The Fanonite

Jean-Paul Sartre: Human All Too Human.

What I find ironic is that BBC couldn’t find anyone better than the clown Bernard-Henry Levy, a man who is perhaps the antithesis of everything Sartre stood for.

The French were denounced by the neocons as ‘Cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ for opposing the war in 2003. Nikolas Sarkozy is on a mission to erase that legacy. He first flattered Americans, and now in almost identical words he flatters the Brits. Starved for anything other than the revulsion the Iraq war has been plying them with, government’s in both countries are lapping it up.

…from your job, if you are living in Israeli Occupied France. Senior civil servant sacked for writing in online column Israel is ‘only state where snipers shoot down little girls outside their school gates’, AP reports. Clearly the French put a very high premium on ‘free speech’.

French senior civil servant has been sacked for publishing a violent anti-Israeli diatribe on a website, the Interior Ministry said.

The atricle was published on March 13 on the Oumma.com website, which serves the Muslim community in France. Bruno Guigue, deputy prefect of the southwestern town of Saintes, wrote that Israel was “the only state where snipers shoot down little girls outside their school gates.”

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When you have a dead people, anyone can come and piss on you. Even those who until recently were being described by their (neocon) friends as ‘cheese eating surrender monkeys’. From Link TV (via TruthDig).

The Mosaic Intelligence Report investigates France’s aggressive new push to involve itself in the Middle East. The French have signed a deal to set up a permanent military base in the Persian Gulf region, the first such facility controlled by a Western nation that isn’t led by George W. Bush.

How did a former colonial power that knew better than to back the Iraq invasion become so interested in sending troops to the Middle East? You’ll have to ask Nicholas Sarkozy, or watch the video below.

Eyewitness report form Mick Napier of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

The people of Gaza have blown up a wall of the biggest prison on earth, and with it they have outflanked Israel, shown international humanitarian law to be a sick joke, shaken the Egyptian dictatorship, and shamed all of those who have stood by and allowed Israel to carry out its crimes unhindered. Among the tens of thousands who overwhelmed yesterday’s harsh opposition from Egyptian security police, some went to visit long-separated relatives, some for life-saving medicines and all to buy necessities of life no longer available in Gaza. While the chancelleries of the world worked to force the Palestinians to abandon all hope of resisting Israel or of recovering their lost lands, once again, as so often in history, tens of thousands of extra-ordinary ‘ordinary people’ - a few of them lightly-armed fighters -cleared the way to freedom.

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The following is a couple of years old, but quite interesting nevertheless. In an apparent attempt to achieve observational symmetry, the writer, Russel Jacoby, ends by extolling the latter’s ‘moral verities’, even though it is well known that Camus failed to live up to his moral convictions (best illustrated by his partisan colonial attitude towards Algeria). Small wonder then that two of his more recent admirers should be none other than the charmingly simian George W. Bush and Orwell manqué Christopher Hitchens . I, of course, remain partial to Sartre.

“One does not jail Voltaire.” So responded the president of France to calls that Jean-Paul Sartre be arrested for backing an independent Algeria. The year was 1960, and Sartre was traveling the world as a radical ambassador, the guest of Castro, Tito and Khrushchev. He spearheaded a politics that denounced colonialism and imperialism. He would soon write what may be his most famous short piece, the preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, in which he lyrically defends the violence of Algerian rebels against French settlers. In 1960 Sartre seemed to be everywhere. In that year too, Albert Camus died, when the sports car driven by his publisher, Michel Gallimard, slammed into a tree. Camus was 46, Sartre 55.

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Black Agenda Report has an excellent piece on the exploitation of the conflict in Darfur for political reasons entitled ‘Ten Reasons Why “Save Darfur” is a PR Scam to Justify the Next US Oil and Resource Wars in Africa‘, except he studiously avoids mentioning the Israel connection. As the article correctly points out, these philanthropists have actively preempted resolution of the conflict in order to have a cause that they could champion and deflect attention from Israeli crimes. However, as the following article by Gbemisola Olujobi (How Not to Help Africans) shows, the members of the Humanitarian Intervention Industry don’t have any compunctions inflicting abuses of their own, so long as it advances their agenda. (p.s. Also check out this poignant plea from an African writer for the West to ‘Stop trying to “save” Africa‘)

The French charity group L’Arche de Zoé (Zoë’s Ark) took 103 Chadian children from their homes with promises of sweets and a trip to the city of Abeche. But the group put the children on a plane that was bound for France, passing them off as “Sudanese orphans from Darfur” who needed urgent medical care and foster homes in France. The fiasco sheds new light on the activities of Western “angels of mercy” in Africa.

What was Zoë’s Ark up to in Chad? On Oct. 25, a plane carrying 103 children was stopped in the Chadian city of Abeche moments before it was to take off to France. The children were swathed in bloody bandages and IV drips. Officials of Zoë’s Ark, the charity group that arranged the airlift, said the children were sick and destitute orphans from Sudan’s conflict-ridden region of Darfur who needed urgent medical attention. They said the children would be placed temporarily with French families after receiving medical treatment.

But something seemed out of place, and Chadian security insisted on checking out these children. They found that their wounds and illnesses were fake. The bandages had been smeared with dark liquid to make them look bloody, and the IV drips were unconnected. On top of it, the children said they were not from Darfur but were in fact Chadians and that no one had told them they were going to France. They had been picked up from their villages by “humanitarians” who gave them sweets and promised them an educational trip to Abeche.

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Commenting on Bernard-Henri Lévy and Alain Finkielkraut, Norma Finkelstein had once said that what they call a ‘charlatan’ in the rest of the world, in France are known as ‘philosophers’. But of course these two are more than mere charlatans — they are also front-line warriors in the Zionist ideological war. It is curious that whenever you pick up any of these manufactured controversies — head scarf, danish cartoons, the veil etc — you will invariably find the instigator a Zionist Jew (Flemming Rose, Levy, Finkielkraut, Steyn, Straw), which is rather sad given the Jews own very recent experience of European persecution.

Here is Laila Lalami on Joan Wallach’s The Politics of the Veil.

“A kind of aggression.” “A successor to the Berlin Wall.” “A lever in the long power struggle between democratic values and fundamentalism.” “An insult to education.” “A terrorist operation.” These descriptions–by former French President Jacques Chirac; economist Jacques Attali; and philosophers Bernard-Henri Lévy, Alain Finkielkraut and André Glucksmann–do not refer to the next great menace to human civilization but rather to the Muslim woman’s headscarf, which covers the hair and neck, or, as it is known in France, the foulard islamique.

In her keenly observed book The Politics of the Veil, historian Joan Wallach Scott examines the particular French obsession with the foulard, which culminated in March 2004 with the adoption of a law that made it illegal for students to display any “conspicuous signs” of religious affiliation. The law further specified that the Muslim headscarf, the Jewish skullcap and large crosses were not to be worn but that “medallions, small crosses, stars of David, hands of Fatima, and small Korans” were permitted. Despite the multireligious contortions, it was very clear, of course, that the law was primarily aimed at Muslim schoolgirls.

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The reports of sabotage on French rail networks appears like the first step in the classic approach to counterinsurgency. It usually takes the form of some kind of violent or seemingly senseless incident that can be used to discredit the strikers and turn the population at large against them. The system was first perfected in the US in the early 20th century to subdue a massive strike by steel workers, and has since been applied in every corner of the world.

Once again, the distinctly pro-State reportage of the British state propaganda organ BBC is noteworthy. Also note the call at the end of the article, for both those affected by the strike and the ones striking to send in their perspectives. The implicit message being that this is some kind of contest between those two parties, rather than the strikers and the state.

The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has called for those who sabotaged his country’s high-speed TGV rail network to be punished with “extreme severity”.

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Today’s guest editorial is a superb, ranging analysis of the decline of the imperial ancien regimes and their global challengers from my friend toni solo.

One can read too much into the unprecedented rude behaviour and abrupt departure of Juan Carlos, Bourbon King of Spain, during the recent Ibero-American summit in Santiago, Chile. Clearly, when he got up and left in the middle of Daniel Ortega’s lucid analysis of international relations, after first telling Hugo Chavez to shut his mouth, he was simply leaving in order to shape-shift discreetly back into George W. Bush. What else explains the astonishing fall of the United States and its European and Pacific allies into ancien regime corrupt decay and relative decline? The President of the United States is the Bourbon King of Spain. Obvious, once you think about it really ….

Ancien regime leaders like President Bush, Gordon Brown, Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and European Union NATO ventriloquist-dummy Javier Solana have now bumped up hard against the limits of their imperialist regime’s economic power and environmental sustainability. Their overwhelming economic dominance no longer goes unchallenged. Their countries’ own natural resources are almost exhausted. Like any other empire in decline they are more than ready to use military power to hold on to what they want.

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