Category: France

‘There Is No Truth … Only Power’

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French degenerate Michel Foucault

Before he died of AIDS, Michel Foucault was a French philosopher and also sodomized boys in Tunisia. These facts are not unrelated.

Any argument must stand or fall on its own merits. As every educated person knows, attempting to refute an argument by attacking the personality of its proponent is a logical fallacy known as ad hominem. Nonetheless, it has been my observation that advocates of unusual arguments — ideas that seem destructive or counter-factual — generally have something in their biography which helps explain their motives.

Communism is the classic example of this phenomenon. Even if a naïve idealist had been persuaded in the early 20th century that Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, et al., had found the secret of liberating mankind from oppression and poverty, the idealism that won him over to Communism as a theory could not have survived the reality of Communism in practice under Stalin. Indeed, the cynical swindle of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact had the effect of causing a great falling-away among Communists in America, who suddenly realized that all the anti-fascist “Popular Front” rhetoric of the 1930s had been a monstrous lie. What are we to make, then, of those who continued to support and defend Communism after 1939? In every case, the biographical factors must be considered.

Eric Hoffer’s 1951 book The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements addresses this issue, classifying the types of personalities that are attracted to such movements. And I have summarized this insight simply: Bad causes attract bad people.

We know for a fact that Communism leads to mass murder, killing as many as 100 million people in the 20th century, and therefore must question the motives of its defenders. Hence, we can disregard the accusation of committing an ad hominem fallacy in so doing.

Something similar can be said for the philosophers of “postmodernism.” Michel Foucault was an influential French intellectual and also a homosexual pedophile, and this is not a coincidence, you see.

French libertarian Brivael Le Pogam writes:

I want to offer my apologies, on behalf of the French, for giving birth to French Theory (which in turn gave birth to the worst of all ideological monstrosities: wokism).
We gave the world Descartes, Pascal, Tocqueville. And then, in the intellectual ruins of post-1968, we gave Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. Three brilliant men who forged, in the elegance of our language, the ideological weapon that today paralyzes the West.
We must understand what they did. Foucault taught that truth does not exist, that there are only power relations disguised as knowledge. That science, reason, justice, the medical institution, the school, the prison, sexuality — everything is merely a staging of domination. Derrida taught that texts have no stable meaning, that every signifier slips away, that every reading is a betrayal, that the author is dead and the reader reigns supreme. Deleuze taught that we should prefer the rhizome to the tree, the nomad to the sedentary, desire to the law, becoming to being, difference to identity.
Taken individually, these are debatable theses. Combined, exported, and popularized, they form a system. And that system is a poison.
For here’s what happened. These texts, unreadable in France, crossed the Atlantic. The departments of Yale, Berkeley, and Columbia absorbed them in the 1980s. They found there a soil that did not exist among us: American Puritanism, its racial guilt, its obsession with identity. French Theory married this substratum, and the child of that union is called wokism.
Judith Butler reads Foucault and invents performative gender. Edward Said reads Foucault and invents academic postcolonialism. Kimberlé Crenshaw inherits the framework and invents intersectionality. At every step, the matrix is French: there is no truth, there is only power, so every hierarchy is suspect, every institution is oppressive, every norm is violence, every identity is constructed and thus negotiable, every majority is guilty.
That’s how three Parisian philosophers, who probably never imagined their practical consequences, provided the operating software to an entire generation of activists, university bureaucrats, HR managers, journalists, and legislators. That’s how we ended up with a civilization that no longer knows how to say whether a woman is a woman, whether its own history is worth defending, whether merit exists, whether truth can be distinguished from opinion.
It’s shit for one simple reason, and it must be stated calmly. A civilization stands on three pillars: the belief that there exists a truth accessible to reason, the belief that there exists a good distinct from evil, the belief that there exists a heritage to be transmitted. French Theory set out to dynamite all three. Not out of malice. Out of intellectual play, fascination with suspicion, hatred of the bourgeoisie that had nurtured them. But the result is there. An entire generation learned to deconstruct and never learned to build. An entire generation knows how to suspect and no longer knows how to admire. An entire generation sees power everywhere and beauty nowhere.
I apologize because we French bear a particular responsibility. It’s our language, our universities, our publishers, our prestige that gave this nihilism its chic packaging. Without the legitimacy of the Sorbonne and Vincennes, these ideas would never have crossed the ocean. We exported doubt the way others export weapons.
What is being built now, in Silicon Valley, in AI labs, in startups, in workshops, in all the places where people still make things instead of deconstructing them—that is the response. A civilization is rebuilt by builders, not by commentators. By those who believe that truth exists and is worth devoting oneself to. By those who embrace a hierarchy of the beautiful, the true, the good, and are not ashamed to transmit it.
So, forgive us. And back to work.

Well said! More from Le Pogam via Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!



 

Remembering St. Crispin’s Day: ‘We Few, We Happy Few, We Band of Brothers …’

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Today I was waiting for my pizza to come out of the oven and scrolling through Facebook on my phone when I saw my post from last year (“St. Crispin’s Day: ‘If We Are Mark’d to Die, We Are Enough to Do Our Country Loss’”), and said to myself, “Is today October 25?” Never shall we cease to celebrate one of the greatest victories in the history of the English-speaking peoples! It’s important to understand the background of Henry V and the Battle of Agincourt. His father, Henry IV (“Bolingbroke”) stood accused of usurping the crown from Richard II, disinheriting the Earl of March. Henry V gained his military education fighting his father’s wars to suppress a series of rebellions. Just 26 years old when he succeeded to the throne at his father’s death in 1413, Henry V did not face as much domestic opposition, but the old English claim to the French throne soon led him into foreign conflict to claim what he believed was rightfully his. Thus began the third phase of what came to be known as “The Hundred Years’ War.” By 1420, Henry had triumphed and wed Catherine, youngest daughter of the French king, with a guarantee that their son would inherit the French crown. That would not have been possible, however, had the French defeated Henry at Agincourt, where his army fought heroically against overwhelming numerical odds.

WESTMORLAND. O that we now had here
But one ten thousand of those men in England
That do no work to-day!

KING. What’s he that wishes so?
My cousin, Westmorland? No, my fair cousin;
If we are mark’d to die, we are enough
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
God’s will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.
By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
Such outward things dwell not in my desires.
But if it be a sin to covet honour,
I am the most offending soul alive.
No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England.
God’s peace! I would not lose so great an honour
As one man more methinks would share from me
For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!
Rather proclaim it, Westmorland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made,
And crowns for convoy put into his purse;
We would not die in that man’s company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is call’d the feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say “To-morrow is Saint Crispian.”
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say “These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.”
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words—
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester—
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be rememberèd—
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

So it was that the English yeomanry earned their military fame in a battle where the number of French casualties was larger than Henry’s entire army. Indeed we shall remember “to the ending of the world.”



 

‘Allahu Akbar’: Muslim Immigrant Decapitates French Teacher

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The Religion of Peace™ strikes again:

A history teacher who had shown caricatures of Islam’s Prophet Muhammed in class was on Friday decapitated and his assailant shot dead by French police as they tried to arrest him, police and prosecutors said.
The attacker shouted “Allahu Akbar” as he was confronted by police, a police source said. The Muslim phrase, meaning “God is Great,” has often been heard in jihadist attacks.
The suspect’s identity was not made public. French media reported that the suspect was an 18-year-old Chechen, born in Moscow. That information could not be immediately confirmed.
French President Emmanuel Macron called the beheading an “Islamist terrorist attack.” . . .
French anti-terror prosecutors said they were investigating the assault which happened on the outskirts of Paris at around 5 p.m. (1500 GMT) near a school in Conflans Saint-Honorine, a western suburb of the French capital.

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

Notice that when “right-wing” or “white supremacist” violence occurs, the motive becomes the most important thing about the story, and every politician is expected to denounce the motive, per se. By contrast, when violence is perpetrated by left-wing extremists, by Muslims, or by any protected minority group, the media will never generalize these crimes as representing the collective sentiment of a group, nor is there any political pressure to denounce the attacker’s motive.

In fact, the media will often times bend over backward to humanize terrorists who fit a favored political or ethnic profile, with the suggestion that their motives are legitimate grievances. The media feels compelled to depict certain terrorists (e.g., Dzhokhar Tsarnaev) as sympathetic figures because, they fear, an unsympathetic portrayal of such figures might inspire “backlash” against whatever group the attacker represents. Obversely, when the accused terrorist is white and can plausibly be shown to have a “right-wing” motive, not only is the perpetrator (e.g., Dylann Roof) depicted without sympathy, but the media employ broad-brush smear tactics to imply that similarly hateful sentiments are widespread among white people, and that every vaguely “right-wing” public figure is somehow complicit in the atrocity. The rationale of news coverage in such cases is to inspire prejudice against conservatives, and particularly to incite fear that further “right-wing” violence is likely, requiring renewed efforts to “educate” the ignorant masses.




 

New Joe Biden Campaign Ad Released

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Oh, wait . . . that’s not the headline?

Netflix accused of promoting pedophilia
with ‘Cuties’ film about children ‘twerking’

Who owns Netflix? Who are the executives at Netflix? Can somebody check and see whether these executives have donated to Democrats? Because I’m pretty sure Republicans are against this slime show:

Netflix recently released the trailer for an upcoming film called Cuties — a French film that hyper-sexualizes 11-year-old girls as they form a twerking dance crew. A petition was kicked off shortly after the trailer was released that has, at the time of this writing, reeled in just shy of 28,000 signatures.
The trailer shows an 11-year-old protagonist grappling with wanting to join a twerking crew while balancing what appears to be a culturally conservative home life. The film seems to depict the protagonist stealing money, sneaking around, and experiencing the faux fame that comes with girls exposing their bodies on social media.
The film was initially released on January 23 at the Sundance Film Festival, competing in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition sector, and winning the Dramatic Jury Award.

Oh, it’s a French film? Of course, “French” and “pedophile” are more or less synonymous. The French can’t imagine why puritanical Americans have a problem with Roman Polanski raping a 13-year-old.

In 1977, a petition was addressed to the French parliament calling for the abrogation of several articles of the age of consent law and the decriminalization of all consensual relations between adults and minors below the age of fifteen (the age of consent in France). A number of French intellectuals — including such prominent names as Louis Aragon, Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Michel Leiris, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Philippe Sollers, Jacques Rancière, Jean-François Lyotard, Francis Ponge, Bernard Besret and various prominent doctors and psychologists — signed the petition. In 1979 two open letters were published in French newspapers defending individuals arrested under charges of statutory rape, in the context of abolition of age of consent laws.
Michel Foucault argued that children are able to give consent to sexual relations, saying that assuming “that a child is incapable of explaining what happened and was incapable of giving his consent are two abuses that are intolerable, quite unacceptable.”

The age of consent in France is 15, but “French intellectuals” wanted to abolish this law as “quite unacceptable,” quoth Professor Foucault. It is therefore no surprise that this perverse film originated in France, and that it is being promoted by the Democrat operatives at Netflix.

 

However, Republicans pounced and seized, causing an apology:

Netflix has issued a swift mea culpa after a strong backlash today around the marketing of its forthcoming release Cuties.
The largely well-received French-language pic won the World Cinema Dramatic Directing Award at Sundance this year. It follows Amy, an 11-year-old girl who joins a group of dancers named “The Cuties” at school and rapidly grows aware of her burgeoning femininity — upsetting her mother and her values. The film is rated 82% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, and critics generally praised it for its handling of sensitive topics.
Netflix recently began promoting the movie ahead of its September 9 release on the platform. However, the accompany artwork has provoked a storm of online criticism, with many saying the poster sexualizes children. . . .
Netflix . . . apologized in a statement to Deadline: “We’re deeply sorry for the inappropriate artwork that we used for Cuties. It was not OK, nor was it representative of this French film which premiered at Sundance. We’ve now updated the pictures and description.”

 

Notice the spin here: Netflix is OK with 11-year-old French girls shaking their rumps as an expression of “burgeoning femininity” (praised by critics for “its handling of sensitive topics”), but what they apologized for is the “inappropriate artwork” of the preteen rump-shakers. So they’ll stream this perverted freak show to promote the Democratic agenda of prepubescent twerking, but they don’t want to offend anyone with the marketing of the “forthcoming release.” Excuse me while I vomit.

Ace asks the obvious question: “If that art isn’t representative of the film, where did it come from? Is it all just a pure photoshop?”

Oh, I decided to check — Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings is indeed a Democratic donor who, among his other contributions, gave $50,000 to the 2016 Hillary Clinton Victory Fund and is now helping Joe Biden, by promoting the 2020 Democrat agenda of sexy 11-year-olds.

“Netflix and ill.”

UPDATE: Ed Driscoll — who has the greatest memory of anyone in the blog racket — reminds us of France’s sordid history of high-culture pedophilia. Gabriel Matzneff was “a French literary darling” who openly boasted of having sex with minors. He wrote books on the subject, went from one 14-year-old girlfriend to another, and found time in between these liasons to have sex with young boys while on “sex tourism” journeys to the Philippines. Then last year one of Matzneff’s ex-girlfriends, Vanessa Springora, published a memoir detailing his abuse of her, and Matzneff was “cancelled,” as they say.

Thanks also to the commenter who called my attention to the 2007 French film Naissance des Pieuvres (“birth of the octopuses,” released as The Water Lilies in English), a creepy lesbian coming-of-age story. The director of that film, Céline Sciamma, is a feminist who evidently seduced the teenage star, Adèle Haenel. It was not until 2014 that Haenel “came out” as a lesbian in an award acceptance speech, thus making public her relationship with Sciamma, who is more than 10 years her senior. Then last year, Haenel accused director Christophe Ruggia of sexually harassing her from the ages of 12 to 15. Ruggia, who directed Haenel in her first film in 2002, was arrested earlier this year.

So apparently it is customary for film directors in France to have sex with the stars of their movies, no matter what age or gender, and I can hardly wait for the stories of behind-the-scene scandals about this new preteen twerking movie. Every adult involved should probably go to jail.




 

The New York Times Smears French Author Who Predicted Our Current Crisis

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Twenty-five years ago, when a friend sent me a copy of Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints, it was a book so taboo that you were considered racist merely for knowing of its existence. The 1973 novel, which imagines France invaded by a flotilla of refugees from the Indian subcontinent, pointed out how Western civilization had lost its will to survive, having become decadent, full of self-loathing and racial guilt.

Five years ago, however, when the Syrian civil war produced an influx of “refugees” into the European Union, suddenly Raspail’s novel was recognized as prophetic; even many liberals said the scenes in Europe were reminiscent of The Camp of the Saints. The election of Donald Trump and other politicial events indicative of a “nationalist” mood in the electorate seemed to validate much of Raspail’s critique.

Jean Raspail died at age 94 earlier this month, and his obituary in the New York Times was an act of deliberate character assassination.

Phyllis Chesler describes the crude smear:

A photo of Raspail’s book is accompanied by a caption: “Mr. Raspail dehumanized immigrants in his 1973 book.” The piece describes Raspail’s followers as “white supremacists, far-right political figures;” worse yet, as one “member of the Trump administration.” In addition, “many conservatives” attended his funeral; his readers were “far right,” his book spawned or influenced today’s “white supremacists” — and led to the shootings at two mosques, one in New Zealand, one in Texas. . . .
In case you still don’t know what Raspail represents, the obituary goes on to describe Raspail as one of the “last members of the old reactionary right” in France. One of President Trumps advisers had “written approvingly of the novel in an email (!) to an editor at the right wing website Breitbart.” Can’t be clearer than this.
But, in case you are still unsure of whose reputation must be shamed, cancelled, and toppled, his novel has been called a “racist novel.” Raspail insisted that he was not a “racist,” but he also said that he would not change a single line in The Camp of the Saints, and “described himself as ‘right wing, even right-right-wing.’” The Obituary continues along in this vein. The novel is a “racist diatribe.”

Never mind, of course, that Raspail’s novel accurately predicted the future in which we are now living. The fact that Raspail was correct in his assessment of the West’s cowardice doesn’t matter; what matters, to the New York Times, is that Raspail was against surrendering to foreign invasion. You’re not allowed to be against surrender. It’s “racist” to think French people have a right to defend France against foreigners.

You’d better buy the book now, before they ban it.




 

Fire Destroys Notre Dame Cathedral

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Paris has lost its iconic landmark:

French firefighters were racing Monday to save Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris after a colossal fire caused the spire of the historic edifice to crash to the ground and wiped out centuries of heritage.
The fire already destroyed the roof of the 850 year old UNESCO world heritage landmark, whose spectacular gothic spire collapsed before the eyes of horrified onlookers on a previously pristine early spring evening.
The fire, which came as Catholics prepare to celebrate Easter, sent orange flames and clouds of grey smoke billowing into the sky as stunned Parisians and tourists watched on in horror.
Some were in tears, others offered prayers from the banks of the river Seine as the inferno devoured the cathedral.

Of course, many people understandably expressed suspicions of terrorism, but there is no evidence that terrorists were involved, and it would be irresponsible to speculate in the absence of evidence.



 

Known Wolf: ‘Allahu Akbar’ Killer in France Had 27 Criminal Convictions

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By the time he opened fire on a Christmas market in France, the killer had spent nearly two decades as a menace to Europe:

Cherif Chekatt’s criminal career began at age 10. By age 13 he had been convicted. Now, with his third decade still incomplete, he is a fugitive, accused in the deadly shooting at France’s most famous Christmas market.
The 29-year-old has more than two dozen convictions, mostly in France but also in Switzerland and Germany. The rare times he’s been out of jail, he’s moved around. He had lived at his latest apartment, in a grim housing bloc on the edge of Strasbourg, for just a few months before police broke down the door in an unrelated case.
But Chekatt wasn’t home on Tuesday morning when the police arrived at the fifth-floor flat overlooking a pair of smokestacks and flat-topped houses in the distance. Further in the distance, barely visible, is downtown Strasbourg, where that evening he allegedly shouted “God is Great” in Arabic [“Allahu Akbar”] amid gunfire and shootouts with police in northeastern Strasbourg that left two dead, one person brain dead and 12 others injured.
Hundreds of officers fanned out Wednesday in a massive manhunt, hoping to put him behind bars yet again.
Police had been trailing Chekatt, a Strasbourg native and one of six siblings who was “well known” to authorities: He had 27 convictions in his criminal record, said Paris prosecutor Remy Heitz. Chekatt was also tracked by the domestic counterintelligence service, DGSI — France’s equivalent of the FBI.
Interior Minister Christophe Castaner said by age 10 the suspect “already had behavior that fell under penal law.” . . .
Authorities say he was flagged for Islamic extremism in prison in 2015 and put on the “Fiche S” radical watch list then. It’s a profile familiar to many in European security, and has hit France particularly hard — that of a petty criminal who fuses a life of violence with Islamic extremism.

Here’s a question: If this profile is so “familiar,” why are they turning these monsters loose on the streets? And why are they embracing open borders policy to bring more monsters to Europe?

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!



 

Macron Deploys E.U. Army in Paris?

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If you’re trying to quell a populist uprising against the globalist elite, this is probably not your smartest move:

A strange sighting in France has the internet abuzz over whether the Macron administration deployed armored vehicles bearing the EU flag to perform riot control during Saturday’s Yellow Vest protests, stoking concerns over whether it’s the first sign of a much talked about EU Army.

“rather than bearing the French Tricolore flag, the vehicles bore the distinct starred EU flag, which critics have said is a sign an EU Army is drawing closer to existence” — Daily Star . . .

The notion of an EU Army is not new — as both French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have both floated the idea.

In November, Merkel said “The days where we can unconditionally rely on others are gone,” adding “We should work on a vision to create a real European army one day.” 

Stressing that such an army would not be “against NATO” but complement it, the chancellor also proposed a European Security Council with rotating seats for member states that would make speedy foreign policy decisions without the need for unanimity. — New York Times

In early November, Macron told France’s Europe 1 Radio that Europeans cannot be protected without a “true, European army.” 

Yeah, Paris is burning, but we must save the planet!

In launching their now successful protests against President Emmanuel Macron’s gas hike, the French gilets jaunes (yellow jackets) have revived their country’s reputation for rebelling against monarchial rule. It may well foreshadow a bitter, albeit largely avoidable, battle over how to address the issue of climate change. . . .
Macron’s policies rest on the notion on-going climate catastrophe embraced by media, the academy and the intelligentsia. Every time weather takes a nasty turn as it often does — heat waves, downpours, forest fires, floods — it’s often attributed to climate change. . . .
The gilets jaune revolt begs the issue: who pays to save the planet? The Paris accords absolved the very countries driving emission increases — China and India — from mandating emissions cuts until 2030, leaving the burden largely on the backs of the West’s own middle and working classes.
Yet many of these people need fossil fuels to get to work or operate their businesses. Tourists may gape at the high-speed trains and the Paris Metro, but the vast majority get to work in cars. More than 80 percent of the Paris metropolitan area population lives in the suburbs and exurbs, in an area nearly the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined.

The global elite want to compel ordinary people to pay for this radical environmental agenda. Aux armes, citoyens!

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)