US bears all blame, say French elites

"We are all Americans!" proclaimed the uncharacteristic but dramatic and poignant headline in Le Monde, France's left-wing newspaper, on Sept. 12, 2001, the day after the dastardly terrorist attacks on the United States of America. Six years later, the sympathy that rightfully characterized French reactions to infamy and abomination has regrettably vanished. Instead editorials, op-eds and commentaries in France last week almost unanimously blamed America for making the world a far more dangerous place to live, hypocritically rued what they described as America’s loss of prestige and “moral authority," and expectantly looked to French diplomats to broker some sort of international ceasefire and restore peace, love and understanding to a troubled world. They may as well look for them in Sesame Street.

Le Monde, the business daily Les Echos, the center-right Le Figaro, respected commentators on the radio, and prominent political scientists all deplored the fact that American foreign policy in general and the Iraq War in particular have -- as they see it -- directly contributed to today’s instability and insecurity.

If Bin Laden is still at large, defiantly cocking a blood-stained snoot at America through his well-publicized videos, if the Taliban fiend is once again rearing his ugly head in Afghanistan, if Iran is provocatively forging ahead with its nuclear weapons program, and if places like Pakistan, Indonesia, and Africa have become highly-inflammable tinderboxes, the blame (by this account) should unequivocally be laid at America’s door.

In Les Echos, on the 6th anniversary of the New York attacks, a regular columnist called Favilla went so far as to suggest that the American response to terrorism so far has generated so much hatred and sympathy for radical Islam among European-born young Muslims that many of them may well now be contemplating the destruction of the political and philosophical foundations of Europe.

The most striking thing about all these comments was their failure, deliberate or not, to even identify the threat coming from radical Islam. Instead, referring to Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib in particular, all of them insisted on America’s perceived inability to live up to its own democratic and humanitarian ideals and its supposedly ignorant and wrong-headed insistence on seeing the world in terms of good and evil.

Favilla explained that “the gap between [American] rhetoric on human rights and [American] acts at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib has completed the moral decay of the Western World”. The same day, in an editorial called “Of The Vanity of [American] Power”, the coat-turning Le Monde snidely drew attention to what it sees as America’s authoritarian and implicitly xenophobic, if not racist, restrictions on foreigners’ “individual freedoms."

Not coincidentally, the next day, a talk show host on Canal Plus, a popular pay-TV station, devoted a fifteen-minute segment of his prime-time show to a book called “In the Hell of Guantanamo”, written by Murat Kurmaz, a German national of Turkish descent, who was apparently wrongly accused of terrorist wrongdoing and spent four years in Guantanamo. Focusing more specifically on the psychological and physical torture allegedly carried out there, the segment was basically an excuse for indicting America, interdicting whatever sympathy viewers might have had for the country at a time of painful memories for its people.

Finally, in an op-ed published in Le Figaro on this Sept. 11, Nicole Bacharan, a prominent political scientist specializing in American politics, spoke of President Bush’s “obsession," expressed rigorously expert concern that the War in Iraq has been waged so ineptly by the Bush administration that the very foundations of American democracy are being shaken, and generously called for other nations, including France, to help “restore America’s political legitimacy and moral authority."

The most appalling but sadly predictable thing about such self-serving prattle is its lack of courage and logic. Indeed if its authors are so concerned about America’s moral standing, the safety of Europe, and the fate of the Iraqi people, why don’t they deafeningly call President Sarkozy’s bluff and urge him to send French troops to Iraq to help strike down the nihilist threat?

They never will. After all parroting such benighted platitudes as “negotiation” or “appeasement” that were murderously expressed in Munich in 1938 sounds so much more morally civilized, doesn’t it?

A 9/11 tribute from abroad

Upon waking this coming Tuesday, I will think aloud: "Today is 9/11. Today is a sad day. Today is the saddest day of the year." That fateful September 11th six years ago, at about four in the afternoon here in France, I remember getting into my car to go home after an uneventful day’s work. The radio was on and I was half-listening to a news program on the BBC World Service as I leisurely made my way home. I remember being suddenly yanked out of my comfortable daydreaming into a reality that my mind initially failed to grasp when the announcer reminded listeners that “at least 1,500 people were now feared dead in the New York attack”. I immediately reached for my cell phone to ask my wife to turn the TV on to find out what was going on. When she sketchily told me that a jumbo jet had ploughed into the World Trade Center, that the Pentagon had been hit and that a plane had crashed in Pennsylvania in mysterious circumstances I ended the conversation with words to the effect that this was nothing less than a declaration of war and rushed home to appalling pictures of a world in ruins.

Three years later, when the first opportunity came, my wife and I flew to the United States for a summer vacation on the East coast. I must admit that my very first encounter with an inhabitant of the New World turned out to be a little awkward. When I stepped up to the customs officer to show my passport, he asked me what the purpose of my visit to the U.S. was. I hate cheating so the answer I gave came from the heart: “Because I love America.”

The officer looked at me as if something was wrong with me, my sanity, or my mental age, and gave me a second chance when he repeated: “The purpose of your visit to the U.S. is because you love America??!!” I sheepishly said it again: “Yes, because I love America.” Still sizing me up incredulously, the officer eventually gave up and wished me a pleasant stay nonetheless, and I walked into a world that since then has never failed to amaze, fascinate, energize and inspire me.

What is so unique and awe-inspiring about America that still deserves praise and profound deference six years after that horrific attempt to throw us “into a thousand years of darkness”? Paradoxically “universality” encapsulates the essence of America’s uniqueness.

The genius of the Founding Fathers was to devise a system of government that not only worked well for thirteen colonies but also proved adequate and successful for thirty-seven more states. How could the rest of the world deny the potency of a simple formula based on individual freedom from government, constitutional checks and balances, and federalism?

The maverick vision, determination, and dauntlessness of men like Barry Goldwater and President Ronald Reagan to face down enemies morbidly bent on spreading collectivist Utopias, led to the triumph of the free enterprise system. How could the rest of the world deny the morality and efficiency of the most emancipatory economic system the world has ever produced?

None of this would have happened without America’s faith in the individual’s transcendent destiny and in the restraining mechanisms that Tradition has passed on from one generation to the next. How could the rest of the world deny that life is not an outlet for secular instincts? In all these areas and in others, the duty of America is to lead the world by example.

Although America’s image abroad has suffered even more since 2003, Americans should never be ashamed to be Americans. Americans should always be proud of their achievements as a nation since 1776. Americans should always be proud of their investment in freedom and democracy at home and around the world.

On this September 11, 2007 -- and eternally --the duty of America is to keep that French-given beacon in New York Harbor illuminatingly bright to give hope to the “huddled masses” who silently, awkwardly perhaps (as I did), but tenaciously always, proclaim “God bless America!”

Environmental follies in France

"To arms, oh citizens! Form up in serried ranks! March on, march on! May their impure blood / Flow in our fields!" When it was first heard in 1792, the chorus of La Marseillaise, France’s national anthem, left no doubt whatsoever about the determination of French revolutionary troops to win the war their national assembly had just declared on the King of Austria purportedly in the name of freedom. The same kind of Jacobin take-no-prisoners approach has been favored by latter-day French authorities in their latest revolutionary expedition against environmental damage. Too bad if Baby Freedom is being thrown out with the bloody bath water.

The war on environmental recklessness started back in February 2005 when then President Jacques Chirac, otherwise known as a peace-loving world leader, convened all 907 French deputes et senateurs in a special parliamentary session which was held, of all places, in regal Versailles and in which a so-called Charter for the Environment was ratified almost unanimously as an amendment to the French Constitution. Representative government can undoubtedly work wonders when a majority might produce a different outcome at the ballot box in a referendum.

Anyway the charter duly strikes a balance between the singular right of French citizens “to live in a healthy environment” (Article 1) and their plural duties to protect the earth (Articles 2, 3, and 4). Just as importantly, the document democratically goes on to point out in Article 8 that “education and training will have to contribute to the fulfillment of the rights and duties described in the Charter”. Mercifully no mention is made of reeducation camps for recalcitrant green fellow travelers -- but those in France who still believed that representative government and propaganda did not mix have now been warned to think again.

Whether these skeptics like it or not, even French meteorologists will patriotically make sure they put on their green thinking cap by “educating” and “training” viewers, at the end of their televised forecasts, about the various potential environmental dangers of turning on the heat when it’s cold or the air-conditioning when it’s too hot, of performing prolonged ablutions and cooking gargantuan meals. (Now you know why the French are so slim!) For good measure, the democratically naïve will afterwards be treated to three or four segments in the nightly news on environmentally-friendly anchors for fishing vessels, writing materials for school children, and preposterous whatnot.

Of course, French environmental education would not be complete without fiscal illustration. Since November 2006, the French have had to pay a new euphemistically called “eco-participation” (read, “eco-tax”) to help with the costs of recycling electrical and electronic waste.

Finally, early this week, even President Sarkozy, Jacques Chirac’s successor, “trained” his fellow countrymen by lambasting his new American friends with words to the effect that while the U.S. once (can anyone remember when?) couldn’t resist the temptation to use force unilaterally, it now “unfortunately” does not show the same kind of unilateral commitment in the war on global warming.

There is one little inconvenient truth in all this, though. French authorities have actually been too doctrinally successful in their green revolutionary drive. Indeed, this has been one of the coolest and wettest summers in France in almost half a century, and French citizens have apparently been voting with their feet lately: record numbers of them traveled abroad in July and August. The most popular destinations? Sun-drenched resorts.

Time to close the borders?

Note: "Paoli" is the pen name, or should we say nom de plume, of our French correspondent, a close student of European politics and a well-wisher to us Americans. He informs us the original Pasquale Paoli, 1725-1807, was the George Washington of Corsica.

Sarko should read Goldwater

(Lyon, France) Was I too uncompromising in last week's piece about the challenges facing Nicolas Sarkozy as he embarks on his first term as President of France? Some readers, drawing on their own experience of France and French people, may have thought so. However, today, as I perused material on the US presidential election of 1964 as part of my doctoral research, I came across something that makes me think not. It's an article written by Alan L. Otten and published in the Wall Street Journal on September 16, 1964, which quotes extensively from a statement Senator Barry Goldwater “prepared for a 1962 Encyclopaedia Britannica volume on ‘Great Ideas Today’.” There Goldwater gave his definition of the people whom he called “the Forgotten Americans” and whose concerns he endeavored to articulate in the 1964 campaign. He wrote:

“The forgotten American is that dragooned and ignored individual who is either outside the organized pressure groups or who finds himself represented by organizations with whose policies he disagrees either in whole or in part. Big power-blocs and lobbies, labor unions, farm organizations, racial groups, civil liberties groups, consumer groups, nationality groups, cooperatives, educational associations, and even cultural and artistic groups have used their pressures to obtain through Government large benefits for their members, or, at any rate, what the leaders of these groups say are benefits. But the average citizen of the United States, a member of the real majority, pays the price of such pressures, and often is adversely affected.”

Goldwater went on to point out that:

“Though most of [the forgotten Americans] are patient men and women, they are beginning to get their backs up, and no wonder. Every special interest or “minority” has powerful backing in Washington but the forgotten American, who pays the taxes and fights the battles and does the work of the nation, feels that he has been left out. Minorities have real rights which must be protected. But majorities also have rights, and the people outside the pressure groups actually constitute the American majority.”

And the senator said in conclusion:

“[The forgotten American] is annoyed at certain welfare measures that seem to put a premium upon indolence and fraud. He does not like being pushed around. He thinks he has some things worth conserving -church and family and home and constitutional government and property and freedom of opportunity.”

It is quite clear that parallels may legitimately be drawn between the situation described by Sen. Goldwater in America in the early 1960s and the state of affairs in France today, after decades of government expansion. The only exception may be that, at least prior to the 2007 Presidential election, “the Forgotten Frenchman” was assuredly in the minority. Be that as it may, what “the Forgotten Frenchman” now hopes for in the very near future is a conservative revolution of Goldwaterite proportions.

Somebody order a copy of The Conscience of a Conservative for Mr. Sarkozy, Elysee Palace, please.

Note: "Paoli" is the pen name, or should we say nom de plume, of our French correspondent, a close student of European politics and a good friend of America. He informs us the original Pasquale Paoli, 1725-1807, was the George Washington of Corsica.

Challenges for President Sarkozy

Going back to France after spending a year in the western United States brings the ills that stubbornly plague French society into even sharper focus. If Mr. Sarkozy, the new President of France, is to break with the past, as he promised during the campaign earlier this year, and revitalize a sclerotic nation, he will have to take up one formidable challenge: initiating a genuine cultural and psychological revolution in a country where l’exception francaise precludes national self-criticism. Described in very basic terms, France is a socialist country where Thomas Hobbes’ theory of man’s natural state has been fully objectified not despite, but with the full complicity of, Leviathan, leading the nation to decadence.

To put it differently, successive French governments, equally from the center left and the center right, have, in stark and willful contrast to some of their more enlightened Anglo-Saxon counterparts of the early 1980’s, traditionally resorted to the power of the state to insure that all members of society, regardless of merit and abilities, have access to material well-being, fostering irresponsibility and an entitlement mentality in the process.

Egalite in Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite has maddeningly come to be expected to mean equality of outcome.

Cajoling or shoving the French into thinking in terms of self-denial, discipline, self-regulation, and independence will assuredly take more than mere campaign rhetoric. President Sarkozy has shown himself disappointingly conscious of the risks: he has so far basically taken the bite out of his promised reforms in higher education and trade union laws in order to rumple as few feathers as possible.

No wonder the French claim to be happy with President Sarkozy’s elaborate window-dressing so far, as a recent opinion poll shows. Even more ominous is their disapproval of Mr. Sarkozy’s already diluted plans to reduce the number of public employees. Cutting a bloated bureaucracy down to size was counterintuitively not what French citizens expected from their new President when they voted for him back in May.

The reason? The French generally much prefer the law of the jungle to more civilized methods of government. How much more convenient and rewarding for many of them to selectively get together as a group and blackmail a subservient government into extorting for them a share of a pie that others have painstakingly and legitimately prepared and cooked by and for themselves!

Large battalions of selfless bureaucrats are only too happy to oblige. How much more mature of lookers-on to throw tantrums at that particular group’s audacity and success and to blubberingly vow to do the same! How much more electorally worthwhile for Leviathan not to guarantee the rights of the weak against the strong as Hobbes theorized but to cowardly crush the weak in the stampede started by the deceptively strong!

Do the weak really mind? Not a bit! After all, they know they can band together some day too and ransack the nation with a nod and a wink at the only reaction the government can summon enough courage and strength to have. In this context, no one should be surprised that the French word for “qualms” should, to all intents and purposes, have disappeared from the French language.

The importance of social cohesion based on such ideals as responsibility, character, charity, the work ethic, the sanctity of individual freedom consistent with order, free enterprise, and constitutional checks and balances sounds terribly passé, if at all intelligible.

In the five years ahead of him as President, if Mr. Sarkozy is to reconcile the French with each other and steer the country back in the direction of civilization and a constructive role in world affairs, he will have to spend many more summer vacations in Wolfeboro, N.H., … and read John Locke.

Note: "Paoli" is the pen name, or should we say nom de plume, of our French correspondent, a close student of European politics and a good friend of America. He informs us the original Pasquale Paoli, 1725-1807, was the George Washington of Corsica.