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      in Elections

      Biden to call Macron amid outrage over Australia's nuclear submarine deal, says White House – video

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      The White House said US president Joe Biden will hold a call with French president Emmanuel Macron in the coming days to reaffirm America’s commitment to one of its “oldest and closest partners” amid a diplomatic crisis stemming from a nuclear submarine deal. France is reeling after being humiliated by a major Pacific defence pact orchestrated by the US, Australia and Britain, which involved a submarine deal that sank a rival French submarine contract.

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      in World Politics

      Thought Suppression Flourishes in France and Washington

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      In August, the Daily Devil’s Dictionary appears in a single weekly edition containing multiple items taken from a variety of contexts. 

      This week, we jump from French President Emmanuel Macron’s proposal of a new law intended to produce electoral momentum in the run-up to the presidential election to Republican Senator Josh Hawley’s campaign to avoid dishonoring the great tradition of white supremacy. We then move on to congressional Democrats’ greater sense of loyalty to the military-industrial complex than to their elected president and also the military threat that China’s peaceful overtures in Africa appear to represent for the US. Finally, we look at the Financial Times’ realistic, but unorthodox reading of the global debt crisis. 

      Macron’s Revised Motto: Liberté (diminished), Egalité (Two-tiered) and Neutralité

      It used to be that countries like Switzerland could claim the privilege of neutrality. The notion applied to political entities. President Macron of France has extended it to people in the name of combating “separatism,” the latest and deadliest sin against what he imagines to be republican integrity. Parliament is now deliberating on a bill designed literally to neuter the French by imposing neutrality as a behavioral norm. Macron sees the effort to inculcate and enforce “republican values” as the key to winning reelection in 2022.

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      “Introduced by hardline French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, the bill contains a slew of measures on the neutrality of the civil service, the fight against online hatred, and the protection of civil servants such as teachers,” France 24 informs us. The New York Times explains that this “law also extends strict religious neutrality obligations beyond civil servants to anyone who is a private contractor of a public service, like bus drivers.”

      Neutralité:

      A legal concept that provides a pretext for targeting the Muslim community in France for failing to live up to republican standards, a requirement that not only judges people on their aptitude to adhere to a modern faith known as “republican principles” (which supersedes any other creed or philosophy a person may identify with), but also proclaims that those principles are universal and should be shared by any rational person anywhere in the world

      The Context

      The law voted by parliament on July 23 seeks to eliminate “separatism” by removing a few of the traditional liberties the French formerly enjoyed. It also seeks to foment a climate of suspicion against anyone who resists signing on to a behavioral code designed to protect members of the current secular order.

      To ensure that some of Marine Le Pen’s xenophobic, anti-immigrant voters may be tempted to drift across to vote for Macron in next year’s election, the president has proposed a law clearly intended to demonstrate his personal pleasure in intimidating Muslims.

      Radical Ideology According to Senator Josh Hawley

      Republicans in the United States believe in freedom of expression so long as thought itself is controlled. Missouri Senator Josh Hawley understands that white exceptionalism is the unimpeachable foundation of the American way of life. “Over the past year, Americans have watched stunned as a radical ideology spread through our country’s elite institutions—one that teaches America is an irredeemably racist nation founded by white supremacists,” Hawley said. “We cannot afford for our children to lose faith in the noble ideals this country was founded on.”

      Radical ideology:

      The citing of any facts of history that might contradict the self-proclaimed normal and noble ideology of those who believe that the power structure they are a part of is predestined not only to rule the world, but also to restrict useful, objective knowledge of the world

      The Context

      When Hawley claims that we “have to make sure that our children understand what makes this country great, the ideals of hope and promise our Founding Fathers fought for, and the love of country that unites us all,” the key concept is “make sure.” This is the language not of education but of indoctrination, a characteristic traditionally associated with totalitarian regimes that mobilize whatever resources are required to “make sure” people toe the line.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The idea of “making sure” that children “understand” should be seen as an aporia, a simple contradiction, since true understanding means appreciating what one cannot be sure of — in other words, of putting things in perspective. Hawley clearly wants to remove what he calls the “ideals” from their context. This is more about undermining than understanding.

      There are similarities between Macron’s and Hawley’s approach to normalizing understanding and testing for loyalty.

      The Democrats’ Competing Priorities 

      US President Joe Biden has claimed that transformative FDR-style reforms are his priority and opposed Donald Trump’s race to further bloat the defense budget. Biden’s party in Congress is implementing its own priorities, similar to Trump’s.

      “One has to wonder what is even the point of a Senate Democratic majority if they’re going to not only continue Trump policies but work with Senate Republicans to undermine [Biden’s] priorities. Utterly pathetic,” tweeted Stephen Miles, executive director of Win Without War.

      Priority:

      Something political leaders want the public to believe is the first thing they wish to accomplish, even when they have no intention of implementing the stated policy and also expect it will not be implemented

      The Context

      During last year’s presidential campaign, Defense News reported that Biden said that “if elected president, he doesn’t foresee major reductions in the U.S. defense budget as the military refocuses its attention to potential threats from ‘near-peer’ powers such as China and Russia.” The website nevertheless suspected that “internal pressure from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, combined with pandemic-related economic pressures, may ultimately add up to budget cuts at a Biden Pentagon.”

      In a comic historical twist, Biden did not propose a reduction in the defense budget, but instead a modest increase despite drawing down the US commitment in the Middle East. The Senate Armed Services Committee, with a majority of Democrats, applied its pressure not to reduce the budget, but to spend even more than Biden demanded. The only “internal pressure” came from one isolated progressive, outvoted by 25 Democrats and Republicans.

      The moral of the story is clear. The president cannot run the country because even the policies he prefers (sincerely or insincerely) will be overturned by the all-powerful military-industrial complex that controls Congress. Defense is no longer about defending the nation, which is already extremely well defended. It’s about supporting the defense industries that are at the core of the economy and the focus of politicians’ attention. Spending freely on defense is the norm even in a nation that hates any spending other than consumer spending. The taxpayers will never complain, because they have been taught that producing arsenals that will never be needed is consistent with the belief in the “ideals of hope and promise our Founding Fathers fought for,” to quote Hawley again.

      Embed from Getty Images

      As the wealth gap continues to grow and the effects of both the COVID-19 pandemic and a growing climate crisis have spread more misery across the nation, the Republicans and Democrats on the Armed Services Committee appear to blissfully ignore the observation of a former Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

      The US Counters a Global Overture Threat

      It goes without saying that, given the multiplicity of threats to “national security,” the US is supposed to be everywhere in the world as a military presence. For two decades, terrorism was the main pretext, but its attraction has faded, allowing other missions to emerge, especially in Africa.

      “Now, in addition to fighting violent extremist groups, they have to counter Chinese and Russian overtures in a region where great powers are increasingly competing for access, influence, and resources,” writes Stavros Atlamazoglou in Business Insider

      Overture:

      Any initiative taken by a rival power in territories currently dominated by Western colonial and neocolonial powers, especially in regions where US troops are already present as a reminder that these are the West’s private hunting grounds

      The Context

      America’s hard power, its famed military might, appears to have a new challenge. This time it isn’t a foreign army, insurgents or terrorist cells. It is, as Atlamazoglou explains, something far more frightening: “Chinese aid, in the form of loans or infrastructure development,” part of “Beijing’s quest for natural resources and global legitimacy.” How dare the most populous nation on earth seek “natural resources and global legitimacy?” No one has called them off the bench to play the same game Western powers have excelled at for the past 500 years.

      Then there is the Russian variant, which is more respectful of the well-established American model. “Russia sells arms and provides political advisors in addition to hunting for lucrative contracts for natural resources and other geopolitical benefits,” Atlamazoglou writes. The two former rivals have remained faithful to the methods developed in that golden age politicians remember as the Cold War.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Atlamazoglou relies heavily on the testimony of John Black, a retired Special Forces warrant officer, who observes that American ambassadors need “to look at the country as a whole and take more risks, use [the US] military arm to effect real change within a country.” The stirring examples of Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya demonstrate how “real change” can take place when you accept to “take more risks.”

      Black understands the risk, apparently viscerally: “China or Russia might not hesitate to work with a dictator with an abdominal [sic] human-rights record to further their geopolitical goals.” Could he have possibly meant “abominable?” Or does this describe a brutal regime that weaponizes diarrhea? Citing the US commitment to the rule of law, Black implies that the US would never cavort with a dictator possessed of an abominable human-rights record.

      How did the usually serious Business Insider allow such an “abdominal” article to appear?  

      The Great Reset: The Effect of Coordination or Chaos?

      The magnates of Davos recently agreed to mobilize their forces to implement what they call the “Great Reset,” ushering in a new golden age of socially responsible capitalism. All it requires is some concerted action under their leadership.  

      Gillian Tett, writing for the Financial Times, seems to envision a different scenario: “The total global debt is now more than three times the size of the global economy, since debt — and money — has expanded inexorably since 1971. It seems most unlikely this can ever be repaid just by growth; sooner or later — and it may be much later — this will probably cause a direct or indirect restructuring or a social or financial implosion.”

      Restructuring:

      The process by which the laws of inertia teach human beings with political and economic power, who believe they possess the intelligence capable of problem-solving, that such a belief can only be an illusion

      The Context

      Humanity finds itself struggling with a straightforward situation: multiple crises related to health, climate and an economy functioning on increasingly absurd principles. Theoretically, they can all be addressed through a harmonious global focus on rational resource management followed by intelligent decision-making. But history demonstrates on a daily basis that society has delegated decision-making to: first, individuals within nations (consumers and voters); second, nations (each competing one another); and third, those who govern the nations (theoretically, politicians whose sole aim is to hold onto power once they have acquired it and who are beholden to anyone who assists them in achieving that goal).

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      In other words, the more universal the problem, the less likely it will be that it may be solved. Local and national crises continue to exist, but they have now become dominated by universal crises. The consumer economy and the quasi-democratic nation-states are structured, in terms of decision-making, in a way that makes any voluntary effort at restructuring impossible.

      Not only do our economies and political systems need restructuring. Our thinking about who we are and how we function as a society needs some serious revision.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      France’s Electoral Abyss

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      Across the globe, democracy appears to be in a curious state. One of the main indicators of the health or pathology of democracy is the turnout in elections. Some might claim that the high turnout for the Biden-Trump face-off last year was a sign of health for US democracy.

      But the aftermath — marked by the “stop the steal” movement, a riotous occupation of the Capitol building and a continued spirit of revolt by a significant proportion of the citizenry as well as some prominent politicians — reveals that the spectacular numbers achieved by both candidates in the presidential election were a sign of high fever in the body politic rather than healthy democratic engagement. Many commentators noticed that voting against a particular candidate — Hillary Clinton in 2016, Donald Trump in 2020 — rather than voting for a preferred candidate may have been the determining factor in those two elections.

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      Iran’s presidential election on June 18 was notable for its low turnout. But that is what everyone expected. Iran’s centrally controlled electoral system, emanating from a strictly hierarchical governmental structure in which the power of the president is extremely restricted, produces elections that are more accurately referred to as “selections.”

      Though the two-party system in the US, sometimes referred to as a “duopoly,” leaves itself open to a similar critique, Western democracies still hold onto the idea that elections are expressions of vox populi, reflecting the will of the people. The general trend noted in recent years and in many democratic nations toward levels of abstention that often dip below 50% indicates that belief in democracy as a viable representative form of government may be far less solid than politicians and educators like to affirm.

      France set a record on June 20 for its combined departmental and regional elections, two distinct opportunities to vote on the same day in the same place. With nearly 33.3% showing up to vote, two-thirds of the electorate simply didn’t bother. The only worse showing was in a referendum in 2000, where only 30% of the electorate bothered to vote on shortening the length of a presidential term. On Sunday, the abstention figure was dramatic enough, in any case, for President Emmanuel Macron’s press secretary to term it “abyssale” (abysmal).

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Abyssale:

      A French adjective, usually translated in English as “abysmal,” but with a more literal meaning that serves to compare what is being described to a literal abyss, something most French people also consider to be an appropriate characterization of the level of competence and efficacy of the current French government and more generally of the political class

      Contextual Note

      Macron’s government has every reason to deem the result of this first round abysmal. Occurring less than a year before the 2022 presidential election in which Macron hopes to break the recent trend of one-term presidents (Nicolas Sarkozy and Francois Hollande), the media and the pollsters regarded these local elections primarily as an indicator of what to expect in next May’s contest. The majority party — itself a “bricolage,” an assemblage cobbled together after Macron’s freak parting of the Red Sea in 2017 — performed particularly badly, not even attaining the 10% required to remain in the running for the second round in five of the 13 regions. 

      Embed from Getty Images

      For most of his term, Macron has had low approval ratings. He has never earned the admiration of the masses that presidents of the Fifth Republic once managed to achieve, though there have been moments when the French were willing to respect his apparent competence. This was especially true after his initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic. But there are other moments, far more frequent, in which his popularity has not only faded, but Macron himself has become an object of public scorn. The yellow vest movement that raged in 2018 and 2019 is the closest thing in modern times to the kind of popular revolt immortalized during the French Revolution that more than two centuries ago, at least provisionally, abolished the monarchy.

      The commentators were even more surprised by the unexpectedly low score of Marine Le Pen’s right-wing populist party, the National Rally, formerly the National Front. The media have been building up the idea that the second round of next year’s presidential election will inevitably be a remake of 2017, with a rising Le Pen challenging a fading Macron, a recipe for anguished suspense among those less tempted by fascism. Over the next week, and immediately following the second-round results, the pundits will begin drawing conclusions about what this tells us about who will actually be present in the second round next year and how they may fare. 

      The same pundits may even decide that it means nothing at all, given the rate of abstention. Prognostication has suddenly become a more difficult exercise. The manifest indifference of the electorate to everything that politicians believe is important does, however, tell us something about the state of democracy in France in what may be the waning years of the Fifth Republic. L’Obs, a left-center weekly, cites what it calls “fatigue démocratique,” a weariness with the very rituals of democracy.

      Historical Note

      The one dramatic indicator early commentators have highlighted is the apparent victory of the traditional right that had formerly been humiliated, finding itself in a no-man’s-land between Emmanuel Macron’s increasingly right-wing neoliberal center and Marine Le Pen’s xenophobic right-wing nationalism. Some see it as a sign of rejuvenation for the Gaullist tradition. The leader of Les Républicains, Xavier Bertrand, has been trying to resist Macron’s sedulous attempt to laminate the traditional right by adopting not only its policy themes, but also the demagogic Islamophobia of Le Pen’s party.

      President Macron, the self-declared centrist, was counting on using his status as incumbent to position himself in a way that would make him attractive to a full range of voters on the right, while assuming that in his contest with Le Pen in the second round, he would also pick up most of the voters on the left who would be afraid to abstain. This could be compared on some points with Joe Biden’s successful strategy in the 2020 US presidential election.

      Les Républicains appear as the real winners for the moment, if only because they have thrown a wrench into Macron’s 2022 strategy. There now may be a stronger likelihood that Bertrand will reach the second round opposite Macron, or possibly even opposite Le Pen. This is a cause of deep embarrassment, if not consternation. The combination of Le Pen’s low score and the Républicains’ success means that the traditional right — whose continuity dates back to Jacques Chirac and, ultimately, Charles De Gaulle, the founder of the Fifth Republic — may have recovered its mojo that so suddenly faded in 2017 following the scandals of its leading candidate, Francois Fillon, and its most recent president, Nicolas Sarkozy. The latter was recently convicted for electoral fraud and has been sentenced to six months in prison.

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      The media hasn’t begun asking the real historical question that underlies this curious drama. The parties are one thing, but what about the French people? What do they think, and what do they want at this historical “inflection point,” to quote Biden? The yellow vest spirit is still floating in the air, maybe even permeating the atmosphere.

      The only candidate to have dared to talk about the eventuality of a Sixth Republic is Jean-Luc Melenchon, the left-wing populist candidate who fared honorably in the first round of the 2017 election at a moment when the once conquering Socialist Party imploded. The French media refuse to take Melenchon seriously, except as a foil to the legitimate pretenders. He has been cast in the role of the French Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders, with a stronger intelligence, a more marked strain of rebelliousness against the establishment, but less charisma. Though he could never win a presidential election, he is still the strongest political personality on the left.

      With other crises brewing — a pandemic still dragging on, hints of a possible new global financial crisis, a deepening climate crisis, exacerbated European instability, complemented by shaky leadership in the US — the French may simply be wondering how voting for anyone promises to accomplish anything worthwhile.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      Macron’s Campaign to Reveal France’s Historical Sins

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      One of the worst humanitarian disasters of the past 30 years took place in 1994 in Rwanda. Approximately 800,000 people died in a genocidal campaign led by the Hutu majority against the Tutsi minority. The rampage began after Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down. The Hutus immediately blamed the Tutsis and initiated a “well-organized campaign of slaughter” that lasted several months. A new French report on the Rwandan genocide has revealed some uglier truths about the role played by Western powers — particularly France.

      Since his election, French President Emmanuel Macron has demonstrated what some French patriots feel is a morbid curiosity about the history of France’s relations with the African continent. In the first three months of 2021, two reports by French historians tasked by Macron to tell the truth have been released. The first concerns France’s role in the Algerian War of Independence between 1954 and 1962, and the second, the Rwandan genocide.

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      Le Monde describes the 1,200-page Rwandan report as “solid, established by independent researchers and founded on newly opened archives.” Shortly after taking office in 2017, Macron asked historian Vincent Duclert to elucidate France’s role in the Rwandan genocide. Al Jazeera describes the report as criticizing “the French authorities under [Francois] Mitterrand for adopting a ‘binary view’ that set Habyarimana as a ‘Hutu ally’ against an ‘enemy’ of Tutsi forces backed by Uganda, and then offering military intervention only ‘belatedly’ when it was too late to halt the genocide.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Binary view:

      A prevalent mindset among leaders responsible for foreign policy in powerful nations, whose tendency to reduce every problem to a contest between two diametrically opposed points of view permits them to justify the most cynical and cruelly destructive policies

      Contextual Note

      In the aftermath of the genocide, analysts speculated about whom to blame, not only concerning the genocide itself but also the failure to prevent it from spinning out of control. As the leader of the nation whose role as “policeman of the world” became consolidated after the fall of the Soviet Union, US President Bill Clinton exhibited an apparent “indifference” to tribal slaughter in Africa. It included deliberate “efforts to constrain U.N. peacekeeping.” Canadian General Romeo Dallaire accused Clinton of establishing “a policy that he did not want to know,” even though since 1992, US intelligence had been aware of a serious Hutu plan to carry out genocide.

      French President Francois Mitterand’s guilt, it now turns out, was far more patent and direct than Clinton’s. The historians who authored the French report call it “a defeat of thinking” on the part of an administration never held accountable for its “continual blindness of its support for a racist, corrupt and violent regime.” Astonishingly, the report reveals that “French intelligence knew it was Hutu extremists that shot President Habyarimana’s plane down, which was seen as the trigger for the genocide.” Le Monde attributes Mitterand’s blindness to his “personal relationship” with the slain Hutu president.

      Historical Note

      By sneaking through the gaping cracks in the traditional parties on the right and left to be elected president, Emmanuel Macron became the leader of a new party created for the purpose of providing him with a majority in the 2017 parliamentary election that followed his historic victory. As a political maverick, Macron felt himself liberated from at least some of the shackles of history.

      He first dared to do what Fifth Republic presidents of the past had carefully avoided when, as a candidate, he attacked the very idea of colonization, which not only played an essential role in France’s past, but continued to produce its effects through the concept of Francafrique. In an interview in Algiers, the Algerian capital, early in the 2017 presidential campaign, Macron described colonization as a “genuinely barbaric” practice, adding that it “constitutes a part of our past that we have to confront by also apologising to those against whom we committed these acts.”

      Politicians on the right predictably denounced what they qualified as Macron’s “hatred of our history, this perpetual repentance that is unworthy of a candidate for the presidency of the republic.” This is the usual complaint of the nationalist right in every Western nation. Recently, columnist Ben Weingarten complained that Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project for The New York Times Magazine was motivated by “hatred for America.” Patriots in every country tend to believe that exposing any embarrassing historical truth is tantamount to hate and intolerance of their own noble traditions. Telling the truth is treasonous.

      Embed from Getty Images

      In January 2021, the historian Benjamin Stora presented the report Macron commissioned him to produce on France’s historical relationship with Algeria. Stora proposed the “creation of a joint ‘Memory and Truth’ commission.” The report also recommended “restitution, recognition of certain crimes, publication of lists of the disappeared, access to archives” and “creation of places of memory.” Suddenly, Macron realized that he had received more than he bargained for. As the website JusticeInfo.net reported, “The French presidency said there was ‘no question of showing repentance’ or of ‘presenting an apology’ for the occupation of Algeria or the bloody eight-year war that ended 132 years of French rule.”

      These two examples demonstrate France’s curious relationship with history. They also tell us about how powerful nations elaborate and execute their foreign policy. France is not alone. Every nation’s policy starts from a sense of national interest. The ensuing analysis begins by assessing threats to it. These may be military, economic or even cultural. In the case of military threat, the nation in question will be branded either an enemy or, if diplomatic politeness prevails, an adversary. When the discord is purely economic, the other nation will most likely be called a competitor or a rival. When the threat is cultural — as when Lebanon and Israel square off against each other about who makes the most authentic hummus — foreign policy experts will simply shut up and enjoy the show.

      On the other hand, three forms of cultural competition — linguistic, tribal and religious rivalries — have real implications for the exercise of power and may seriously influence the perception of whether what is at stake is enmity, rivalry or friendly competition. The danger in such cases lies in confusing cultural frictions with political ambitions.

      The two French reports reveal that the very idea of “national interest” may not be as innocent as it sounds. It can also mean “extranational indifference,” or worse. Indifference turns out to be not just a harmless alternative to the aggressive pursuit of national interest. In some cases, it translates as a convenient pretext for the toleration or even encouragement of brutally inhuman practices. That is why Rwanda may be a stain on both Francois Mitterand’s and Bill Clinton’s legacies.

      Another feature of modern policy may appear less extreme than the tolerance of genocide while being just as deadly. As Noam Chomsky, Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies and others have repeatedly asserted, the imposition of drastic sanctions has become a major weapon in the US foreign policy arsenal. Sanctions essentially and often sadistically target civilian populations with little effect on the targeted leaders. Sanctions have become an automatic reflex mobilized not just against enemies or rivals, but also against the economically disobedient, nations that purchase goods from the wrong designated supplier.

      In 2012, Saeed Kamali Dehghan, writing for The Guardian, noted that the Obama administration’s sanctions on Iran were “pushing ordinary Iranians to the edge of poverty, destroying the quality of their lives, isolating them from the outside world and most importantly, blocking their path to democracy.” Nine years later, those sanctions were made more extreme under Donald Trump and continue unabated under President Joe Biden. All the consequences Dehghan listed have continued, with no effect on the hard-line Iranian regime’s hold on power. Can anyone pretend that such policies are consistent with a commitment to human rights? Do they reveal the existence of even an ounce of empathy for human beings other than one’s own voters?

      The French at least have solicited truthful historical research about their past. But politicians like Macron, who have encouraged the research, inevitably turn out to be too embarrassed by the truth to seek any form of reparation. After commissioning it, they prefer to deny the need for it.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      Macron Enriches French Vocabulary and Impoverishes Political Thought

      by

      France appears to be living through a strange transitional period that could be described as the waning of the Fifth Republic. It contains no sense of what a sixth republic might look like or why it might even be necessary. But today’s republic, with its unique electoral system, has achieved a summit of incoherence. The current president, Emmanuel Macron, has only one thing in mind: getting reelected in 2022 and maintaining the shaky status quo. 

      The Fifth Republic had a few moments of glory marked by at least three somewhat illustrious personalities who became president. The actions of these three men left a mark on the memory of the French. Their names? Charles de Gaulle, Francois Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac. The only recent president to make a valiant but ultimately futile attempt to achieve their stature, Nicolas Sarkozy, was just this week convicted of corruption and sentenced to three years in prison.

      Serious Politics Is Not About Recalibration

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      Macron hoped to surpass them all but has clearly failed. Instead of playing by the consecrated rules of the Fifth Republic dominated by powerful parties, he profited from a sudden and unexpected vacuum within both the traditional right and the traditional left to sneak through the cracks and create the illusion that a system permanently dominated by the “alternance” of right and left could be run from the center. 

      It was quite an achievement, but Macron failed to understand that modern French political thinking is not about vague ideas or even attractive personalities. It remains based on the notion of “engagement” (commitment) in favor of one or another strong position. The center Macron so proudly claimed to represent has always been seen as spineless and fundamentally unexciting. At best it reflects a commitment to bureaucracy, which the French have no respect for but cannot live without.

      In 2017, it looked like a free ride for Macron that would last five years thanks to a guaranteed majority in parliament, no viable opposition and a public initially willing to entertain the centrist experiment. But it has become a living hell. Macron never managed to build his own party into something that could represent a political force, despite his massive majority elected to parliament on the coattails of his 2017 electoral victory.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Now, Macron finds himself embroiled in a controversy of his own creation. Its focus has been defining Islam as the enemy and intellectuals sympathizing with Muslims as the enemy within. In November 2020, The Atlantic reported that “Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer has bemoaned the influence of American critical race theory on the French social sciences, blaming them for undermining France’s race- and ethnicity-blind universalism, and for giving comfort to ‘islamo-gauchisme,’ or ‘Islamo-leftism.’” Then, just two weeks ago, France’s higher education minister, Frederique Vidal, set off an uproar in the media and in academe itself when she demanded an “investigation” be carried out into “Islamo-leftist” influence within the universities and research community.

      This spectacular initiative has ended up having a closer resemblance to QAnon than to traditional French intellectual creativity and freedom. Vidal now wants the French to believe that universities and research institutes are harboring a cabal that englobes the French left (irresponsible intellectuals with ideas no sane Frenchmen would endorse) and Islamist extremists (murderous jihadist activists) in an unholy alliance that is threatening the security of the Republic.

      Why? Because a number of serious thinkers have dared to detect a link between the history of European colonialism, including the extension of some its practices into the present, and the rise of violent revolt by Islamic extremists against a system they believe to be oppressive of their people and their people’s well-being. Detecting historical links — or at least certain specific links — has become a crime that can no longer be tolerated.

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Islamo-gauchiste:

      A faux portmanteau word invented by Emmanuel Macron’s government to create the belief that two segments of French society, each with its own tradition of respectability — leftist thinkers and the Muslims who were part of the booty of the former French empire — are plotting to overthrow the modern mainstream, neoliberal, corporatist and implicitly racist consensus that Macron’s party believes to be the main voting bloc in French society today

      Contextual Note

      Macron’s desire to profit from the fear of Muslims that has attracted voters to his main rival, Marine Le Pen, is understandable, though risky since its anti-intellectual belligerence alienates many to the left of center. More surprising is one of its oddest features, that its promoters have coupled it with an appeal to a long-standing trend among the French of anti-Americanism. It claims to be anti-Islamic, anti-intellectual and anti-American, all at the same time.

      It isn’t enough to attack French researchers who propose readings of history that make French colonial incursions into Muslim lands look inglorious. The Macronists are now affirming that this acknowledgment of France’s historical injustice toward its minorities is an example of slavish emulation of American “critical race theory” that has now infected the minds of a generation of French academics. It’s all the fault of American “wokism,” which has no place in French culture.

      Le Monde has long been the serious newspaper of the intellectual rather than the activist left. Since the end of the Second World War, it has stood as the alternative to the other “serious” newspaper, Le Figaro, which reflected the positions of the establishment right and more specifically the Gaullists. De Gaulle, after all, was the founder of the Fifth Republic.

      Macron claims to be neither right nor left, but his electoral strategy has clearly pushed him to commit to policies agreeable to the right. Responding to the proposal of an investigation into academic Islamo-gauchisme, Le Monde immediately published the appeal launched by 600 academics condemning Vidal’s obscurantist effort. The signatories included the immensely successful Thomas Piketty, highly respected on the left. No one would think of branding Piketty as an Islamo-gauchiste.

      Historical Note

      For nearly a century, the French have complained about the attack on the noble purity of the language of Racine and Voltaire by the importation of English words. In the past, governments have legislated to prevent modern French vocabulary from being overwhelmed by trendy American coinages. That hasn’t prevented French people, and especially professionals, from using the very “anglicisms” they are expected to patriotically deplore. “Low-cost” could simply be called “pas cher” but not by people in business, who prefer the English term. Buzz, open space, leader, flop, play-list, best-of and the verb “booster” (to boost) are commonly spoken. Many deem these words illegal occupiers, on a par with the postcolonial invasion of North African immigrants. Neither of them has any business being here and sapping French culture.

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      Interviewed by the magazine L’Obs, political analyst Olivier Roy provides an acute analysis of the French president’s absurd and futile attempt to strategize his reelection: “Emmanuel Macron believes he is playing a grand strategic game by aiming to reach the second round of the next presidential elections in a face-off against Marine Le Pen.” Macron’s ministers are no longer working for the French republic. They are working for Macron’s reelection in 2022. 

      Recent polls show Le Pen within two points of Macron. For Jean-Michel Blanquer and Frederique Vidal, to steal votes from Le Pen’s white working-class constituency, intellectuals on the left must be branded as traitors to the white European republic. They may be unhappy, but just as US President Joe Biden did with progressive Democrats, the Macronists count on the vast majority on the left to vote against Le Pen.

      What Macron fails to realize is that his quandary is closer to the Democratic Party’s failure in the 2016 US presidential election than its success in 2020. Like Hillary Clinton in 2016, people now see him as a shabby, ineffective pillar of a discredited establishment. Nobody likes Macron enough to want to see him hanging around for another five years. As Roy points out, the strategy he has devised is absurd. He cannot win over Le Pen voters. His commitment to Europe has made him their enemy. And now polls show that many on the left will no longer be intimidated to vote for someone so committed to betraying them and their intellectual culture.

      After two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, 2022 promises to be the year of political pandemonium.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      Unchanged or Unchained: What’s in Store for the JCPOA?

      by

      When any new US president is inaugurated, especially when there is a change of party, the world expects some kind of serious change. Despite the fact that since 1992 every change of president has seen a change of the party in power, continuity has been the most consistent feature of those moments of transition. Every president has to embody change without betraying a system that insists on remaining permanent. 

      Over the next few months, observers will be wondering how President Joe Biden intends to play the game of balancing change and continuity, especially after Donald Trump’s radical attempt to rewrite the rules of the game. One of the key issues on which Trump carried out his fanatical zeal was the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), known as the Iran deal.

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      Biden’s team has affirmed its intention to rejoin the nuclear deal, breaking with Trump and returning to Barack Obama’s status quo. But voices in the Biden administration have indicated that it will only happen if there is a significant change in the terms, which was also Trump’s position. As speculation mounts concerning Biden’s intentions, Al Jazeera offers the following subtitle to an article on the JCPOA: “Iranian foreign ministry says deal ‘unchangeable’ after French President Macron calls for talks to include Saudi Arabia.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Unchangeable:

      Not subject to the normal practice of politicians, which consists of exploiting every absurd pretext available to them in a political game to move the goalposts before restarting a game that they have themselves interrupted

      Contextual Note

      Trump, the former US president, promised change and to a certain extent delivered it. The most significant change in US foreign policy he managed to accomplish was sowing confusion across the globe by practicing an incomprehensible policy labeled “America First.” When applied to the Middle East and led by his viceroy and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, it could have been called “Israel first.” This included some serious initiatives such as moving the US Embassy to Tel Aviv, endorsing the colonization of the Golan Heights, consolidating a kind of triumvirate of interests between the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia, and positioning Israel as an indefectible ally and trading partner of the Sunni oil states in the Gulf, thereby undermining the traditional obligation of Arab states to show solidarity with the Palestinian cause.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Withdrawing from the JCPOA in 2018 was an important component of Trump’s Israel first policy. For Trump, withdrawing from the deal was the ultimate symbol of his break with the politics of the Obama administration. Many assume that it will be the emblematic symbol of the Biden administration’s rupture with the Trump era. But it turns out to be far more complicated than just returning to the status quo ante Trump. Whether it’s the consequence of President Biden’s timidity or the success of Trump’s nationalistic propaganda, the Biden team appears to feel bound to imposing new conditions, perhaps to prove that Biden is not just a duplicate of Obama. Israeli interests play a role in that repositioning.

      The easiest route for a Democratic president would be to apologize for Trump’s hubris, call the whole thing a mistake and proclaim the USA’s good faith by quietly returning to the deal on the same terms after that inadvertent interruption. But to be credible, American presidents must show they are tough. True tough guys don’t bend to the other party’s terms even when they are the one that betrayed all the other partners’ trust. Tough guys require compensation for their willingness to make a friendly gesture.

      Curiously, French President Emmanuel Macron has stepped in to play a secondary tough guy role by casually insisting that Saudi Arabia should now be associated with the deal, a proposition that makes no sense at all. Macron has several good reasons to appear as a tough guy. He has an election coming up next year where he is pitted against the xenophobic Marine Le Pen. Part of his strategy in recent months has been to demonstrate that with Arabs and Muslims he’s capable of being a tough guy. He helpfully instructed the Muslim world in November 2020 that Islam was in crisis, just in case Muslims themselves hadn’t noticed. 

      Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman, Saeed Khatibzadeh, struck back with this cutting response: “If the French authorities are worried about selling their huge cargoes of arms to the Arab countries of the Persian Gulf, it is better to reconsider their policies.” The Iranians cannot have missed the fact that Macron offered his remarks not to the signatories of the agreement or even to his own French media, but to the Saudi TV channel, Al Arabiya. Khatibzadeh was spot on about Macron’s real motive.

      Historical Note

      Since 1992, the departure of every sitting US president has always been followed by the arrival of a president from the opposing party. In 2001, Republican George W. Bush promised to reign as a “compassionate conservative,” a strategy designed to reassure the nation and create a sense of continuity with the Democrat, Bill Clinton. Bush subsequently demonstrated the full extent of his compassion by offering massive tax breaks to the rich and then going to war with a major portion of humanity.

      Democrat Barack Obama owed his election to the enthusiasm of voters who rallied behind his theme of “hope and change” and his opposition to Bush’s wars in the Middle East. The Nobel committee was so impressed it immediately awarded Obama the Nobel Peace Prize. Once in action, “hope and change” oddly morphed into “pretty much the same thing,” but with better PR than the Bush-Cheney team. That consolidated a different kind of change, within the Democratic Party itself, which now felt totally comfortable embracing the traditional free market ideology of the Republicans. It fulfilled the trend that Clinton had launched in the 1990s.

      Obama, the peace candidate of 2008 who defeated the hawkish wife of Bill Clinton in the Democratic primaries, became the US president who dropped the most bombs on foreign countries. Under the Espionage Act, he arrested more of the whistleblowers he had promised to protect than all other presidents combined. He installed and defended a profoundly military conception of US democracy, which extended to the militarizing of urban law enforcement, to the extreme detriment of the black community. His practical understanding of change was to shift as far away from his campaign promises as possible.

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      Donald Trump presented himself in the 2016 election as the ultimate outlier. To win over the voters disappointed by Obama’s policies, he promised to change everything. He definitely changed the idea of presidential style and its methods of communication. Trump promised much more, such as draining the swamp and bringing home US troops after ending the wars. He did neither. Instead, the institutions of the US found themselves more deeply ensconced in an immobile status quo imposed by an oligarchy that had been in place for decades. What did change, however, was the image of the US across the globe. US prestige reached an all-time low.

      All this highlights the weird relationship US politics now has with the very idea of change. What was once framed as the nation’s historic mission to ameliorate the conditions of humanity by spreading democracy and modernizing the economy (the ideology some call neoliberalism) now could be seen as a cynical tactic for promoting any number of vested interests, all in the name of positive change. When Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal and the 2015 Paris climate accord — two agreements that most of humanity considered vital to the future — the idea of change would always come from the whim of an executive suddenly achieved a legitimacy that no previous president had dared to affirm.

      Trumpism appears to have left a serious trace on all forms of political discourse in the US. It has validated cynicism and opportunism in a way that was previously unthinkable. It has modified the expectations of political actors and of the public itself. Although the accumulation of power by the executive has been in the works for some time, Joe Biden’s signing a mountain of executive orders in his first days in office validates the legitimacy of Trump’s innovation.

      Americans once believed that a signed contract was law and could not be changed even in changing circumstances. That assumption in US culture appears to have changed.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    • 175 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      'Great expectations': how world leaders reacted to Biden and Harris's election win – video

      by

      Most world leaders rushed to congratulate Joe Biden on his election on Twitter, and spoke of ‘hope’ and ‘expectation’ in later statements.
      Biden’s key foreign policy priorities are cooperation in the fight against coronavirus, a commitment to rejoin the UN Paris climate agreement and, more broadly, to promise a change in tone toward traditional US allies. 
      Russia and China are yet to congratulate the president-elect, as the outgoing president, Donald Trump, is yet to concede defeat
      Russia and China silence speaks volumes as leaders congratulate Biden More

    • 88 Shares99 Views

      in World Politics

      Muslims Will Not Kill God for Marianne

      by

      Two conflicting narratives have been clashing anew in extremely heated debates amid what we may call “a new cartoon crisis.” On one side, there is a sizable portion of orthodox Muslims with a strong aniconism tradition and who perceive the representation of sacred characters as unpardonable blasphemy. On the other are defenders of secularism who consider freedom of expression a holy human right. The world is witnessing the confrontation of two epistemologically divergent civilizations: a humanist one that killed God and put the human at its center, and a metaphysical one ready to die and kill for its deity and sacrosanct icons.

      Is Peace Religious or Secular?

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      “Islam is a religion that is in crisis,” stated French President Emmanuel Macron, as he unveiled his plan to defend French secularism against Islamic extremism in early October. This prompted a backlash from Muslim communities around the world. The events escalated further amidst the beheading of a French teacher who shared with his class derogatory caricatures featuring Prophet Muhammad. In an act of defiance, Macron insisted the French will make no concessions and would “not cease drawing caricatures” as Paris displayed gigantic reproductions of the cartoons in question on government buildings.

      Post-Truth Era

      The current situation is a classic case of a post-truth-era dilemma. Each camp firmly believes it is the keeper of a universal, irrefutable truth, while in reality it lives inside its own ideological bubble and refuses to accept that there are other truths out there and probably a transcendental one that is beyond all opposing paradigms.

      Post-truth — which was named the Word of the Year in 2016 by the Oxford Dictionary in the midst of the divisions caused by Brexit and the election of Donald Trump — is a philosophical concept that signals a context where shared rational facts are replaced by subjective and emotional beliefs that shape public opinion. French humanism is rooted in centuries of reforms ending in a rupture between the state and the church. Muslim societies lived a completely different historical reality, where metaphysics are central and populations still romanticize the theological concept of the umma (global Muslim community).

      Embed from Getty Images

      In an ideal world, both “truths” would be able to coexist peacefully. Nevertheless, France never overcame its colonial mindset with its good old “civilizing mission.” Macron arrogantly insinuates that it is the white man’s burden to modernize and secularize a Muslim world “in crisis.” Acts of terror committed by Muslims are indubitably repugnant and humanly unacceptable, but so is radical secularization and the extremist modernization dogma that blindly attempts to assimilate citizens into the fifth republic’s grinding machine.

      Defenders of the French perspective would say: Why don’t followers of other religions get angry when we draw Jesus or Moses? This is a shallow and simplistic comparison that does not take into consideration the cultural and anthropological particularity of the Muslim community, nor the sanguinary colonial encounter it had with France just decades back in Africa. It also characterizes the obstinate myopia with which the country of Marianne continues to deal with its almost 6 million Muslims.

      Maybe the most revealing inconsistency in the French discourse can be summed up in a saying repeated by those who call to boycott French products: “Insulting a black person is racism, insulting a Jew is anti-Semitism, insulting a woman is sexism, but insulting a Muslim is freedom of expression.”  

      Both Sides Demonize the Other

      Of course, not all French people are rigid defenders of the values of the republic. Many philosophers, artists and journalists came out to condemn the French president’s provocations. However, as in many post-truth dichotomies, both antagonists compete to demonize the other, which fuels further hate and animosity. Moreover, instead of fighting violent extremism, it can do just the opposite, such as with the previous Danish cartoon controversy of 2005 and the Charlie Hebdo attacks in 2015. Meanwhile, Muslims are flooding the internet with hashtags and memes against Macron, while countries like Kuwait removed French products from its shelves and the Turkish president even questioned the mental health of his counterpart in Paris.

      To answer Macron’s statement, we can regrettably say that France is a country in crisis because of its failure to address systemic racism against Muslims and its refusal to embrace cultural plurality and hybridity. In the French context, Edward Said’s “clash of ignorance” can no longer be used as an excuse to hide the clash of truths between radical secularism and Muslims refusing to kill God for Marianne.

      *[An earlier version of this article was published by Raseef22.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More