Ainsi parle l’Éternel à son oint, à Cyrus (…) C’est moi qui ai suscité Cyrus dans ma justice. Il rebâtira ma ville, et libérera mes captifs, sans rançon ni présents, dit l’Éternel des armées. Esaïe 45: 1-13
Là où le péché abonde, la grâce surabonde. Paul (Romains 5 : 20)
Où est le péril, croît, le salutaire aussi. Hölderlin
La vertu même devient vice, étant mal appliquée, et le vice est parfois ennobli par l’action. Frère Laurent (Roméo et Juliette, Shakespeare)
Le monde moderne n’est pas mauvais : à certains égards, il est bien trop bon. Il est rempli de vertus féroces et gâchées. Lorsqu’un dispositif religieux est brisé (comme le fut le christianisme pendant la Réforme), ce ne sont pas seulement les vices qui sont libérés. Les vices sont en effet libérés, et ils errent de par le monde en faisant des ravages ; mais les vertus le sont aussi, et elles errent plus férocement encore en faisant des ravages plus terribles. Le monde moderne est saturé des vieilles vertus chrétiennes virant à la folie. Elles ont viré à la folie parce qu’on les a isolées les unes des autres et qu’elles errent indépendamment dans la solitude. Ainsi des scientifiques se passionnent-ils pour la vérité, et leur vérité est impitoyable. Ainsi des « humanitaires » ne se soucient-ils que de la pitié, mais leur pitié (je regrette de le dire) est souvent mensongère. G.K. Chesterton
Comme une réponse, les trois slogans inscrits sur la façade blanche du ministère de la Vérité lui revinrent à l’esprit. La guerre, c’est la paix. La liberté, c’est l’esclavage. L’ignorance, c’est la force. 1984 (George Orwell)
La liberté, c’est la liberté de dire que deux et deux font quatre. Lorsque cela est accordé, le reste suit. George Orwell (1984)
Il est des idées d’une telle absurdité que seuls les intellectuels peuvent y croire. George Orwell
Les intellectuels sont portés au totalitarisme bien plus que les gens ordinaires. George Orwell
Le langage politique est destiné à rendre vraisemblables les mensonges, respectables les meurtres, et à donner l’apparence de la solidité à ce qui n’est que vent. George Orwell
Parler de liberté n’a de sens qu’à condition que ce soit la liberté de dire aux gens ce qu’ils n’ont pas envie d’entendre. George Orwell
I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal. General Curtis LeMay
La démocratie est le pire système de gouvernement, à l’exception de tous les autres qui ont pu être expérimentés dans l’histoire. Winston Churchill (1947)
To label him a great or good or even a weak president misses the point. He was merely necessary. Herbert Parmet (Eisenhower, 1972)
Je n’avais pas pensé au président Trump comme candidat à la présidentielle jusqu’à ce qu’il devienne candidat à la présidentielle. Et dans ses premières apparitions, j’ai pensé que c’était un phénomène éphémère, mais je lui attribue un immense mérite d’avoir analysé un aspect de la situation américaine, la stratégie disponible, de l’avoir menée contre la direction de son propre parti, et de l’avoir emporté. Maintenant, son défi est d’appliquer cette même compétence à la situation internationale. (…) Donald Trump est un phénomène que les pays étrangers n’ont pas vu, cela a donc été une expérience choquante pour eux qu’il entre en fonction. En même temps, et je crois qu’il a la possibilité d’entrer dans l’histoire comme un très grand président, parce que chaque pays a maintenant deux choses à considérer. Premièrement, leur perception que le président précédent ou le président sortant a essentiellement retiré l’Amérique de la politique internationale, de sorte qu’ils ont dû faire leur propre évaluation de leurs besoins. Et, deuxièmement, voici un nouveau président qui pose beaucoup de questions inconnues. Et à cause de la combinaison du vide partiel et des nouvelles questions, on pourrait imaginer que quelque chose de remarquable et de nouveau en émerge. Je ne dis pas que ce sera le cas. Je dis que c’est une opportunité extraordinaire. (…) Je pense qu’il opère par une sorte d’instinct qui est une forme d’analyse différente de la mienne, plus académique. Mais il a soulevé un certain nombre de questions que j’estime importantes, très importantes. Et si elles sont traitées correctement, cela pourrait conduire à de bons – d’excellents résultats. Henry Kissinger (Dec. 20, 2016)
Many of the younger — they’re not so young anymore — neoconservatives have gone over to the Never Trump movement. And they are extremely angry with anybody who doesn’t share their view. But I describe myself as anti-anti Trump. While I have no great admiration for him, to put it mildly, I think she’s worse. Between the two, he’s the lesser evil. (…) I think the Iran deal is one of the most catastrophic actions that any American president has ever taken. That’s how seriously I regard it. It paves the way for Iran to get a nuclear weapon. If Iran gets a nuclear weapon, I think that we would be in great danger of seeing an outbreak of a nuclear exchange between Iran and Israel. So that alone would be enough to turn me against the Obama administration and virtually everyone who took part in it, and certainly Hillary Clinton. It overshadows everything from my point of view. (…) I’m not 100 percent sure, not even 50 percent sure. [Trump] has described it as the worst deal ever made, and he has said he would renegotiate it — and he may very well mean that. (…) I find Trump impossible to predict. I don’t think anyone knows exactly what he would do about anything. But the fact of the matter is, you’re dealing here not just with two individuals, you know, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, you’re dealing with two political parties. (…) I think there is no question that on Israel the Democrats can no longer be trusted. The liberal community, generally, and the Democratic Party, particularly, have grown increasingly unfriendly to Israel over 50 years, and it’s reached a point now where there are elements within the party who are positively hostile to Israel, and many who are simply cold and unfriendly. (…) If Trump were to be elected, he’s not an emperor, he’s just one person, and he’s got a whole party and constituency coming along with him and so does Hillary. You know, you’re not voting for king. You’re voting for a president whose powers are limited and circumscribed by the Constitution and by the other branches of government. So to me, it’s just a no-brainer. (…) While I can’t predict for you what Trump will do about anything. I can predict for you what Hillary will do about everything. (…) I think she would continue the policy of daylight between Israel and the United States that Obama inaugurated. And by the way, she played along with that completely. There was the 45-minute harangue, the chewing out she gave to Bibi at one point. So I think this distancing from Israel would continue and probably grow worse. (…) Hillary has a worse character than Donald Trump. She’s a thief and a liar and a brazen unprincipled opportunist. She has never done anything good in her entire political career. Even as a woman, she has gotten to where she is on the shoulders of her husband, not on her own merits. No, I have no respect for her whatsoever on any front. (….) That’s a long time ago, and he’s said more reassuring things since then. He’s gone out of his way in several speeches to describe Israel as our strongest ally. And I think he would no longer say that he’s neutral. But I would not bet my life on anything about Trump. I can imagine him going the opposite direction on everything that he says he’s for. (…) I once said that Trump is Pat Buchanan without the anti-Semitism. By that, I meant that he seemed to be a nativist, an isolationist, and a protectionist. Those are sort of the three pillars of the Buchanan political creed. But whereas Buchanan really believes that stuff, I don’t think Trump does. I think he’s perfectly capable of turning on a dime on each one of those issues. (…) again, I’m not saying I would confidently predict what he would do as president. I only have a sort of hunch. (…) I think the Jews will vote for Hillary. They’ll revert to their old obsession with sticking with the Democratic Party, I think. (…) Trump certainly believes in the traditional American system, I think. He has no reason not to, and when he keeps saying that he wants to ‘Make America Great Again,’ that’s not that different from what Reagan was saying, ‘Our best days lie ahead,’ and so on. (…) [Even my son] thinks that Trump is worse, and I think that Hillary is worse. He keeps trying to persuade me. He sends me things, articles, showing how bad Trump is. And I keep saying, ‘I know all this. I don’t need to be persuaded.’” Norman Podhoretz (2016)
Trump’s move from Queens to Manhattan was, as I understand the real estate business, a quite daring move. Maybe that was the longest journey in the world because the Manhattan real estate world is a world unto its own. The competition is very fierce, you’re dealing with many, many clever people. I think it was Tom Klingenstein who said he always thought Trump was Jewish because he fit in so well with the real-estatenicks in Manhattan, most of whom were, and are, Jewish. (…) I take it as an affectionate remark. He had the qualities that all those guys had in common, and you might have thought, other things being equal, that he was one of them. And in a certain sense he was, but not entirely. I know a few of those guys and they’re actually very impressive. You have to get permits, and you have to deal with the mob, and you have to know how to handle workers who are very recalcitrant, many of whom are thuggish. You’re in a battlefield there, so you have to know how to operate politically as well as in a managerial capacity, and how to sweet talk and also how to curse. It’s not an easy field to master.(…) I do see [Trump’s blue collar sensibility] and even before Trump—long before Trump—actually going back to when I was in the army in the 1950s, I got to know blue-collar Americans. I’m “blue collar” myself, I suppose. I’m from the working class—my father was a milk man. But in the army I got to know people from all over the country and I fell in love with Americans—they were just great! These guys were unlike anybody I had ever met in New York or in England or France. They were mostly blue-collar kids and I think Trump has, in that sense, the common touch. That’s one of the things—it may be the main thing—that explains his political success. It doesn’t explain his success in general, but his political success, yes. Also—I often explain this to people—when I was a kid, you would rather be beaten up than back away from a fight. The worst thing in the world you could be called was a sissy. And I was beaten up many times. Trump fights back. The people who say: “Oh, he shouldn’t lower himself,” “He should ignore this,” and “Why is he demeaning himself by arguing with some dopey reporter?” I think on the contrary—if you hit him, he hits back; and he is an equal opportunity counter puncher. It doesn’t matter who you are. And actually Obama, oddly enough, made the same statement: “He pulls a knife, you pull a gun.” (…) when he first appeared on the scene, I disliked him because he resembled one of the figures that I dislike most in American politics and with whom I had tangled, namely Pat Buchanan—I had tangled with him in print and I had accused him of anti-Semitism. And he came back at me, and I came back at him. And it was a real street fight. And I said to my wife: “This guy [Trump] is Buchanan without the anti-Semitism,” because he was a protectionist, a nativist, and an isolationist. And those were the three pillars of Pat Buchanan’s political philosophy. How did I know he wasn’t an anti-Semite? I don’t know—I just knew. And he certainly wasn’t and isn’t, and I don’t think he’s a racist or any of those things. (…) that’s what’s so interesting. At first, I disliked him because I thought he was a Buchananite, and then when he said that they lied us into Iraq—that put me off, because that is itself one of the big lies of the century, and no matter how often it’s been refuted and refuted decisively, it just stays alive. And when Trump committed himself to that, I thought, “well, to hell with him.” (…) So for a while I was supporting Marco Rubio and I was enthusiastic about him. As time went on, and I looked around me, however, I began to be bothered by the hatred that was building up against Trump from my soon to be new set of ex-friends. It really disgusted me. I just thought it had no objective correlative. You could think that he was unfit for office—I could understand that—but my ex-friends’ revulsion was always accompanied by attacks on the people who supported him. They called them dishonorable, or opportunists, or cowards—and this was done by people like Bret Stephens, Bill Kristol, and various others. And I took offense at that. So that inclined me to what I then became: anti-anti-Trump. By the time he finally won the nomination, I was sliding into a pro-Trump position, which has grown stronger and more passionate as time has gone on. On the question of his isolationism, he doesn’t seem to give a damn. He hires John Bolton and Mike Pompeo who, from my point of view, as a neoconservative (I call myself a “paleo-neoconservative” because I’ve been one for so long), couldn’t be better. And that’s true of many of his other cabinet appointments. He has a much better cabinet than Ronald Reagan had, and Reagan is the sacred figure in Republican hagiography. Trump is able to do that because, not only is he not dogmatic, he doesn’t operate on the basis of fixed principles. Now some people can think that’s a defect—I don’t think it’s a defect in a politician at a high level. I remember thinking to myself once on the issue of his embrace of tariffs, and some of my friends were very angry. I said to myself for the first time, “Was thou shalt not have tariffs inscribed on the tablets that Moses brought down from Sinai? Maybe Trump has something on this issue, in this particular”—and then I discovered to my total amazement that there are a hundred tariffs (I think that’s right) against America from all over the world. So the idea that we’re living in a free trade paradise was itself wrong, and in any case, there was no reason to latch onto it as a sacred dogma. And that was true of immigration. I was always pro-immigration because I’m the child of immigrants. And I thought it was unseemly of me to oppose what not only had saved my life, but had given me the best life I think I could possibly have had. I wrote a book called My Love Affair with America, and that states it accurately. So I was very reluctant to join in Trump’s skepticism about the virtues of immigration. (…) We weren’t arguing about illegal immigration. We were arguing about immigration. (…) In 1924, immigration virtually stopped and the rationale for the new policy was to give newcomers a chance to assimilate—which may or may not have been the main reason—but it probably worked. What has changed my mind about immigration now—even legal immigration—is that our culture has weakened to the point where it’s no longer attractive enough for people to want to assimilate to, and we don’t insist that they do assimilate. When I was a kid, I lived in a neighborhood that had immigrant Jews, immigrant Italians (mainly from Sicily), and immigrant blacks—that is, they had come up from the South recently. It was incidentally one of the things that made me a lifelong skeptic about integration because far from understanding each other and getting to know each other, all we did was fight. In any case, the stuff that went on in the public schools! I had an incident when I went to school at the age of five. Although I was born in Brooklyn, I was bilingual and Yiddish was in a sense my first language, so I came to school with a bit of an accent. And the story was: I was wandering around in the hall, and the teacher said: “Where are you going?” And I said: “I’m goink op de stez.” And they slapped me into a remedial speech class. Now, if anyone did that now, federal marshals would materialize out of the wall and arrest them for cultural genocide. But, of course, they did me an enormous favor. I imagine my life would have been very different if I had not been subjected to that “speech therapy,” as they called it. And parents then did not object—on the contrary, they were very humble. If the teacher thought so, and the school thought so, they must be right. That was the culture of the prewar period. You certainly wanted your children to be Americans—real Americans—even if you wanted them to hold on to their ancestral culture as well. You were free to do that on your own time and your own dime. And it worked. It worked beautifully. (…) [Back to Trump] it wasn’t a lightbulb, and it wasn’t the road to Damascus revelation. It was that as I watched the appointments he was making even at the beginning, I was astonished. And he couldn’t have been doing this by accident. So that everything he was doing by way of policy as president, belied the impression he had given to me of a Buchananite. He was the opposite of a Buchananite in practice. The fact is he was a new phenomenon. And I still to this day haven’t quite figured out how he reconciled all of this in his own head. Maybe because, as I said earlier, he was not dogmatic about things. He did what he had to do to get things done. (…) [ he didn’t have principles] okay, but he had something—he had instincts. And he knew, from my point of view, who the good guys were. Now, he made some mistakes, for example, with Secretary of State Tillerson, but so did Reagan. I used to point out to people that it took Lincoln three years to find the right generals to fight the civil war, so what did you expect from George W. Bush? In Trump’s case, most of his appointments were very good and they’ve gotten better as time’s gone on. And even the thing that I held almost sacred, and still do really, which is the need for American action abroad—interventionism—which he still says he’s against. I mean, he wants to pull out all our troops from Syria and I think it was probably Bolton who talked him out of doing it all in one stroke. Even concerning interventionism, I began to rethink. I found my mind opening to possibilities that hadn’t been there before. And in this case it was a matter of acknowledging changing circumstances rather than philosophical or theoretical changes. (…) [As to Iraq] I am intransigent on Iraq. I think it was the right thing to do at the time. I’ve even gone so far as to say Bush would have deserved to be impeached if he had not gone in. Every intelligence agency in the world said that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction—nuclear weapons, actually—every one of his own intelligence agencies said so. Saddam himself said so. Especially after 9/11, there was almost no good reason not to go in. The administration had gone through all the diplomatic kabuki, which I always knew wouldn’t work. It’s inconceivable that they could have been lying. Who would be stupid enough to lie when you’re going to be exposed in a week? It’s ridiculous! Nobody was lying, except Saddam. (…) I still feel it was the right thing to do and the story’s not over yet, by the way. I mean, it’s assumed Iraq is a disaster and Iran is taking over—that’s not quite true. Many Iraqis are trying to resist Iran. I’m told that Baghdad has become what Beirut used to be—full of cafés and nightlife and traffic jams and liveliness; and they had a decent election. (…) [About democratizing Iraq] I know, it’s as if the effort to democratize was somehow ignoble instead of just misplaced. I mean, let me put it this way, we obviously did a bad job of the occupation and we are not an imperial power despite what the Left says. We’re not good at it. Although, in the case of Germany, Japan, and Korea, we’ve stationed troops there for 50 years. If you’re going to do it, you need to be prepared to do what is necessary when it’s over—when you’ve won. And we were not prepared. Many mistakes were made, and the will to see it through to the end was absent. So that I agree to. But my hope was not that we could have an election and overnight everything would be fine, but that we could clear the ground a bit in which seeds of democratization could be planted. That was what I used to call “draining the swamp.” And that swamp, we knew, was the swamp in which terrorism festered. So it seemed to me to make sense as a policy. (…) [Trump] was against what he called stupid wars or unnecessary wars. But I think that, again, he’s willing to be flexible under certain circumstances. I think that if we were hit by any of those people, he would respond with a hydrogen bomb. (…) some of [my ex-friends] have gone so far as to make me wonder whether they’ve lost their minds altogether. I didn’t object to their opposition to Trump. There was a case to be made, and they made it—okay. Of course, they had no reasonable alternative. A couple of them voted for Hillary, which I think would have been far worse for the country than anything Trump could have done. But, basically, I think we’re all in a state of confusion as to what’s going on. Tom Klingenstein has made a brilliant effort to explain it, in terms that haven’t really been used before. He says that our domestic politics has erupted into a kind of war between patriotism and multiculturalism, and he draws out the implications of that war very well. I might put it in different terms—love of America versus hatred of America. But it’s the same idea. We find ourselves in a domestic, or civil, war almost. In 1969-70, we neocons analyzed the international situation in a similar way, behind a clarifying idea that had a serious impact because it was both simple and sufficiently complex in its implications. I had by then become alienated from my long-term friend Hannah Arendt, whose book The Origins of Totalitarianism had had an enormous effect on me. Although she had become an ex-friend, her book’s argument still inspired me, and I think a lot of other people, to fight. And that argument was that the Soviet Union was an evil, moral and political, comparable to Nazi Germany. As we had fought to defend the West in World War II from the evil coming from, as it were, the Right, so we had to fight it coming from the Left in the Cold War, which I liked to call World War III. (And I’ve tried to say since 9/11, we have to fight an evil coming from the 7th century in what amounts to World War IV—but that name hasn’t caught on.) But the important point is we offered a wholehearted, full-throated defense of America. Not merely a defense, but a celebration, which is what I thought it deserved, nothing less. It was like rediscovering America—its virtues, its values, and how precious the heritage we had been born to was, and how it was, in effect, worth dying for. And that had a refreshing impact, I think, because that’s how most people felt. But all they had heard—though nothing compared to now—was that America was terrible. It was the greatest danger to peace in the world, it was born in racism, and genocide, and committed every conceivable crime. And then when new crimes were invented like sexism and Islamophobia, we were guilty of those, too. (…) one of the Soviet officials, after the fall of the Soviet Union, actually put it correctly when he said: “You’ve lost your enemy.” And that’s, I think, the largest cause. (…) the external threat inspired us, but it also gave rise to a new appreciation of what we were fighting for—not just against. I was a Democrat, you know, by heritage, and in 1972 I helped found a movement called, “The Coalition for a Democratic Majority,” which was an effort to save the Democratic Party from the McGovernites who had taken it over. We knew exactly what was wrong, but it metastasized. The long march through the institutions, as the Maoists called it, was more successful than I would have anticipated. The anti-Americanism became so powerful that there was virtually nothing to stop it. Even back then I once said, and it’s truer now: this country is like a warrior tribe which sends all its children to a pacifist monk to be educated. And after a while—it took 20 or 40 years—but little by little it turned out that Antonio Gramsci—the Communist theoretician who said that the culture is where the power is, not the economy—turned out to be right; and little by little the anti-Americanism made its way all the way down to kindergarten, practically. And there was no effective counterattack. I’m not sure why. I mean, some of us tried, but we didn’t get very far. (…) The crack I make these days is that the Left thinks that the Constitution is unconstitutional. When Barack Obama said, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming this country,” well it wasn’t five days, but he was for once telling the truth. He knew what he was doing. I’ve always said that Obama, from his own point of view, was a very successful president. I wrote a piece about that in the Wall Street Journal which surprised a lot of people. Far from being a failure, within the constraints of what is still the democratic political system, he had done about as much as you possibly could to transform the country into something like a social democracy. The term “social democrat,” however, used to be an honorable one. It designated people on the Left who were anti-Communist, who believed in democracy, but who thought that certain socialist measures could make the world more equitable. Now it’s become a euphemism for something that is hard to distinguish from Communism. And I would say the same thing about anti-Zionism. I gave a talk to a meeting of the American Jewish Committee, which was then the publisher of Commentary, two years or so after the Six Day War. And I said what’s happened since that war is that anti-Semitism has migrated from the Right, which was its traditional home, to the Left, where it is getting a more and more hospitable reception. And people walked out on the talk, I mean, literally just got up. These were all Jews, you understand. Today, anti-Semitism, under the cover of anti-Zionism, has established itself much more firmly in the Democratic Party than I could ever have predicted, which is beyond appalling. The Democrats were unable to pass a House resolution condemning anti-Semitism, for example, which is confirmation of the Gramscian victory. I think they are anti-American—that’s what I would call them. They’ve become anti-American. (…) some of them say they’re pro-socialism, but most of them don’t know what they’re talking about. They ought to visit a British hospital or a Canadian hospital once in a while to see what Medicare for All comes down to. They don’t know what they’re for. I mean, the interesting thing about this whole leftist movement that started in the ’60s is how different it is from the Left of the ’30s. The Left of the ’30s had a positive alternative in mind—what they thought was positive—namely, the Soviet Union. So America was bad; Soviet Union, good. Turn America into the Soviet Union and everything is fine. The Left of the ’60s knew that the Soviet Union was flawed because its crimes that had been exposed, so they never had a well-defined alternative. One day it was Castro, the next day Mao, the next day Zimbabwe, I mean, they kept shifting—as long as it wasn’t America. Their real passion was to destroy America and the assumption was that anything that came out of those ruins would be better than the existing evil. That was the mentality—there was never an alternative and there still isn’t. So Bernie Sanders, who honeymooned in the Soviet Union—I mean, I don’t know him personally, but I have relatives who resemble him; I know him in my bones—and he’s an old Stalinist if there ever was one. Things have gone so haywire, he was able to revive the totally discredited idea of socialism, and others were so ignorant that they picked it up. As for attitudes toward America, I believe that Howard Zinn’s relentlessly anti-American People’s History of the United States sells something like 130,000 copies a year, and it’s a main text for the study of American History in the high schools and in grade schools. So, we have miseducated a whole generation, two generations by now, about almost everything. (…) The only way I know out of this is to fight it intellectually, which sounds weak. But the fact that Trump was elected is a kind of miracle. I now believe he’s an unworthy vessel chosen by God to save us from the evil on the Left. And he’s not the first unworthy vessel chosen by God. There was King David who was very bad—I mean he had a guy murdered so he could sleep with his wife, among other things. And then there was King Solomon who was considered virtuous enough—more than his father—to build the temple, and then desecrated it with pagan altars; but he was nevertheless considered a great ancestor. So there are precedents for these unworthy vessels, and Trump, with all his vices, has the necessary virtues and strength to fight the fight that needs to be fought. And if he doesn’t win in 2020, I would despair of the future. I have 13 grandchildren and 12 great grandchildren, and they are hostages to fortune. So I don’t have the luxury of not caring what’s going to happen after I’m gone. (…) His virtues are the virtues of the street kids of Brooklyn. You don’t back away from a fight and you fight to win. That’s one of the things that the Americans who love him, love him for—that he’s willing to fight, not willing but eager to fight. And that’s the main virtue and all the rest stem from, as Klingenstein says, his love of America. I mean, Trump loves America. He thinks it’s great or could be made great again. Eric Holder, former attorney general, said, “When was it ever great?” And Michelle Obama says that the first time she was ever proud of her country was when Obama won. (…) Mainly they think [Trump]’s unfit to be president for all the obvious reasons—that he disgraces the office. I mean, I would say Bill Clinton disgraced the office. I was in England at Cambridge University when Harry Truman was president, and there were Americans there who were ashamed of the fact that somebody like Harry Truman was president. (…) [A haberdasher] and no college degree. And, of course, Andrew Jackson encountered some of that animosity. There’s snobbery in it and there’s genuine, you might say, aesthetic revulsion. It’s more than disagreements about policy, because the fact of the matter is they have few grounds for disagreement about policy. I mean, I’ve known Bill Kristol all his life, and I like him. But I must say I’m shocked by his saying that if it comes to the deep state versus Trump, he’ll take the deep state. You know, I was raised to believe that the last thing in the world you defend is your own, and I am proud to have overcome that education. I think the first thing in the world you defend is your own, especially when it’s under siege both from without and within. So the conservative elite has allowed its worst features—its sense of superiority—to overcome its intellectual powers, let’s put it that way. I don’t know how else to explain this. (…) I often quote and I have always believed in Bill Buckley’s notorious declaration that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone book than by the faculty of Harvard University. That’s what I call intelligent populism. And Trump is Exhibit A of the truth of that proposition. Norman Podhoretz (2019)
Sir Andrew … told me he knew a former MI6 officer by the name of Christopher Steele, who had been commissioned to investigate connections between the Trump campaign and Russian agents as well as potentially compromising information about the President-elect that Putin allegedly possessed. Steele had prepared a report that Wood had not read and conceded was mostly raw, unverified intelligence, but that the author strongly believed merited a thorough examination by counterintelligence experts. Steele was a respected professional, Wood assured us, who had good Russian contacts and long experience collecting and analyzing intelligence on the Kremlin. (…) I was skeptical that Trump or his aides had actively cooperated with Russia’s interference. And I certainly did not want to believe that the Kremlin could have acquired kompromat on an American President. (…) Our impromptu meeting felt charged with a strange intensity. No one wise-cracked to lighten the mood. We spoke in lowered voices. The room was dimly lit, and the atmosphere was eerie. It all seemed too strange a scenario to believe at first, but even a remote risk that the President of the United States might be vulnerable to Russian extortion had to be investigated. (…) The allegations were disturbing, but I had no idea which if any were true. I could not independently verify any of it, and so I did what any American who cares about our nation’s security should have done. I put the dossier in my office safe, called the office of the director of the FBI, Jim Comey, and asked for a meeting. (…) I did what duty demanded I do, anyone who disagrees with his decision can ‘go to hell’. John McCain
The late Sen. John McCain provided intimate details of how he obtained the infamous so-called Steele dossier in his 2018 book, ‘The Restless Wave.’ The Republican senator was attending an annual security conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia shortly after the presidential election in November 2016 when retired a British diplomat approached him. According to McCain, he didn’t recall ever having a previous conversation with Sir Andrew Wood, but may have met him before in passing. Chris Brose, a staff member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and David Kramer, a former assistant secretary of state with Russian expertise, joined McCain and Wood in a room off the main conference hall. After discussing Russian election interference for a few minutes, Wood explained why he’d approached McCain in the first place. ‘He told me he knew a former MI6 officer by the name of Christopher Steele, who had been commissioned to investigate connections between the Trump campaign and Russian agents as well as potentially compromising information about the President-elect that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin allegedly possessed,’ McCain wrote. Wood told McCain that Steele had compiled a report, while careful to note the information was unverified, which the former British spy « strongly believed merited a thorough examination by counterintelligence experts.’ ‘Our impromptu meeting felt charged with a strange intensity,’ McCain wrote. ‘No one wise-cracked to lighten the mood. We spoke in lowered voices. The room was dimly lit, and the atmosphere was eerie.’ It all seemed ‘too strange a scenario to believe » at first, he wrote, but the six-term senator felt that ‘even a remote risk that the President of the United States might be vulnerable to Russian extortion had to be investigated.’ After further discussion, the group agreed to send Kramer to London to meet Steele. When Kramer returned from the meeting and told McCain that Steele seemed to be a reputable source, the Republican senator agreed to receive a copy of the dossier. ‘The allegations were disturbing, but I had no idea which if any were true,’ McCain said. ‘I could not independently verify any of it, and so I did what any American who cares about our nation’s security should have done. I put the dossier in my office safe, called the office of the director of the FBI, Jim Comey, and asked for a meeting.’ McCain ultimately turned the dossier over to Comey in a meeting on December 9, 2016 that he said lasted about 10 minutes. ‘I did what duty demanded I do, » McCain wrote, adding that anyone who disagrees with his decision can « go to hell.’ The Trump-Russia dossier alleges the Kremlin has been « cultivating, supporting, and assisting » Trump for years under the watchful eye of Putin. The most salacious allegation claims Trump once paid Russian prostitutes to perform sexual acts in front of him that involved urination in a Moscow hotel. Trump has dismissed the dossier as ‘fake’ and ‘phony.’ In general, the concern surrounding the dossier is that, if it were all true, the Russian government could have enough incriminating evidence on Trump to make him vulnerable to blackmail, though the president has fervently pushed back against this perception. Some details within the dossier have been verified, but much of it remains unconfirmed. With that said, it continues to be one of the most controversial topics of conversation regarding the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia. McCain wrote that he suspects Wood approached him about the Steele dossier because he has been such a persistent, staunch critic of Putin over the years, and that he would « take their concerns seriously.’ The Arizona senator’s last book, which he co-wrote with Mark Salter, came out in May 2018. Business insider
How can evangelicals support Donald Trump? That question continues to befuddle and exasperate liberals. How, they wonder, can a man who is twice divorced, a serial liar, a shameless boaster (including about alleged sexual assault) and an unrepentant xenophobe earn the enthusiastic backing of so many devout Christians? About 80% of evangelicals voted for Trump in 2016; according to a recent poll, almost 70% of white evangelicals approve of how he has handled the presidency – far more than any other religious group. To most Democrats, such support seems a case of blatant hypocrisy and political cynicism. Since Trump is delivering on matters such as abortion, the supreme court and moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, conservative Christians are evidently willing to overlook the president’s moral failings. In embracing such a one-dimensional explanation, however, liberals risk falling into the same trap as they did in 2016, when their scorn for evangelicals fed evangelicals’ anger and resentment, contributing to Trump’s huge margin among this group. Bill Maher fell into this trap during a biting six-minute polemic he delivered on his television show in early March. Evangelicals, he said, “needed to solve this little problem” – they want to support a Republican president, but this particular one “happens to be the least Christian person ever”. “How to square the circle?” he asked. “Say that Trump is like King Cyrus.” According to Isaiah 45, God used the non-believer Cyrus as a vessel for his will; many evangelicals today believe that God is similarly using the less-than-perfect Trump to achieve Christian aims. But Trump isn’t a vessel for God’s will, Maher said, and Cyrus “wasn’t a fat, orange-haired, conscience-less scumbag”. Trump’s supporters “don’t care”, he ventured, because “that’s religion. The more it doesn’t make sense the better, because it proves your faith.” Maher portrayed evangelical Christians as a dim-witted group willing to make the most ludicrous theological leaps to advance their agenda. As I watched, I tried to imagine how evangelicals would view this routine. I think they would see a secular elitist eager to assert what he considers his superior intelligence. They would certainly sense his contempt for the many millions of Americans who believe fervently in God, revere the Bible and see Trump as representing their interests. Maher’s diatribe reminded me of a pro-Trump acquaintance from Ohio who now lives in Manhattan and who says that New York liberals are among the most intolerant people he has ever met. Liberals have good cause to decry the ideology of conservative Christians, given their relentless assault on abortion rights, same-sex marriage, transgender rights and climate science. But the disdain for Christians common among the credentialed class can only add to the sense of alienation and marginalization among evangelicals. Many evangelicals feel themselves to be under siege. In a 2016 survey, 41% said it was becoming more difficult to be an evangelical. And many conservative Christians see the national news media as unrelievedly hostile to them. Most media coverage of evangelicals falls into a few predictable categories. One is the exotic and titillating – stories of ministers who come out as transgender, or stories of evangelical sexual hypocrisies. Another favorite subject is progressive evangelicals who challenge the Christian establishment. (…) In 2016, [ the Times’ Nicholas Kristof,] wrote a column criticizing the pervasive discrimination toward Christians in liberal circles. He quoted Jonathan Walton, a black evangelical and professor of Christian morals at Harvard, who compared the common condescension toward evangelicals to that directed at racial minorities, with both seen as “politically unsophisticated, lacking education, angry, bitter, emotional, poor”. Strangely, the group most overlooked by the press is the people in the pews. It would be refreshing for more reporters to travel through the Bible belt and talk to ordinary churchgoers about their faith and values, hopes and struggles. Such reporting would no doubt show that the world of American Christianity is far more varied and complex than is generally thought. It would reveal, for instance, a subtle but important distinction between the Christian right and evangelicals in general, who tend to be less political (though still largely conservative). This kind of deep reporting would probably also highlight the enduring power of a key tenet of the founder of Protestantism. “Faith, not works,” was Martin Luther’s watchword. In his view, it is faith in Christ that truly matters. If one believes in Christ, then one will feel driven to do good works, but such works are always secondary. Trump’s own misdeeds are thus not central; what he stands for – the defense of Christian interests and values – is. Luther also preached the doctrine of original sin, which holds that all humans are tainted by Adam’s transgression in the Garden of Eden and so remain innately prone to pride, anger, lust, vengeance and other failings. Many evangelicals have themselves struggled with divorce, broken families, addiction and abuse. We are thus all sinners – the president included. (…) I can hear the reactions of some readers to this column: Enough! Enough trying to understand a group that helped put such a noxious man in the White House. Yet such a reaction is both ungenerous and shortsighted. Liberals take pride in their empathy for “the other” and their efforts to understand the perspective of groups different from themselves. They should apply that principle to evangelicals. If liberals continue to scoff, they risk reinforcing the rage of evangelicals – and their support for Trump. Michael Massing
To adopt for a moment the language of the center-left, the “populist cancer” is not at all limited to the Visegrád Group. Above all, the arguments used in Austria, in Poland, in Italy, and in Sweden are exactly the same. One of the constants in Europe’s long history is the struggle against Islam; today, that struggle has simply returned to the foreground. (…) Trump is pursuing and amplifying the policy of disengagement initiated by Obama; this is very good news for the rest of the world. (…) But what’s most remarkable about the new American policies is certainly the country’s position on trade, and there Trump has been like a healthy breath of fresh air; you’ve really done well to elect a president with origins in what is called “civil society.” President Trump tears up treaties and trade agreements when he thinks it was wrong to sign them. He’s right about that; leaders must know how to use the cooling-off period and withdraw from bad deals. Unlike free-market liberals (who are, in their way, as fanatical as communists), President Trump doesn’t consider global free trade the be-all and end-all of human progress. When free trade favors American interests, President Trump is in favor of free trade; in the contrary case, he finds old-fashioned protectionist measures entirely appropriate. President Trump was elected to safeguard the interests of American workers; he’s safeguarding the interests of American workers. During the past fifty years in France, one would have wished to come upon this sort of attitude more often. President Trump doesn’t like the European Union; he thinks we don’t have a lot in common, especially not “values”; and I call this fortunate, because, what values? “Human rights”? Seriously? He’d rather negotiate directly with individual countries, and I believe this would actually be preferable; I don’t think that strength necessarily proceeds from union. It’s my belief that we in Europe have neither a common language, nor common values, nor common interests, that, in a word, Europe doesn’t exist, and that it will never constitute a people or support a possible democracy (see the etymology of the term), simply because it doesn’t want to constitute a people. In short, Europe is just a dumb idea that has gradually turned into a bad dream, from which we shall eventually wake up. And in his hopes for a “United States of Europe,” an obvious reference to the United States, Victor Hugo only gave further proof of his grandiloquence and his stupidity; it always does me a bit of good to criticize Victor Hugo. Logically enough, President Trump was pleased about Brexit. Logically enough, so was I; my sole regret was that the British had once again shown themselves to be more courageous than us in the face of empire. The British get on my nerves, but their courage cannot be denied. President Trump doesn’t consider Vladimir Putin an unworthy negotiating partner; neither do I. I don’t believe Russia has been assigned the role of humankind’s universal guide—my admiration for Dostoevsky doesn’t extend that far—but I admire the persistence of orthodoxy in its own lands, I think Roman Catholicism would do well to take inspiration from it, and I believe that the “ecumenical dialogue” could be usefully limited to a dialogue with the Orthodox Church (Christianity is not only a “religion of the Book,” as is too quickly said; it’s also, and perhaps above all, a religion of the Incarnation). I’m painfully aware that the Great Schism of 1054 was, for Christian Europe, the beginning of the end; but on the other hand, I believe that the end is never certain until it arrives. It seems that President Trump has even managed to tame the North Korean madman; I found this feat positively classy. It seems that President Trump recently declared, “You know what I am? I’m a nationalist!” Me too, precisely so. Nationalists can talk to one another; with internationalists, oddly enough, talking doesn’t work so well. France should leave NATO, but maybe such a step will become pointless if lack of operational funding causes NATO to disappear on its own. That would be one less thing to worry about, and a new reason to sing the praises of President Trump. In summary, President Trump seems to me to be one of the best American presidents I’ve ever seen. On the personal level, he is, of course, pretty repulsive. If he consorted with a porn star, that’s not a problem, who gives a shit, but making fun of handicapped people is bad behavior. With an equivalent agenda, an authentic Christian conservative—which is to say, an honorable and moral person—would have been better for America. But maybe it could happen next time, or the time after that, if you insist on keeping Trump. In six years, Ted Cruz will still be comparatively young, and surely there are other outstanding Christian conservatives. You’ll be a little less competitive, but you’ll rediscover the joy of living within the borders of your magnificent country, practicing honesty and virtue. (…) China will scale back its overweening ambitions. This outcome will be the hardest to achieve, but in the end, China will limit its aspirations, and India will do the same. China has never been a global imperialist power, nor has India—unlike the United States, their military aims are local. Their economic aims, it’s true, are global. They have some economic revenge to take, they’re taking it at the moment, which is indeed a matter of some concern; Donald Trump is quite right to not let himself be pushed around. But in the end, their contentiousness will subside, their growth rate will subside. All this will take place within one human lifetime. You have to get used to the idea, worthy American people: in the final analysis, maybe Donald Trump will have been a necessary ordeal for you. Michel Houellebecq
Sur un plan personnel, Trump est bien sûr assez repoussant, notamment pour s’être moqué des handicapés lors d’un meeting électoral fin 2015. Avec un programme équivalent, un conservateur authentiquement chrétien – une personne honorable et morale – aurait été mieux pour l’Amérique. En attendant, autant vous habituer à l’idée: en dernière analyse, peut-être que Trump aura été une épreuve nécessaire pour vous. Michel Houellebecq
Comment les évangéliques peuvent-ils soutenir Donald Trump? Cette question continue de brouiller et d’exaspérer les progressistes. Comment, se demandent-ils, un homme qui est divorcé deux fois, un menteur en série, un fanfaron éhonté (y compris au sujet d’une agression sexuelle présumée) et un xénophobe impénitent peut-il obtenir le soutien enthousiaste de tant de chrétiens dévots? Environ 80% des évangéliques ont voté pour Trump en 2016; selon un récent sondage, près de 70% des évangéliques blancs approuvent la façon dont il a géré la présidence – bien plus que tout autre groupe religieux. Pour la plupart des démocrates, un tel soutien semble être un cas d’hypocrisie flagrante et de cynisme politique. Étant donné que Trump se prononce sur des questions telles que l’avortement, la Cour suprême et le déplacement de l’ambassade américaine en Israël à Jérusalem, les chrétiens conservateurs sont évidemment prêts à ignorer les défauts moraux du président. Cependant, en adoptant une telle explication unidimensionnelle, les libéraux risquent de tomber dans le même piège qu’en 2016, lorsque leur mépris pour les évangéliques a nourri la colère et le ressentiment des évangéliques, contribuant à l’énorme marge de Trump parmi ce groupe. Bill Maher est tombé dans ce piège dans la diatribe mordante de six minutes qu’il a prononcée lors de son émission de télévision début mars. Les évangéliques, a-t-il dit, « devaient résoudre ce petit problème » – ils veulent soutenir un président républicain, mais celui-ci « se trouve être le moins chrétien de tous les temps ». « Comment résoudre cette quadrature du cercle? », a-t-il demandé. « Dire que Trump est comme le roi Cyrus. » Selon Ésaïe 45, Dieu a utilisé le non-croyant Cyrus comme véhicule de sa volonté; de nombreux évangéliques croient aujourd’hui que Dieu utilise de la même manière un Trump moins que parfait pour atteindre les objectifs chrétiens. Mais Trump n’est pas un vaisseau pour la volonté de Dieu, a déclaré Maher, et Cyrus « n’était pas un nul gras, aux cheveux orange et sans conscience ». Les partisans de Trump « ne s’en soucient pas », s’est-il aventuré, parce que « c’est la religion. Moins cela a de sens, mieux c’est, car cela prouve votre foi. »Maher a dépeint les chrétiens évangéliques comme un groupe humble disposé à faire les sauts théologiques les plus ridicules pour faire avancer leur programme. Pendant que je regardais, j’ai essayé d’imaginer comment les évangéliques verraient cette routine. Je pense qu’ils verraient un élitiste laïc désireux d’affirmer ce qu’il considère comme son intelligence supérieure. Ils ressentiraient certainement son mépris pour les millions d’Américains qui croient ardemment en Dieu, vénèrent la Bible et considèrent Trump comme représentant leurs intérêts. La diatribe de Maher m’a rappelé une connaissance pro-Trump de l’Ohio qui vit maintenant à Manhattan et qui dit que les libéraux de New York sont parmi les personnes les plus intolérantes qu’il ait jamais rencontrées. Les libéraux ont de bonnes raisons de dénoncer l’idéologie des chrétiens conservateurs, étant donné leur assaut incessant contre les droits à l’avortement, le mariage homosexuel, les droits des transgenres et la science du climat. Mais le mépris pour les chrétiens, commun à la classe diplômée, ne peut qu’ajouter au sentiment d’aliénation et de marginalisation des évangéliques. De nombreux évangéliques se sentent assiégés. Dans une enquête de 2016, 41% ont déclaré qu’il devenait plus difficile d’être évangélique. Et de nombreux chrétiens conservateurs considèrent les médias nationaux comme hostiles à leur égard. La plupart des reportages médiatiques sur les évangéliques se répartissent en quelques catégories prévisibles. L’une est les histoires exotiques et émouvantes – des histoires de pasteurs qui se révèlent transgenres, ou des histoires d’hypocrisies sexuelles évangéliques. Un autre sujet de prédilection est celui des évangélistes progressistes qui défient l’establishment chrétien. (…) En 2016, [léditorialiste du NYT Nicholas Kristof] a écrit une chronique critiquant la discrimination omniprésente envers les chrétiens dans les milieux de gauche. Il a cité Jonathan Walton, un évangélique noir et professeur de morale chrétienne à Harvard, qui a comparé la condescendance commune envers les évangéliques à celle dirigée contre les minorités raciales, les deux étant considérées comme «politiquement peu sophistiquées, manquant d’éducation, en colère, amères, émotionnelles, pauvres». Étrangement, le groupe le plus négligé par la presse est celui des blancs. Il serait rafraîchissant que davantage de journalistes parcourent la « Bible belt » et parlent aux fidèles ordinaires de leur foi et de leurs valeurs, de leurs espoirs et de leurs luttes. De tels reportages montreraient sans aucun doute que le monde du christianisme américain est beaucoup plus varié et complexe qu’on ne le pense généralement. Cela révélerait, par exemple, une distinction subtile mais importante entre la droite chrétienne et les évangéliques en général, qui ont tendance à être moins politiques (quoique encore largement conservateurs). Ce genre de reportage approfondi mettrait probablement également en évidence le pouvoir durable d’un principe clé du fondateur du protestantisme.«La foi, pas les œuvres», était le mot d’ordre de Martin Luther. Selon lui, c’est la foi en Christ qui compte vraiment. Si l’on croit en Christ, on se sent poussé à faire de bonnes œuvres, mais ces œuvres sont toujours secondaires. Les propres manquements de Trump ne sont donc pas centraux; mais c’est ce qu’il représente – la défense des intérêts et des valeurs chrétiennes – qui l’est. Luther a également prêché la doctrine du péché originel, selon laquelle tous les humains sont entachés par la transgression d’Adam dans le jardin d’Eden et restent donc naturellement enclins à l’orgueil, la colère, la luxure, la vengeance et d’autres défauts. De nombreux évangéliques ont eux-mêmes lutté contre le divorce, la rupture dans leurs familles, la toxicomanie et les abus. Nous sommes donc tous pécheurs – y compris le président. (…) J’entends les réactions de certains lecteurs à cette chronique: Il y en assez d’essayer de comprendre un groupe qui a permis l’arrivée d’un homme aussi nocif à la Maison Blanche. Pourtant, une telle réaction est à la fois peu généreuse et à courte vue. Les libéraux sont fiers de leur empathie pour ‘l’autre’ et de leurs efforts pour comprendre la perspective de groupes différents d’eux. Ils devraient appliquer ce principe aux évangéliques. Si la gauche continue ses moqueries, elle risque de renforcer la rage des évangéliques – et leur soutien à Trump. » Michael Massing
Sur les plans géographique, culturel et social, il existe bien des points communs entre les situations françaises et américaines, à commencer par le déclassement de la classe moyenne. C’est « l’Amérique périphérique » qui a voté Trump, celle des territoires désindustrialisés et ruraux qui est aussi celle des ouvriers, employés, travailleurs indépendants ou paysans. Ceux qui étaient hier au cœur de la machine économique en sont aujourd’hui bannis. Le parallèle avec la situation américaine existe aussi sur le plan culturel, nous avons adopté un modèle économique mondialisé. Fort logiquement, nous devons affronter les conséquences de ce modèle économique mondialisé : l’ouvrier – hier à gauche –, le paysan – hier à droite –, l’employé – à gauche et à droite – ont aujourd’hui une perception commune des effets de la mondialisation et rompent avec ceux qui n’ont pas su les protéger. La France est en train de dngevenir une société américaine, il n’y a aucune raison pour que l’on échappe aux effets indésirables du modèle. (…) Dans l’ensemble des pays développés, le modèle mondialisé produit la même contestation. Elle émane des mêmes territoires (Amérique périphérique, France périphérique, Angleterre périphérique… ) et de catégories qui constituaient hier la classe moyenne, largement perdue de vue par le monde d’en haut. (…) Faire passer les classes moyennes et populaires pour « réactionnaires », « fascisées », « pétinisées » est très pratique. Cela permet d’éviter de se poser des questions cruciales. Lorsque l’on diagnostique quelqu’un comme fasciste, la priorité devient de le rééduquer, pas de s’interroger sur l’organisation économique du territoire où il vit. L’antifascisme est une arme de classe. Pasolini expliquait déjà dans ses Écrits corsaires que depuis que la gauche a adopté l’économie de marché, il ne lui reste qu’une chose à faire pour garder sa posture de gauche : lutter contre un fascisme qui n’existe pas. C’est exactement ce qui est en train de se passer. Christophe Guilluy
Madame Hidalgo persécute l’artisan qui roule dans une vieille camionnette, mais elle rêve d’attirer toujours plus de touristes dont les autocars font trembler les pavés parisiens, elle veut une ville verte et cycliste pour accueillir des foules livrées par Airbus. Bref, elle psalmodie avec la même conviction l’urgence écologique et l’impératif touristique, ce qui est à hurler de rire. (…) On ne cesse de nous rappeler que la planète n’est pas renouvelable, mais les vieilles pierres, les églises, les temples ne le sont pas non plus. Il est tout de même curieux qu’on trouve normal de pénaliser un travailleur qui n’a pas les moyens de se payer une voiture propre mais qu’on refuse toute mesure de restriction touristique au prétexte que les classes moyennes brésiliennes ou indiennes ont aussi le droit de visiter Chambord. Du reste, cet argument est d’une rare hypocrisie: si nous nous mettons en quatre pour recevoir le touriste, même modeste, ce n’est évidemment pas par esprit démocratique mais parce que, pauvre ou pas, nous pourrons le soulager de quelques devises. Rassurez-vous, je ne prétends pas qu’il faudrait interdire le tourisme, mais au moins le réguler. On somme les Chinois de modérer leurs émissions de carbone, pourquoi serait-il intolérable de leur demander de réduire leurs voyages? Alors oui, peut-être faudra-t-il à l’avenir attendre plus longtemps et payer plus cher pour visiter nos monuments. Mais si on ne restreint pas les flux, ces générations futures pour lesquelles on nous demande de changer nos habitudes n’auront plus rien à visiter. (…) On a (…) vendu la mobilité, la flexibilité, la désaffiliation comme des idéaux à des classes populaires ou moyennes qui non seulement n’ont pas les moyens financiers et culturels de passer leur vie à sauter les frontières ou à s’installer ailleurs que dans l’endroit où ils ont acheté une maison invendable, mais qui, en plus, semblent assez largement rétives aux beautés du nomadisme. (…) Le tourisme éthique et citoyen inventé par les marchands de voyages et le «guide du Roublard» (encore Muray) n’étaient pas mal non plus. Encore une fois, le tourisme écologique est un oxymore. Ou pour le dire autrement, une vaste blague. Cependant, aujourd’hui, certains écolos (et les technos du ministère) rêvent de «valoriser» la nature et d’en faire à son tour un patrimoine touristique bien plus profitable que l’élevage qui occupe actuellement les déserts français. Les promoteurs de ce Yellowstone à la française, sur lequel Causeur publie une enquête, aimeraient donc se débarrasser du pastoralisme, cette activité humaine ancestrale, pour implanter des loups et des ours. Le calcul est simple: des touristes fortunés susceptibles de payer pour voir des prédateurs, il y en a beaucoup, alors que ces éleveurs nous coûtent un pognon de dingue. En somme, cette écologie de l’ensauvagement lutte contre l’homme et pour le touriste. (…) Je ne me moque nullement de ces bénéfices, je me désole que nous acceptions de n’être plus qu’un pays où on vient passer ses vacances ou, pire encore, un pays qu’on traverse pour aller en Italie ou en Espagne. Nous sommes fiers de notre médaille d’or du nombre de touristes mais ce chiffre masque le fait que beaucoup ne dépensent chez nous que le prix de deux pleins et de trois sandwiches. Par ailleurs, on oublie toujours, quand on parle des recettes du tourisme, de compter le coût des nuisances qu’il occasionne et des investissements qu’il nécessite, dont une partie notable est à la charge de la collectivité. Cela dit, je ne me désole pas que des milliards d’étrangers rêvent de visiter Paris, je me désole du fait que «la ville de demain», comme dit la maire, soit d’abord conçue pour eux et si peu pour ceux qui y vivent. Et aussi que nous renoncions à être une grande nation industrielle pour être la première destination touristique du monde. Comme si nous n’avions plus rien d’autre à vendre que notre passé débité en visites guidées et produits dérivés. (…) Quand Paris a «gagné» les JO, – contre personne car il n’y avait pas d’autres candidats – nous avons été les seuls à dénoncer cette catastrophe. On nous disait: vous n’aimez rien, ce sera formidable pour la ville, la grande fête du sport, et tout ce baratin. Plus l’échéance approche et plus on se rend compte que ce sera, comme toujours, la grande fête du business, de la pub, de la vente de bière, de la fête obligatoire et du bruit. Paris va se transformer en ville-sandwich mais joue les vertueuses en refusant Total, un peu comme une prostituée qui refuserait les hommes mariés. Et je ne vous parle même pas des retards dans les chantiers et des dépassements de budget qui s’annoncent. Dans quatre ans, tous ceux qui nous sommaient hier de nous enthousiasmer hurleront au scandale. (…) Muray était un prophète, il a deviné toutes les potentialités diaboliques et comiques de notre époque sans autre et sans ailleurs bien avant qu’elles soient accomplies. Autant dire que les occasions de lui rendre hommage ne manquent pas. Il est impossible de comprendre ce qui se joue dans l’arraisonnement touristique du monde sans le lire. Elisabeth Lévy
I don’t believe only in reproductive freedom, I believe in reproductive justice. And what that means is just because a woman, or let’s also not forget someone in the trans community — a trans female — is poor, doesn’t mean they shouldn’t exercise that right to choose. So I absolutely would cover that right to have an abortion. Julian Castro
Let me just be very clear: we have to have a secure border. But I am in favor of saying that we’re not going to treat people who are undocumented [and] cross the borders as criminals, that is correct. What we cannot do is have any more policy like we have under this current president that is about inhumane conduct, that is about putting babies in cages, that is about separating children from their parents and we have got to have policy that is about passing comprehensive immigration reform with a pathway toward citizenship. I would not make it punishable by jail. It should be a civil enforcement issue, but not a criminal enforcement issue. Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.)
I’ve been to that facility, where they talk about cages. That facility was built under President Obama under (Homeland Security) Secretary Jeh Johnson. I was there because I was there when it was built. The kids are being house in the same facility built under the Obama administration.’ If you want to call them cages, call them cages. But if the left wants to call them cages and the Democrats want to call them cages then they have to accept the fact that they were built and funded in FY 2015. It’s chain link dividers that keeps children separate from unrelated adults. It’s about protecting children. Thomas Homan (Obama’s executive associate director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement)
Ne fermez pas les portes à ceux qui frappent. Le monde des migrants et des réfugiés est la croix de l’humanité. Pape François
Des associations comme SOS Méditerranée et Sea Watch nous honorent et nous obligent face à l’inertie des gouvernements européens. Carola Rackete et Pia Klemp sont les emblèmes de ce combat, porteuses des valeurs européennes auxquelles la Ville de Paris appelle une nouvelle fois notre continent à rester fidèle. Patrick Klugman (adjoint à la maire de Paris chargé des Relations internationales)
L’Eglise est dans son rôle quand elle fait preuve de compassion et de charité pour les plus vulnérables. Elle sort de ses fonctions quand elle fait de la politique, par son opposition aux Etats qui entendent contrôler leurs frontières. Une chose est d’aider des migrants qui risquent la mort. Une autre est de rester indifférent aux peuples d’Europe qui voient l’immigration de masse comme une force potentielle de déstabilisation de leur civilisation fatiguée. François se comporte comme s’il avait déjà tiré un trait sur la vieille Europe infertile et décadente, pour lui préférer la plus prolifique clientèle du tiers-monde. Et se plaçant en chef de file des humanitaires, sans manifester de curiosité particulière pour leurs arrangements avec les passeurs en Méditerranée, le Pape est en train de transformer l’Eglise catholique en une super-ONG à la George Soros. Il est également en train de vider de sa substance le subtil message religieux, qui s’adresse à chaque croyant soucieux de sa rédemption, au profit de lourds slogans humanitaires culpabilisant les Etats. Le plus grave est que François ne semble pas vouloir mesurer la force conquérante de l’islam au contact de l’Occident, et la faiblesse de l’Europe oublieuse de ses propres racines. Le cardinal Robert Sarah remarque avec justesse : « L’Europe veut s’ouvrir à toutes les cultures – ce qui peut être louable et source de richesse – et à toutes les religions du monde, mais elle ne s’aime plus« . Le pape, non plus, n’aime pas l’Europe. Ivan Rioufol
Arrêtée par la police italienne, le capitaine du bateau Sea Watch, Carola Rackete, semble être devenue l’héroïne de toute une gauche européenne dont l’activisme humanitaire et victimiste pro-migrants sert en réalité une idéologie anti-nationale, anti-frontières et viscéralement hostile à la civilisation européenne-occidentale assimilée au Mal et dont les « fautes » passées et présentes ne pourraient être expiées qu’en acceptant l’auto-submersion migratoire et islamique… Rappelons que le Sea-Watch 3, navire de 600 tonnes battant pavillon hollandais et cofinancé par les fonds de George Soros et autres riches contributeurs, a non seulement « récupéré » des migrants illégaux acheminés par des passeurs nord-africains, ce qui est en soi un viol de la loi, mais a délibérément forcé le blocus des eaux territoriales italiennes, donc violé la souveraineté de ce pays. De ce fait, son capitaine, l’Allemande Carola Rackete, va être présentée à un juge en début de semaine, à Agrigente, dans le sud de la Sicile, puis répondra des faits « d’aide à l’immigration clandestine » (punie de prison par la loi italienne et le « décret-sécurité » (decreto-sicurezza) du gouvernement / Ligue (5 étoiles de Rome), puis de « résistance à un bateau de guerre ». Quant aux 42 migrants clandestins de la Sea Watch 3 débarqués après l’arrestation de la capitaine-activiste allemande (11 migrants plus « vulnérables » avaient déjà été débarqués légalement), ils ont fini par débarquer à Lampedusa après que la France, l’Allemagne, le Portugal, le Luxembourg et la Finlande ont accepté un plan de répartition visant à en accueillir chacun quelques-uns. (…) Pendant ce temps, des petites embarcations moins identifiables et qui ne font pas la une des médias continuent d’arriver chaque jour à Lampedusa et au sud d’Agrigente (200 ces derniers jours). Et d’autres navires affrétés par des ONG pro-migrants continuent de défier les autorités italiennes ou d’autres pays (Malte, Espagne, Grèce, etc.) dans l’indifférence générale et en violation banalisée de la loi et du principe de protection des frontières. On peut citer par exemple l’ONG espagnole Proactiva open arms, qui patrouille au large de la Libye malgré la menace d’une amende de 200 000 à 900 000 euros brandie par les autorités espagnoles. « Si je dois payer par la prison ou par une amende le fait de sauver les vies de quelques personnes, je le ferais », a d’ailleurs assuré Oscar Camps, fondateur de l’ONG. Utilisant la même rhétorique de « résistance » et de « désobéissance civile » face à une autorité étatique « répressive », Carola Rackette expliquait elle aussi au Spiegel, quelques jours seulement avant d’accoster à Lampedusa : « Si nous ne sommes pas acquittés par un tribunal, nous le serons dans les livres d’histoire. » (…) La stratégie d’intimidation psychologique des ONG et lobbies subversifs pro-migrants consiste en fait à adopter une rhétorique victimaire et hautement culpabilisatrice qui a pour but de faire passer pour des horribles racistes / fascistes les défenseurs des frontières et des lois sécuritaires pourtant démocratiquement adoptées. Carola Rackete a ainsi déclaré au journal italien La Repubblica : « J’ai la peau blanche, j’ai grandi dans un pays riche, j’ai le bon passeport, j’ai pu faire trois universités différentes et j’ai fini mes études à 23 ans. Mon obligation morale est d’aider les gens qui n’ont pas bénéficié des mêmes conditions que moi (…). Les pauvres, ils ne se sentent pas bienvenus, imaginez leur souffrance (…), j’ai voulu accoster de force car beaucoup risquaient de se suicider sur la bateau et étaient en danger depuis 17 jours d’immobilisation ». (…) Très fier de lui et de son « coup », Chris Grodotzki, le président de l’ONG Sea Watch, se réjouit que « dans toute l’Europe, Carole est devenue un symbole. Nous n’avons jamais reçu autant de dons », indiquant qu’en Italie une cagnotte a recueilli dimanche 400 000 euros. Samedi, en Allemagne, deux stars de la télévision, Jan Böhmermann et Klaas Heufer-Umlauf, ont lancé quant à eux une cagnotte et 500 000 euros ont été récoltés en moins de vingt-quatre heures. En fait, l’aide aux migrants clandestins est une activité lucrative pour les ONG, et pas seulement pour les passeurs et les établissements payés pour offrir le gîte et l’accueil avec les deniers publics. (…) D’après Matteo Salvini, Carola Rackete serait une « criminelle » qui aurait tenté de « tuer des membres des forces de l’ordre italienne ». Il est vrai que la vedette de la Guarda della Finanza, (12 mètres), très légère, n’aurait pas résisté au choc du navire de la Sea Watch (600 tonnes) si elle ne s’était pas retirée. Inculpée par le procureur d’Agrigente, la capitaine de la Sea Watch risque jusqu’à dix ans de prison pour « résistance ou violence envers un navire de guerre ». En fait, bien moins que dans de nombreux autres pays du monde, y compris démocratiques comme l’Australie, les Etats-Unis ou la Hongrie. Le procureur d’Agrigente, Luigi Patronaggio, qui est pourtant connu pour ne pas être du tout favorable à la Ligue de Matteo Salvini, a d’ailleurs qualifié le geste de Carola Rackete de « violence inadmissible » et placé la capitaine du navire humanitaire aux « arrêts domiciliaires » (contrôle judiciaire avec assignation à résidence), avant le lancement d’une procédure de flagrant délit. L’intéressée a répondu via le Corriere della Sera, en affirmant que « ce n’était pas un acte de violence, seulement de désobéissance ». (…) Depuis, de Rome à Berlin, et au sein de toute la gauche et l’extrême-gauche européenne, « Carola » est devenue une nouvelle « héroïne de la désobéissance civile », le concept clef de la gauche marxiste ou libertaire pour justifier moralement le fait de bafouer délibérément les règles des Etats et de violer les lois démocratiques qui font obstacle à leur idéologie anti-nationale. Et la désinformation médiatique consiste justement à faire passer l’appui que Carola Rackete a reçu – de la part de stars de TV, de politiques bien-pensants et de lobbies pro-migrants chouchoutés par les médias – pour un « soutien de l’Opinion publique ». En Allemagne, du président de l’Église évangélique, Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, au PDG de Siemens, Joe Kaeser, de nombreuses voix se sont élevées pour prendre sa défense comme si elle était une nouvelle Pasionaria « antifasciste / antinazie », 90 ans plus tard… (…) En Italie, outre la figure de Leo Luca Orlando, le maire de Palerme, qui accorde régulièrement la « citoyenneté d’honneur » de sa ville aux dirigeants d’ONG pro-migrants et qui assimile les « cartes de séjours » et contrôles aux frontières à des « instruments de torture », l’ensemble de la gauche (hors le parti 5 étoiles allié de la Ligue), et surtout le parti démocrate, (PD), jouent cette carte de « l’illégalité légitime » et appuie les ONG anti-frontières. « Par nécessité, vous pouvez enfreindre la loi », ont déclaré aux membres de la Sea Watch les députés de gauche montés à bord du bateau Sea Watch 3 avant l’arrestation de Carole Rackete. Premier à être monté à bord du Sea Watch 3, l’élu du PD Graziano Delrio ose lancer : « Dans certains cas, vous ne pouvez pas respecter les lois et vous pouvez même au contraire, dans des cas de nécessité, enfreindre les lois. » (..;) Détail stupéfiant, les représentants du PD venus manifester leur solidarité avec la capitaine (étrangère) d’un navire (étranger) faisant le travail de passeurs / trafiquants d’êtres humains, n’ont pas même condamné ou regretté le fait que la « militante humanitaire Carole » a failli tuer les policiers de la vedette de la Guardia di Finanza qui bloquait le Sea Watch 3. Estimant qu’il ne pouvait manquer ce « coup médiatique » afin de complaire aux lobbies et médias immigrationnistes dominant, l’ex-Premier ministre (PD) Matteo Renzi était lui aussi sur le pont du Sea Watch 3 lorsque Carola Rackete a décidé de forcer le blocus. Avec lui, d’autres parlementaires de gauche (Matteo Orfini, Davide Faraone, Nicola Fratoianni et Riccardo Magi) ont carrément « béni » cette action illégale et violente qui a pourtant mis en danger les membres des forces de leur propre pays. (..;) Étaient également venus applaudir la capitaine allemande et son action illégale : le curé de Lampedusa, Don Carmelo La Magra ; l’ancien maire de l’île Giusi Nicolini, le médecin et député européen Pietro Bartolo, et le secrétaire local du parti PD Peppino Palmeri, lequel a déclaré pompeusement que « l’humanité a gagné, (…). Je pense que oui, nous devons être unis dans une fraternité universelle »… Plutôt que de respecter la légalité des lois approuvées démocratiquement par le Parlement de leur propre pays dont ils sont élus, ces représentants de la gauche ont accusé le gouvernement Ligue / 5 étoiles d’avoir « laissé au milieu de la mer pendant 16 jours un bateau qui avait besoin d’un refuge » (Matteo Orfini), alors qu’en réalité, sur les 53 migrants illégaux au départ présents sur le Sea Watch 3, onze avaient été débarqués en Italie en raison de leur état vulnérable, les autres étant nourris et auscultés par des médecins envoyés par l’Etat italien. (..;) Dès qu’elle est descendue du navire accompagnée des policiers italiens venus l’arrêter, Carola Rackete a été saluée par les ovations d’un groupe d’activistes ainsi que par le curé de la paroisse de Lampedusa, Carmelo La Magra, lequel dormait dans le cimetière de sa paroisse depuis une semaine « en signe de solidarité ». Rivalisant avec les plus virulents pro-migrants d’extrême-gauche, le curé de Lampedusa a exulté : « Noël vient quand il arrive. Bienvenue aux migrants à Porto Salvo di Lampedusa. » Le prêtre de l’église de San Gerlando di Lampedusa s’est ainsi joint à l’appel de l’Action catholique italienne « à permettre le débarquement immédiat des 42 personnes à bord du Sea Watch ». (..;) Au début du mois de mai dernier, lors de son voyage en Bulgarie, le Pape avait donné le ton et répondu ainsi à la politique des « ports fermés » de Matteo Salvini : « Ne fermez pas les portes à ceux qui frappent. Le monde des migrants et des réfugiés est la croix de l’humanité. » Preuve que les curés pro-migrants et l’Église catholique de plus en plus immigrationniste sont, comme la gauche anti-nationale post-ouvrière, totalement déconnectés des peuples et de leurs ouailles : rappelons qu’à Lampedusa la Ligue de Salvini est arrivée en tête avec 45 % des voix aux dernières élections européennes ; que plus de 65 % des Italiens (catholiques) approuvent ses lois et actions visant à combattre l’immigration clandestine ; et que le Pape François, certes populaire auprès des médias quand il défend les migrants, exaspère de plus en plus et a même rendu antipapistes des millions d’Italiens qui se sentent trahis par un souverain Pontife qui semble préférer les musulmans aux chrétiens et les Africains aux Européens. A tort ou à raison d’ailleurs. (…) Il est vrai que la Sicile et en particulier Lampedusa sont plus que jamais en première ligne face à l’immigration clandestine : rien que pendant les deux dernières semaines durant lesquelles le Sea Watch est resté bloqué au large de l’île, Lampedusa a assisté impuissante, malgré la politique des « ports fermés » de Matteo Salvini et de son nouveau « décret sécurité », plus de 200 clandestins (majoritairement tunisiens et aucunement des « réfugiés » politiques syriens) acheminés par des barques de fortunes plus difficiles à repérer que les navires des ONG. Depuis des années, la ville est littéralement défigurée, l’arrivée de migrants entraînant des faits quotidiens de violences, d’agressions, de vols et destructions de commerces. (…) Malgré cela, le médiatique curé de Lampedusa, grand adepte du pape François, martèle qu’il faut « accueillir, protéger, promouvoir et intégrer les migrants et les réfugiés ». Dans une autre ville de Sicile, Noto, où nous nous sommes rendus le 27 juin dernier, une immense croix en bois a été construite à partir de morceaux d’une embarcation de migrants et a été carrément érigée dans l’entrée de la plus grande église du centre-ville. A Catania, ville très catholique-conservatrice et de droite – où se déroule chaque année début février la troisième plus grande fête chrétienne au monde, la Santa Agata – la cathédrale a été prise d’assauts par des sit-in pro-migrants en défense de Carola Rackete et de la Sea Watch. (…) Quant à Palerme, l’alliance entre l’Église catholique et le maire de la Ville, Leo Luca Orlando, chef de file de la lutte contre la politique migratoire de Matteo Salvini, est totale, alors même que Orlando est un anticlérical patenté à la fois islamophile et pro-LGBT. Sa dernière trouvaille a consisté à proposer d’éliminer le terme même de « migrant », puisque « nous sommes tous des personnes ». D’après lui, le terme « migrants » devrait être supprimé, tout comme la gauche a réussi à faire supprimer celui de « clandestin », remplacé dans le jargon journalistique par celui, trompeur, mais plus valorisant, de « migrant ». Cette manipulation sémantique visant à abolir la distinction migrant régulier / illégal est également très présente dans le pacte de Marrakech des Nations-unies. (..;) Récemment, à l’occasion de la rupture du jeûne du ramadan, le médiatique maire palermitain s’est affiché en train de prier avec une assemblée de musulmans, consacrant même une « journée consacrée à l’islam » en rappelant le « glorieux passé arabo-islamique » de la Sicile (en réalité envahie et libérée deux siècles plus tard par les Normands). Orlando utilise lui aussi à merveille l’arme de la culpabilisation lorsqu’il ne cesse de justifier l’immigration illimitée au nom du fait que les Siciliens « ont eu eux aussi des grands-parents qui ont décidé d’aller vivre dans un autre pays en demandant à être considérés comme des personnes humaines ». Bref, « on est tous des migrants ». Une musique bien connue aussi en France. (…) A chaque nouvelle affaire de blocage de bateaux d’ONG pro-migrants par les autorités italiennes obéissant à la politique de la Ligue, le maire de Palerme se déclare prêt à accueillir des navires dans le port de Palerme. Lors de notre visite, le 26 juin dernier, Orlando nous a d’ailleurs remis une brochure consacrée à l’accueil des migrants, « chez eux chez nous ». Comme le Pape ou l’ex-maire de Lampedusa, Leoluca Orlando est depuis quelques années tellement obsédé par « l’impératif d’accueil » des migrants, alors que la Sicile connaît encore une grande pauvreté et un chômage de masse, qu’il suscite une réaction de rejet et d’exaspération, d’autant que de nombreuses initiatives en faveur des migrants sont financées par des citoyens italiens-siciliens hyper-taxés et précarisés. (…) Le 28 juin, lorsque nous avons parlé de la question migratoire au maire de la seconde ville de Sicile, Catania, Salvatore Pogliese, ex-membre d’Alleanza nazionale élu député européen et maire sous les couleurs de Forza Italia, celui-ci nous confiait qu’il jugeait absurdes et extrêmes les vues du maire de Palerme ou du curé de Lampedusa. Et il rappelait que lorsque des maires pro-migrants jouent aux « héros » en réclamant l’ouverture sans limites des ports pour accueillir les « réfugiés » du monde entier, ils mentent puisque l’ouverture des ports relève, comme en France, non pas des maires, mais de l’Etat central (ministères des Transports et de l’Intérieur). (..;) Une autre alliance de forces « progressistes » / pro-migrants n’a pas manqué de surprendre les analystes de la vie politique italienne, notamment à l’occasion de la Gay Pride, organisée à Milan le 28 juin, par le maire de gauche, Beppe Sala, champion de la « diversité » et des minorités en tout genre : l’alliance de la gauche et des multinationales et des Gafam. C’est ainsi que certains journaux italiens de droite ont relevé le fait que les sponsors de la Gay Pride, officiellement indiqués sur le site de l’événement – Google, Microsoft, eBay, Coca-Cola, PayPal, RedBull, Durex, Benetton, etc. – ont tenu et obtenu que soient associées à la cause des gays celle des migrants afin de « prendre en compte toutes les différences, pas seulement liées à l’identité et à l’orientation sexuelle (immigration, handicap, appartenance ethnique, etc.) ». (..;) Les « migrants » illégaux et autres faux réfugiés secourus par les ONG immigrationnistes, adeptes des « ports ouverts », ont donc eu droit à un traitement de faveur et ont pu officiellement venir « exprimer toute sa solidarité avec le capitaine du navire (Sea Watch 3) Carola Rackete, avec les membres de l’équipage et avec toutes les personnes à bord », écrit sur Facebook « Ensemble sans murs », qui « participera avec enthousiasme au défilé de mode de Milan ». L’idéologie diversitaire est si puissante, et l’accueil des migrants est tellement devenu la « cause des causes » capable de surpasser les autres, qu’elle s’invite même chez les lobbies LGBT, pourtant la « minorité » la plus directement persécutée – avec les juifs – par l’islamisme. (..;) Or, une grande majorité d’immigrés clandestins est de confession musulmane : Subsahariens, Erythréens, Soudanais, Égyptiens, Syriens, Turcs, Maghrébins ou Pakistanais et Afghans qui émigrent en masse dans la Vieille Europe de façon tant légale (regroupement familial, migrations économiques, visas étudiants, mineurs non-accompagnés…) qu’illégale. (..;) Pour bien comprendre « d’où parlent » les défenseurs des migrants clandestins qui ne cessent d’apostropher Victor Orban, Matteo Salvini ou encore le « diable en chef » Donald Trump pour leurs politiques de contrôle de l’immigration, il suffit de constater le deux poids deux mesures et l’indignation sélective de la gauche et de l’Église catholique qui dénoncent les « populistes européens xénophobes / islamophobes / racistes » mais très peu le néo-Sultan Erdogan et encore moins les pays d’Afrique, du Maghreb, d’Amérique latine ou d’Asie qui répriment extrêmement sévèrement et violemment l’immigration clandestine et / ou l’islamisme. (…) Deux exemples flagrants suffiront à s’en convaincre : l’ONU a récemment condamné « l’islamophobie » européenne et occidentale, notamment de la France et de l’Italie, mais pas les massacres de masse de musulmans en Chine ou en Inde. Ensuite, le 5 septembre 2018, lorsque la marine marocaine a fait tirer sur une embarcation de migrants clandestins, faisant un mort et un blessé grave, puis fait arrêter le capitaine espagnol du bateau, l’ONU n’a pas bronché. Pas plus dans de nombreux cas de mauvais traitements, persécutions de migrants subsahariens ou de chrétiens dans l’ensemble des pays d’Afrique du Nord et arabes. (..;) Les Etats européens et les « militants » antifascistes hostiles aux « populistes » n’ont pas manifesté la moindre indignation face à ces phénomènes récurrents. Pas plus que les antiracistes français et leurs alliés féministes et pro-LGBT ne dénoncent la misogynie et l’homophobie islamiques, de facto exonérées par primat xénophile et auto-racisme anti-occidental. Ce dernier exemple est significatif : loin de se laisser culpabiliser, les autorités marocaines ont pourtant assumé le fait qu’une « unité de combat de la Marine royale » a ouvert le feu sur l’embarcation (un « go-fast » léger) en tuant une passagère. Comme Carola Rackete, le capitaine de la vedette de clandestins n’avait pas obéi aux ordres des militaires marocains l’intimant de stopper sa course. (..;) Morale de l’histoire : l’immigrationnisme des ONG comme la Sea Watch et autres « No Borders » est – comme l’antiracisme à sens unique – une arme subversive tournée contre les seuls peuples blancs-judéo-chrétiens-occidentaux et leurs Etats-Nations souverains. D’évidence, les forces cosmopolitiquement correctes (gauche internationaliste-marxiste ; libéraux-multiculturalistes ; multinationales / Mc Word ; Église catholique ; fédéralistes européens et autres instances onusiennes) veulent détruire en premier lieu les vieilles nations européennes culpabilisées et vieillissantes, sorte de terra nullius en devenir conçue comme le laboratoire de leurs projets néo-impériaux / mondialistes respectifs. (..) Ces différentes forces ne sont pas amies, mais elles convergent dans un même projet de destruction des Etats-souverains occidentaux. Voilà d’où parlent les No Borders. Et à l’aune de ce constat, le fait que le milliardaire Soros et les multinationales précitées sponsorisent des opérations pro-migrants, pourtant exécutées par des ONG et forces de gauche et d’extrême-gauche ou chrétiennes / tiersmondistes, en dit long sur la convergence des forces cosmopolitiquement correctes hostiles à l’Etat-Nation et à la défense de l’identité occidentale. Alexandre del Valle
Cela s’inscrit dans la ligne politique engagée par l’Iran depuis quarante ans. Ils déploient une politique de chantage sans pour autant l’assumer. Ils déploient une politique de chantage sans pour autant l’assumer. Ils jettent de l’huile sur le feu, mais de manière modérée. La seule chose qui leur reste, c’est leur pouvoir de nuisance. Mahnaz Shirali
Le Président américain Donald Trump est présenté comme un abruti erratique guidé par ses impulsions, ignorant et dangereux. Bien que le rapport Mueller ait montré qu’il n’y a jamais eu aucune «collusion» entre Trump et la Russie, les journalistes français en leur grande majorité se refusent à le dire explicitement et à reconnaître qu’ils ont pratiqué la désinformation à dose intensive pendant deux ans. Les résultats obtenus par Trump, tant sur le plan intérieur que sur le plan extérieur, sont à peine notés et ne le sont parfois pas du tout. Quand ils le sont, le nom de Trump est le plus souvent omis, comme si le citer positivement, ne serait-ce qu’une seule fois, était absolument impensable. Ce n’est, en soi, pas grave: Trump gouverne sans se préoccuper de ce que diront des journalistes français. Cela contribue néanmoins à entraver la compréhension des choses de tous ceux qui ne s’informeraient que grâce à la presse française, et nombre de gens seront dès lors surpris lorsque Trump sera réélu en novembre 2020 (car tout l’indique: il sera réélu). On leur expliquera sans doute que c’est parce que le peuple américain est lui-même ignorant et dangereux. Cela contribue aussi à empêcher de voir que l’action et les idées de Trump ont un impact beaucoup plus vaste, et qui excède de beaucoup les frontières des États-Unis. La politique économique menée par Donald Trump – qui ajoute à une forte baisse des impôts et à une déréglementation radicale, un refus de se soumettre aux lubies écologistes et un nationalisme économique basé sur la renégociation de tous les accords internationaux antécédemment négociés et sur la création de rapports de force – porte ses fruits et mène divers gouvernements sur la planète à adopter des mesures allant dans la même direction. Sa politique intérieure – basée sur un retour à une immigration strictement contrôlée et sur la réaffirmation des valeurs qui fondent la civilisation occidentale – porte, elle aussi, ses fruits, même si elle est, dans plusieurs États du pays, entravée par les décisions délétères de la gauche américaine qui entend protéger les immigrants illégaux (criminels compris). Plusieurs gouvernements sur la planète adoptent des mesures allant dans le même sens. Au Proche-Orient, Donald Trump conduit une asphyxie du régime iranien qui progresse et, n’en déplaise à ceux qui refusent de le voir, diminue la dangerosité de celui-ci. Il met en place un rapprochement entre les pays du monde arabe sunnite et Israël qui modifie profondément la donne régionale et, n’en déplaise là encore à ceux qui refusent de le voir, fait apparaître pour la première fois des espoirs réels qu’émerge une paix durable. L’anéantissement de l’État islamique permet de juguler le terrorisme islamique sur les cinq continents. L’action d’endiguement de la Chine communiste déstabilise celle-ci et freine les ambitions hégémoniques nourries par Xi Jinping. La Corée du Nord n’est plus une menace pour la Corée du Sud et le Japon. L’arrivée au pouvoir de Jaïr Bolsonaro au Brésil est au cœur d’un changement majeur dans toute l’Amérique latine. En Europe, Trump ne cesse d’appuyer les dirigeants «populistes» d’Europe centrale contre les orientations anti-démocratiques et islamophiles de l’Union européenne, et la perspective d’une Europe des nations souveraines fait son chemin. L’ère Trump est en son aurore. La grande presse du monde qui parle anglais le dit explicitement. Ne comptez pas sur la grande presse française pour vous le dire! Guy Millière
Trump ne voulait pas du rôle de policier mondial, mais il se trouve obligé de l’assumer, puisqu’il n’y a aucune puissance capable de remplacer les États-Unis dans ce domaine-clé. C’est l’Amérique, pas l’ONU impotente et corrompue, qui maintient les routes commerciales, et le monde entier en profite, gratuitement – comme si cela allait de soi. Or, non seulement, cela ne va pas de soi, mais beaucoup d’obligés geignent contre un pseudo «impérialisme américain», sans jamais se remettre en question. Si l’Amérique trouve certes son compte dans ce service planétaire assuré à grands frais par sa flotte et ses services de surveillance, ce n’est pas elle qui en a le plus besoin, mais ses alliés qui, eux, ne sont pas sevrés du brut que leur vend l’OPEP. C’est aussi l’Amérique qui en assume les risques comme on vient de voir avec la descente en flammes d’un drone de 100 millions de dollars, heureusement sans pilote, qui croisait dans l’espace international et non iranien. Cela, après des attaques iraniennes, sans raison non plus, sur des pétroliers norvégien et japonais. Alors, «l’opinion internationale» (c’est-à-dire la gauche mondialiste et ses médias désinformateurs) se dit «soulagée» que Trump n’ait pas poursuivi «son escalade», mais tous ces trolls qui renversent ignominieusement les responsabilités, déplorent à présent son «manque de stratégie». Qu’est-ce que des anti-américains et anti-militaristes primaires peuvent comprendre aux questions de stratégie avec leur logiciel bloqué? La véritable question est: pourquoi l’ayatollah Khamenei décide-t-il maintenant de provoquer Trump? Les sanctions asphyxient son économie de rente, d’autant que l’aide concoctée par les Européens cupides, hypocrites et lâches, tarde à se matérialiser. Les dirigeants de l’UE, qui marchent au pas de l’oie avec Merkel, entretiennent une cécité criminelle vis-à-vis de l’Iran. Sous Merkel, l’Allemagne oublie qu’elle doit tout aux États-Unis. Elle remercie par une politique teigneuse de tarifs douaniers. Elle se targue cyniquement d’être la plus mauvaise payeuse de l’OTAN, achète le gaz de la Russie et refuse le gaz américain. Et voici qu’elle pactise avec les ayatollahs contre les USA. L’Allemagne et l’UE illustrent tout ce qui est inacceptable pour Trump: l’archétype de l’allié félon aux prétentions disproportionnées au vu de la réalité. Et elles sont coupables de négligence inadmissible envers notre sécurité collective en dissimulant le danger pour l’Occident qu’est la République islamique, nullement différente (dans ses visées hégémoniques et ses méthodes internes brutales) de l’État islamique que l’Iran aidait et que Trump a éradiqué. L’Iran n’a jamais cessé l’enrichissement d’uranium et continue d’alimenter le terrorisme islamique. Les sanctions ne sont que justice et, malgré leur dureté renforcée, Trump espère des Iraniens éclairés un énième et décisif soulèvement contre ses dirigeants. Car il n’en a qu’après ce régime meurtrier et sympathise avec les Iraniens, mais il leur rappelle qu’il ne peut intervenir militairement, sauf attaque avec victimes américaines, auquel cas la réponse serait foudroyante. Loin de vouloir la guerre, il veut «redonner à l’Iran sa grandeur». Khamenei sait qu’à la Maison Blanche, Trump s’est entouré volontairement de conseillers aux vues opposées qui représentent chacun une partie de la base de Trump et qui constituent un «brain-trust». Il table sur le fait que Trump est tenu par l’impératif de sa réélection. Les « deux côtés de l’équation », comme Trump les appelle, sont parfaitement honorables et défendent des arguments que l’on ne peut négliger. Pour le moment, le côté «colombe» exulte, les isolationnistes, les libertariens, et toute la mouvance du «The American Conservative». Les «faucons» comprennent que l’heure de l’action militaire n’est pas venue. Mais ce serait mal connaître Trump que de penser qu’il ne va pas trouver le moyen de faire payer aux criminels de Téhéran leurs méfaits. Il doit, seul, parvenir à empêcher les ayatollahs d’accéder au nucléaire et faire cesser leur financement du terrorisme, sans engager de troupes et sans dépenser des milliards. C’est une tâche de police mondiale à laquelle les Européens devraient participer. La stratégie de Trump, c’est de voir venir, de ne pas dévoiler son jeu et de se tenir prêt à frapper. Ceux qui lui font confiance ne sont pas inquiets et savourent un divertissement politique quotidien de qualité. Evelyne Joslain
Critics describe President Donald Trump’s foreign policy as a muddled, unpredictable collection of impulses, with the one organizing principle being the coddling of like-minded, ruthless dictators. But there is, in fact, a defining diplomatic strategy: He is cleaning up the messes left by his predecessors. Trump, regularly derided as the most irresponsible of presidents, is actually taking ownership of the most terrifying problems the country faces and trying to solve them in a direct way that his recent predecessors avoided. With respect to Iran, China, North Korea and even Russia, Trump is taking tough stances. He is getting cozy with dictators because the man who considers himself an artist of the deal understands that those are the people he must strike bargains with. Under Trump, China has finally been recognized as a long-term strategic opponent and potential enemy, rather than a nation of billions yearning for democracy. Capitalism has indeed taken hold in China — though without economic nor political liberalization. Instead, authoritarian China is using its newfound riches to expand its economic, political and military influence. Since Clinton permanently normalized trade relations with China in 2000, American manufacturing has relocated to China for its cheap labor, the Chinese have consistently cheated on trade and the annual U.S. trade deficit with China has soared from $83 billion to a record $419 billion in 2018. Recognizing that placating China and quietly nudging it to play fair is not going to work; Trump has taken a more direct approach and assessed tariffs on Chinese imports while threatening even more. The Chinese are now at the table, talking, and Washington may at last secure a more equitable deal. After two and a half decades of Washington dithering, by 2017 the North Koreans were on the cusp of being able to load their bombs on missiles that could reach the continental United States. So Trump decided to try something different. (…) Trump likely cannot succeed in disarming Kim of his weapons by disarming him personally. The North Korean dictator is probably just buying more time. But Trump is at least taking an unconventional approach rather than re-enacting the failures of the past. Since Clinton, administrations have fostered quixotic illusions of reasonable moderates within the Tehran leadership. But there was little change in that country’s behavior — which has included supporting terrorist groups like Hezbollah and killing more than 600 U.S. troops in Iraq through militia surrogates. Obama’s 2015 Iran deal was the ultimate can-kicking exercise, granting Iran sanctions relief in return for limits on its nuclear program that would expire over the next dozen years. The arrangement could have given Iran the cash it would need to complete its nuclear ambitions once sunset clauses allowing it to enrich more uranium were invoked. (…) But Trump has reasoned the time to get tough with Iran is now, not in a dozen years when they are stronger and have perfected technologies related to nuclear weapons. U.S. policy toward Russia pre-Trump had also been marked by years of complacency — remember Russian President Vladimir Putin convincing Bush there was a soul behind his eyes? During the 2012 presidential campaign, Obama dismissed Republican nominee Mitt Romney’s concerns about Russia with a quip about the 1980s wanting its foreign policy back. Obama was also caught on an open mic whispering to Russia’s then-President Dmitri Medvedev that he’d have more “flexibility” after the election. (…) Trump’s administration, Foreign Policy explained, “has held a tough line on Russia, building on his predecessor’s policies by layering on further sanctions, expelling dozens of Russian diplomats, and providing lethal weapons support to Ukraine — a step that former President Barack Obama had been unwilling to take.” Trump’s demand that European nations pay their North Atlantic Treaty Organization obligations — another can regularly kicked down the road — might seem hostile toward long-time allies, but ensures they have skin in the game when it comes to confronting Russia. The Washington establishment, so used to conventional ways, is aghast. But business as usual has strengthened our enemies. Trump’s iconoclasm is worth a try. Keith Koffler
Presidents are drawn to intellectuals — thinkers who can elevate their impulses, distill coherence from chaos and sometimes write the very history they helped shape. It is not always a fruitful partnership. John F. Kennedy had wordsmiths and chroniclers in Ted Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., as well as the whiz kids who authored Vietnam. George W. Bush met with historians, philosophers and theologians during dark times in his presidency, when the fiasco of Iraq weighed heavy. Ronald Reagan leaned on the governing plans of the Heritage Foundation, while Bill Clinton combined endless policy salons with the centrist blueprints of the Democratic Leadership Council. Barack Obama had, well, himself. And recall how Jimmy Carter took inspiration from the writings of Christopher Lasch for his ill-fated “malaise” speech in 1979. Yes, surrounding yourself with the brightest does not always prove best. Being a Trump intellectual is an entirely different task. Donald Trump won the White House campaigning against established expertise. He doesn’t like to read beyond a page or so. His brain trust is more “Fox & Friends” than American Enterprise Institute, his influences more Bannon than Buckley. (…) Presidents and intellectuals are always an awkward love affair, especially so when one side seems desperate and the other indifferent. Trump has seemed more concerned about retaining the affections of conservative media figures such as Fox News host Sean Hannity or commentator Ann Coulter, whose 2015 book “Adios, America” likely inspired his attack on Mexican immigrants in the speech announcing his presidential bid. Yet, for all their declared high principle, Trump’s intellectuals have tied themselves to the whims and feuds of their leader, captive minds to that indefinable mix of ideology, impulse and invective known as Trumpism. Hanson, to his credit, attempts to define it in broad terms. Trumpism, he concludes, “was the idea that there were no longer taboo subjects. Everything was open for negotiation; nothing was sacred.” A useful interpretation, but a partial one. Even if nothing is sacred, must everything be profane? (…) In September 2016, Michael Anton, a former aide in the George W. Bush White House, published “The Flight 93 Election,” a pseudonymous essay that previewed this adversarial fixation in melodramatic terms. Voting for Trump, he wrote in the Claremont Review of Books, was like charging the cockpit of a hijacked plane on Sept. 11, 2001. You might die, but if you do nothing, death is certain. A Hillary Clinton presidency would constitute an extinction-level event for American freedom and true conservatism; it would be “pedal-to-the-metal on the entire progressive-Left agenda.” Or, as Anton put it in an excess of metaphor, “Russian Roulette with a semi-auto.” The essay drew criticism for its imagery, anonymity and hostility toward conventional conservatives as well as immigrants — Anton decried America’s “ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners” — thus making the writer a perfect candidate for a job in the Trump White House. Anton, whose identity was revealed by the late Weekly Standard, served for 14 months as a National Security Council official. Then-White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon dubbed him “one of the most significant intellects in this nationalist movement.” So with his new book, “After the Flight 93 Election,” Anton would seem well-positioned to move beyond the election and argue a more concrete case for the president, drawing on the administration’s first two years and on the author’s experience in the Trump White House. Except Anton doesn’t even try; the “After” of his title is an afterthought. Instead, he reprints his original essay, plus a follow-up “restatement” that was posted a week later, arguing that Trump constituted “the first serious national-political defense of the Constitution in a generation” and that concerns over despotism were pointless because the candidate was more “buffoon” than tyrant. Also, Hillary was still way worse. The book’s only new material is the preface and a lengthy rumination (titled “Pre-Statement on Flight 93”) that purports to explain “the essences of conservatism, Americanism, and Western civilization, and to review the main threats to their survival.” The system of federalism, separation of powers and limited government bequeathed to us by the founders is under siege, Anton writes, and the barbarians rattling the gate are the latest iteration of early-20th-century progressives and 1960s radicals, justifying an ever-expanding administrative state with social-justice mantras of personal identity. “The post-1960s Left co-opts the language of ‘justice’ and ‘rights’ as a rhetorical device to get what it wants: the transfer of power, honor, and wealth between groups as retribution for past offenses.” The result, Anton contends, is crime, family dissolution, weak foreign policy, limitless government and restricted speech. (…) In “The Case for Trump,” historian Victor Davis Hanson also treats 2016 as a reaction by voters tired of progressive orthodoxy, globalization and left-wing identity politics. “Trump did not create these divides,” Hanson writes. “He simply found existing sectarianism politically useful.” Trump’s insults, vile language and incessant denigration of opponents are just part of his “uncouth authenticity,” which appeals to supporters and enrages the rest. From the start of his campaign, Trump displayed “an uncanny ability to troll and create hysteria among his media and political critics,” Hanson marvels. “In their anti-Trump rage, they revealed their own character flaws.” Hanson relishes those flaws, and, despite the title, his book focuses less on the case for Trump than on the case against everyone else. Hillary Clinton’s infamous “basket of deplorables” line typified the “toxic venom” with which liberals regard the nation’s interior, he writes, while Clinton’s past misdeeds, real or alleged, provided “scandal vaccination” for Trump’s bankruptcies, sexual misconduct and endless lawsuits. Clinton’s problem, Hanson explains, was threefold: She lied so much that her various deceptions could not be reconciled; she never learned from her past scandals; and she thought herself exempt from accountability. The fact that this trifecta nicely describes Trump’s behavior while in office does not seem to occur to Hanson. He’d rather indulge in casual sexism, criticizing Clinton’s “shrill” voice and her “signature off-putting laugh,” and inexplicably suggesting that while “Trump’s bulk fueled a monstrous energy; Hillary’s girth sapped her strength.” Hanson, a senior fellow with Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, assails the “deep state,” even while acknowledging that Trump’s use of the term is so vague as to be meaningless. He praises the “inspired” and “impressive” Cabinet members Trump has assembled, largely forgetting their high-profile scandals, conflicts of interest, obeisance and resignations. “The Case for Trump” is notable for such omissions. (…) Stephen Moore and Arthur Laffer disagree with some of Trump’s hard-line positions on immigration and worry about his trade protectionism. “To say the least, Donald Trump is a work in progress on trade,” they admit. “He is playing a high-stakes game of poker here with a big upside. But if it doesn’t work, the ramifications scare us to death.” So why did the veteran conservative economists sign on as advisers for Trump’s 2016 campaign, and why did they write a book — titled “Trumponomics” and published late last year — enthusiastically defending the economic policies and instincts of a leader who thinks trade wars are good and easy to win? The answer is simple: “We liked his tax plan.” Forget single-issue voters; Moore and Laffer are single-issue thinkers. Cutting taxes is the siren that lured them to Trump, and for which they appear willing to make any substantive or intellectual sacrifices. The authors recount their role in helping shape the 2017 tax bill — they’re especially proud of their op-eds, which they quote extensively in the book, along with praise thereof — and reiterate their belief that tax cuts and deregulation will unleash so much economic activity that hard choices melt away. “We have always believed that the shrewdest way to make entitlement programs solvent is to restore rapid growth,” they write. And they swoon over Trump’s “unyielding optimism” about the nation’s economic potential, even when he embraces growth projections that the two economists consider unrealistic. Washington Post
Hanson himself calls Trump “flawed,” but his presidency exemplary. Hanson is a retired classics professor from California State University, Fresno, and senior fellow in military history at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and he has written two dozen books on topics ranging from the ancient world to the Second World War. He lives on a working farm in a multiracial, rural area in the interior of California, southeast of San Francisco. He doesn’t live in an Ivory Tower. He also uses his hometown of Selma as a classic example of why America elected Trump. Once prosperous with family-run farms and food-processing plants and other manufacturing jobs, now most jobs are gone, unemployment high, crime and drug abuse commonplace. “In 1970, we did not have keys for our outside doors; in 2018, I have six guard dogs,” he writes. While he is a conservative with an upfront agenda, his critics come from the left and the right. One of the nastiest attacks upon Hanson comes from a Republican who worked on Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign and calls him a “Nazi sympathizer,” “racist enabler” and a “treasonous sophist.” A liberal writer says it’s oxymoronic to call Hanson a “pro-Trump intellectual.” If his ideas are ticking off both ends of the spectrum, they must have some merit, or, at the very least, be interesting. In defending his book, Hanson’s tone is civil. He tells stories from antiquity to make a point; or he acknowledges that Trump is a blowhard like the character Rodney Dangerfield played in the movie Caddyshack. But that doesn’t mean Trump’s policies aren’t working, he says. When one defends a position with reasoned thought, instead of rants and personal attacks like so many Trump supporters and detractors, it’s a welcome change. Some of Hanson’s observations are disagreeable, others are worthy of pointing out and giving Trump his due. For example, Trump’s stand towards China and its murky trade practices is a reprieve from the appeasement of recent years. His support of the Catholic and Jewish faiths is also admirable. Ultimately, though, The Case for Trump crumbles on two fundamental points. It is disingenuous to separate the man from the presidency, but Hanson does. “Trump’s own uncouthness,” he writes, “was in its own manner contextualized by his supporters as a long overdue pushback to the elite disdain and indeed hatred shown them.” Hanson also points out character flaws in former presidents as somehow a reason to hand Trump a “get-out-of-jail-free-card” for his extracurricular activities with hookers and porn stars. “It doesn’t mean Donald Trump is a saint,” Hanson said during a recorded book tour event, “but he’s not an aberration either.” My mother often said “two wrongs don’t make a right” and that applies here, along with Trump’s penchant to surround himself with hucksters, grifters, con men, liars and felons. Then there are the relentless and often vicious personal tweets and attacks on the Constitution. Sorry, but these character cancers cannot be ignored simply because one likes Trump’s tax cuts and deregulation that may or may not have boosted economic growth. Besides, Hanson doesn’t make the case — with hard facts — that Trump’s policies are actually working. Has picking on allies like Canada really helped Wisconsin dairy farmers? Has he really tamed Kim Jong Un and his nuclear aspirations? Have Trump policies really boosted growth more than simply the cyclical nature of the economy itself? The list goes on and on. Trump opponents probably won’t read the book, but it’s not your regular right-wing diatribe camouflaged as a book. It’s readable and, at times, highly entertaining in how he skewers Trump’s adversaries. But, in the end, the book can’t make a case that electing a status quo disruptor like Donald Trump is any more than a Pyrrhic victory in the classical tragic sense. Bob Brehl
One lesson, however, has not fully sunk in and awaits final elucidation in the 2012 election: that of the Chicago style of Barack Obama’s politicking. In 2008 few of the true believers accepted that, in his first political race, in 1996, Barack Obama sued successfully to remove his opponents from the ballot. Or that in his race for the US Senate eight years later, sealed divorced records for both his primary- and general-election opponents were mysteriously leaked by unnamed Chicagoans, leading to the implosions of both candidates’ campaigns. Or that Obama was the first presidential candidate in the history of public campaign financing to reject it, or that he was also the largest recipient of cash from Wall Street in general, and from BP and Goldman Sachs in particular. Or that Obama was the first presidential candidate in recent memory not to disclose either undergraduate records or even partial medical. Or that remarks like “typical white person,” the clingers speech, and the spread-the-wealth quip would soon prove to be characteristic rather than anomalous. Few American presidents have dashed so many popular, deeply embedded illusions as has Barack Obama. And for that, we owe him a strange sort of thanks. Victor Davis Hanson
Presidents run for re-election against real opponents, not public perceptions. For all the media hype, voters often pick the lesser of two evils, not their ideals of a perfect candidate. Victor Davis Hanson
Securing national borders seems pretty orthodox. In an age of anti-Western terrorism, placing temporary holds on would-be immigrants from war-torn zones until they can be vetted is hardly radical. Expecting “sanctuary cities” to follow federal laws rather than embrace the nullification strategies of the secessionist Old Confederacy is a return to the laws of the Constitution. Using the term “radical Islamic terror” in place of “workplace violence” or “man-caused disasters” is sensible, not subversive. Insisting that NATO members meet their long-ignored defense-spending obligations is not provocative but overdue. Assuming that both the European Union and the United Nations are imploding is empirical, not unhinged. Questioning the secret side agreements of the Iran deal or failed Russian reset is facing reality. Making the Environmental Protection Agency follow laws rather than make laws is the way it always was supposed to be. Unapologetically siding with Israel, the only free and democratic country in the Middle East, used to be standard U.S. policy until Obama was elected. (…) Expecting the media to report the news rather than massage it to fit progressive agendas makes sense. In the past, proclaiming Obama a “sort of god” or the smartest man ever to enter the presidency was not normal journalistic practice. (…) Half the country is having a hard time adjusting to Trumpism, confusing Trump’s often unorthodox and grating style with his otherwise practical and mostly centrist agenda. In sum, Trump seems a revolutionary, but that is only because he is loudly undoing a revolution. Victor Davis Hanson
What makes such men and women both tragic and heroic is their knowledge that the natural expression of their personas can lead only to their own destruction or ostracism from an advancing civilization that they seek to protect. And yet they willingly accept the challenge to be of service . . . Yet for a variety of reasons, both personal and civic, their characters not only should not be altered, but could not be, even if the tragic hero wished to change . . . In the classical tragic sense, Trump likely will end in one of two fashions, both not particularly good: either spectacular but unacknowledged accomplishments followed by ostracism . . . or, less likely, a single term due to the eventual embarrassment of his beneficiaries. Victor Davis Hanson
Trump’s own uncouthness was in its own manner contextualized by his supporters as a long overdue pushback to the elite disdain and indeed hatred shown them. (…) Trumpism was the idea that there were no longer taboo subjects. Everything was open for negotiation; nothing was sacred. Victor Davis Hanson
The very idea that Donald Trump could, even in a perverse way, be heroic may appall half the country. Nonetheless, one way of understanding both Trump’s personal excesses and his accomplishments is that his not being traditionally presidential may have been valuable in bringing long-overdue changes in foreign and domestic policy. Tragic heroes, as they have been portrayed from Sophocles’ plays (e.g., Ajax, Antigone, Oedipus Rex, Philoctetes) to the modern western film, are not intrinsically noble. Much less are they likeable. Certainly, they can often be obnoxious and petty, if not dangerous, especially to those around them. These mercurial sorts never end well — and on occasion neither do those in their vicinity. Oedipus was rudely narcissistic, Hombre’s John Russell (Paul Newman) arrogant and off-putting. Tragic heroes are loners, both by preference and because of society’s understandable unease with them. Ajax’s soliloquies about a rigged system and the lack of recognition accorded his undeniable accomplishments are Trumpian to the core — something akin to the sensational rumors that at night Trump is holed up alone, petulant, brooding, eating fast food, and watching Fox News shows. Outlaw leader Pike Bishop (William Holden), in director Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, is a killer whose final gory sacrifice results in the slaughter of the toxic General Mapache and his corrupt local Federales. A foreboding Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), of John Ford’s classic 1956 film The Searchers, alone can track down his kidnapped niece. But his methods and his recent past as a Confederate renegade make him suspect and largely unfit for a civilizing frontier after the expiration of his transitory usefulness. These characters are not the sorts that we would associate with Bob Dole, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, or Mitt Romney. The tragic hero’s change of fortune — often from good to bad, as Aristotle reminds us — is due to an innate flaw (hamartia), or at least in some cases an intrinsic and usually uncivilized trait that can be of service to the community, albeit usually expressed fully only at the expense of the hero’s own fortune. The problem for civilization is that the creation of those skill sets often brings with it past baggage of lawlessness and comfortability with violence. Trump’s cunning and mercurialness, honed in Manhattan real estate, global salesmanship, reality TV, and wheeler-dealer investments, may have earned him ostracism from polite Washington society. But these talents also may for a time be suited for dealing with many of the outlaws of the global frontier. (…) So what makes such men and women both tragic and heroic is their full knowledge that the natural expression of their personas can lead only to their own destruction or ostracism. Yet for a variety of reasons, both personal and civic, their characters not only should not be altered but could not be, even if the tragic hero wished to change, given his megalomania and Manichean views of the human experience. Clint Eastwood’s Inspector “Dirty” Harry Callahan cannot serve as the official face of the San Francisco police department. But Dirty Harry alone has the skills and ruthlessness to ensure that the mass murderer Scorpio will never harm the innocent again. So, in the finale, he taunts and then shoots the psychopathic Scorpio, ending both their careers, and walks off — after throwing his inspector’s badge into the water. Marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper) of High Noon did about the same thing, but only after gunning down (with the help of his wife) four killers whom the law-abiding but temporizing elders of Hadleyville proved utterly incapable of stopping. (…) In other words, tragic heroes are often simply too volatile to continue in polite society. In George Stevens’s classic 1953 western Shane, even the reforming and soft-spoken gunslinger Shane (Alan Ladd) understands his own dilemma all too well: He alone possesses the violent skills necessary to free the homesteaders from the insidious threats of hired guns and murderous cattle barons. (And how he got those skills worries those he plans to help.) Yet by the time of his final resort to lethal violence, Shane has sacrificed all prior chances of reform and claims on reentering the civilized world of the stable “sodbuster” community. (…) Trump could not cease tweeting, not cease his rallies, not cease his feuding, and not cease his nonstop motion and unbridled speech if he wished to. It is his brand, and such overbearing made Trump, for good or evil, what he is — and will likely eventually banish him from establishment Washington, whether after or during his elected term. His raucousness can be managed, perhaps mitigated for a time — thus the effective tenure of his sober cabinet choices and his chief of staff, the ex–Marine general, no-nonsense John Kelly — but not eliminated. His blunt views cannot really thrive, and indeed can scarcely survive, in the nuance, complexity, and ambiguity of Washington. Trump is not a mannered Mitt Romney, who would never have left the Paris climate agreement. He is not a veteran who knew the whiz of real bullets and remains a Washington icon, such as John McCain, who would never have moved the American embassy to Jerusalem. Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush certainly would never have waded into no-win controversies such as the take-a-knee NFL debacle and unvetted immigration from suspect countries in the Middle East and Africa, or called to account sanctuary cities that thwarted federal law. Our modern Agamemnon, Speaker Paul Ryan, is too circumspect to get caught up with Trump’s wall or a mini-trade war with China. Trump does not seem to care whether he is acting “presidential.” The word — as he admits — is foreign to him. He does not worry whether his furious tweets, his revolving-door firing and hiring, and his rally counterpunches reveal a lack of stature or are becoming an embarrassing window into his own insecurities and apprehensions as a Beltway media world closes in upon him in the manner that, as the trapped western hero felt, the shrinking landscape was increasingly without options in the new 20th century. The real moral question is not whether the gunslinger Trump could or should become civilized (again, defined in our context as becoming normalized as “presidential”) but whether he could be of service at the opportune time and right place for his country, crude as he is. After all, despite their decency, in extremis did the frontier farmers have a solution without Shane, or the Mexican peasants a realistic alternative to the Magnificent Seven, or the town elders a viable plan without Will Kane? Perhaps we could not withstand the fire and smoke of a series of Trump presidencies, but given the direction of the country over the last 16 years, half the population, the proverbial townspeople of the western, wanted some outsider, even with a dubious past, to ride in and do things that most normal politicians not only would not but could not do — before exiting stage left or riding off into the sunset, to the relief of most and the regrets of a few. The best and the brightest résumés of the Bush and Obama administrations had doubled the national debt — twice. Three prior presidents had helped to empower North Korea, now with nuclear-tipped missiles pointing at the West Coast. Supposedly refined and sophisticated diplomats of the last quarter century, who would never utter the name “Rocket Man” or stoop to call Kim Jong-un “short and fat,” nonetheless had gone through the “agreed framework,” “six-party talks,” and “strategic patience,” in which three administrations gave Pyongyang quite massive aid to behave and either not to proliferate or at least to denuclearize. And it was all a failure, and a deadly one at that. For all of Obama’s sophisticated discourse about “spread the wealth around” and “You didn’t build that,” quantitative easing, zero interest rates, massive new regulations, the stimulus, and shovel-ready, government-inspired jobs, he could not achieve 3 percent annualized economic growth. Half the country, the more desperate half, believed that the remedy for a government in which the IRS, the FBI, the DOJ, and the NSA were weaponized, often in partisan fashion and without worry about the civil liberties of American citizens, was not more temporizing technicians but a pariah who cleaned house and moved on. Certainly Obama was not willing to have a showdown with the Chinese over their widely acknowledged cheating and coerced expropriation of U.S. technology, with the NATO allies over their chronic welching on prior defense commitments, with the North Koreans after they achieved the capability of hitting U.S. West Coast cities, or with the European Union over its mostly empty climate-change accords. Moving on, sometimes fatally so, is the tragic hero’s operative exit. Antigone certainly makes her point about the absurdity of small men’s sexism and moral emptiness in such an uncompromising way that her own doom is assured. Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, unheroically kills the thuggish Liberty Valance, births the career of Ranse Stoddard and his marriage to Doniphon’s girlfriend, and thereby ensures civilization is Shinbone’s frontier future. His service done, he burns down his house and degenerates from feared rancher to alcoholic outcast. (…) He knows that few appreciate that the tragic heroes in their midst are either tragic or heroic — until they are safely gone and what they have done in time can be attributed to someone else. Worse, he knows that the tragic hero’s existence is solitary and without the nourishing networks and affirmation of the peasant’s agrarian life. (…) By his very excesses Trump has already lost, but in his losing he might alone be able to end some things that long ago should have been ended. Victor Davis Hanson
That is how human nature is. (…) if you talk to people in the military, the diplomatic corps, the academic world, and, just to take one example, China, they will tell you in the last two years they have had an awakening. They feel that Chinese military superiority is now to deny help to America’s allies. They believe that the trade deficit is unsustainable. They will tell you all of that, and you are almost listening to Donald Trump in 2015, but they won’t mention the word “Trump,” because to do so would contaminate that argument. What I am getting at is he looked at the world empirically. (…) he said, “This is what’s wrong, and this is what we would have to do to address this problem.” And he said it in such a way—whether he wanted to say it in that way or whether he was forced to say it in that way, I don’t know—but he said it in such a way that was designed to grab attention, to be polarizing, to get through bureaucratic doublespeak. So now he succeeded, but if I were to ask anybody at Stanford University, or anybody that I know is a four-star general or a diplomat, “What caused your sudden change about China?,” they would not say Donald Trump, and yet we know who it was. [Like a hero out of Greek myth] as long as we understand the word “hero.” Americans don’t know what that word means. They think it means you live happily ever after or you are selfless. Whether it is Achilles or Sophocles’s Ajax or Antigone, they can act out of insecurity, they can act out of impatience—they can act out of all sorts of motives that are less than what we say in America are heroic. But the point that they are making is, I see a skill that I have. I see a problem. I want to solve that problem, and I want to solve that problem so much that the ensuing reaction to that solution may not necessarily be good for me. And they accept that. (…) I tried to use as many examples as I could of the classic Western, whether it was “Shane” or “High Noon” or “The Magnificent Seven.” They all are the same—the community doesn’t have the skills or doesn’t have the willpower or doesn’t want to stoop to the corrective method to solve the existential problem, whether it is cattle barons or banditos. So they bring in an outsider, and immediately they start to be uneasy because he is uncouth—his skills, his attitude—and then he solves the problem, and they declare to him, whether it is Gary Cooper in “High Noon” or Alan Ladd in “Shane,” “I think it’s better you leave. We don’t need you anymore. We feel dirty that we ever had to call you in.” I think that is what is awaiting Trump. (…) I think Trump really did think that there were certain problems and he had particular skills that he could solve. Maybe in a naïve fashion. But I think he understood, for all the emoluments-clause hysteria, that he wasn’t going to make a lot of money from it or be liked for it. (…) I look at everything empirically. I know what the left said, and the media said, but I ask myself, “What actually happened?” There are a billion Muslims in the world, and he has, I think, six countries who were not able to substantiate that their passports were vetted. [Trump’s final travel plan limits or prevents travel from seven countries.] We didn’t even, in the final calibration, base it on religion. I think we have two countries that are not predominantly Muslim. (…) As far as separation, I remember very carefully that the whole child separation was started during Barack Obama. (…) It was unapologetically said this came from Obama and we are going to continue to practice deterrence. As someone who lives in a community that is ninety per cent Hispanic, probably forty per cent undocumented, I can tell you that it’s a very different world from what people are talking about in Washington. I have had people knock on my door and ask me where the ob-gyn lives, because they got her name in Oaxaca. And the woman in the car is six months pregnant and living across the border and given the name of a nice doctor in Selma, California, that will deliver the baby. (…) It has happened once, but I know people who come from Mexico with the names of doctors and clinics in Fresno County where they know they will get, for free, twenty to thirty thousand dollars of medical care and an anchor baby. I know that’s supposed to be an uncouth thing to say. (…) As I am talking right now, I have a guy, a U.S. citizen, tiling my kitchen, and he does not like the idea that people hire people illegally for twelve dollars an hour in cash, when he should be getting eighteen, nineteen, twenty dollars. But, when you make these arguments, they are just brushed aside by the left or the media, by saying, oh, these are anecdotal or racist or stereotype. (…) [Trump saying there were good people on both sides] was very clumsy (…) But there wasn’t a monolithic white racist protest movement. There were collections of people. Some of them were just out there because maybe they are deluded and maybe they are not. I don’t know what their hearts are like, but they did not want statues torn down or defaced. (…) You can argue that what was O.K. in 2010 suddenly was racist in 2017. But, in today’s polarized climate, Trump should have said, “While both groups are demonstrating, we can’t have a group on any side that identifies by race.” He should have said that. He just said there were good people on both sides. It was clumsy. (…) I was trying to look at Trump in classical terms, so words like eirôneia, or irony—how could it be that the Republican Party supposedly was empathetic, but a millionaire, a billionaire Manhattanite started using terms I had never heard Romney or McCain or Paul Ryan say? He started saying “our.” Our miners. And then, on the left, every time Hillary Clinton went before a Southern audience, she started speaking in a Southern accent. And Barack Obama, I think you would agree, when he gets before an inner-city audience, he suddenly sounded as if he spoke in a black patois. When Trump went to any of these groups, he had the same tie, the same suit, the same accent. What people thought was that, whatever he is, he is authentic. (…) I read a great deal about the Mar-a-Lago project, and I was shocked that the people who opposed that on cultural and social grounds were largely anti-Semitic. Trump had already announced that he was not going to discriminate against Jews and Mexicans and other people. He said, “I want wealthy people.” I went to Palm Beach and talked to wealthy Jewish donors and Cubans, and they said the same thing to me—“He likes rich people. He doesn’t care what you look like.” (…) I don’t know what the driving force was, but I found that he was indifferent. And I think the same thing is true of blacks and Hispanics. (…) [using birtherism as a way of discrediting Obama] was absurd. I think it was demonstrable that Obama was born in the United States. The only ambiguity was that two things gave rise to the conspiracy theorists. One was—and I think this is a hundred-per-cent accurate—an advertising group that worked in concert with his publisher put on a booklet that Obama was born in Kenya. That gave third-world cachet to “Dreams from My Father.” And he didn’t look at it or didn’t change it. [In 1991, four years before Obama’s first book was published, his literary agency incorrectly stated on a client list that Obama was born in Kenya.] And he left as a young kid and went to Indonesia and applied when he came back as a Fulbright Fellow, and I don’t know if this is substantiated or just rumor, but he probably was given dual citizenship. [The claim that Obama was a Fulbright Fellow from Indonesia, and therefore had Indonesian citizenship, originated in a hoax e-mail, from April 1, 2009, and has been discredited.] (…) What I am getting at is, here you have a guy named Barack Obama, who grew up in Hawaii, and there were indications in his past that there was ambiguity. (…) I think Trump was doing what Trump does, which is trying to sensationalize it. I don’t think it was racial. I think it was political. (…) I mean carefully calibrated in a political sense. That’s my point. Not that it was careful in the sense of being humane or sympathetic. By that I mean, there were elements in Ted Cruz’s personality that offended people. And he got Ted Cruz really angry, and Ted Cruz doesn’t come across well. (…) if you go back and look at the worst tweets, they are retaliatory. What he does is he waits like a coiled cobra until people attack him, and then he attacks them in a much cruder, blunter fashion. And he has an uncanny ability to pick people that have attacked him, whether it’s Rosie O’Donnell, Megyn Kelly—there were elements in all those people’s careers that were starting to bother people, and Trump sensed that out. I don’t think he would have gotten away with taking on other people that were completely beloved. Colin Kaepernick. People were getting tired of him, so he took him on. All that stuff was calibrated. Trump was replying and understood public sympathy would be at least fifty-fifty, if not in his favor. Victor Davis Hanson
Et si, à l’instar de la démocratie selon Churchill, Donald Trump était le pire président – à l’exception de tous les autres ?
En ces temps proprement orwelliens …
Où des élus démocrates assimilent aux camps nazis les camps de rétention pour migrants clandestins …
Ou, entre deux subventions de l’avortement à quasi-terme ou des transsexuels, des candidats du même parti proposent de décriminaliser l’immigration illégale …
Pendant que de l’autre côté de l’Atlantique, on célèbre avec le maître-démagoque du Vatican et une Mairie de Paris plus touristophile que jamais le trafic d’êtres humains …
Et après 30 ou 40 ans de tolérance …
D’une Corée du nord finalement capable d’atteindre avec ses missiles nucléaires la totalité du territoire américain …
D’un Iran menaçant un de ses voisins de rayage de la carte et mettant l’ensemble de la région à feu et à sang …
D’une Chine empilant les surplus commerciaux grâce au pillage des secrets industriels de ses partenaires tout en militarisant les eaux territoriales de ses voisins …
D’une Allemagne accumulant elle aussi les excédents commerciaux tout en réduisant à 1,25% sa contribution à ses défenses militaires …
Comment brusquement ne pas voir …
Avec l’historien américain Victor Davis Hanson
Ou les politologues français Guy Millière ou Evelyne Joslain …
Ou même le grand manitou du néoconservatisme Norman Podhoretz …
Comme l’avait pressenti dès son élection l’ancien secrétaire d’etat Henry Kissinger lui-même …
Et avec ses électeurs de 2016 comme probablement de 2020 …
La véritable force finalement des si nombreuses faiblesses …
Y compris pour les plus pragmatiques des évangéliques …
D’un président aussi peu « présidentiel » que l’actuel président américain ?
Donald Trump, Tragic Hero
His very flaws may be his strengths
Victor Davis Hanson
April 12, 2018
The very idea that Donald Trump could, even in a perverse way, be heroic may appall half the country. Nonetheless, one way of understanding both Trump’s personal excesses and his accomplishments is that his not being traditionally presidential may have been valuable in bringing long-overdue changes in foreign and domestic policy.
Tragic heroes, as they have been portrayed from Sophocles’ plays (e.g., Ajax, Antigone, Oedipus Rex, Philoctetes) to the modern western film, are not intrinsically noble. Much less are they likeable. Certainly, they can often be obnoxious and petty, if not dangerous, especially to those around them. These mercurial sorts never end well — and on occasion neither do those in their vicinity. Oedipus was rudely narcissistic, Hombre’s John Russell (Paul Newman) arrogant and off-putting.
Tragic heroes are loners, both by preference and because of society’s understandable unease with them. Ajax’s soliloquies about a rigged system and the lack of recognition accorded his undeniable accomplishments are Trumpian to the core — something akin to the sensational rumors that at night Trump is holed up alone, petulant, brooding, eating fast food, and watching Fox News shows.
Outlaw leader Pike Bishop (William Holden), in director Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, is a killer whose final gory sacrifice results in the slaughter of the toxic General Mapache and his corrupt local Federales. A foreboding Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), of John Ford’s classic 1956 film The Searchers, alone can track down his kidnapped niece. But his methods and his recent past as a Confederate renegade make him suspect and largely unfit for a civilizing frontier after the expiration of his transitory usefulness. These characters are not the sorts that we would associate with Bob Dole, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, or Mitt Romney.
The tragic hero’s change of fortune — often from good to bad, as Aristotle reminds us — is due to an innate flaw (hamartia), or at least in some cases an intrinsic and usually uncivilized trait that can be of service to the community, albeit usually expressed fully only at the expense of the hero’s own fortune. The problem for civilization is that the creation of those skill sets often brings with it past baggage of lawlessness and comfortability with violence. Trump’s cunning and mercurialness, honed in Manhattan real estate, global salesmanship, reality TV, and wheeler-dealer investments, may have earned him ostracism from polite Washington society. But these talents also may for a time be suited for dealing with many of the outlaws of the global frontier.
At rare times, a General George S. Patton (“Give me an army of West Point graduates and I’ll win a battle. Give me a handful of Texas Aggies and I’ll win a war”) could be harnessed to serve the country in extremis. General Curtis LeMay did what others could not — and would not: “I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal. . . . Every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you’re not a good soldier.” Later, the public exposure given to the mentalities and behaviors of such controversial figures would only ensure that they would likely be estranged from or even caricatured by their peers — once, of course, they were no longer needed by those whom they had benefited. When one is willing to burn down with napalm 75 percent of the industrial core of an often-genocidal wartime Japan, and thereby help bring a vicious war to an end, then one looks for sorts like Curtis LeMay and his B-29s. In the later calm of peace, one is often shocked that one ever had. A sober and judicious General Omar Bradley grows on us in peace even if he was hardly Patton in war.
So what makes such men and women both tragic and heroic is their full knowledge that the natural expression of their personas can lead only to their own destruction or ostracism. Yet for a variety of reasons, both personal and civic, their characters not only should not be altered but could not be, even if the tragic hero wished to change, given his megalomania and Manichean views of the human experience. Clint Eastwood’s Inspector “Dirty” Harry Callahan cannot serve as the official face of the San Francisco police department. But Dirty Harry alone has the skills and ruthlessness to ensure that the mass murderer Scorpio will never harm the innocent again. So, in the finale, he taunts and then shoots the psychopathic Scorpio, ending both their careers, and walks off — after throwing his inspector’s badge into the water. Marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper) of High Noon did about the same thing, but only after gunning down (with the help of his wife) four killers whom the law-abiding but temporizing elders of Hadleyville proved utterly incapable of stopping.
The out-of-place Ajax in Sophocles’ tragedy of the same name cannot function apart from the battlefield. Unlike Odysseus, he lacks the tact and fluidity to succeed in a new world of nuanced civic rules. So he would rather “live nobly, or nobly die” — “nobly” meaning according to an obsolete black-and-white code that is no longer compatible with the ascendant polis.
In other words, tragic heroes are often simply too volatile to continue in polite society. In George Stevens’s classic 1953 western Shane, even the reforming and soft-spoken gunslinger Shane (Alan Ladd) understands his own dilemma all too well: He alone possesses the violent skills necessary to free the homesteaders from the insidious threats of hired guns and murderous cattle barons. (And how he got those skills worries those he plans to help.) Yet by the time of his final resort to lethal violence, Shane has sacrificed all prior chances of reform and claims on reentering the civilized world of the stable “sodbuster” community. As Shane tells young Joey after gunning down the three villains of the film and thereby saving the small farming community: “Can’t break the mold. I tried it, and it didn’t work for me. . . . Joey, there’s no living with . . . a killing. There’s no going back from one. Right or wrong, it’s a brand. A brand sticks. There’s no going back.”
Trump could not cease tweeting, not cease his rallies, not cease his feuding, and not cease his nonstop motion and unbridled speech if he wished to. It is his brand, and such overbearing made Trump, for good or evil, what he is — and will likely eventually banish him from establishment Washington, whether after or during his elected term. His raucousness can be managed, perhaps mitigated for a time — thus the effective tenure of his sober cabinet choices and his chief of staff, the ex–Marine general, no-nonsense John Kelly — but not eliminated. His blunt views cannot really thrive, and indeed can scarcely survive, in the nuance, complexity, and ambiguity of Washington.
Trump is not a mannered Mitt Romney, who would never have left the Paris climate agreement. He is not a veteran who knew the whiz of real bullets and remains a Washington icon, such as John McCain, who would never have moved the American embassy to Jerusalem. Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush certainly would never have waded into no-win controversies such as the take-a-knee NFL debacle and unvetted immigration from suspect countries in the Middle East and Africa, or called to account sanctuary cities that thwarted federal law. Our modern Agamemnon, Speaker Paul Ryan, is too circumspect to get caught up with Trump’s wall or a mini-trade war with China.
Trump does not seem to care whether he is acting “presidential.” The word — as he admits — is foreign to him. He does not worry whether his furious tweets, his revolving-door firing and hiring, and his rally counterpunches reveal a lack of stature or are becoming an embarrassing window into his own insecurities and apprehensions as a Beltway media world closes in upon him in the manner that, as the trapped western hero felt, the shrinking landscape was increasingly without options in the new 20th century.
The real moral question is not whether the gunslinger Trump could or should become civilized (again, defined in our context as becoming normalized as “presidential”) but whether he could be of service at the opportune time and right place for his country, crude as he is. After all, despite their decency, in extremis did the frontier farmers have a solution without Shane, or the Mexican peasants a realistic alternative to the Magnificent Seven, or the town elders a viable plan without Will Kane?
Perhaps we could not withstand the fire and smoke of a series of Trump presidencies, but given the direction of the country over the last 16 years, half the population, the proverbial townspeople of the western, wanted some outsider, even with a dubious past, to ride in and do things that most normal politicians not only would not but could not do — before exiting stage left or riding off into the sunset, to the relief of most and the regrets of a few.
The best and the brightest résumés of the Bush and Obama administrations had doubled the national debt — twice. Three prior presidents had helped to empower North Korea, now with nuclear-tipped missiles pointing at the West Coast. Supposedly refined and sophisticated diplomats of the last quarter century, who would never utter the name “Rocket Man” or stoop to call Kim Jong-un “short and fat,” nonetheless had gone through the “agreed framework,” “six-party talks,” and “strategic patience,” in which three administrations gave Pyongyang quite massive aid to behave and either not to proliferate or at least to denuclearize. And it was all a failure, and a deadly one at that.
For all of Obama’s sophisticated discourse about “spread the wealth around” and “You didn’t build that,” quantitative easing, zero interest rates, massive new regulations, the stimulus, and shovel-ready, government-inspired jobs, he could not achieve 3 percent annualized economic growth. Half the country, the more desperate half, believed that the remedy for a government in which the IRS, the FBI, the DOJ, and the NSA were weaponized, often in partisan fashion and without worry about the civil liberties of American citizens, was not more temporizing technicians but a pariah who cleaned house and moved on. Certainly Obama was not willing to have a showdown with the Chinese over their widely acknowledged cheating and coerced expropriation of U.S. technology, with the NATO allies over their chronic welching on prior defense commitments, with the North Koreans after they achieved the capability of hitting U.S. West Coast cities, or with the European Union over its mostly empty climate-change accords.
Moving on, sometimes fatally so, is the tragic hero’s operative exit. Antigone certainly makes her point about the absurdity of small men’s sexism and moral emptiness in such an uncompromising way that her own doom is assured. Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, unheroically kills the thuggish Liberty Valance, births the career of Ranse Stoddard and his marriage to Doniphon’s girlfriend, and thereby ensures civilization is Shinbone’s frontier future. His service done, he burns down his house and degenerates from feared rancher to alcoholic outcast.
The remnants of The Magnificent Seven would no longer be magnificent had they stayed on in the village, settled down to age, and endlessly rehashed the morality and utility of slaughtering the outlaw Calvera and his banditos. As Chris rides out, he sums up to Vin their dilemma: “The old man was right. Only the farmers won. We lost. We always lose.” He knows that few appreciate that the tragic heroes in their midst are either tragic or heroic — until they are safely gone and what they have done in time can be attributed to someone else. Worse, he knows that the tragic hero’s existence is solitary and without the nourishing networks and affirmation of the peasant’s agrarian life.
John Ford’s most moving scene in his best film, The Searchers, is Ethan Edwards’s final exit from a house of shadows, swinging open the door and walking alone into sunlit oblivion. If he is lucky, Trump may well experience the same self-inflicted fate.
By his very excesses Trump has already lost, but in his losing he might alone be able to end some things that long ago should have been ended.
Voir aussi:
Q & A
The Classicist Who Sees Donald Trump as a Tragic Hero
Isaac Chotiner
The New Yorker
February 20, 2019
Many of the books written in support of Donald Trump’s Presidency have been authored by Trump family hangers-on or charlatans looking to make a buck. (Examples include “Trump’s Enemies: How the Deep State Is Undermining the Presidency,” by Corey Lewandowski and David N. Bossie, and “The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump,” by Gregg Jarrett.) “The Case for Trump,” by Victor Davis Hanson, is different. (There isn’t even a subtitle.) Hanson, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, is a classicist and military historian, who was awarded the National Humanities Medal by George W. Bush, in 2007. His previous book, “The Second World Wars,” was respectfully reviewed by the Times and The New Yorker.
But Hanson has another side, one that is well suited for the age of Trump. A longtime contributor to the National Review, he has a history of hostility to undocumented Mexican and Central American immigrants, who he claims are undermining American culture, and to African-Americans who speak about the persistence of racism, including Barack Obama, whom he has described as a leading member of “the new segregationists.” In his new book, which will be published by Basic Books, in March, Hanson explains why he thinks Trump was elected, and why he views the President as akin to a classically tragic hero, whom America needs but will never fully appreciate.
I recently spoke by phone with Hanson, who was in his home, in California. During our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, we discussed whether Trump should be compared to heroes of Greek myth, Hanson’s view of the Charlottesville protesters, and whether the President is carefully choosing the people he attacks.
I want to start with a quote from your book. You compare the President to others you admire in American history, writing, “What makes such men and women both tragic and heroic is their knowledge that the natural expression of their personas can lead only to their own destruction or ostracism from an advancing civilization that they seek to protect. And yet they willingly accept the challenge to be of service . . . Yet for a variety of reasons, both personal and civic, their characters not only should not be altered, but could not be, even if the tragic hero wished to change . . . In the classical tragic sense, Trump likely will end in one of two fashions, both not particularly good: either spectacular but unacknowledged accomplishments followed by ostracism . . . or, less likely, a single term due to the eventual embarrassment of his beneficiaries.” I wonder how your training as a classicist informs this passage, but I also want to ask, is our flawed, sinful country not worthy of Donald Trump?
No, I don’t mean that, as to the latter. I mean that that is how human nature is. So, if you talk to people in the military, the diplomatic corps, the academic world, and, just to take one example, China, they will tell you in the last two years they have had an awakening. They feel that Chinese military superiority is now to deny help to America’s allies. They believe that the trade deficit is unsustainable. They will tell you all of that, and you are almost listening to Donald Trump in 2015, but they won’t mention the word “Trump,” because to do so would contaminate that argument. What I am getting at is he looked at the world empirically.
Empirically?
Yes, empirically, and he said, “This is what’s wrong, and this is what we would have to do to address this problem.” And he said it in such a way—whether he wanted to say it in that way or whether he was forced to say it in that way, I don’t know—but he said it in such a way that was designed to grab attention, to be polarizing, to get through bureaucratic doublespeak. So now he succeeded, but if I were to ask anybody at Stanford University, or anybody that I know is a four-star general or a diplomat, “What caused your sudden change about China?,” they would not say Donald Trump, and yet we know who it was.
Do you feel that in some ways he is a hero out of Greek myth?
Yeah, as long as we understand the word “hero.” Americans don’t know what that word means. They think it means you live happily ever after or you are selfless. Whether it is Achilles or Sophocles’s Ajax or Antigone, they can act out of insecurity, they can act out of impatience—they can act out of all sorts of motives that are less than what we say in America are heroic. But the point that they are making is, I see a skill that I have. I see a problem. I want to solve that problem, and I want to solve that problem so much that the ensuing reaction to that solution may not necessarily be good for me. And they accept that.
It reminds me of Trump saying that people will get sick of winning. It seems like you are saying we have gotten sick of it, and that is the tragedy of Trump.
I think so. I tried to use as many examples as I could of the classic Western, whether it was “Shane” or “High Noon” or “The Magnificent Seven.” They all are the same—the community doesn’t have the skills or doesn’t have the willpower or doesn’t want to stoop to the corrective method to solve the existential problem, whether it is cattle barons or banditos. So they bring in an outsider, and immediately they start to be uneasy because he is uncouth—his skills, his attitude—and then he solves the problem, and they declare to him, whether it is Gary Cooper in “High Noon” or Alan Ladd in “Shane,” “I think it’s better you leave. We don’t need you anymore. We feel dirty that we ever had to call you in.” I think that is what is awaiting Trump.
How does this fit, in a Greek sense, with the man we are often confronted with—constantly tweeting, spending much of his day watching cable news, obsessed with small slights. Do these things, allowing for the modern context, also remind you of great heroes of myth?
Have you read Sophocles’s Ajax ever? It’s one of his best plays.
No, I haven’t.
You have a neurotic hero who cannot get over the fact that he was by all standards the successor to Achilles and deserves Achilles’s armor, and yet he was outsmarted by this wily, lesser Odysseus, who rigged the contest and got the armor. All he does is say, “This wasn’t fair. I’m better. Doesn’t anybody know this?” It’s true, but you want to say to Ajax, “Shut up and just take it.” Achilles has elements of a tragic hero. He says, at the beginning of the Iliad, “I do all the work. I kill all the Trojans. But when it comes to assigning booty, you always give it to mediocrities—deep-state, administrative nothings.” So he stalks off. And the gods tell him, “If you come back in, you will win fame, but you are going to end up dead.” So he makes a tragic, heroic decision that he is going to do that.
I think Trump really did think that there were certain problems and he had particular skills that he could solve. Maybe in a naïve fashion. But I think he understood, for all the emoluments-clause hysteria, that he wasn’t going to make a lot of money from it or be liked for it.
You don’t have much to say about child separation, the ban on certain Muslims, Charlottesville—the more controversial aspects of his Presidency. Are these nicks on a glorious record, or are they actually accomplishments?
I look at everything empirically. I know what the left said, and the media said, but I ask myself, “What actually happened?” There are a billion Muslims in the world, and he has, I think, six countries who were not able to substantiate that their passports were vetted. [Trump’s final travel plan limits or prevents travel from seven countries.] We didn’t even, in the final calibration, base it on religion. I think we have two countries that are not predominantly Muslim.
It was very clever how they did that.
Yeah. And so that’s one thing. As far as separation, I remember very carefully that the whole child separation was started during Barack Obama.
The policy of separating was a Trump thing.
It was used by Trump. It was unapologetically said this came from Obama and we are going to continue to practice deterrence. As someone who lives in a community that is ninety per cent Hispanic, probably forty per cent undocumented, I can tell you that it’s a very different world from what people are talking about in Washington. I have had people knock on my door and ask me where the ob-gyn lives, because they got her name in Oaxaca. And the woman in the car is six months pregnant and living across the border and given the name of a nice doctor in Selma, California, that will deliver the baby.
This has happened once? More than once?
It has happened once, but I know people who come from Mexico with the names of doctors and clinics in Fresno County where they know they will get, for free, twenty to thirty thousand dollars of medical care and an anchor baby. I know that’s supposed to be an uncouth thing to say.
Just a bit.
And they will be here. As I am talking right now, I have a guy, a U.S. citizen, tiling my kitchen, and he does not like the idea that people hire people illegally for twelve dollars an hour in cash, when he should be getting eighteen, nineteen, twenty dollars. But, when you make these arguments, they are just brushed aside by the left or the media, by saying, oh, these are anecdotal or racist or stereotype.
Right, people hear a story about someone knocking on your door wanting an ob-gyn and they say that is anecdotal. Charlottesville was the last one you are going to address, Trump saying there were good people on both sides.
That was very clumsy to say. But there wasn’t a monolithic white racist protest movement. There were collections of people. Some of them were just out there because maybe they are deluded and maybe they are not. I don’t know what their hearts are like, but they did not want statues torn down or defaced.
History buffs, really.
Yeah. You can argue that what was O.K. in 2010 suddenly was racist in 2017. But, in today’s polarized climate, Trump should have said, “While both groups are demonstrating, we can’t have a group on any side that identifies by race.” He should have said that. He just said there were good people on both sides. It was clumsy.
This is what you were saying about Greek heroes. You don’t get the perfect person who will phrase everything or do everything perfectly.
You don’t. You don’t. I was trying to look at Trump in classical terms, so words like eirôneia, or irony—how could it be that the Republican Party supposedly was empathetic, but a millionaire, a billionaire Manhattanite started using terms I had never heard Romney or McCain or Paul Ryan say? He started saying “our.” Our miners. And then, on the left, every time Hillary Clinton went before a Southern audience, she started speaking in a Southern accent. And Barack Obama, I think you would agree, when he gets before an inner-city audience, he suddenly sounded as if he spoke in a black patois. When Trump went to any of these groups, he had the same tie, the same suit, the same accent. What people thought was that, whatever he is, he is authentic.
Honest, authentic.
I don’t know about honest, but authentic and genuine. Honest in the sense that . . .
The larger sense.
Yeah.
Race has been a big part of Trump’s Presidency. There is not a lot of that in your book. The index contains an entry for “blacks,” which just says, when you turn to the page, that “African-Americans increasingly began to control big-city governments.” But there wasn’t a larger discussion of race. Where do you think Trump stands on racial issues?
When I wrote the book, I was interested, so I actually looked at things. I read a great deal about the Mar-a-Lago project, and I was shocked that the people who opposed that on cultural and social grounds were largely anti-Semitic. Trump had already announced that he was not going to discriminate against Jews and Mexicans and other people. He said, “I want wealthy people.” I went to Palm Beach and talked to wealthy Jewish donors and Cubans, and they said the same thing to me—“He likes rich people. He doesn’t care what you look like.”
Egalitarian, yeah.
I don’t know what the driving force was, but I found that he was indifferent. And I think the same thing is true of blacks and Hispanics.
What did you think about him using birtherism as a way of discrediting Obama?
You mean when he was a private citizen? He dropped that.
Well, what do you think about it?
I think it was absurd. I think it was demonstrable that Obama was born in the United States. The only ambiguity was that two things gave rise to the conspiracy theorists. One was—and I think this is a hundred-per-cent accurate—an advertising group that worked in concert with his publisher put on a booklet that Obama was born in Kenya. That gave third-world cachet to “Dreams from My Father.” And he didn’t look at it or didn’t change it. [In 1991, four years before Obama’s first book was published, his literary agency incorrectly stated on a client list that Obama was born in Kenya.] And he left as a young kid and went to Indonesia and applied when he came back as a Fulbright Fellow, and I don’t know if this is substantiated or just rumor, but he probably was given dual citizenship. [The claim that Obama was a Fulbright Fellow from Indonesia, and therefore had Indonesian citizenship, originated in a hoax e-mail, from April 1, 2009, and has been discredited.]
Rumors are fine.
Yeah. While in Indonesia. What I am getting at is, here you have a guy named Barack Obama, who grew up in Hawaii, and there were indications in his past that there was ambiguity.
You don’t think Trump was using it as a racially—
No, no, I think Trump was doing what Trump does, which is trying to sensationalize it. I don’t think it was racial. I think it was political.
You write, “Trump picked his targets carefully. His epithets even more carefully.” On the other hand, you have him making fun of Mika Brzezinski’s looks or saying that Ted Cruz’s dad had a role in the J.F.K. assassination.
I mentioned how that was crude in the book.
O.K., so do we think he picks his targets carefully, or maybe not?
If you go back and look at that, I mean carefully calibrated in a political sense. That’s my point. Not that it was careful in the sense of being humane or sympathetic. By that I mean, there were elements in Ted Cruz’s personality that offended people. And he got Ted Cruz really angry, and Ted Cruz doesn’t come across well.
Right, if someone accused your dad of killing J.F.K., or said that your wife was unattractive, you might get a little—
I think so. But if you go back and look at the worst tweets, they are retaliatory.
What he does is he waits like a coiled cobra until people attack him, and then he attacks them in a much cruder, blunter fashion. And he has an uncanny ability to pick people that have attacked him, whether it’s Rosie O’Donnell, Megyn Kelly—there were elements in all those people’s careers that were starting to bother people, and Trump sensed that out. I don’t think he would have gotten away with taking on other people that were completely beloved. Colin Kaepernick. People were getting tired of him, so he took him on. All that stuff was calibrated. Trump was replying and understood public sympathy would be at least fifty-fifty, if not in his favor.
No, I mean, if you are going to attack a woman as ugly you want to make sure you at least have public sympathy on your side.
I think so. There are certain women that may be homely.
Voir également:
Book paints Trump as tragic hero
Robert Brehl
The Catholic register
March 26, 2019
In a new book, The Case for Trump, scholarly classicist Victor Davis Hanson paints the U.S. president as a tragic hero like Achilles or Ajax from classic Greek literature.
“What makes such men and women both tragic and heroic is their knowledge that the natural expression of their personas can lead only to their own destruction or ostracism from an advancing civilization that they seek to protect. And yet they willingly accept the challenge to be of service,” Hanson writes.
“Yet for a variety of reasons, both personal and civic, their characters not only should not be altered, but could not be, even if the tragic hero wished to change. … In the classical tragic sense, Trump likely will end in one of two fashions, both not particularly good: either spectacular but unacknowledged accomplishments followed by ostracism … or, less likely, a single term due to the eventual embarrassment of his beneficiaries.”
Donald Trump, with metaphorical sword and shield in hand, slaying 21st century dragons like illegal immigrants or foreign despots threatening America; all the while, his selfless bravery misunderstood. It’s quite an image.
But it would be wrong to swiftly dismiss Hanson’s ideas and his book, especially by those opposed to the president and his policies. Hanson himself calls Trump “flawed,” but his presidency exemplary.
Hanson is a retired classics professor from California State University, Fresno, and senior fellow in military history at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and he has written two dozen books on topics ranging from the ancient world to the Second World War. He lives on a working farm in a multiracial, rural area in the interior of California, southeast of San Francisco. He doesn’t live in an Ivory Tower.
He also uses his hometown of Selma as a classic example of why America elected Trump. Once prosperous with family-run farms and food-processing plants and other manufacturing jobs, now most jobs are gone, unemployment high, crime and drug abuse commonplace. “In 1970, we did not have keys for our outside doors; in 2018, I have six guard dogs,” he writes.
While he is a conservative with an upfront agenda, his critics come from the left and the right. One of the nastiest attacks upon Hanson comes from a Republican who worked on Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign and calls him a “Nazi sympathizer,” “racist enabler” and a “treasonous sophist.” A liberal writer says it’s oxymoronic to call Hanson a “pro-Trump intellectual.”
If his ideas are ticking off both ends of the spectrum, they must have some merit, or, at the very least, be interesting.
In defending his book, Hanson’s tone is civil. He tells stories from antiquity to make a point; or he acknowledges that Trump is a blowhard like the character Rodney Dangerfield played in the movie Caddyshack. But that doesn’t mean Trump’s policies aren’t working, he says. When one defends a position with reasoned thought, instead of rants and personal attacks like so many Trump supporters and detractors, it’s a welcome change.
Some of Hanson’s observations are disagreeable, others are worthy of pointing out and giving Trump his due.
For example, Trump’s stand towards China and its murky trade practices is a reprieve from the appeasement of recent years. His support of the Catholic and Jewish faiths is also admirable.
Ultimately, though, The Case for Trump crumbles on two fundamental points.
It is disingenuous to separate the man from the presidency, but Hanson does. “Trump’s own uncouthness,” he writes, “was in its own manner contextualized by his supporters as a long overdue pushback to the elite disdain and indeed hatred shown them.”
Hanson also points out character flaws in former presidents as somehow a reason to hand Trump a “get-out-of-jail-free-card” for his extracurricular activities with hookers and porn stars.
“It doesn’t mean Donald Trump is a saint,” Hanson said during a recorded book tour event, “but he’s not an aberration either.”
My mother often said “two wrongs don’t make a right” and that applies here, along with Trump’s penchant to surround himself with hucksters, grifters, con men, liars and felons. Then there are the relentless and often vicious personal tweets and attacks on the Constitution.
Sorry, but these character cancers cannot be ignored simply because one likes Trump’s tax cuts and deregulation that may or may not have boosted economic growth.
Besides, Hanson doesn’t make the case — with hard facts — that Trump’s policies are actually working. Has picking on allies like Canada really helped Wisconsin dairy farmers? Has he really tamed Kim Jong Un and his nuclear aspirations? Have Trump policies really boosted growth more than simply the cyclical nature of the economy itself? The list goes on and on.
Trump opponents probably won’t read the book, but it’s not your regular right-wing diatribe camouflaged as a book. It’s readable and, at times, highly entertaining in how he skewers Trump’s adversaries.
But, in the end, the book can’t make a case that electing a status quo disruptor like Donald Trump is any more than a Pyrrhic victory in the classical tragic sense.
Voir de même:
That clattering noise you’ve been hearing for years is the sound of previous U.S. presidents, from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush to Barack Obama, kicking cans down the road for someone else to pick up. Now, a heavyset older man with orange hair has set about collecting them — not to recycle for another president, but to ensure no future U.S. leader will trip over them.
Critics describe President Donald Trump’s foreign policy as a muddled, unpredictable collection of impulses, with the one organizing principle being the coddling of like-minded, ruthless dictators. But there is, in fact, a defining diplomatic strategy: He is cleaning up the messes left by his predecessors.
Trump, regularly derided as the most irresponsible of presidents, is actually taking ownership of the most terrifying problems the country faces and trying to solve them in a direct way that his recent predecessors avoided.
Trump is actually taking ownership of the most terrifying problems the country faces and trying to solve them in a direct way that his recent predecessors avoided.
With respect to Iran, China, North Korea and even Russia, Trump is taking tough stances. He is getting cozy with dictators because the man who considers himself an artist of the deal understands that those are the people he must strike bargains with.
Under Trump, China has finally been recognized as a long-term strategic opponent and potential enemy, rather than a nation of billions yearning for democracy. Capitalism has indeed taken hold in China — though without economic nor political liberalization. Instead, authoritarian China is using its newfound riches to expand its economic, political and military influence.
Since Clinton permanently normalized trade relations with China in 2000, American manufacturing has relocated to China for its cheap labor, the Chinese have consistently cheated on trade and the annual U.S. trade deficit with China has soared from $83 billion to a record $419 billion in 2018. Recognizing that placating China and quietly nudging it to play fair is not going to work; Trump has taken a more direct approach and assessed tariffs on Chinese imports while threatening even more. The Chinese are now at the table, talking, and Washington may at last secure a more equitable deal.
Meanwhile, North Korea’s nuclear program has been progressing steadily since 1994 when Clinton, instead of risking military confrontation to put a stop to the nascent effort, acquiesced to a deal negotiated by President Jimmy Carter. That agreement gave the Kim family the room it needed to develop nuclear weapons. Bush’s six-party talks from 2003 to 2008 failed to stem North Korea’s ambitions, and the country continued to build bombs during Obama’s even more passive “strategic patience” approach.
After two and a half decades of Washington dithering, by 2017 the North Koreans were on the cusp of being able to load their bombs on missiles that could reach the continental United States. So Trump decided to try something different.
First, he mocked North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and menaced him with U.S. gunboats. Then, having made it clear he had no problem getting dirty, he started meeting with Kim directly.
Trump likely cannot succeed in disarming Kim of his weapons by disarming him personally. The North Korean dictator is probably just buying more time. But Trump is at least taking an unconventional approach rather than re-enacting the failures of the past.
Trump, however, has decided a nuclear Iran is not acceptable — neither now nor 12 years from now. He withdrew from the deal and re-invoked sanctions in the hope that the Iranians will renegotiate the terms that legally could have put them on a path toward nuclear weapons.
Of course, this path too has drawbacks — Iran responded by claiming it will increase its uranium enrichment. But Trump has reasoned the time to get tough with Iran is now, not in a dozen years when they are stronger and have perfected technologies related to nuclear weapons.
U.S. policy toward Russia pre-Trump had also been marked by years of complacency — remember Russian President Vladimir Putin convincing Bush there was a soul behind his eyes? During the 2012 presidential campaign, Obama dismissed Republican nominee Mitt Romney’s concerns about Russia with a quip about the 1980s wanting its foreign policy back. Obama was also caught on an open mic whispering to Russia’s then-President Dmitri Medvedev that he’d have more “flexibility” after the election.
In key ways, the White House has been strengthening U.S. posture toward Russia — even if Trump seems to be buddying up to Putin. The Brookings Institution noted this, asserting, “The Trump administration’s policy actions often seem at odds with the president’s rhetoric,” and listing a series of Trump policy actions toward Russia.
Trump’s administration, Foreign Policy explained, “has held a tough line on Russia, building on his predecessor’s policies by layering on further sanctions, expelling dozens of Russian diplomats, and providing lethal weapons support to Ukraine — a step that former President Barack Obama had been unwilling to take.”
Trump’s demand that European nations pay their North Atlantic Treaty Organization obligations — another can regularly kicked down the road — might seem hostile toward long-time allies, but ensures they have skin in the game when it comes to confronting Russia.
The Washington establishment, so used to conventional ways, is aghast. But business as usual has strengthened our enemies. Trump’s iconoclasm is worth a try.
Les semaines se suivent et se ressemblent dans la grande presse française.
Le Président américain Donald Trump est présenté comme un abruti erratique guidé par ses impulsions, ignorant et dangereux.
Bien que le rapport Mueller ait montré qu’il n’y a jamais eu aucune «collusion» entre Trump et la Russie, les journalistes français en leur grande majorité se refusent à le dire explicitement et à reconnaître qu’ils ont pratiqué la désinformation à dose intensive pendant deux ans.
Les résultats obtenus par Trump, tant sur le plan intérieur que sur le plan extérieur, sont à peine notés et ne le sont parfois pas du tout. Quand ils le sont, le nom de Trump est le plus souvent omis, comme si le citer positivement, ne serait-ce qu’une seule fois, était absolument impensable.
Ce n’est, en soi, pas grave: Trump gouverne sans se préoccuper de ce que diront des journalistes français. Cela contribue néanmoins à entraver la compréhension des choses de tous ceux qui ne s’informeraient que grâce à la presse française, et nombre de gens seront dès lors surpris lorsque Trump sera réélu en novembre 2020 (car tout l’indique: il sera réélu).
On leur expliquera sans doute que c’est parce que le peuple américain est lui-même ignorant et dangereux.
Cela contribue aussi à empêcher de voir que l’action et les idées de Trump ont un impact beaucoup plus vaste, et qui excède de beaucoup les frontières des États-Unis.
J’ai écrit en 2017 un premier livre sur l’action et les idées de Trump et j’y disais que la révolution Trump venait de commencer.
Depuis, la révolution Trump suit son cours, aux États-Unis et sur le reste de la planète.
J’ai écrit en 2018 un deuxième livre expliquant la doctrine Trump («Ce que veut Trump»).
Je publierai un troisième livre en 2020 qui portera sur l’ère Trump. Car nous sommes dans l’ère Trump.
La politique économique menée par Donald Trump – qui ajoute à une forte baisse des impôts et à une déréglementation radicale, un refus de se soumettre aux lubies écologistes et un nationalisme économique basé sur la renégociation de tous les accords internationaux antécédemment négociés et sur la création de rapports de force – porte ses fruits et mène divers gouvernements sur la planète à adopter des mesures allant dans la même direction.
Sa politique intérieure – basée sur un retour à une immigration strictement contrôlée et sur la réaffirmation des valeurs qui fondent la civilisation occidentale – porte, elle aussi, ses fruits, même si elle est, dans plusieurs États du pays, entravée par les décisions délétères de la gauche américaine qui entend protéger les immigrants illégaux (criminels compris).
Plusieurs gouvernements sur la planète adoptent des mesures allant dans le même sens.
La façon de Trump d’affronter la gauche et les médias désinformateurs contribue à donner à d’autres dirigeants conservateurs le courage d’affronter la gauche et les médias désinformateurs d’une même façon.
La politique étrangère menée par Donald Trump change le monde.
Au Proche-Orient, Donald Trump conduit une asphyxie du régime iranien qui progresse et, n’en déplaise à ceux qui refusent de le voir, diminue la dangerosité de celui-ci.
Il met en place un rapprochement entre les pays du monde arabe sunnite et Israël qui modifie profondément la donne régionale et, n’en déplaise là encore à ceux qui refusent de le voir, fait apparaître pour la première fois des espoirs réels qu’émerge une paix durable.
L’anéantissement de l’État islamique permet de juguler le terrorisme islamique sur les cinq continents.
L’action d’endiguement de la Chine communiste déstabilise celle-ci et freine les ambitions hégémoniques nourries par Xi Jinping. La Corée du Nord n’est plus une menace pour la Corée du Sud et le Japon.
L’arrivée au pouvoir de Jaïr Bolsonaro au Brésil est au cœur d’un changement majeur dans toute l’Amérique latine.
En Europe, Trump ne cesse d’appuyer les dirigeants «populistes» d’Europe centrale contre les orientations anti-démocratiques et islamophiles de l’Union européenne, et la perspective d’une Europe des nations souveraines fait son chemin.
L’ère Trump est en son aurore. La grande presse du monde qui parle anglais le dit explicitement. Ne comptez pas sur la grande presse française pour vous le dire!
Voir encore:
Trump ne voulait pas du rôle de policier mondial, mais il se trouve obligé de l’assumer, puisqu’il n’y a aucune puissance capable de remplacer les États-Unis dans ce domaine-clé.
C’est l’Amérique, pas l’ONU impotente et corrompue, qui maintient les routes commerciales, et le monde entier en profite, gratuitement – comme si cela allait de soi. Or, non seulement, cela ne va pas de soi, mais beaucoup d’obligés geignent contre un pseudo «impérialisme américain», sans jamais se remettre en question.
Si l’Amérique trouve certes son compte dans ce service planétaire assuré à grands frais par sa flotte et ses services de surveillance, ce n’est pas elle qui en a le plus besoin, mais ses alliés qui, eux, ne sont pas sevrés du brut que leur vend l’OPEP.
C’est aussi l’Amérique qui en assume les risques comme on vient de voir avec la descente en flammes d’un drone de 100 millions de dollars, heureusement sans pilote, qui croisait dans l’espace international et non iranien. Cela, après des attaques iraniennes, sans raison non plus, sur des pétroliers norvégien et japonais.
Alors, «l’opinion internationale» (c’est-à-dire la gauche mondialiste et ses médias désinformateurs) se dit «soulagée» que Trump n’ait pas poursuivi «son escalade», mais tous ces trolls qui renversent ignominieusement les responsabilités, déplorent à présent son «manque de stratégie».
Qu’est-ce que des anti-américains et anti-militaristes primaires peuvent comprendre aux questions de stratégie avec leur logiciel bloqué?
La véritable question est: pourquoi l’ayatollah Khamenei décide-t-il maintenant de provoquer Trump?
Les sanctions asphyxient son économie de rente, d’autant que l’aide concoctée par les Européens cupides, hypocrites et lâches, tarde à se matérialiser.
Les dirigeants de l’UE, qui marchent au pas de l’oie avec Merkel, entretiennent une cécité criminelle vis-à-vis de l’Iran.
Sous Merkel, l’Allemagne oublie qu’elle doit tout aux États-Unis. Elle remercie par une politique teigneuse de tarifs douaniers. Elle se targue cyniquement d’être la plus mauvaise payeuse de l’OTAN, achète le gaz de la Russie et refuse le gaz américain. Et voici qu’elle pactise avec les ayatollahs contre les USA.
L’Allemagne et l’UE illustrent tout ce qui est inacceptable pour Trump: l’archétype de l’allié félon aux prétentions disproportionnées au vu de la réalité. Et elles sont coupables de négligence inadmissible envers notre sécurité collective en dissimulant le danger pour l’Occident qu’est la République islamique, nullement différente (dans ses visées hégémoniques et ses méthodes internes brutales) de l’État islamique que l’Iran aidait et que Trump a éradiqué.
L’Iran n’a jamais cessé l’enrichissement d’uranium et continue d’alimenter le terrorisme islamique. Les sanctions ne sont que justice et, malgré leur dureté renforcée, Trump espère des Iraniens éclairés un énième et décisif soulèvement contre ses dirigeants. Car il n’en a qu’après ce régime meurtrier et sympathise avec les Iraniens, mais il leur rappelle qu’il ne peut intervenir militairement, sauf attaque avec victimes américaines, auquel cas la réponse serait foudroyante. Loin de vouloir la guerre, il veut «redonner à l’Iran sa grandeur».
Khamenei sait qu’à la Maison Blanche, Trump s’est entouré volontairement de conseillers aux vues opposées qui représentent chacun une partie de la base de Trump et qui constituent un «brain-trust». Il table sur le fait que Trump est tenu par l’impératif de sa réélection. Les « deux côtés de l’équation », comme Trump les appelle, sont parfaitement honorables et défendent des arguments que l’on ne peut négliger.
Pour le moment, le côté «colombe» exulte, les isolationnistes, les libertariens, et toute la mouvance du «The American Conservative».
Les «faucons» comprennent que l’heure de l’action militaire n’est pas venue. Mais ce serait mal connaître Trump que de penser qu’il ne va pas trouver le moyen de faire payer aux criminels de Téhéran leurs méfaits.
Il doit, seul, parvenir à empêcher les ayatollahs d’accéder au nucléaire et faire cesser leur financement du terrorisme, sans engager de troupes et sans dépenser des milliards.
C’est une tâche de police mondiale à laquelle les Européens devraient participer.
La stratégie de Trump, c’est de voir venir, de ne pas dévoiler son jeu et de se tenir prêt à frapper.
Ceux qui lui font confiance ne sont pas inquiets et savourent un divertissement politique quotidien de qualité.
Voir encore:
How can evangelicals support Donald Trump?
That question continues to befuddle and exasperate liberals. How, they wonder, can a man who is twice divorced, a serial liar, a shameless boaster (including about alleged sexual assault) and an unrepentant xenophobe earn the enthusiastic backing of so many devout Christians? About 80% of evangelicals voted for Trump in 2016; according to a recent poll, almost 70% of white evangelicals approve of how he has handled the presidency – far more than any other religious group.
To most Democrats, such support seems a case of blatant hypocrisy and political cynicism. Since Trump is delivering on matters such as abortion, the supreme court and moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, conservative Christians are evidently willing to overlook the president’s moral failings. In embracing such a one-dimensional explanation, however, liberals risk falling into the same trap as they did in 2016, when their scorn for evangelicals fed evangelicals’ anger and resentment, contributing to Trump’s huge margin among this group.
Bill Maher fell into this trap during a biting six-minute polemic he delivered on his television show in early March. Evangelicals, he said, “needed to solve this little problem” – they want to support a Republican president, but this particular one “happens to be the least Christian person ever”. “How to square the circle?” he asked. “Say that Trump is like King Cyrus.” According to Isaiah 45, God used the non-believer Cyrus as a vessel for his will; many evangelicals today believe that God is similarly using the less-than-perfect Trump to achieve Christian aims.
But Trump isn’t a vessel for God’s will, Maher said, and Cyrus “wasn’t a fat, orange-haired, conscience-less scumbag”. Trump’s supporters “don’t care”, he ventured, because “that’s religion. The more it doesn’t make sense the better, because it proves your faith.” Maher portrayed evangelical Christians as a dim-witted group willing to make the most ludicrous theological leaps to advance their agenda.
As I watched, I tried to imagine how evangelicals would view this routine. I think they would see a secular elitist eager to assert what he considers his superior intelligence. They would certainly sense his contempt for the many millions of Americans who believe fervently in God, revere the Bible and see Trump as representing their interests. Maher’s diatribe reminded me of a pro-Trump acquaintance from Ohio who now lives in Manhattan and who says that New York liberals are among the most intolerant people he has ever met.
Liberals have good cause to decry the ideology of conservative Christians, given their relentless assault on abortion rights, same-sex marriage, transgender rights and climate science. But the disdain for Christians common among the credentialed class can only add to the sense of alienation and marginalization among evangelicals.
Many evangelicals feel themselves to be under siege. In a 2016 survey, 41% said it was becoming more difficult to be an evangelical. And many conservative Christians see the national news media as unrelievedly hostile to them.
Most media coverage of evangelicals falls into a few predictable categories. One is the exotic and titillating – stories of ministers who come out as transgender, or stories of evangelical sexual hypocrisies. Another favorite subject is progressive evangelicals who challenge the Christian establishment.
During the 2016 campaign, a prevailing theme in the press was “the end of white Christian America”, as the title of a much-quoted book by pollster Robert P Jones put it. In an article in the Atlantic that July, Jones noted that the declining number of white Christians can help explain their profound anxiety. But, he warned, relying on “supermajorities” of white Christians to offset broader demographic changes was a losing strategy – one that “sealed the fate of the Romney campaign in 2012 and will likely set the GOP back as it turns to the task of reclaiming the White House in 2016”. That, of course, proved flatly wrong.
In a similar vein, the New York Times ran a piece three weeks before the election describing how the traditional evangelical bloc was splintering, with young people and women voters fleeing the Republican party. “While most of the religious right’s aging old guard has chosen to stand by Mr Trump,” the Times stated, “its judgment and authority are being challenged by an increasingly assertive crop of younger leaders, minorities and women.”
Though many young, black and female evangelicals did reject Trump, the article underestimated his bedrock of evangelical support. In the end, the share of white, born-again Christians in the electorate held steady at about 25 – the same as in 2008 and 2012 – and they gave a greater proportion of their vote to Trump than that recorded for any prior candidate.
There are of course exceptions to such miscast coverage. The Washington Post, with three religion reporters, covers American evangelicalism more fully than most news organizations. And the Times’ Nicholas Kristof, who grew up among evangelicals in rural Oregon, makes periodic efforts to explain their world. In 2016, he wrote a column criticizing the pervasive discrimination toward Christians in liberal circles. He quoted Jonathan Walton, a black evangelical and professor of Christian morals at Harvard, who compared the common condescension toward evangelicals to that directed at racial minorities, with both seen as “politically unsophisticated, lacking education, angry, bitter, emotional, poor”.
Strangely, the group most overlooked by the press is the people in the pews. It would be refreshing for more reporters to travel through the Bible belt and talk to ordinary churchgoers about their faith and values, hopes and struggles. Such reporting would no doubt show that the world of American Christianity is far more varied and complex than is generally thought. It would reveal, for instance, a subtle but important distinction between the Christian right and evangelicals in general, who tend to be less political (though still largely conservative).
This kind of deep reporting would probably also highlight the enduring power of a key tenet of the founder of Protestantism. “Faith, not works,” was Martin Luther’s watchword. In his view, it is faith in Christ that truly matters. If one believes in Christ, then one will feel driven to do good works, but such works are always secondary. Trump’s own misdeeds are thus not central; what he stands for – the defense of Christian interests and values – is.
Luther also preached the doctrine of original sin, which holds that all humans are tainted by Adam’s transgression in the Garden of Eden and so remain innately prone to pride, anger, lust, vengeance and other failings. Many evangelicals have themselves struggled with divorce, broken families, addiction and abuse. We are thus all sinners – the president included.
I don’t expect the media’s dismissive attitude toward evangelicalism to abate anytime soon. A journalist at a top US news organization told me that she and other evangelicals feel the need to “fly under the radar” because of the unwelcoming attitude toward them.
I can hear the reactions of some readers to this column: Enough! Enough trying to understand a group that helped put such a noxious man in the White House. Yet such a reaction is both ungenerous and shortsighted. Liberals take pride in their empathy for “the other” and their efforts to understand the perspective of groups different from themselves. They should apply that principle to evangelicals. If liberals continue to scoff, they risk reinforcing the rage of evangelicals – and their support for Trump.
Voir par ailleurs:
De retour de Sicile, Alexandre del Valle revient sur l’affaire du bateau de l’ONG pro-migrants Sea Watch qui avait « secouru » 53 clandestins dans les eaux internationales au large de la Libye, mi-juin et dont le capitaine fait la une des journaux depuis que son navire a risqué, dans la nuit du 28 juin, d’écraser une vedette de la Guardia della Finanza qui l’empêchait d’accoster.
Arrêtée par la police italienne, le capitaine du bateau Sea Watch, CarolaRackete, semble être devenue l’héroïne de toute une gauche européenne dont l’activisme humanitaire et victimiste pro-migrants sert en réalité une idéologie anti-nationale, anti-frontières et viscéralement hostile à la civilisation européenne-occidentale assimilée au Mal et dont les « fautes » passées et présentes ne pourraient être expiées qu’en acceptant l’auto-submersion migratoire et islamique…
La stratégie culpabilisatrice et victimaire des ONG / lobbies pro-Migrants
Rappelons que le Sea-Watch 3, navire de 600 tonnes battant pavillon hollandais et cofinancé par les fonds de George Soros et autres riches contributeurs, a non seulement « récupéré » des migrants illégaux acheminés par des passeurs nord-africains, ce qui est en soi un viol de la loi, mais a délibérément forcé le blocus des eaux territoriales italiennes, donc violé la souveraineté de ce pays. De ce fait, son capitaine, l’Allemande Carola Rackete, va être présentée à un juge en début de semaine, à Agrigente, dans le sud de la Sicile, puis répondra des faits « d’aide à l’immigration clandestine » (punie de prison par la loi italienne et le « décret-sécurité » (decreto-sicurezza) du gouvernement / Ligue (5 étoiles de Rome), puis de « résistance à un bateau de guerre ». Quant aux 42 migrants clandestins de la Sea Watch 3 débarqués après l’arrestation de la capitaine-activiste allemande (11 migrants plus « vulnérables » avaient déjà été débarqués légalement), ils ont fini par débarquer à Lampedusa après que la France, l’Allemagne, le Portugal, le Luxembourg et la Finlande ont accepté un plan de répartition visant à en accueillir chacun quelques-uns.
Pendant ce temps, des petites embarcations moins identifiables et qui ne font pas la une des médias continuent d’arriver chaque jour à Lampedusa et au sud d’Agrigente (200 ces derniers jours). Et d’autres navires affrétés par des ONG pro-migrants continuent de défier les autorités italiennes ou d’autres pays (Malte, Espagne, Grèce, etc.) dans l’indifférence générale et en violation banalisée de la loi et du principe de protection des frontières. On peut citer par exemple l’ONG espagnole Proactiva open arms, qui patrouille au large de la Libye malgré la menace d’une amende de 200 000 à 900 000 euros brandie par les autorités espagnoles. « Si je dois payer par la prison ou par une amende le fait de sauver les vies de quelques personnes, je le ferais », a d’ailleurs assuré Oscar Camps, fondateur de l’ONG. Utilisant la même rhétorique de « résistance » et de « désobéissance civile » face à une autorité étatique « répressive », Carola Rackette expliquait elle aussi au Spiegel, quelques jours seulement avant d’accoster à Lampedusa : « Si nous ne sommes pas acquittés par un tribunal, nous le serons dans les livres d’histoire. » Niente di meno !
Mon obligation morale est d’aider les gens qui n’ont pas bénéficié des mêmes conditions que moi.
La stratégie d’intimidation psychologique des ONG et lobbies subversifs pro-migrants consiste en fait à adopter une rhétorique victimaire et hautement culpabilisatrice qui a pour but de faire passer pour des horribles racistes / fascistes les défenseurs des frontières et des lois sécuritaires pourtant démocratiquement adoptées. Carola Rackete a ainsi déclaré au journal italien La Repubblica : « J’ai la peau blanche, j’ai grandi dans un pays riche, j’ai le bon passeport, j’ai pu faire trois universités différentes et j’ai fini mes études à 23 ans. Mon obligation morale est d’aider les gens qui n’ont pas bénéficié des mêmes conditions que moi (…). Les pauvres, ils ne se sentent pas bienvenus, imaginez leur souffrance (…), j’ai voulu accoster de force car beaucoup risquaient de se suicider sur la bateau et étaient en danger depuis 17 jours d’immobilisation ».
Très fier de lui et de son « coup », Chris Grodotzki, le président de l’ONG Sea Watch, se réjouit que « dans toute l’Europe, Carole est devenue un symbole. Nous n’avons jamais reçu autant de dons »,indiquant qu’en Italie une cagnotte a recueilli dimanche 400 000 euros. Samedi, en Allemagne, deux stars de la télévision, Jan Böhmermann et Klaas Heufer-Umlauf, ont lancé quant à eux une cagnotte et 500 000 euros ont été récoltés en moins de vingt-quatre heures.En fait, l’aide aux migrants clandestins est une activité lucrative pour les ONG, et pas seulement pour les passeurs et les établissements payés pour offrir le gîte et l’accueil avec les deniers publics.
Quand la gauche italienne et européenne appelle à violer les lois des Etats souverains
D’après Matteo Salvini, Carola Rackete serait une « criminelle » qui aurait tenté de « tuer des membres des forces de l’ordre italienne ». Il est vrai que la vedette de la Guarda della Finanza, (12 mètres), très légère, n’aurait pas résisté au choc du navire de la Sea Watch (600 tonnes) si elle ne s’était pas retirée. Inculpée par le procureur d’Agrigente, la capitaine de la Sea Watch risque jusqu’à dix ans de prison pour « résistance ou violence envers un navire de guerre ». En fait, bien moins que dans de nombreux autres pays du monde, y compris démocratiques comme l’Australie, les Etats-Unis ou la Hongrie. Le procureur d’Agrigente, Luigi Patronaggio, qui est pourtant connu pour ne pas être du tout favorable à la Ligue de Matteo Salvini, a d’ailleurs qualifié le geste de Carola Rackete de « violence inadmissible » et placé la capitaine du navire humanitaire aux « arrêts domiciliaires » (contrôle judiciaire avec assignation à résidence), avant le lancement d’une procédure de flagrant délit. L’intéressée a répondu via le Corriere della Sera, en affirmant que « ce n’était pas un acte de violence, seulement de désobéissance ».
Depuis, de Rome à Berlin, et au sein de toute la gauche et l’extrême-gauche européenne, « Carola » est devenue une nouvelle « héroïne de la désobéissance civile », le concept clef de la gauche marxiste ou libertaire pour justifier moralement le fait de bafouer délibérément les règles des Etats et de violer les lois démocratiques qui font obstacle à leur idéologie anti-nationale. Et la désinformation médiatique consiste justement à faire passer l’appui que Carola Rackete a reçu – de la part de stars de TV, de politiques bien-pensants et de lobbies pro-migrants chouchoutés par les médias – pour un « soutien de l’Opinion publique ».En Allemagne, du président de l’Église évangélique, Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, au PDG de Siemens, Joe Kaeser, de nombreuses voix se sont élevées pour prendre sa défense comme si elle était une nouvelle Pasionaria « antifasciste / antinazie », 90 ans plus tard…
Dans certains cas, vous ne pouvez pas respecter les lois et vous pouvez même au contraire, dans des cas de nécessité, enfreindre les lois.
En Italie, outre la figure de Leo Luca Orlando, le maire de Palerme, qui accorde régulièrement la « citoyenneté d’honneur » de sa ville aux dirigeants d’ONG pro-migrants et qui assimile les « cartes de séjours » et contrôles aux frontières à des « instruments de torture », l’ensemble de la gauche (hors le parti 5 étoiles allié de la Ligue), et surtout le parti démocrate, (PD), jouent cette carte de « l’illégalité légitime » et appuie les ONG anti-frontières. « Par nécessité, vous pouvez enfreindre la loi », ont déclaré aux membres de la Sea Watch les députés de gauche montés à bord du bateau Sea Watch 3 avant l’arrestation de Carole Rackete. Premier à être monté à bord du Sea Watch 3, l’élu du PD Graziano Delrio ose lancer : « Dans certains cas, vous ne pouvez pas respecter les lois et vous pouvez même au contraire, dans des cas de nécessité, enfreindre les lois. »
Détail stupéfiant, les représentants du PD venus manifester leur solidarité avec la capitaine (étrangère) d’un navire (étranger) faisant le travail de passeurs / trafiquants d’êtres humains, n’ont pas même condamné ou regretté le fait que la « militante humanitaire Carole » a failli tuer les policiers de la vedette de la Guardia di Finanza qui bloquait le Sea Watch 3. Estimant qu’il ne pouvait manquer ce « coup médiatique » afin de complaire aux lobbies et médias immigrationnistes dominant, l’ex-Premier ministre (PD) Matteo Renzi était lui aussi sur le pont du Sea Watch 3 lorsque Carola Rackete a décidé de forcer le blocus. Avec lui, d’autres parlementaires de gauche (Matteo Orfini, Davide Faraone, Nicola Fratoianni et Riccardo Magi) ont carrément « béni » cette action illégale et violente qui a pourtant mis en danger les membres des forces de leur propre pays.
Étaient également venus applaudir la capitaine allemande et son action illégale : le curé de Lampedusa, Don Carmelo La Magra ; l’ancien maire de l’île Giusi Nicolini, le médecin et député européen Pietro Bartolo, et le secrétaire local du parti PD Peppino Palmeri, lequel a déclaré pompeusement que « l’humanité a gagné, (…). Je pense que oui, nous devons être unis dans une fraternité universelle »… Plutôt que de respecter la légalité des lois approuvées démocratiquement par le Parlement de leur propre pays dont ils sont élus, ces représentants de la gauche ont accusé le gouvernement Ligue / 5 étoiles d’avoir « laissé au milieu de la mer pendant 16 jours un bateau qui avait besoin d’un refuge » (Matteo Orfini), alors qu’en réalité, sur les 53 migrants illégaux au départ présents sur le Sea Watch 3, onze avaient été débarqués en Italie en raison de leur état vulnérable, les autres étant nourris et auscultés par des médecins envoyés par l’Etat italien.
L’alliance immigrationniste entre la gauche anti-nationale ; l’Eglise catholique et le grand Capital !
Dès qu’elle est descendue du navire accompagnée des policiers italiens venus l’arrêter, Carola Rackete a été saluée par les ovations d’un groupe d’activistes ainsi que par le curé de la paroisse de Lampedusa, Carmelo La Magra, lequel dormait dans le cimetière de sa paroisse depuis une semaine « en signe de solidarité ». Rivalisant avec les plus virulents pro-migrants d’extrême-gauche, le curé de Lampedusa a exulté : « Noël vient quand il arrive. Bienvenue aux migrants à Porto Salvo di Lampedusa. » Le prêtre de l’église de San Gerlando di Lampedusa s’est ainsi joint à l’appel de l’Action catholique italienne « à permettre le débarquement immédiat des 42 personnes à bord du Sea Watch ».
Au début du mois de mai dernier, lors de son voyage en Bulgarie, le Pape avait donné le ton et répondu ainsi à la politique des « ports fermés » de Matteo Salvini : « Ne fermez pas les portes à ceux qui frappent. Le monde des migrants et des réfugiés est la croix de l’humanité. » Preuve que les curés pro-migrants et l’Église catholique de plus en plus immigrationniste sont, comme la gauche anti-nationale post-ouvrière, totalement déconnectés des peuples et de leurs ouailles : rappelons qu’à Lampedusa la Ligue de Salvini est arrivée en tête avec 45 % des voix aux dernières élections européennes ; que plus de 65 % des Italiens (catholiques) approuvent ses lois et actions visant à combattre l’immigration clandestine ; et que le Pape François, certes populaire auprès des médias quand il défend les migrants, exaspère de plus en plus et a même rendu antipapistes des millions d’Italiens qui se sentent trahis par un souverain Pontife qui semble préférer les musulmans aux chrétiens et les Africains aux Européens. A tort ou à raison d’ailleurs.
Il est vrai que la Sicile et en particulier Lampedusa sont plus que jamais en première ligne face à l’immigration clandestine : rien que pendant les deux dernières semaines durant lesquelles le Sea Watch est resté bloqué au large de l’île, Lampedusa a assisté impuissante, malgré la politique des « ports fermés » de Matteo Salvini et de son nouveau « décret sécurité », plus de 200 clandestins (majoritairement tunisiens et aucunement des « réfugiés » politiques syriens) acheminés par des barques de fortunes plus difficiles à repérer que les navires des ONG. Depuis des années, la ville est littéralement défigurée, l’arrivée de migrants entraînant des faits quotidiens de violences, d’agressions, de vols et destructions de commerces.
Nous sommes tous des personnes.
Malgré cela, le médiatique curé de Lampedusa, grand adepte du pape François, martèle qu’il faut « accueillir, protéger, promouvoir et intégrer les migrants et les réfugiés ». Dans une autre ville de Sicile, Noto, où nous nous sommes rendus le 27 juin dernier, une immense croix en bois a été construite à partir de morceaux d’une embarcation de migrants et a été carrément érigée dans l’entrée de la plus grande église du centre-ville. A Catania, ville très catholique-conservatrice et de droite – où se déroule chaque année début février la troisième plus grande fête chrétienne au monde, la Santa Agata – la cathédrale a été prise d’assauts par des sit-in pro-migrants en défense de Carola Rackete et de la Sea Watch.
Quant à Palerme, l’alliance entre l’Église catholique et le maire de la Ville, Leo Luca Orlando, chef de file de la lutte contre la politique migratoire de Matteo Salvini, est totale, alors même que Orlando est un anticlérical patenté à la fois islamophile et pro-LGBT. Sa dernière trouvaille a consisté à proposer d’éliminer le terme même de « migrant », puisque « nous sommes tous des personnes ». D’après lui, le terme « migrants » devrait être supprimé, tout comme la gauche a réussi à faire supprimer celui de « clandestin », remplacé dans le jargon journalistique par celui, trompeur, mais plus valorisant, de « migrant ». Cette manipulation sémantique visant à abolir la distinction migrant régulier / illégal est également très présente dans le pacte de Marrakech des Nations-unies.
Récemment, à l’occasion de la rupture du jeûne du ramadan, le médiatique maire palermitain s’est affiché en train de prier avec une assemblée de musulmans, consacrant même une « journée consacrée à l’islam » en rappelant le « glorieux passé arabo-islamique » de la Sicile (en réalité envahie et libérée deux siècles plus tard par les Normands). Orlando utilise lui aussi à merveille l’arme de la culpabilisation lorsqu’il ne cesse de justifier l’immigration illimitée au nom du fait que les Siciliens « ont eu eux aussi des grands-parents qui ont décidé d’aller vivre dans un autre pays en demandant à être considérés comme des personnes humaines ». Bref, « on est tous des migrants ». Une musique bien connue aussi en France.
A chaque nouvelle affaire de blocage de bateaux d’ONG pro-migrants par les autorités italiennes obéissant à la politique de la Ligue, le maire de Palerme se déclare prêt à accueillir des navires dans le port de Palerme. Lors de notre visite, le 26 juin dernier, Orlando nous a d’ailleurs remis une brochure consacrée à l’accueil des migrants, « chez eux chez nous ». Comme le Pape ou l’ex-maire de Lampedusa, Leoluca Orlando est depuis quelques années tellement obsédé par « l’impératif d’accueil » des migrants, alors que la Sicile connaît encore une grande pauvreté et un chômage de masse, qu’il suscite une réaction de rejet et d’exaspération, d’autant que de nombreuses initiatives en faveur des migrants sont financées par des citoyens italiens-siciliens hyper-taxés et précarisés.
Le 28 juin, lorsque nous avons parlé de la question migratoire au maire de la seconde ville de Sicile, Catania, Salvatore Pogliese, ex-membre d’Alleanza nazionale élu député européen et maire sous les couleurs de Forza Italia, celui-ci nous confiait qu’il jugeait absurdes et extrêmes les vues du maire de Palerme ou du curé de Lampedusa. Et il rappelait que lorsque des maires pro-migrants jouent aux « héros » en réclamant l’ouverture sans limites des ports pour accueillir les « réfugiés » du monde entier, ils mentent puisque l’ouverture des ports relève, comme en France, non pas des maires, mais de l’Etat central (ministères des Transports et de l’Intérieur).
L’alliance de la gauche et des multinationales
Une autre alliance de forces « progressistes » / pro-migrants n’a pas manqué de surprendre les analystes de la vie politique italienne, notamment à l’occasion de la Gay Pride, organisée à Milan le 28 juin, par le maire de gauche, Beppe Sala, champion de la « diversité » et des minorités en tout genre : l’alliance de la gauche et des multinationales et des Gafam. C’est ainsi que certains journaux italiens de droite ont relevé le fait que les sponsors de la Gay Pride, officiellement indiqués sur le site de l’événement – Google, Microsoft, eBay, Coca-Cola, PayPal, RedBull, Durex, Benetton, etc. – ont tenu et obtenu que soient associées à la cause des gays celle des migrants afin de « prendre en compte toutes les différences, pas seulement liées à l’identité et à l’orientation sexuelle (immigration, handicap, appartenance ethnique, etc.) ».
Les « migrants » illégaux et autres faux réfugiés secourus par les ONG immigrationnistes, adeptes des « ports ouverts », ont donc eu droit à un traitement de faveur et ont pu officiellement venir « exprimer toute sa solidarité avec le capitaine du navire (Sea Watch 3) Carola Rackete, avec les membres de l’équipage et avec toutes les personnes à bord », écrit sur Facebook « Ensemble sans murs », qui « participera avec enthousiasme au défilé de mode de Milan ». L’idéologie diversitaire est si puissante, et l’accueil des migrants est tellement devenu la « cause des causes » capable de surpasser les autres, qu’elle s’invite même chez les lobbies LGBT, pourtant la « minorité » la plus directement persécutée – avec les juifs – par l’islamisme.
Or, une grande majorité d’immigrés clandestins est de confession musulmane : Subsahariens, Erythréens, Soudanais, Égyptiens, Syriens, Turcs, Maghrébins ou Pakistanais et Afghans qui émigrent en masse dans la Vieille Europe de façon tant légale (regroupement familial, migrations économiques, visas étudiants, mineurs non-accompagnés…) qu’illégale.
Deux poids deux mesures
Pour bien comprendre « d’où parlent » les défenseurs des migrants clandestins qui ne cessent d’apostropher Victor Orban, Matteo Salvini ou encore le « diable en chef » Donald Trump pour leurs politiques de contrôle de l’immigration, il suffit de constater le deux poids deux mesures et l’indignation sélective de la gauche et de l’Église catholique qui dénoncent les « populistes européens xénophobes / islamophobes / racistes » mais très peu le néo-Sultan Erdogan et encore moins les pays d’Afrique, du Maghreb, d’Amérique latine ou d’Asie qui répriment extrêmement sévèrement et violemment l’immigration clandestine et / ou l’islamisme.
Deux exemples flagrants suffiront à s’en convaincre : l’ONU a récemment condamné « l’islamophobie » européenne et occidentale, notamment de la France et de l’Italie, mais pas les massacres de masse de musulmans en Chine ou en Inde. Ensuite, le 5 septembre 2018, lorsque la marine marocaine a fait tirer sur une embarcation de migrants clandestins, faisant un mort et un blessé grave, puis fait arrêter le capitaine espagnol du bateau, l’ONU n’a pas bronché. Pas plus dans de nombreux cas de mauvais traitements, persécutions de migrants subsahariens ou de chrétiens dans l’ensemble des pays d’Afrique du Nord et arabes.
Les Etats européens et les « militants » antifascistes hostiles aux « populistes » n’ont pas manifesté la moindre indignation face à ces phénomènes récurrents. Pas plus que les antiracistes français et leurs alliés féministes et pro-LGBT ne dénoncent la misogynie et l’homophobie islamiques, de facto exonérées par primat xénophile et auto-racisme anti-occidental. Ce dernier exemple est significatif : loin de se laisser culpabiliser, les autorités marocaines ont pourtant assumé le fait qu’une « unité de combat de la Marine royale » a ouvert le feu sur l’embarcation (un « go-fast » léger) en tuant une passagère. Comme Carola Rackete, le capitaine de la vedette de clandestins n’avait pas obéi aux ordres des militaires marocains l’intimant de stopper sa course.
Morale de l’histoire : l’immigrationnisme des ONG comme la Sea Watch et autres « No Borders » est – comme l’antiracisme à sens unique – une arme subversive tournée contre les seuls peuples blancs-judéo-chrétiens-occidentaux et leurs Etats-Nations souverains. D’évidence, les forces cosmopolitiquement correctes (gauche internationaliste-marxiste ; libéraux-multiculturalistes ; multinationales / Mc Word ; Église catholique ; fédéralistes européens et autres instances onusiennes) veulent détruire en premier lieu les vieilles nations européennes culpabilisées et vieillissantes, sorte de terra nullius en devenir conçue comme le laboratoire de leurs projets néo-impériaux / mondialistes respectifs.
Ces différentes forces ne sont pas amies, mais elles convergent dans un même projet de destruction des Etats-souverains occidentaux. Voilà d’où parlent les No Borders. Et à l’aune de ce constat, le fait que le milliardaire Soros et les multinationales précitées sponsorisent des opérations pro-migrants, pourtant exécutées par des ONG et forces de gauche et d’extrême-gauche ou chrétiennes / tiersmondistes, en dit long sur la convergence des forces cosmopolitiquement correctes hostiles à l’Etat-Nation et à la défense de l’identité occidentale.
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