MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘Emmanuel Macron’

Who’s Brain-Dead Now, Macron?

Posted by M. C. on February 29, 2024

Macron wants to start World War Three based on sheer lies and vanity. He’s not only brain-dead. He’s soul-dead too.

There are already NATO troops in Ukraine…US. When Macron says NATO he means primarily US.

Finian Cunningham

French President Emmanuel Macron wants to send NATO ground troops into Ukraine to defeat Russia.

Only a delusional fool could make such a crass proposal which goes to show that Macron is brain-dead. NATO troops deployed to fight Russian forces would mean an all-out war, which most likely would spiral into a nuclear conflagration.

Ironically, the French leader made headlines a while back when he labeled the US-led NATO alliance as being “brain-dead”. He’s now competing for the same epithet.

When Macron made those harsh remarks about NATO in an interview with the Economist in November 2019, some observers thought that he was being intelligently critical of the transatlantic military organization and how it was no longer fit for purpose in the modern age.

But, no, Macron wasn’t offering constructive criticism of NATO or American leadership. He was simply being a conceited charlatan, trying to promote himself as the “strong leader” of Europe and peddling his hobby horse of building up a European army by appearing to bad mouth NATO.

This week, the former Rothschild banker was at it again, indulging in his grandiose fantasies of leading the rest of Europe.

Macron hosted 25 European heads of state or government at the Conference in Support of Ukraine. In the grandeur of the Elysee Palace, he warned that Russia “must not win the war in Ukraine” otherwise, he claimed, the whole of Europe would succumb to Russian aggression.

This is reckless and dangerous fantasy by the French president indulging in the most unhinged Russophobia. Moscow has categorically stated that it has no interest in anything beyond denazifying the NATO-sponsored regime in Kiev and protecting its national security.

See the rest here

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Is France Beginning To Steer an Independent Course? – Antiwar.com Original

Posted by M. C. on April 10, 2023

The disagreement is fundamental. The Biden administration’s signature foreign policy framework has been the battle between democracy and autocracy. France is not subscribing to that Manichean battle. Macron refuses to conclude that different forms of government entail a generational battle.

Maybe it’s just because a lot of people wear useless masks in China. Macron likes masks.

https://original.antiwar.com/Ted_Snider/2023/04/06/is-france-beginning-to-steer-an-independent-course/

by Ted Snider

Is it time to put Freedom Fries back on the menu? Back in 2003, french fries became freedom fries in the US in disgust with “our so-called ally, France” who took an independent “self-serving” course and refused to support US policy on Iraq. Having finally become popular on American menus again, is it time, once again, to replace French fries with freedom fries?

France is not breaking with the US and charting its own course against Russia in the war in Ukraine. But it is gently veering off. And in the prelude to any future conflict with China, the gap is wider and the course more independent.

The US has insisted on the acceptance of the starting point that Russia’s war on Ukraine is unprovoked. It has refused, including refusal to negotiate Russia’s December 2021 security proposals, to take seriously Russia’s security concerns or to negotiate security guarantees for Russia. It has refused to even discuss NATO expansion to Ukraine or NATO troops and weapons in Ukraine, topics that were never even on the table.

French President Emmanuel Macron, however, has said that the West should prepare to negotiate all three. Veering widely off the course charted by the White House, Macron has said that “We need to prepare what we are ready to do, how we protect our allies and member states, and how to give guarantees to Russia the day it returns to the negotiating table. One of the essential points we must address – as President Putin has always said – is the fear that NATO comes right up to its doors, and the deployment of weapons that could threaten Russia.”

Breaking from the US, France has glanced, at least, at Russia’s fear of NATO on its borders and weapons at its door. It has heard Russia’s calls for the indivisibility of security and said the West needs to reconsider how to protect its allies while guaranteeing the security concerns of Russia. Macron has gone so far as to agree with Putin that Ukraine joining NATO and NATO deployment of weapons in Ukraine are “essential points” that must be negotiated.

France is firmly in the US fleet in supporting Ukraine in the war against Russia, but it is veering away in preparing for the negotiations to end the war.

And when it comes to preparing for a future conflict with China, France is veering even further away and, seemingly, charting its own course.

President Biden cannot get Chinese President Xi Jinping to talk to him. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin cannot get his Chinese counterpart, Li Shangfu, to take his calls. And China has refused to put Antony Blinken’s trip to Beijing “back on the calendar” after the US Secretary of State canceled his scheduled February visit over the Chinese balloon incident.

Macron, however, does not need to beg for a brief phone call. He is in Beijing for three days where he will be granted more than six hours of personal meetings with XI, “treatment described by Western diplomats as exceptional.”

And it is not just China that is treating France differently. France is treating China differently. In a significant break from the US, France is far from dismissing China’s role as a broker in negotiations to end the war: it is encouraging it.

On February 24, China published its “Position on the Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis.” It pledged that China is willing to assume “a constructive role in this regard.” The US has consistently and assertively rejected that role.

See the rest here

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How the Mainstream Media Misses the Money Quote – Antiwar.com Original

Posted by M. C. on December 9, 2022

The mainstream media’s money quote missed that France, one of the two most powerful members of the EU, insists that a negotiated settlement to the war addresses Russia’s security concerns about NATO at its door and weapons at its border.

Macron is no different. Tell the US one thing, tell his constituents another and keeping to himself what he really thinks.

https://original.antiwar.com/Ted_Snider/2022/12/08/how-the-mainstream-media-misses-the-money-quote/

by Ted Snider

On December 1, French President Emmanuel Macron went to Washington for the first state visit of the Biden administration. After the pageantry, presents, hand holding and flattering words of fraternity and solidarity, Macron faced the gathered press.

“We will never urge Ukrainians to make a compromise that will not be acceptable for them.” “That,” said Helene Cooper of The New York Times, “is the money quote.”

But it wasn’t the money quote by several euros. The money quote came days later when Macron was not standing shoulder to shoulder with Biden in front of an American audience, but standing on his own addressing a French audience. Macron told the French television network TF1, in an interview filmed during his visit to Washington but aired as he left, that “We need to prepare what we are ready to do, how we protect our allies and member states, and how to give guarantees to Russia the day it returns to the negotiating table.” Then Macron made his full meaning clear: “One of the essential points we must address – as President Putin has always said – is the fear that NATO comes right up to its doors, and the deployment of weapons that could threaten Russia.”

The money quote was that, despite the display of solidarity, there was a canyon between the leader of the US and the leader of the loyal European opposition. The canyon was so wide that it included disagreement over the causes and solutions of the war. Biden and Macron both “strongly condemn Russia’s illegal war of aggression against Ukraine.” But for Biden, in the beginning, that war was wholly unprovoked, and, in the end, the settlement must reflect that and protect core US values. For Macron, though the war was illegal, Russia had legitimate security concerns that NATO had been pushing, and the settlement must reflect that too.

See the rest here

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To What End?

Posted by M. C. on February 10, 2022

That is the problem with closed regimes like we have in Washington. No one can see inside to figure out what is happening. Everyone inside sees everyone outside as a possible enemy, so no one talks candidly about what is happening. Everything operates inside of a black box. No one sees in and no one sees out. To the outside the world, the regime looks increasingly paranoid and dangerous. Eventually, it burns through its legitimacy and we arrive at a Ceausescu moment.

by thezman

Note: For those in need of some audio stimulation, my appearance on Cotto & Gottfried is now up on iTunes. It is mostly about the state of conservatism.


It has been noted many times now that people in the West have to read American media the same way they used to read the Soviet media. Most of what we get from mainstream sources is the natural propaganda one expects from the toadies and bootlickers that follow every authoritarian regime. Other pieces are planted by regime elements for reasons that are not always obvious. As with Kremlinology a generation ago, regime-ology is something of sport now.

For example, the regime keeps planting these stories about an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine in their favorites outlets. A few days ago this entirely made up report was sprinkled all over regime media. It painted a grim picture of the attack that we are told was happening any minute. Of course, the White House comes out every day and tells the stenographers in the press pool that the Russians will invade Ukraine as soon as tomorrow, but tomorrow never comes.

Today we have the latest regime scare story written by one of the zombies at their favorite outlet. The point of this story is to embarrass French President Emmanuel Macron who is trying to work out a deal with the Russians. He has been meeting with the parties the last two weeks to put an end to the situation. Unlike the Washington regime, Europe has no interest in war over Ukraine. The Europeans can read a map and they are not insane.

For a long time, it was assumed that the reason for the war drums from Washington was due to so many pols being on the Ukrainian payroll. We know the Biden family has been taking bribes from Ukraine for over a decade. That was one of those interesting stories that arose from the second impeachment of Trump. This tiny little corrupt country in Eurasia had a lot of friends in both political parties. The best sort of friends, the kind that can be bought and will stay bought.

That may be part of it, but it is clear that the Ukrainians have no desire to be the battleground in a new Cold War. For their part, the Russians have made clear they will never tolerate Ukraine in NATO. This should be an easy demand to meet, as no one in NATO, other than the Washington regime, wants Ukraine in NATO. Everyone in Europe understands the reality of Ukraine. It is a hyper corrupt kleptocracy that would be better off turned into a federalized neutral zone.

The other aspect of this is that the stories about the Russian military buildup appear to be mostly fake. The Russians are free to conduct exercises in their own land, which is what they have been doing thus far. They have not been sending weapons or “advisers” to the friendly militias operating in Ukraine. The CIA has been conducting covert operations with friendly militias for a decade now. In other words, this whole thing is one long running color revolution.

That raises the obvious question. If no one in Europe wants a war over Ukraine and the Ukrainians are not interested in a war, what is really going on here? One option is the permanent foreign policy establishment is infested with paranoids who wake in the middle of the night to the sound of hoofbeats. That has been an amusing line for years, but it would be a terrifying reality. Is the Ukraine mess really the result of deranged fanatics operating in the Washington foreign policy establishment?

Another less terrifying option is energy. The one thread that ties the foreign policy misadventures of the last thirty years together is energy. Russia has partnered with Iran and Syria because of energy. If they can control of natural gas out of the Middle East into Europe, that gives them leverage. Nord Stream 2 is a regular topic for the regime media, so it is fair to assume that the regime is worried about it. In this context, Ukraine is just a convenient cat’s paw in a larger geopolitical game.

What the regime is hoping for is an invasion of Ukraine that would then force the Europeans, especially the Germans, to kill Nord Stream 2. The Russians would remain the primary supplier of natural gas to Europe, but they would not become the exclusive supplier of energy. If Nord Stream 2 comes online Washington loses most of its leverage over Europe with regards to Russia. This is why they are so committed to this narrative about a Russian invasion. It has to happen.

The problem with this scenario is that it is too late to kill Nord Stream 2. The pipeline is complete and filled with gas. The last step in the project is for Germany to start using the gas and pay the Russians for it. No sane person can imagine a scenario in which this project is shut down. Even an invasion of Ukraine by Russia would only delay the opening of the pipeline. The Germans want the gas, the Russians want to sell it to them, so that deal will be consummated no matter what.

One interesting side bar to this is that the regime is certain they can jawbone the Russians into invading Ukraine. They also seem to think they can convince the world that a war is imminent. It is one of those examples where the regime reveals how disconnected they are from reality. Exactly no one seems to be falling for this disinformation campaign, especially the Russians. Yet the regime keeps running these stories in their media as if they are working.

As was the case with Kremlinology, we are left with our best guesses as to why the Washington regime is hyper-aggressive toward Russia. It could simply be cultural momentum within the foreign policy establishment. No one inside the regime knows why they have to talk about Russia as the great villain. It has just been the way it has always been. No one questions it, so the cultural inertia inside the system just keeps pushing the political class into confrontation with Russia.

That is the problem with closed regimes like we have in Washington. No one can see inside to figure out what is happening. Everyone inside sees everyone outside as a possible enemy, so no one talks candidly about what is happening. Everything operates inside of a black box. No one sees in and no one sees out. To the outside the world, the regime looks increasingly paranoid and dangerous. Eventually, it burns through its legitimacy and we arrive at a Ceausescu moment.


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The Approaching Storm – OffGuardian

Posted by M. C. on July 16, 2021

As I noted in my previous column, our societies have been torn apart. We’re living in two mutually hostile “realities,” a state which cannot continue indefinitely. The problem for us (i.e., the Unvaccinated) is, we probably constitute somewhere around 20 to 25 percent of the population, so we are massively outnumbered by New Normals. The problem for the New Normals is, we probably constitute somewhere around 20 to 25 percent of the population, which is way too many people to imprison or otherwise remove from society.

https://off-guardian.org/2021/07/15/the-approaching-storm/

CJ Hopkins

So, it looks like GloboCap isn’t going to be happy until they have fomented the widespread social unrest — or de facto global civil war — that they need as a pretext to lock in the new pathologized totalitarianism and remake whatever remains of society into a global pseudo-medicalized police state, or that appears to where we’re headed currently. We appear to be heading there at breakneck speed.

I don’t have a crystal ball or anything, but I’m expecting things to get rather ugly this Autumn, and probably even uglier in the foreseeable future.

Yes, friends, a storm is coming. It has been coming for the last 16 months. And GloboCap is steering right into it.

I, and many others like me, have been tracking its relentless advance like a self-appointed International Pathologized-Totalitarian Hurricane Center (you know, like the one in Miami, except all the meteorologists are “conspiracy theorists”). We have documented all the propaganda, the lies, the manipulation of statistics, the abrogation of constitutional rights, the New Normal goon squads, the corporate censorship, and all the rest of the roll-out of the new official ideology and the totalitarian measures deployed to enforce it.

Our efforts have not been in vain, but they have not been successful enough to change the course events are now taking … a course of events that has always been clear, a course that every totalitarian movement needs to take to get where it’s going. You can’t remake entire societies into quasi-totalitarian systems without civil unrest, chaos, rioting, war, or some other form of cataclysm.

Brainwashing the masses is all fine and good, but, at some point, you need to goad the people who are resisting your new totalitarian “reality” into getting unruly, so you can crack down on them, and transform them into official enemies, which appears to be what is happening currently.

GloboCap is dialing up the totalitarianism, and they are rubbing it in our faces.

Here in New Normal Germany, prominent health officials are openly barking out Goebbelsian slogans like “NO FREEDOM FOR THE UNVACCINATED!” and “THE UNVACCINATED ARE A DANGER TO SOCIETY!”

All over Europe, including the UK, where “Freedom Day” is fast approaching, pseudo-medical social-segregation systems are being implemented.

In France, Greece, and many other countries, people who refuse to be “vaccinated” are being stripped of their jobs and otherwise punished.

In the USA, where the Unvaccinated are also being segregated, New Normal goon squads are going door-to-door, bullying “vaccine hesitant” families into conforming to the new official ideology.

And so on … I’m tired of citing the facts. They do not make the slightest difference to the vast majority of New Normals, anyway. As I’ve noted in several previous columns, these people have surrendered their rationality, and have been subsumed into a totalitarian movement, which has become their perceptual and social “reality,” which their “sanity” now depends upon defending, so the facts mean absolutely nothing to them.

And you already know the facts.

Yes, you. Us. The others. The Unvaccinated. The “Covid deniers.” You don’t really think any hardcore New Normals have made it this far into this column, do you? They haven’t. If they stumbled into it on the Internet and accidentally started to read it, their brains switched off in the opening paragraph…literally, neurologically, switched off.

They recognized it as a threat to their “reality” and instantly erased it from their consciousness, or they reported it to the proper authorities, perhaps the FBI, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, or Facebook, or some other global corporation.

This is what it has come to, folks … people are reporting other people’s “thoughtcrimes” to global corporations and the law enforcement agencies of “democratic” governments in the hopes of destroying or damaging their lives, or, at the very least, getting them censored, or otherwise erased from public view.

As I noted in my previous column, our societies have been torn apart. We’re living in two mutually hostile “realities,” a state which cannot continue indefinitely. The problem for us (i.e., the Unvaccinated) is, we probably constitute somewhere around 20 to 25 percent of the population, so we are massively outnumbered by New Normals. The problem for the New Normals is, we probably constitute somewhere around 20 to 25 percent of the population, which is way too many people to imprison or otherwise remove from society.

Thus, their plan is to make our lives as miserable as possible, to segregate us, stigmatize us, demonize us, bully, and harrass us, and pressure us to conform at every turn.

They are not going to put us on the trains to the camps. GloboCap is not the Nazis. They need to maintain the simulation of democracy.

So, they need to transform us into an underclass of “anti-social conspiracy theorists,” “anti-vaxxer disinformationists,” “white-supremacist election-result deniers,” “potentially violent domestic extremists,” and whatever other epithets they come up with, so that we can be painted as dangerously unhinged freaks and cast out of society in a way that makes it appear that we have cast out ourselves.

This process is already well underway, and it’s only going to get more intense, which will inevitably lead to social unrest. The hardcore “Unvaccinated” are not going to go quietly. Again, this isn’t Nazi Germany. There are too many of us who are already resisting. They can segregate us, ban us from travelling, blackout our protests, censor us, deplatform us, cancel our bank accounts, and otherwise harass us, but they cannot forcibly disappear us.

So, they are going to keep goading us until we lose it. We have demonstrated incredible discipline so far, but eventually, we’re going to run out patience. It’s going to get messy. People will get hurt.

Which, of course, is exactly what GloboCap wants. Nothing will make them happier than if we turn ourselves into the “violent extremists” they have been conjuring into existence for the last five years. They desperately need us to become those “extremists” before we “embolden” too many others with our “disinformation,” “vaccine hesitancy,” “election result denial,” and general distaste for the whole global-capitalist ideological program.

Unfortunately, they are probably going to get their wish.

What we need is an organized, global campaign of classic, non-violent civil disobedience, but they are not going to give us time to organize that. They are going to keep the pressure on, and crank up the pace, and the official propaganda, and the absurdity, and the confusion, and the ever-changing rules, and the mass hysteria, and the blatant lies, until we start flipping out in restaurants, and in pubs, and schools, and on public transportation, and segregated New Normal establishments start getting nocturnally vandalized, or worse, and other forms of “direct action” are taken.

At which point, game over, because they will have won. We will be the “extremists” they warned themselves about, and they’ll be able to do whatever they want with us, and our former (now New Normal) friends will applaud, or just look away in silence.

Or…I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe some New Normals are still reading this essay, and can still, at this late stage, regain their senses. Maybe we can still avoid the storm, and the full implementation of “New Normal Reality.” I know, I’m probably a hopeless idealist, but let me tell you a quick anecdote before I let you go.

I’ve been kind of nudging, or politely badgering, Glenn Greenwald, who I respect, and have always respected, to grow a pair and at least speak out against the totalitarian features of the New Normal movement. Glenn is totally on board with the official Covid narrative, and has made it clear that he has no interest in using his investigative-journalism skills to investigate that official narrative.

Despite that, I have continued to nudge him, and politely prod him, and otherwise urge him, to maybe post a few critical words, or raise a few investigative-journalist questions, about the most flagrant official propaganda campaign in the history of official propaganda campaigns and the blatantly totalitarian actions of governments all over the world.

For example, I posted this on Twitter recently.

15 months into the New Normal, as government officials openly bark out spittle-flecked, Goebbelsian slogans like “THERE IS NO FREEDOM FOR THE UNVACCINATED!” and “THE UNVACCINATED ARE A DANGER TO SOCIETY!”, the silence from certain quarters is deafening. pic.twitter.com/bNuZ5np1Ny

— Consent Factory (@consent_factory) July 12, 2021

Shortly thereafter — and I’m sure this was just a coincidence, because Glenn doesn’t follow the Consent Factory — he tweeted this bit of New Normal blasphemy:

The UK is one of the most vaccinated countries on earth. 70% have at least one dose. More than half have both. The CDC says vaccinated people need not wear masks.

Why do experts who keep insisting the vaccine works demand people act as if it doesn’t? Why ignore CDC advice? https://t.co/aBjeXpWZjh

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 12, 2021

So, apparently, it is, in fact, still possible for people who believe the official Covid narrative as if it were the Word of God to speak out against some aspect of it, or just politely question the logic of it, or otherwise stop behaving like a bunch of mindlessly obedient “Good Germans” as a new iteration of totalitarianism is rolled out right in front of their eyes.

Yes, I know. I’m clutching at straws, but I have this crazy faith in people. On top of which, I’m getting old, so I am not looking forward to the street-fighting part of this as much as I would have 30 or 40 years ago.

Oh, and, I almost forgot, to all my friends in the New Normal UK … have a lovely Freedom Day!

CJ Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing and Broadway Play Publishing, Inc. His dystopian novel, Zone 23, is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. Volumes I and II of his Consent Factory Essays are published by Consent Factory Publishing, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amalgamated Content, Inc. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org.

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Who Dominates Whom? – American Greatness

Posted by M. C. on March 1, 2021

It is amusing listening to Canadian or French academics explain how their country differs morally and philosophically from the reactionary American empire. Unlike us, these non-Americans feature feminism and gay rights and are vigorously opposing white racism. Why should I believe that we borrowed such stuff from French postmodernists or, as Bloom argues, from exposing youth to the (right-wing) writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger? Enough has been going on within our borders to explain the presence of cancel-culture and why we are afflicting ourselves with politically correct nonsense.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/27/who-dominates-whom/

By Paul Gottfried

Recent broadsides from the French government, and most conspicuously from French President Emmanuel Macron, against the American woke Left and U.S. cancel culture drew a mixed reaction from me. Frankly, I find no reason as a European historian to believe that French journalists and academics are any less infected than our own with political correctness.

Looking at Le Monde, one can imagine reading the New York Times en francais. An attack on Western civilization and French national institutions has been underway in France since the native Left’s outcry against colonialism and the glorification of Third World revolutionaries after World War II. That was also the time when French intellectuals were talking up the Stalinist side in the Cold War and doing everything humanly possible to undermine any defense against a Soviet takeover of Europe. Raymond Aron’s Opium of the Intellectuals unmasked the antibourgeois radical mindset of the French intelligentsia back in the 1950s. One is struck by a remarkable overlap between these loonies and our own woke crowd. 

Moreover, Macron’s party la République en Marche faces persistent opposition from the Right in the form of the Rassemblement National, which does not hide its French patriotism and its detestation of woke intellectuals. Macron and the head of the RN, Marine Le Pen, are now running neck and neck in polls as they prepare for next year’s presidential election. 

The recipe for electoral success for the French globalist establishment has been to pick off votes from the Right by sending agreeable messages in that direction before elections. This powerful force works to stay in power, by seeking the votes of the working class and rural Frenchmen as well as those of affluent urbanites. In runoff presidential elections, the French establishment solicits support from the multicultural Left, which stands in fierce opposition to the immigration-critical Right.

Macron is playing the same game as other French centrist politicians, who have complained insincerely about things that concern the Right—e.g., North African immigration—as a timely electoral strategy. Jacques Chirac, while still mayor of Paris, delivered a controversial speech in Orléans in 1991 in which he mocked the “sound and odor” of North African immigrants. But once Chirac moved up to become French president, he worked together with the French Left to keep the rightist National Front from winning any representation in the French assembly.

Despite what I think is the dishonest electoral intent of Macron’s lament, what he is saying is essentially true. The French government is bewailing exactly what I have been saying in books and articles for decades, to the dismay of the American conservative establishment. Since the end of World War II, the United States has dominated the Western world not only militarily and economically but also in terms of popular and academic culture. The notion that American culture fell to the anti-Western Left because of alien German and French ideas, a theme popularized partly through Allan Bloom’s bestseller The Closing of the American Mind, overlooks our capacity to generate our own bad ideas. 

In The First Universal Nation, which the late Ben Wattenberg published in 1991, we encounter this astonishing but well-documented fact: the U.S. exports cultural products to Europe relative to what it takes back at the rate of 50-1. From my visits to European and Canadian bookstores, it seems that Wattenberg’s exchange rate has tilted even more decisively in our favor. 

It is amusing listening to Canadian or French academics explain how their country differs morally and philosophically from the reactionary American empire. Unlike us, these non-Americans feature feminism and gay rights and are vigorously opposing white racism. Why should I believe that we borrowed such stuff from French postmodernists or, as Bloom argues, from exposing youth to the (right-wing) writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger? Enough has been going on within our borders to explain the presence of cancel-culture and why we are afflicting ourselves with politically correct nonsense.

Having spent over 40 years in American universities, it is obvious to me that we have a superabundance of home-grown lunatics to account for these disorders.

I would also like to think that we have enough going for us as a country to overcome this prolonged bout of insanity. I am especially heartened by the fact that about half of our voting population seems unaffected by the madness that Macron has complained about. That percentage is higher than the roughly one-third of the French electorate that will likely cast its vote for the RN in next year’s presidential contest. It is also over 35 percent higher than the percentage of those beleaguered non-leftists who vote for the right-of-center AfD in Germany. In Canada, I am still looking for evidence of a non-leftist electorate, unless I factor in the misnamed Conservatives.

What I am suggesting is that we in the United States not only created much of the poison from which other Western countries are now suffering, we may also be among the very few who can offer an example of recovery. 

About Paul Gottfried

Paul Edward Gottfried is the editor of Chronicles. An American paleoconservative philosopher, historian, and columnist, Gottfried is a former Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, as well as a Guggenheim recipient.

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France confronted with the jihadism of its Turkish ally, by Thierry Meyssan

Posted by M. C. on February 10, 2021

France realises a little late that the jihadists who have carried out attacks on its soil and others who are preparing new ones are supported by foreign states, military allies within NATO.

It revolves around four strong ideas, including the prohibition of the financing of religious associations by foreign States. Everyone is well aware that this is the head of Islamism, but no one dares to name these states: Turkey and Qatar, remote controlled by the United Kingdom and the United States.

https://www.voltairenet.org/article212155.html

by Thierry Meyssan

France realises a little late that the jihadists who have carried out attacks on its soil and others who are preparing new ones are supported by foreign states, military allies within NATO. The refusal to draw conclusions in terms of foreign policy makes the bill to combat Islamism of little use.

President Emmanuel Macron and the government of Jean Castex drafted a bill to combat the political instrumentation of the Muslim faith. This text is currently being discussed in Parliament.

It revolves around four strong ideas, including the prohibition of the financing of religious associations by foreign States. Everyone is well aware that this is the head of Islamism, but no one dares to name these states: Turkey and Qatar, remote controlled by the United Kingdom and the United States. Indeed, fighting against Islamism in France has many brutal consequences in foreign policy. No party dares to tackle this problem, rendering all the efforts made in this struggle ineffective.

France has already experienced this hesitation in the face of Islamism in the mid-1990s. At the time, the United Kingdom and the United States supported the jihadists in Algeria against French influence. London also offered political asylum to these “democrats” who were fighting against a military regime. The Minister of the Interior, Charles Pasqua, launched a showdown that led him to have the members of a commando of the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) who had hijacked an Air France plane shot dead and to expel the CIA chief of post in Paris (who was also compromised in a case of economic espionage). The issue was thus settled for 20 years.JPEG - 62.1 kb

The Directorate General of Internal Security (DGSI) inspired a press dossier, in the Journal du Dimanche of February 7, 2021, on how “Erdoğan is infiltrating France”. Note: the newspaper did not question Turkey, but the only President Erdoğan. Similarly, at least initially, it did not mention Qatar, the United Kingdom or the United States. Above all, it quoted the Millî Görüş which it accuses, without noting that it was the militia of Prime minister Necmettin Erbakan and that President Erdoğan was one of its leaders. Finally, it omitted to mention the alleged role of the Turkish secret services in the attacks of November 13, 2015 (the Bataclan).

It is this theme that we are going to develop by rectifying many prejudices.JPEG - 64.1 kbDidier Lemaire, professor of philosophy in the Paris region (in France, one teaches philosophy in the final year of secondary school), has been threatened by Islamists because he dares to debate political Islam. He was placed under police protection.

Islam: faith and politics

Mohammed was a prophet, warlord and prince at the same time. The Islam he founded was at the same time a particular rite of Christianity [1], his policy towards the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula and the law he promulgated. No one was able at his death to distinguish his spiritual heritage from his political and military action. On the contrary, his political successors (in Arabic: “Caliphs”) inherited his authority in religious matters, although they had no theological knowledge and sometimes even did not believe in God.

Today, Muslims living in Europe aspire to sort out this Islam, to keep only the spiritual part of it and to abandon dated aspects, especially the Sharia. On the contrary, President Erdoğan, who officially wishes to be declared Caliph of Muslims on October 29, 2023 (the centenary of the Turkish Republic), is doing everything possible to oppose this.

It is therefore a struggle between two civilisations. Not between European culture and that of Turkey, but contemporary civilisation against another, which disappeared a century ago.JPEG - 43.8 kbFormer Islamist Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan and his bodyguards. To the right of the photo is Recep Tayyp Erdoğan.

Erdoğan: an Islamist thug who became president

President Erdoğan is not a politician like the others. He started his career as a thug who was punching in the streets of the capital. He entered politics in the 1970s by joining an Islamist militia, the Akıncılar, until he joined the militia created during the fall of Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan in 1997, the Millî Görüş. This organisation of nervis was financed by the Iraq of President Saddam Hussein and placed under the control of the Grand Master of the Sufi Order of the Naqchbandis, General Ezzat Ibrahim Al-Douri, future Iraqi Vice-President.JPEG - 23.3 kbIn Afghanistan, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar with at his feet Rachid Ghanoucchi Ghanoucchi (left in the photo) and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (right).

The Anglo-Tunisian Rachid Ghanoucchi, one of the great figures of the Muslim Brotherhood, said: “In the Arab world of my generation, when people talked about the Islamic movement, they talked about Erbakan. When they talked about Erbakan, it was the way they talked about Hassan al-Banna and Sayyed Qutb”. So, although the Islamist movement is organisationally divided between the Muslim Brotherhood on the one hand and the Naqchbandis on the other, they undoubtedly form a single ideology.

It is in the name of the Millî Görüş that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan played an effective role in the wars in Afghanistan alongside Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and in the wars in Chechnya alongside Shamil Basayev. Once he became president, he imposed himself as the leader of this movement during the NATO war in Syria. Today he is the leader of both the Muslim Brotherhood (established in the wider Middle East and Europe) and the Naqchbandis (established mainly in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Russian Dagestan, South Asia and Chinese Xinjiang).

Islamist networks

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The More the EU Tightens Its Grip, the More Countries Slip Through Its Fingers — Strategic Culture

Posted by M. C. on October 27, 2020

These lockdowns have nothing to do with public health. They have everything to do with maintaining the political health of the current ruling classes. Nothing more.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/10/24/more-eu-tightens-its-grip-more-countries-slip-through-its-fingers/

Tom Luongo

It finally looks like the four-and-a-half-year saga of Brexit is coming to an ignominious end. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson called the final bluff of the incompetent bureaucrats in Brussels, walking away from trade talks while leaving the door open.

But that door is only open if the EU is willing to crawl in on its knees and give the UK what it wants, a minimal free trade deal, Canada-style, which was offered by then President of the European Council Donald Tusk.

The EU played hardball giving zero ground for four years while undermining the UK from within its own political and bureaucratic structures. It was as transparent as it was cynical, but it couldn’t sway the British people and that gave Johnson the political will to just say no.

And it was this hardball negotiating stance that had worked in the past finally broke like waves along the Cliffs of Dover. The reason why it failed was that arrogance was fueled by powerful forces having their back,

They believed in the power of coercion being stronger than the will of the British people.

And they were wrong. Dead wrong.

In an instant this past weekend the entire façade of he the EU’s inevitability vaporized as Johnson went on TV and told the world to prepare for a No-Deal Brexit, regardless of whether that was the optimal outcome or not.

It signaled to the rest of Europe that no longer do you have to take the diktats of a bunch of feckless, unelected technocrats if you don’t want to. And this failure to secure submission of the Brits will have immense consequences during this next election cycle in Europe.

This is why the fiction of the Second Wave of the Coronapocalypse persists all across the continent. Germany, France, Spain and other countries are implementing the worst kind of draconian lockdowns on people hanging on by a thread while the pols in Brussels scheme as to how best to continue advancing their plans for a future with the people trapped in the neo-feudalism of the EU corporatocracy.

These lockdowns have nothing to do with public health. They have everything to do with maintaining the political health of the current ruling classes. Nothing more.

And I include the UK in this as well but for different reasons. It’s my feeling that even though Johnson may have given the EU ‘two fingers up’ the EU and those behind it aren’t done with the Brits yet.

Walking away from narcissists inevitably invokes anger. There is too much at stake for the European Project for the annoying Brits to just walk away from it and give everyone else the wrong idea.

So, I feel very strongly we should be watching for more signs of the same color revolution tactics on display in the U.S. to depose Donald Trump showing up in the UK I don’t rule out an attempted coup against Johnson in the next seven weeks.

This is why I think he’s imposing similar lock downs in the UK to manage the inevitable activation of ‘ground forces’ once things get down to the wire later this year.

Brexit has exposed a myriad of fault lines within the EU, most notably between the two heavyweights, Germany and France. And Johnson, for all his shambolic organization, understood this perfectly, playing Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron off each other capturing their agendas in amber so when crunch-time came, they were paralyzed with inaction.

Weasels on both sides of the channel refused to accept the vote for any number of reasons but it didn’t matter.

The UK always had the upper hand in this situation if it stood its ground, made its demands known and negotiated like an equal rather than a wayward child.

Ever the abusive parent, the EU Council and its Chief Negotiator continue to treat the Brits like they treated Greece in 2015 and are now openly furious that no one is taking them seriously.

But why should anyone take Brussels seriously, other than because it is backed by the failing and sclerotic post-WWII institutions revealed to be complicit in the wholesale destruction of Western culture and economic vitality who are pushing a Great Reset on them whether they want it or not?

One need look no further than the insipid way Merkel has handled the obvious intelligence job surrounding Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny. Navalny is a nobody outside the halls of the CIA and MI-6 who, through the media, sell him to the West as a major thorn in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s side.

But he’s nothing of the sort. He has fewer people show up to his ‘rallies’ now than Joe Biden. So, the idea that Putin would poison this bozo is laughable. And yet, because the EU, and specifically Germany, are so scared of angering the U.S. they entertained this fantasy hoping the Russians would bail them out and play along with the fiction, publicly threatening the completion of the Nordstream 2 pipeline over it.

Putin told Merkel to go scratch, and why not? She’ll be out of the picture in a year.

So, now she has personally lost Russia as a potential ally for Germany. Instead of finally choosing a side, Merkel, ever the dutiful soldier, kept playing the U.S. and Russia off each other alienating both.

Germany will get no help from Russia when a vindictive second-term Trump tightens the screws on her even more. Because stop looking at polls designed to gaslight you and look at what’s happening in the U.S. People will walk over broken glass to vote for Trump. The biggest worry about Biden is whether he’ll soil his Depends.

Merkel ham-fistedly played for time hoping to run out the clock on Trump and Johnson both over the U.S. election and it will cost Germany everything in the long run. She has a chance post-election to make things right with Putin but don’t bet on it.

Once she loses Russia, she’ll lose the Visegrad nations as the U.S. abandons Europe and the 21st century will turn most unkind on a hubristic and vainglorious European elite.

If the EU leadership want to be taken seriously then they need to act like world leaders and not like a bunch of vindictive high schoolers vying for class president. That these incompetent people are leading some of the most powerful countries in the world should frighten you.

They also reflect very poorly on the people who stand behind them, who I like to call The Davos Crowd, whose policies they were chosen to implement.

And now that the best of all possible Brexits is near at hand, the rest of Europe is going to get an object lesson in just how much it costs to keep them around as the UK thrives in the post-Brexit world and why they shouldn’t be afraid of their wrath.

© 2010 – 2020 | Strategic Culture Foundation | Republishing is welcomed with reference to Strategic Culture online journal www.strategic-culture.org.

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How Bolton, Netanyahu and Pompeo sabotaged Trump’s dream of talks with Iran

Posted by M. C. on June 22, 2020

Bolton recounts this story with pride, and hints that the efforts by himself and Pompeo, with Netanyahu’s backing, stopped Trump from going for a broader U.S.-Iran deal, which was being pushed at the time by French President Emmanuel Macron.

https://outline.com/2s9RB6

Amir Tibon

In his new book, John Bolton recounts how a potential meeting between the U.S. president and Iran’s foreign minister spread panic among top U.S. and Israeli officials last summer

WASHINGTON – Benjamin Netanyahu is mentioned over 30 times in John Bolton’s new book, “The Room Where it Happened,” which details his tumultuous 18 months working as President Donald Trump’s national security adviser.

Most of the references to the Israeli prime minister are short descriptions of conversations between Netanyahu and Bolton regarding Iran, containing very little new or significant information.

One story Bolton tells in more detail, however, reveals how Netanyahu – together with Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – reportedly sabotaged Trump’s attempts to open diplomatic channels with Tehran last summer.

Bolton recounts this story with pride, and hints that the efforts by himself and Pompeo, with Netanyahu’s backing, stopped Trump from going for a broader U.S.-Iran deal, which was being pushed at the time by French President Emmanuel Macron.

The events Bolton describes happened in the lead-up to his own ouster from the White House. First, in June 2019, Trump surprised and disappointed Bolton and the other Iran hawks in his administration by canceling, at the last moment, a military strike against Iranian targets in retaliation for an Iranian attack on a U.S. military drone. Bolton describes that event as one of the most unprofessional decisions he had ever witnessed in his career in national security.

Later that summer, as tensions with Iran continued to rise, Macron began to offer Trump his help as a mediator between the two countries. His grand plan, according to Bolton, was for Trump to meet with a senior Iranian official in late August in the French coastal town of Biarritz, as France was hosting a meeting of the G-7 countries with the American president in attendance.

Bolton writes how he and Pompeo, the administration’s two most prominent Iran hawks, both worked during the summer to scuttle Macron’s diplomatic efforts and convince Trump to reject any proposal. But Macron, he explains, surprised them by inviting Mohammad Javad Zarif to the G-7 gathering, opening the door for a potential meeting between Iran’s foreign minister and Trump.

For Bolton, Pompeo and Netanyahu, this was unacceptable, especially because Macron was also promoting another idea: an international “credit line” to Iran that would ease some of the grave economic pressure placed on the country by Trump’s imposition of sanctions.

Bolton writes that when Trump arrived in Biarritz in August, he had an unscheduled one-on-one meeting with Macron, during which Iran was the sole topic under discussion. According to Bolton, Trump later described that conversation as “the best hour and a half he’d ever spent.”

The next day, rumors about Zarif’s imminent arrival in southern France began to surface. Bolton received a worried call from Pompeo, who had spoken earlier with Netanyahu about airstrikes against Iranian targets in Syria that had been attributed to Israel. Bolton fails to mention in the book that all of this was happening just three weeks before Israel’s September 17 election, at a point in time when Netanyahu was down in the polls and short of the majority he needed in order to be granted immunity from prosecution on corruption charges.

After the call with Pompeo, Bolton heard from Trump’s personal staff that Macron had invited the president to meet with Zarif, and he was “eager” to take the meeting. Bolton’s reaction was to ask his own staff to prepare a flight for him to return to the United States: if the meeting were to go ahead, he would resign immediately from the White House.

Pompeo and Bolton continued to communicate in an attempt to stop Trump from meeting Zarif, and Bolton writes that both of them were at the same time also speaking to Netanyahu and his ambassador to Washington, Ron Dermer. Bolton asked Pompeo to tell Netanyahu and Dermer that he “felt like the Light Brigade” – meaning that his efforts to stop the meeting were running into powerful forces he was not necessarily equipped to overcome.

In Bolton’s telling, two other senior administration officials – Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner – were in favor of taking the Zarif meeting. Pompeo complained to Bolton that “we have Mnuchin and Jared, two Democrats, running our foreign policy.”

Bolton told Pompeo of his intention to resign, and the secretary of state replied that if the meeting went through, he would do the same, according to Bolton.

Bolton wrote that he then had a conversation with Trump, in which he told the president that if the United States released even just a bit of the pressure placed on Iran, it would be “very difficult” to put it back in place. He urged Trump not to meet Zarif at all – not even for a private handshake, as Trump suggested at some point he wanted to do. Bolton said he was encouraged, however, by the fact that Trump had soured on the credit line idea, stating: “They’re not getting any line of credit until the whole deal is done.” This, Bolton writes, was the opposite of what Macron suggested – opening a line of credit as a gesture of goodwill that would lead to further negotiations.

Netanyahu, meanwhile, was trying to reach Trump directly to explain his strong opposition to the meeting but, in Bolton’s telling, could not get through to the president. Bolton said Kushner was against connecting the two men, because he found it inappropriate for a foreign leader to try to dictate to Trump whom he should speak to.

Bolton was convinced the meeting with Zarif would happen before the end of the G-7 summit, but he provides no clear explanation as to why it eventually didn’t. At the time, most analysts wrote that the meeting never took place mostly because of the Iranians, who demanded a concrete easing of sanctions before giving Trump the photo opportunity he was craving.

Bolton concludes the chapter by writing that he “couldn’t rule out” the possibility that Kushner or Mnuchin met with Zarif instead of Trump, in order to “create a future channel of communication,” and that this option caused great concern to Israeli officials and made Pompeo “livid.”

“I don’t know if I had talked Trump out of meeting Zarif,” Bolton concluded, “but the decision [not to hold the meeting] was enough” to stop Bolton from resigning, at least for a few more weeks. Eventually, he left the White House in early September 2019. In the year that has passed since those summer months, there has been no diplomatic progress between the United States and Iran.

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Macron Suffers Huge Blow With Defeat To Le Pen | Zero Hedge

Posted by M. C. on May 27, 2019

A glimmer of hope for those that do not want to be ruled by EU banksters nor overrun by invaders.

Is it enough to maintain the freedom momentum?

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-05-26/macron-suffers-huge-blow-defeat-le-pen

by Tyler Durden

In what may be the biggest shock from today’s European parliamentary elections, President Emmanuel Macron suffered a major blow with French voters set to hand a victory to Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, picking the vocal Eurosceptic and nationalist over the former Rothschild banker.

Macron’s En Marche (Republic on The Move) will have just 22.5% of the vote compared with 24% for Le Pen, according to pollsters Ifop. With Macron and Le Pen neck and neck ahead of the elections, the outcome will be a humiliation for the liberal politician who said before the elections that everything less than 1st place would be a defeat…

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