Wednesday, November 30, 2005

France is a shitty little country

I hate to generalize. But after reading this interview, er exercise in humiliation, what else can one deduce?

en francais

English translation (hat tip: Lawrence Auster and friend)

27 comments:

Rick Ballard said...

I disagree. France is at least a medium sized country and some might call it a large country.

It has very, very little (and cowardly) people and does not deserve to continue to exist if this interview is an accurate reflection of what passes for thought there.

Orwell could have written that interview, change Finkielkraut's name to Winston Smith and it reads like the last chapter in 1984.

You sure got the shitty part right.

Doug said...

"You sure got the shitty part right."
---
That's the easy pot, er, part.

Doug said...

Wretchard recently posted on this guy.
Old Tin Ear Missed most of the points per usual when things get dark and cloudy.

I like my opinions Straight:
. Fallaci: Warrior in the Cause of Human Freedom.
By RudeDude

Wed Nov 30, 2005 11:50 AM

“We are gathered here tonight,” announced David Horowitz, “to honor a warrior in the cause of human freedom.”

Oriana Fallaci, who received the Center for the Study of Popular Culture’s Annie Taylor Award in New York Monday evening, has been a warrior for human freedom ever since she joined the anti-fascist resistance in 1944, at age fourteen.

For over six decades, she has fought against those she has labeled “the bastards who decide our lives,” opposing all forms of tyranny and oppression, from Mussolini and Hitler to Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi.
She amassed a fearsome reputation as an interviewer, recounting of Ariel Sharon: “‘I know you’ve come to add another scalp to your necklace,’ he murmured almost with sadness when I went to interview him in 1982.” Other scalps on her necklace include that of Henry Kissinger, who termed his interview with Fallaci “the most disastrous conversation I ever had with any member of the press.”

While interviewing the Ayatollah Khomeini, Fallaci called him a “tyrant” and tore off the chador she had had to wear in order to be admitted to his presence.

According to Daniel Pipes in his introduction of Fallaci Monday night, she is also apparently one of the few who ever made the irascible old man laugh.

Today, at seventy-five years old, Fallaci still stands for freedom. She is suffering from cancer. She stated with her usual directness at the Taylor Awards ceremony: “I shall not last long.”
But she has dedicated the four years since 9/11 to trying to awaken her native Italy, Europe and the world to the magnitude global jihad threat, which most analysts continue, whether from willful blindness, ignorance, or a misplaced strategic imperative, to misapprehend.

Pipes noted that “she has her differences with the President. When he says that Islam a ‘religion of peace,’ she has said, ‘each time he says it on TV? I’m there alone, and I watch it and say, “Shut up! Shut up, Bush!” But he doesn’t listen to me.’
“This,” Fallaci declared, “is what I have experienced the last four years.” She described how, since 9/11, the whole of Europe has become a “Niagara Falls of McCarthyism” – with the new Grand Inquisitors of the Left persecuting and victimizing all others.

“In Europe, we too have our Ward Churchills, our Noam Chomskys, our Michael Moores, our Lewis Farrakhans.”
And they are doing immense damage to the unity, will and cultural identity of the people.
In Europe as in America, the new thought police ban Christmas observances to avoid offending Muslims; history is rewritten to depict Islam as having built a civilization of peace and mercy (regardless of the preponderance of evidence to the contrary), while Europe’s own Judeo-Christian civilization is regarded as “a spark of a cigarette – gone.”
A spent force.
In Leftist-controlled municipalities, police stand idly by while Muslim hooligans demonstrate their contempt for European society and culture by urinating upon and otherwise desecrating churches.
Fallaci: “This is considered ‘freedom of expression’ – unless the offense is committed against Muslims.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This woman has more vigor and balls at 75 than any of the "elitist" men throughout all of western Europe.

Doug said...

Imagine

(Sung to the music of Imagine by John Lennon)

Imagine there's no U.N.
It's easy if you try
No meaningless resolutions
No need to wonder why?
Imagine all the countries
Thinking for themselves...

Imagine there's no French veto
It isn't hard to do
No Dominique De Villipen
And no Kofi Annan too
Imagine all the countries
Taking care of themselves...

You may say I'm a cowboy
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday we'll pull out
And the U.N. will be done

Imagine no committees
I wonder if you can
No blue helmeted peacekeepers
Worthless to the man
Imagine all the countries
Defending their sovereignty...

You may say I'm a cowboy
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday we'll pull out
And the U.N. will be done

Posted by Chad The Elder l link

Anonymous said...

We can probably find some nice spot in the Shenandoah, or in the Idaho mountains around Salmon, near the Continental Divide, to move the tens of thousands of our guys who are buried in France.

I ran my plan past my wife, who said in response: "Nah, make 'em remember." Too late for that, I'm thinkin'.

truepeers said...

Just for fun, I Googled the title to this post. And I discovered this interesting datum. Apparently ninety percent of Jews think France is the most antisemitic country.

Unfortunately, the original link to Haaretz is broken, so I don't know if this was a survey of French Jews, Jews worldwide, or what. I know quite a lot about French antisemitism, but I would have said Jordan, or some ME country.

truepeers said...

Doug, LOL thanks for redeeming JL.

And Skook, a hear, here. One of the more galling parts of that interview is when the interrogator makes out like France and her colonials fought the good fight against the Nazis. It was of course a small minority, after the early days of 1940. If all the anglosphere countries removed their war dead and memorials, that would send an unmistakeable message.

buddy larsen said...

Truepeers, if you ever get a chance, watch a French film from the 60s or early 70s called "The Sorrow and the Pity". Hated in France, it is one of the first post-war 'looks' taken at the truth of France in WWII.

and, google Pierre Laval.

Then, if possible, try to remember that although French collaboration in the destruction of Jewry was extensive, there was also an large, active underground fighting back.

But all in all, I'm afraid that the Nazis--had they lasted a generation, would've rooted very well and quite permanently in France.

buddy larsen said...

Operation Torch, 1943, Allied landings in North Africa, opposed by French armed forces under Vichy, killed as many US and British soldiers & sailors as have been lost to date in the current GWoT.

MeaninglessHotAir said...

Buddy,

The Sorrow and the Pity is available on Netflix and I just added it to my queue.

It's interesting which other movies then popped up as recommended: Shoah, Hearts and Minds (US Govt. was evil to fight in Vietnam), The Fog of War (McNamara confesses), The War on Iraq, Paragraph 175 (Nazis hate gays), and Going Upriver (Kerry hagiography). I'm getting a real good feeling for the target market here and it ain't me.

gumshoe said...

"I'm getting a real good feeling for the target market here and it ain't me."

MHA -
check out the reviews at Amazon.

i think you'll find
"The Sorrow and the Pity"'s
content and audience is a bit different than the others.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/
B00005AFSL/qid=1133424592/sr=8-1/
ref=pd_bbs_1/103-2478812-0501453?
n=507846&s=dvd&v=glance

truepeers said...

Re France and the war: My mother tells a story of visiting France in her youth (probably the late fifties) with her uncle, a Bohemian-German who fled to America before the war. They were in a cafe and overheard some French people making derogatory comments about the American tourists at another table. The cause of the scandal? The Americans were ordering coffee before dinner. The uncle, being a sure and learned man, got up and gave them a lecture in his German-accented French about how the Americans had saved the French hides in two wars and if they wanted to drink coffee before dinner well they were free to do so and the French snobs should be ashamed of themselves.

Just a little anecdote to suggest that maybe the best hope for France is a German-American alliance on a large scale, one that can keep the French in mind of what it is to be free and sure of who they are in a way that mere esthetic snobbery never can. As the humiliating interview linked here shows, many of the "French" are now lost. The Republic may well collapse yet again. Is shame ever a useful tool? I'm not sure, but maybe their best hope yet is Chancellor Merkel.

buddy larsen said...

MHA, trust me, I wouldn't recmnd sitting thru 2 hrs of lefty lies. The flick may've come from a lefty, but it was to puncture DeGaulle--offering (after a few decades) a rare confluence of objectives AKA "truth".

'Peers, after WWII, Berlin was out, so a new capital city for West Germany was up for vote in the Bundestag. Word is, Bonn came in #2, first choice was Paris. (joke)

buddy larsen said...

Basically, they're idealistic about expediency, and expedient about idealism. A crazy-making formula.

buddy larsen said...

...after 1066 AD, that is.

buddy larsen said...

Ahh, but look at the towering names they've given you...Crecy, Agincourt, Trafalgar, Waterloo.

I read an interview some years back when someone asked Moshe Dyan (the great Israeli general--with the eyepatch) what was his secret of his success...he answered "I fight Arabs."

(I know--un-PC--my WG is kickin' in hard)

buddy larsen said...

Oh, there's many great shows of English valor...uh, valour. That's why we're Anglophiles over here--nobody can resist the history. BTW, Blenheim--August 13--is Napoleon's birthday. He coulda took a hint.

truepeers said...

This numbing, this reticence to take action, this refusal to take risks has a name: it is the spirit of Vichy. The spirit of Vichy continues to haunt France despite the defeat of the French state and the expiatory trials conducted during these last years. Vichy is not just complicity with the genocide of the Jews: it is a pacifist and past-oriented vision of the world. And it is above all a refusal to participate in the troubles and misfortunes that are engendered by all resistance and by any pursuit of a ‘warrior adventure.’ Vichy is the belief that one can remove oneself from history and from its necessarily tragic dimensions, the belief that one can evoke moral principles in order to avoid combat--yesterday against Nazism, today against radical Islamism. This spirit is stronger than ever.
And Rigoulot goes on: ‘But Vichy is itself the product of a profounder evil, tied to the terrible consequences of the war of 1914-18, which shaped for decades a mentality increasingly marked by the incapacity to stand up against the adversaries of democracy. They weren't numerous, the resistance fighters of 1940!’ Rigoulot doesn't want to go too far with this remark. He explains, ‘Certainly, the spirit of Vichy, widely spread as it is in French public opinion, does not explain everything. But it is the guarantee that all of the anti-American discourses will find a favorable echo. Above all, in denouncing war. All war.’

Paul Berman

buddy larsen said...

Britain lost a generation in the trenches of WWI, also. Where is Vichy Britain?

truepeers said...

why the hell were we fighting on the side of France?

because Germany thought it would be cool to have a big navy, soe the seed in distant lands. And they could have had France instead. Maybe they knew...

truepeers said...

Where is Vichy Britain?

I think Churchill got his answer on election night 1945, if it hadn't sunk in already during the 1930s wilderness. Slow learners will get a hint if they observe Tony and Red Ken's relations with the "Asian" voter and Israel. But Vichy is everywhere, as Melanie Phillips notes in the above link. See America on "torture" and Gitmo, see the Canadian Liberal party, etc. etc. Denouncing war, all war, as if it were one's choice.

ex-democrat said...

i hereby "denounce" my mortality.
phew, that feels better!

buddy larsen said...

I say, either you denounce war and curse those who protect you, or you're a death-lovin' nazi hate-mongerer.

My world is a small and simple little world. I do not know why I provoke nausea in people who read books n' stuff.

buddy larsen said...

WWII era Collier's Magazine's Arthur Syzk captured WWII France (in the lower right) as efficiently as I believe possible, in terms of ink expended per volume of truth described.

(navigate the whole show--or better, google the artist's name, for an experience in the life of a supreme talent desperately fighting, with pen and ink, for his people imprisoned in the Old World)

ex-democrat said...

buddy - many thanks for that link. "Long before moving to the United States ... Arthur Szyk became entranced by American values and ideals. As an immigrant, he believed that native-born Americans failed to adequately appreciate the freedoms that they readily took for granted."
ah, yes.

truepeers said...

I enjoyed that link Buddy; never seen American iconography quite like that.

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