For the cheetahs, substitute the European Central Bank and Goldman Sachs. For the antelope, substitute Greece, Italy, Spain, Ireland, or possibly even France.
Tag France
When Paris Burned
The Occupy Wall Street demonstration has now inspired sympathetic demonstrations in dozens of American cities. While the number of people in New York has grown, most of the other demonstrations remain small, but the spread in and of itself speaks to the resonance of the message.
In the spring of 1968, the attention of the world turned to the city of Paris, as student demonstrators were joined by workers and other protestors to form a mob of 800,000 demanding reforms from the government of Charles DeGaulle. For a brief moment, it seemed like revolution might actually be at hand. The Paris Review shares some posters of the period from a new book about the art of the uprising.
The revolution in the streets of Paris did not ignite, though the country was paralyzed by strikes. DeGaulle gave into demands to reform the universities and even won re-election. Only time will tell what, if anything, the Occupy Wall Street protestors might achieve.
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The Ghost Of Hitler Is Laughing
The resurgence of the neofascist right in Europe seems to be headed straight for the presidential palaces all across the continent:
The BBC reports that an early poll in the upcoming French presidential elections shows National Front leader Marine LePen beating sitting president Nicolas Sarkozy by a small margin. The same poll also puts her ahead of the likely Socialist candidate, Martine Aubry. LePen is the daughter of Jean-Marie LePen, the long-time leader of the National Front. She inherited the leadership of the far right party last year and currently serves as a member of the European Parliament. Under her leadership, the National Front has curtailed some of its anti-Semitic rhetoric in favor of rallying against the new bogeyman of the Western world: Muslims.
Meanwhile, a recent opinion poll in the U.K. indicates that almost half of the population would support an anti-immigrant far right party if it toned down the thuggish, violent behavior of the British National Party. The BNP were humiliated in last year’s elections, losing 26 out of 28 of the local council seats they controlled, so it’s particularly striking that such a large portion of the British public would support a far-right party.
This Project Syndicate op-ed piece by Bard College political scientist Ian Buruma looks at the new face of the hard right in European politics and their likely continued electoral success. He argues that as the right-wing parties find their way into coalition governments, they will of necessity have to tone down their harsher rhetoric, but the shift in public opinion appears to be willing to meet them at least part of the way. If no Hitler looks to rise out of their advance, perhaps things will not spiral out of control, but factors like the flailing economies of a number of European countries don’t bode well for a smooth integration of right-wing extremists into governments.
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Jerry Lewis, Eat Your Heart Out
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Imagine A Boot Stomping On A Human Face FOREVER
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face — forever.” — George Orwell
So I guess the Tea Party really IS the future of America.
Thanks to the current flood of posts and arguments about the Tea Party over at MetaFilter, last week I learned about a political movement in France in the 1950s and 1960s called Poujadisme. The movement is named after the man who created it, Pierre Poujade, and was a right-wing countermovement that sought to undo many post-war economic reforms in France. A lot of the rhetoric and ideology behind Poujade’s party, the UDCA (Union de Defense Commercants et Artisans), sounds very much like the complaints of the Tea Party, as this PoliticsUSA article explains. Robert Zaresky, a professor of French history, also explains the rise of the Poujadistes in this NYT op-ed from February.
In the face of incidents like the one in Kentucky this week and the illegal handcuffing and intimidation of a journalist at a Joe Miller campaign event in Alaska, there is the inevitable comparison being made between the Tea Party and the rise of the Nazis in Germany. I have even made this observation myself here, and I continue to believe that the parallels exist. However, I also now see that perhaps the parallel to the rise of the Nazis is merely one possible path, and the parallel to the Poujadistes another. The fulcrum that tips the balance one way or another is likely to be not the short-term outcome of next week’s election, but the longer-term outcome of what actually happens in government once the Tea Party candidates are installed in office. In the case of France and the Poujadistes, the advent of DeGaulle as president co-opted much of the nationalist and center-right elements back into mainstream politics, even as such individuals as Jean-Marie LePen were able to use the UDCA to launch their own more extreme parties. In the case of Germany, the much more radicalized political environment was poorly manipulated by the powers-that-be and in short order the Nazis had completely usurped them.
Even though I’m more than a little disquieted by the willingness of the current campaigns to flirt with violence, I am a bit relieved to learn that there is a way in which a group as unfocused as the Tea Party can be defanged a bit, even if it means having to put up with a much more explicitly right-wing government to mollify them. But I also remain convinced that the Tea Party harkens the specter of something far more sinister that could become an unstoppable force if they ever coalesce around a credible charismatic leader, which, luckily, they still have not done.
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Islamophobia Über Alles
Hey, ALL the cool kids are Islamophobes now, so you should be, too!
Not satisfied with kicking all the Roma out of the country, yesterday the French Senate overwhelmingly voted to ban the wearing of full-facial veils, as is the custom of some Muslim women. The so-called “burqa ban” has been a political hot potato since the lower house of Parliament passed the bill a couple of months ago. Proponents, including President Nicholas Sarkozy, have portrayed the ban as a “human rights” effort, but it is estimated that there are only a couple of thousand Muslim women in France to whom the ban applies and critics decry the effort as pandering to the resurgent right wing in France and singling out Muslims over other religious groups.
The Germans, in the meanwhile, have had a whole ‘nother ballgame going on as Thilo Sarrazin, a board member of Germany’s central bank and former finance senator for Berlin, resigned under pressure from the Merkel government after making a number of anti-Muslim remarks in his latest book. Unlike Sarkozy, who uses the cover of secularism to justify his policies, Sarrazin is a straight-up racist and all-around troll who sounds suspiciously like some FOX News personalities talking about little Muslim girls in headscarves having lots of Muslim babies.
And guess who else thinks there are too many Muslims in Europe…that’s right, the Roman Catholic Church. Quelle suprise! Sounding like someone who watches a little too much Glenn Beck, senior Vatican official Fr. Piero Gheddo urged Italian Catholics to start fucking like bunnies to counteract the evil upswing in Muslim births that imperil Christendom. Not to mention the need for future generations of altar boys, I presume.
Back here in the good ol’ United States of Jesus, last week New Republic editor Martin Peretz wrote the New York Times that American Muslims don’t deserve First Amendment rights. That’s caused some appropriately outraged reaction in other quarters, but didn’t stop Harvard University’s plans to name a research fund after him, complete with a big celebration for Peretz planned for next week, though they did call his remarks “distressing”. Peretz has issued an apology of sorts, but it’s one of those “I’m sorry you took offense at what I said” sort of dealies that doesn’t really apologize for anything.
Gosh that’s an awful lot of fuckwittedness.
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Racism Isn’t Strictly American
Topic #1 for the month of August has been and continues to be the ugly return of racism in American politics. The very thin veneer of anti-Muslim sentiment that has been driving the “Ground Zero Mosque” story grows thinner and thinner every day, as the video of the black guy who was mobbed by the anti-Muslim protesters in New York clearly demonstrates, and as the nonsense about Barack Obama being Muslim has now seemingly infected somewhere around a quarter of the entire population. It’s “Scary Black People” Month 24/7 on FOX, as Rachel Maddow recently pointed out, and “Muslim” is just the code-word-du-jour for a certain word that rhymes with Tigger.
But racially-tinged politics and the threat of ethnic violence has been popping up all over Europe, as well. Writing at Project Syndicate, World Jewish Congress president Ronald S. Lauder decries the return of violent anti-Semitism and a series of incidents in the Swedish city of Malmö. Confounding the issue, he says, is state-sanctioned anti-Semitism playing into the hands of anti-Israel Muslims living in European countries, even as Muslims themselves find their own battles with intolerance.
International financier George Soros also has an article at Project Syndicate about the efforts of a number of European governments to expel the Roma people from their countries. The Roma are more commonly, though derogatorily, known as “Gypsies”, and have been a persecuted ethnic minority for centuries. Not unlike the Jews prior to the foundation of Israel, the Roma have no home country to speak of. They mostly come from Southeastern Europe, but through diaspora have ended up in just about every country. The Roma are highly stigmatized as a “criminal element” throughout Europe, but the recent actions in France and Italy to expel them are unusual in targeting the ethnicity as a whole as a criminal group, sadly reminiscent of pre-war imperial times.
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Less Wallooney?
Belgium had a snap parliamentary election over the weekend, and the big winner was the separatist New Flemish Party that wants to dissolve the nation and restore Flanders as an autonomous country.
The devolution of Belgium has been a critical issue for several years. Three years ago, the elections in Belgium were so contentious that it made it almost impossible for the winning party to form a national government for months afterward. The New Flemish Party only won six seats in that election, but yesterday took 27. Ironically enough, they still have to work out a power sharing deal with the French Socialists to create a government, but it means that devolution will be front-and-center on the government’s agenda.
If it comes to pass, there’s a pretty good likelihood that Wallonia would join France, a move that has support in both France and Wallonia. Among the Flemish, only 32% actively support breaking up the country, but the victory of the separatists indicates that the desire for some sort of recalculation of political power in Belgium is strong.
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The Seven Assholes Of The World
Finally, something we’re still Number One at! This post at 3Quarks Daily by Adam Ash dissects the characteristic of national superiority that defines a handful of nations — China, France, Germany, Israel, Japan, the U.K., and, of course, the U.S. — and wonders if the world wouldn’t be a much better place if they gave up their over-inflated self-importance. Frankly, it’s a nice breath of fresh air for a piece like this to acknowledge that we Americans are not the only ones who cannot see beyond our own noses; the Big Three European powers certainly have had their moments, and certainly the xenophobia-cum-racism of both Chinese and Japanese exceptionalism rate high on the scale of general assholery.
For me, the money quote is this section where he talks about how America reacted (and is still reacting) to 9/11:
What in fact did we do after 9/11? Instead of taking the moral high ground, a pedestal upon which we were suddenly thrust by the rest of the world — in Iran they held candle-lit vigils for us, Le Monde thundered “We are all New Yorkers now” — we sunk lower than sharkshit into the deepest assholumbra of assholectonomy. Instead of using our elevated moral position to examine ourselves, and come up with a measured look at ourselves and a suddenly changed world, and to render a semi-mature judgment about what had happened and how a civilized nation should respond, instead of thinking and weighing and reasoning the whole thing out among ourselves like the democracy we’re supposed to be, instead of stepping up like adults, we behaved like a child who stubs his toe and hits the smaller kid next to him for relief. We did not rise to the occasion. We did not even stoop to it.
It brought out the demon in us which, heart-breakingly, might be what we really are.
Definitely worth keeping in mind this week as we all sit glued to our television sets watching most of these World Assholes duke it out through the proxy of men and women in oddly-colored skintight superhero suits and goofy helmets.
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When The Swallows Salmon Come Back To Capistrano Paris
Fishermen on the Seine at Poissy, by Claude Monet
The Seine River, which runs through the middle of Paris, was once home to dozens of species of fish, but, like many other urban rivers, eventually became too polluted to sustain them. Atlantic salmon were present in the river well into the mid-20th century but had not been seen since then.
So scientists and fishermen alike were thrilled to learn that this year as many as 1000 salmon had made the upstream swim from the ocean all the way to the City Of Lights . The return of the salmon is considered to be a significant milestone in France’s efforts to restore the Seine ecosystem, since they are one of the largest species of fish to live in that environment and require the presence of smaller food organisms, adequate oxygen levels, and other indicators of a healthy river.