Council of Europe member states.

The fuse is lit!

Lefty only seems to be able to get off on role-reversal anyway

The boys in the Nine-three grunt, "say it ain't so!"

Le Monde Al-Jazeera on the Seine breaks the sad news to the French. They're cheering in Bagdad, but not in Sarcelles.

Annonce officielle de la mort de Zarkaoui
LEMONDE.FR | 08.06.06

©

Ô Fwance, que sont devenus vos heros d'antan ?

Après Fofana, c'est Zarqaoui qui tombe ... and French youth weeps.

Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out, scumbag

Hey, watch out! Somebody might try to take him out with a pop gun. Looks like Chiraq is not in the best of shape.

National Day of Mourning declared by French youth

Iraqi Prime Minister's office states that al-Zarqawi is dead. If confirmed, French authorities will demand a United Nations investigation and verification that it was a "clean shoot".

A dose a day keeps the French hype away

... and it's Europe !

Its sacraments (abortion)
Its holy writ (Roe v. Wade)
Its martyrs (like Soviet spy Alger Hiss)
Its clergy (public school teachers)
Its churches (government schools, where prayer is prohibited but condoms are free)
Its doctrine of infallibility (as manifest in the "absolute moral authority" of spokesmen from Cindy Sheehan to Max Cleland)
Its cosmology (in which mankind is an inconsequential accident)
And, of course, the liberal creation myth (Charles Darwin's theory of evolution)

Pervasive Simpleton Syndrome

To some it’s the unconscionable presence of Joooooz!, to others it might be that they’re serving up bacon (and a little truth too) – either way indignation and appeasment cannot secure an airspace.

The Air Force took part in exercises with Israel last year in Canada, it has emerged. Last month the government withdrew Swedish participation in international exercises because of the presence of the Israelis.
[ … ]
Despite the controversy, Persson described relations with Israel as good.

"They are good, and I have over the years seen to it that we have developed very close relations with the state of Israel, its government and with Jewish groups around the world as well as here in Sweden."

"I think that one needs good relations with both sides in the Middle East conflict."

Persson tried to play down the significance of the decision to grant a visa to Palestinian minister Atef Adwan.

As if they could have any actual impact on the Middle East conflict. My goodness, how could anyone say that without feeling stupid?
Good relations – selling them up the river – channeling thoughts about Israel by tossing Swedish Jews in the mix – not exactly the height of sophistication, is it?

In other news from the magic kingdom, social services resorts to Gitmo-like forced-feeding [.ram] the depressed, apathetic children of asylum seekers. The situation is created by the parents not being parents and transferring as much of their own hopelessness on the children as they feel satisfactory. The children exhibit behavior that includes not wanting to eat, drink, or move.

It’s called the Pervasive Refusal Syndrome. Now, a study published this week has shown that the number of children suffering from this syndrome has dropped. Their situation seems to be improving as their families are being granted asylum.

Not documented on their website, but in broadcast on state media, critics said that this is likely done to play on the fact that the fear children have of the consequences of not being allowed to stay in Sweden is used as a factor in granting asylum. The fact that their parents are establishing that fear doesn’t bode well for these fine future citizens, but I guess they aren’t picky about their culture’s future.