Little France syndrome

 The Little France syndrome

Well, at last the NYT emerges from its Macron daze to notice the sheer cretinism of the Macron cultural politics, driven by its far right allies, all swimming happily in their own shit and screaming about Islamo-gauchisme.

Meanwhile, the old retired fossils in academe, who made their bones in the 80s and 90s – those decades Francois Cusset labels the great nightmare, due to the proliferation of Nouvelle Philosophes and their wannabe companions, all using leftwing rhetoric to promote right wing economic and foreign policy – are also on the attack against the “Americanization” of the cultural agenda. This movement is in synch with Trump’s 1776 commission and Boris Johnson’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities which last month reported that, hooray, Britain has none, and never did anyway, except during a brief window in May of 1679 when somebody financed somebody else’s slaveboat which we think musta been Dutch – a total anomaly!

All of these can be called “Little” positions – Little America, Little Britain, and now Little France. The attacks on American “wokeness” are congealed in a rhetoric that is difficult to cope with. It seems so ridiculous that French academics, any of them, in this day and age would claim that France represents “universal values”, but of course – in spite of the past five hundred years of history, in spite of the evident and outrageous income and wealth inequalities between people of color and white French people, in spite of what you see the cops doing every day – there we are. It is a country in which, on the one hand, feminist groups graffiti walls with condemnations of femicide, and in which, on the other hand, tve-genic academics who have built careers on subpar academic work bemoan intersectionality – we have come to this, debates with the midgets all descending from Action Francaise.

The laughter that wells up in me is the contrast between this small French attitude – in favor the “universal” – and the subrosa massive support for the Americanization of the French economy – a process that has been going on since the “lefties” of the 80s quietly abandoned the defining left tradition while clinging fiercely to the title. It was so eighties – the leveraged buyout era. The entire vocabular of the regime of the president of the rich consists of banalities from American business schools, from “entrepreneurship” – restored to the French vocabulary! – to competitiveness, to the “burden” of the state on the dynamic private sector. It is a made in America circus. But nobody is talking about the droite-onclesamists. Nor, frankly, is anyone in the Little France corner really attacking Islamicists. The largest and most totalitarian Islamicist state – Saudi Arabia – is France’s friend, and more importantly, France’s weapons industry’s friend. So nobody is going so far as to say that we should boycott the Saudis, or block their gas pipelines, like with evil Putin. This is because Saudi Arabia is reformin’, plus they’ve been waging un mignon génocide in Yemen, and nobody wants to interrupt the cash flow there. Rather, the focus is on how Daech’s leadership is no doubt absorbing Judy Butler’s tomes, one after the other.

Georges Bernanos in Les Grands Cimetieres sous le lune wrote: La colère des imbéciles m'a toujours rempli de tristesse, mais aujourd'hui elle m'épouvanterait plutôt. You and me, Georges my brother.

Cretinism and more cretinism: the French right and Islamoguachisme

 

I spent the 00s in a froth of indignation, and my frothing found a home on my blog. But no matter how I whipped the hypocrisy, cretinism and downright pig ignorance of Bush’s administration and the general bipartisan DC foreign policy set, I got no satisfaction – it just went on and on, through the blood and mire, until gradually the seachange came, we all agreed Iraq was a mistake, and we all agreed to forget all about it. The Obama administration letting the CIA burn its little torture tapes in order to decide that it couldn’t, like, judicially do anything about torturers (just as it couldn’t find a single bankster to prosecute in that unfortunate 2008 financial meltdown thingy) should have taught me a lesson: the plebs will never be heard. Ever ever ever.

So I am doing my best to ignore the hilarious islamo-gauchiste campaign in France, even to the extent of deciding not to finish the incredibly dumb, no good, absolutely disqualifying rant of Pierre Jourde, late of Commentaire, in the Nouvelle Obs. Why froth when spring is here? The birds have their nests, and the son of man, or at least this son of a woman, has a place to lay his head, so whistle while you work.

But I am too tempted by the devil here. For really, what France should have been talking about for, oh, say the last twenty to thirty years is Islamo-Droiteism, otherwise known as the French foreign policy. While Jourde is in such a rage at the likes of  Clémentine Autain or Emmanuel Todd that he can’t be bothered to name one instance in which they have materially helped the Islamicist cause, or Islam in general – it is very easy to put names and dates together for the material and military helping of the great wen of Islamicism, the founder, the center, the om and omega, called Saudi Arabia. From 1956, when France was part of the military team that attacked Nasser’s Egypt – Nasser’s, you will recall, was the first secularist Middle Eastern revolution – to the French military team that was dispatched to help the Saudi royals in 1979, when the great Mosque in Mecca was attacked, all the way up to France bombing Daech on behalf of a coalition consisting of a few “secularist” fronts and a lot of Islamicist fronts – including al qaeda – in Syria, France’s foreign policy has been islamicist to the core. Not one word, of course, is said about this in the French press. After all, to doubt the King’s foreign policy is to doubt royal perogative at all! But this is how it is. After Holland’s disastrous neo-con turn in the Middle East led, predictably enough, to attacks in France, did anybody ask: what was the point of that? No. Dots are not connected if they are inconvenient dots.

If you want to track the growth of Islamacism – or, simply, the Saudi approved school of Islam – in Europe, you would do much better to read the Monthly Newsletter of the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia in Washington DC than Olivier Todd. There you can see wonderful photo ops of various Saudi royals conferring with various European officials, like Chirac in the 90s, about affirming “cultural relationships” – or, in other words, allowing the Saudis to flood the zone in Europe with mosquebuilding money, and propaganda against any other Islamic school. It was through that money that traditional mosques in Bosnia were taken over, razed, and rebuilt with an entirely new message for their congregations. This was seen with a benevolent eye by French politicians who saw weapons sales to the Saudis as an El Dorado, and who definitely were on the petroleum mainline. No, it is not Olivier Todd who is flogging French arm sales, but, gasp, those warriors against Islamo-gauchisme at the Elysee, the government of Macron. Here’s a little precis by AmnestyInternational of who is really promoting islamicism in the world. Hint – it isnot the faculty at the Sorbonne.

I can froth all I want, I know, and it won’t make a gnat’s ass difference. Still, even a gnat has a right to a horselaugh at the moronic inferno called the “french intellectual scene” every once in a while.