It is more than interesting that Mr. Sand worked, in his youth, for a radio repair factory, in Jaffa, and was bowled over by The Mandarins, or at least Ms. de Beauvoir’s depiction of the world of an ingrown coterie of writers. What contemporary public intellectual can claim such proletarian roots?  I read this novel, in an English translation,  and  found it flat. I didn’t know this coterie well, but had read Sartre: A Life by Annie Cohen-Solal.

The Israeli historian Shlomo Sand was working in a radio repair factory during the 1960s when his humdrum life was transformed by reading Simone de Beauvoir’s novel The Mandarins. “I was bowled over by the romantic levity of the world of those who lived from writing, by the idealisation of their intellectual commitment to the service of lost causes,” writes Sand in The End of the French Intellectual.

What we in America see of ‘French Intellectuals’ is the pretentious  buffoon Bernard-Henri Levy. He was once the darling of the influential editors , Arianna Huffington and Tina Brown, whose careers have faded from the American scene, for good reasons. And what we see of  Houellebecq has been a small number of  interviews, and some reviews of his work in the more highfalutin literary journals.

With the death of Derrida, whose literary zenith in France ebbed, as he took up residence at American Universities – his coterie  of ‘Deconstructionists’ has also faded from American life. There has been no French Intellectual of comparable standing to fill the void left by Sartre’s death in 1980,  for Left-wing Intellectuals like Sand. Derrida represented a literary inheritor of the mantle of Sartre. While Houellebecq plays the literary part of a dissolute drunken xenophobe, who wont shut up, while parading his nihilism as a badge.

As an intellectual on The Left, Mr. Sand, anathema to The Financial Times readership, can’t seem to let go of his nostalgia for what was lost: a French Left-wing intellectual vanguard.

American Writer

https://www.ft.com/content/fb15fbe8-37ed-11e8-8b98-2f31af407cc8

The final votes in the 2017 French elections were Macron 20,257,167 , Le Pen 10,584,646, Abstentions 11, 416,454, White or spoiled ballots 4, 045,395. The Rolling Strikes represent not just the ‘over-privileged’ Union members, as argued by Macron and his coterie at The Financial Times, but by my calculation about 15,461,894 French Voters , not counting that 6% of Socialist voters, as I can’t seem to find the final vote count for the Socialists. That these voters are alienated from Macron’s Neo-Liberal Imperative, utterly failed in both America and Great Britain, does not phase Anne-Sylvaine Chassany, as she takes the measure of the new leader of  Socialist Party, Olivier Faure.

The 49-year-old politician identified Mr Macron, who won -the support of centre-left voters and prompted high-profile defections from the Socialist party, as his main target. “Let’s be honest, the idea [of leaving the party] has been in the mind of every one of us at some point recently,” Mr Faure told a Socialist gathering in Aubervilliers in northern Paris.

For reasons of ideology Ms. Chassany misidentifies the ‘center-left voters’ as supporters of Macron,when it doesn’t take much political imagination, to see  that well over 15 million French Voters, with the addition of the Socialist Parties 6%, didn’t find Macron’s Jupertarian Politics, authoritarianism with a Madison Ave. impasto, worthy of casting a ballot for, to maladroitly characterize it. Yet Ms. Chassany can’t quite willfully forget that she is a journalist first, and not just a journalistic hireling, who frames everything she writes to the parameters of the Financial Times Party Line! These two paragraphs if carefully read can offer some valuable insights:

“We’ve been through one of the most gruelling phases of our recent history — because a minister from our ranks, who claimed to be neither on the right nor on the left, then on the right and on the left, is in fact leading policies that are on the right and on the right.” His attack on the president comes as rail workers strike in protest at the president’s economic reform plans.

Mr Faure faces the challenges of rebuilding the Socialist party after François Hollande’s deeply unpopular presidency and after its presidential nominee, Benoît Hamon, attracted a humiliating 6 per cent of the votes in the first round of presidential elections last year, the lowest tally since 1959.

Again, the over-privileged cheminots take center stage, in this Neo-Liberal melodrama, its author Ms. Chassany demonstrates that M. Faure is an ideologue. It takes one to know one?

Giving the example of the planned reform of the indebted state rail operator SNCF, he sided with rail workers, known as cheminots, who disrupted train services last week to protest against government plans to end perks such as lifelong employment and early retirement. “There is no need to challenge the status of the cheminots,” Mr Faure said, triggering applause.

https://www.ft.com/content/c0a092ae-3b24-11e8-b9f9-de94fa33a81e

Old Socialist

Mark Mazower’s ‘capsule reviews’ of these five books offers an insight into the avoidance of the role that the Corporatist imperative has/had played in the rise of Fascism! Not surprising that the Financial Times would avoid, at all cost, this key issue. Nor that the collapse of the Neo-Liberal dispensation was the precursor to the rise of these expressions of political nihilism: Mr Mazower, playing the part of supine political conformist,  avoids confronting this part of the alliance of Fascism and its Corporate paymasters. The Rebellion Against The Elites being the once  battle cry of this publication: the abject failure of those Elites, with their rhetoric carefully garnished with  sophisticated ‘economic models’, failed to see that the 2008 Depression, and its careening vehicle The Free Market were headed for catastrophe.

From Fascism to Populism in History, by Federico Finchelstein, University of California, RRP£24.95, 332 pages

To Fight against This Age: On Fascism and Humanism, by Rob Riemen, Norton, RRP£14.99, 176 pages

The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe: Italy, Spain, and Romania, 1870-1945, by Dylan Riley, Verso, RRP£16.99, 288 pages

The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power, by Benjamin Carter Hett, William Heineman, RRP£20, 304 pages

Fascism: A Warning, by Madeleine Albright, William Collins, RRP£16.99, 304 pages

https://www.ft.com/content/6d57a338-3be9-11e8-bcc8-cebcb81f1f90

Of this long, but not long enough review of theses books, The New York Review of Books, in its long gone salad days, would have acquitted itself in a multipart extended review, that these books deserve, in fact demand!

This reader was struck by this paraphrase of Riemen’s thesis , that reeks  of a not too carefully laundered political romanticism:

As Riemen sees it, its roots lie in the conditions of modern life, in a society that stifles nobility of spirit, that defines its goal as the satisfaction of base material desires, and trusts to science and technology to find the solutions. Credulous masses of voters create the conditions in which charismatic demagogues arise. They do so in an age which — he says — is marked by the politics of the “mass man” and “organised stupidity”.

The inclusion of War Criminal Madeleine Albright’s book demonstrates a complete lack of moral/intellectual standards at this newspaper.

In fact if there is one good thing to come out of the current political uncertainty, it is that complacency about American democracy will be harder to sustain in future. Let us not worry overly about how to define a fascist: there are plenty of other nasty kinds of authoritarian regimes. It is the crisis of democracy that should concern us more. We know by now what can happen when the institutions of representative government become bitterly polarised, when large swathes of the electorate lose the capacity to compromise, when power and wealth pile up in the hands of elites and when those in charge of the state give up the challenge of responding to widespread economic hardship. History is not a one-way street and democracy has turned authoritarian before. Can it happen again? Why not?

Let us not worry overly about how to define a fascist: there are plenty of other nasty kinds of authoritarian regimes. Are definitional frames of any importance ? Or is this just an abdication of Political /Moral responsibility, in service to ideological convenience ? With this caveat should the reader of this newspaper take a critical look at this newspaper’s  Macron Triumphalism and his Jupertarian Politics : Authoritarianism,  defined by an impasto of apologetic propaganda al la Edward Bernays?

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/6d57a338-3be9-11e8-bcc8-cebcb81f1f90

@Chris McClelland @Sergios

Thank you both for your thought provoking comments!

‘Let us not worry overly about how to define a fascist: there are plenty of other nasty kinds of authoritarian regimes.’

Mr. Mazower can’t even provide a definition of what Fascism is! Without that definition Mazower can extemporize on his misbegotten notions of Syriza!  An operational definition of Fascism might be: an alliance between a xenophobic, even racist reactionary political party, awash in a radical nostalgia for a past, or even a halcyon future. Allied to a Capitalism that seeks profit at any cost. Both Hitler, and Pinochet and his economic hirelings The Chicago Boys, or just call them Friedman’s Neo-Liberal Army, meet this capacious definitional frame.

What I’ve offered is far from definitive, or even an expression of adequacy ,  but Mazower, like the careful political conformist and editorial hireling, leaves one of the primary  components of Fascism unaddressed. The critical reader of this collection of  intellectual snap shots, might even call him a Neo-Stalinist: meaning that the historical erasure takes place before the fact of his polemic. If that isn’t too intellectually perverse?

StephenKMackSD

@Toquam

Toquam is really the shade of that all purpose reactionary Alan Bloom, and his anti-student screeching hysterics. Bloom was hurt that a generation of students ignored him, and his warmed-over Neo-Platonic riffs. Allied to his Neo-Conservative politics.

Bloom’s central delusion was that he was a central thinker, in sum, that he was the incarnation of ‘The Guardians’ as imagined by Plato, as interpreted through Bloom’s reactionary sensibility, via the mendacious Leo Strauss.

Bloom was incensed that students didn’t look to him, in favor of other thinkers of the time: his vengeance for being ignored was his ‘Closing of The American Mind’  and one of its central claims that ‘Rock and Roll’ was addling the minds of a ‘Generation’ A central claim of the representatives of that American institution ‘Old Time Religion’.

Andrew Sullivan, at New York Magazine, is Bloom’s hysterical legatee.

Regards,

StephenKMackSD

The Financial Times editors couldn’t trust this essay proclaiming the Good News  of Macron’s ‘Reform’ of the railways, along with his other Neo-Liberalizations of France, to its usual stable of apologists for the dismal, indeed demonstrable failure, of this particular form of nihilism. Here is the a telling quote from Mr. Boone’s essay:

International observers tend to see this latest confrontation — triggered by plans to change the generous working conditions enjoyed by employees of SNCF, the state train operator — as a significant test of President Emmanuel Macron’s ability to reform France. They argue that if Mr Macron’s assault on the special privileges of les cheminots (railway workers) fails, he will forfeit much of the domestic goodwill he has accumulated since his election in May 2017. And defeat at home would jeopardise his European agenda, too.

But in his next paragraph Mr. Boone admonishes his reader to:

This analysis is mistaken, however. It overestimates the importance of this particular reform package and underestimates Mr Macron’s strategic nous. He will emerge from this tug of war victorious, precisely because so much is at stake — both domestically and internationally.

‘Strategic nous’  reeks of the intellectual pretentious menace of The Oxbridger! Spoken like a true Axa Group Economic Buccaneer.  Mr. Boone doesn’t quite descend to the low standards of the Ayn Rand acolytes: Producers vs. Drones,  but does subscribe to the contempt for the lower orders, meaning the utterly undeserving Union Workers and their ‘special privileges’ . He puts his faith in his status as Neo-Liberal Economic Guardian, he extemporizes on Plato.: its the Oxbridger in him, again.

Mr. Boone proclaims his faith in Macron, yet nearly 37% of the voters, in the final election, rendered their ballots uncountable, and Macron’s Jupertarian Politics* allied to his plummeting poll numbers, make Mr. Boone’s unreserved faith in Macron seem to be a closely held political/economic delusion. This Politico essay by Pierre Briançon from 2017 provides a more realistic frame than Mr. Boone’s ideological adoration of Macron:

Headline: Macron’s ‘Jupiter’ model unlikely to stand test of time

Sub-headline: The new French president’s aloof leadership style has put his party on course for a big majority — but may be impossible to maintain.

PARIS — The French noticed a radical change in Emmanuel Macron when he became president a month ago and they seem to like it.

Exit the easy-going candidate of the campaign trail, enter an imperial and icy leader. The question is whether the honeymoon will last when Macron is tested by the unavoidable political and social crises that will force him down from his throne.

The transformation has been spectacular. Gone is the economy minister who never met an interviewer he didn’t like, the presidential candidate who loved a good chat, who was chummy with reporters and went out of his way to hone media-friendly soundbites.

The French head of state has retreated into the Élysée Palace, ordered his aides and ministers into media silence, and tightened presidential communication to the few calibrated messages he thinks opportune. Power, he thinks, is best exercised when wrapped in a cloud of mystery.

This is the “Jupiterian” concept his team developed in the last few months of the presidential campaign to illustrate his vision of the presidency. Jupiter, of course, is the supreme god of Roman mythology, god of the sky, thunder and lightning.

Applied to Macron’s actual presidency, this means former friends and crucial campaign aides have been shunted aside, direct access to the president is restricted to a handful of young advisers, and Macron’s mobile phone seems to have gone silent.

“The French like the Jupiter idea. But they also expect Jupiter to muddy his hands whenever needed” — Former Macron campaign aide

The president gives marching orders, ministers and bureaucrats are expected to execute. No dissent is tolerated in the ranks, nor are the cozy and self-interested off-the-record chats that long provided fodder for political commentators.

Macron doesn’t speak much, and when he does, he doesn’t say much. He has mostly been heard in almost-daily meetings with visiting foreign heads of state. They’ve come from Guatemala and Senegal, Belgium and Bulgaria, Denmark and Peru and elsewhere to meet the new boy wonder. Sober statements in the Élysée gardens are staged for the media, rarely with time for questions.

https://www.politico.eu/article/emmanuel-macron-jupiter-model-unlikely-to-stand-test-of-time-leadership-parliamentary-majority/

Additionally, there are links to three other essays embedded in the body of the above essay that look to be worthy of the readers attention.

Mr. Boone’s notion of ‘liberalise’ can only be taken as frontal attack on French Socialism, that is the bane of the Neo-Liberals. Wedded to the perceived notions that Union Workers enjoy ‘privileges’ that other French citizens don’t enjoy: The Politics of Resentment is Oakeshottian in its origin.  And the The Common Market as imagined by Monnet, as a Cartel, that became the ersatz Federalism of the EU, was/is Neo-Liberalism before the fact!

France agreed years ago to liberalise its railway system by the end of 2020. Notwithstanding that this is an EU obligation, rail is one of the last public services which could be opened to competition without undermining the French “social model”.

Current tension also disguises the fact that the power of the unions has weakened considerably since 1995. Meanwhile, public opinion has become increasingly resentful of the privileges that some parts of the labour force — those where union membership remains high — appear to enjoy.

Mr. Boone ends his essay with this unsurprising bit of Macron kowtowing, framed as a battle against ‘the forces of conservatism’ , meaning the power of French Unionism to battle the Neo-Liberalisation of France :

Mr Macron knows that if the EU does not change now, its institutions might not survive the next recession or crisis. Europe, he said in his Sorbonne speech, “finds itself weaker, exposed to the squalls of globalisation” and vulnerable to the siren lure of nativism and populism. He also knows he will not be able to lead the necessary transformation in Europe if he does not first beat the forces of conservatism in his own country.

The stark object lessons of both America and Britain, in its generations long infatuation, indeed, its institutionalization of Free Market Dogmas , and its inherent nihilism eludes Mr. Boone’s myopic ideological gaze. The Free Market knows one imperative, profit at any cost!

Almost Marx

https://www.ft.com/content/7a98b67e-380e-11e8-b161-65936015ebc3

*Macron is an Authoritarian Personality, but his politics have been given the Madison Avenue treatment:that is about a self-serving political re-description that is supposed to appeal to voters. The nearly 37% of voters were unconvinced!

Andy Divine in his latest essay takes on the vexing question of Gina Haspel.

Mr. Divine’s record of support for the Iraq War is recorded here in his 136 page mea culpa:

This edited by his hirelings Mr. Appel and Mr. Bodenner. The question is whether the reader can stomach this carefully edited record, not of his bad judgement, as a political hysteric he is incapable of such an exercise, but of his political conformity, wedded to his status as true believer in the current iteration of that politics.  Yet there are variations on his theme, according to its audience. His public confessions are made to measure.

This is his apologia as published at The Huffington Post, via Politico (2009) . Call this  a trivialization of an horrific crime!

Headline: Andrew Sullivan: I Supported The War In Iraq “Like A Teenaged Girl Supporting The Jonas Brothers”

Today at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Andrew Sullivan discussed his blogging — past, present and future — before a packed lunchtime crowd and it was Sullivan’s initial support for the U.S.-led invasion in Iraq that proved a prominent topic.

“I supported it like a teenage girl supporting the Jonas Brothers,” confessed Sullivan, who currently writes and blogs for The Atlantic. Sullivan would later admit that his support for the war was misguided and told the crowd that it wasn’t without its consequences.

“You lose all your friends,” said Sullivan. “You make enemies of everyone you used to hang out with. … My traffic went down by 60 percent when I denounced the war, but it went back when those on the left thought I was one of them.”

Sullivan also discussed his earlier days of blogging, when he did so without pay, save for a few generous donations from fans. “Lynne Cheney wrote us a check,” said Sullivan. “Those were the days.”

Although Sullivan’s blog is now one of the most popular destinations online, it took a while for his blogging to earn mainstream credibility.

“Chris Matthews refused to mention my blog on his show for years because he thought it was beneath journalism.”

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/02/andrew-sullivan-i-support_n_224670.html

Or this 2008 Slate essay :

Headline:  How Did I Get Iraq Wrong?

Sub-headline: I seriously misjudged Bush’s sense of morality.

…

But my biggest misreading was not about competence. Wars are often marked by incompetence. It was a fatal misjudgment of Bush’s sense of morality. I had no idea he was so complacent—even glib—about the evil that good intentions can enable.

…

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2008/03/how_did_i_get_iraq_wrong_2.html

Even the negative expressions of his narcissism feeds his very political/moral toxicity!

Ms. Haspel had help in the torture of ‘prisoners of war‘ : Look to this collection of broadcasts from Democracy Now that shown the guilt of Ms. Haspel and her once fellow traveler Mr. Divine:

https://www.democracynow.org/topics/psychology_and_torture

That Ms. Haspel had help administering torture, read this Economist news story:

Headline :How America’s psychologists ended up endorsing torture

Sub-headline : New revelations reveal a surprisingly cosy relatinoship between the American Psychological Association and the Department of Defense

https://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2015/07/terror-torture-and-psychology

Of vital importance to the question of Mr Divine’s faith in American  ‘competence ‘ to wage war,  there is this evidence:

Headline: White phosphorus use by US-led coalition forces in Iraq condemned by humanitarian groups

Sub-headline : The deadly chemical can cause horrific injuries, burning deep into the muscle and bone.

Human rights groups have criticised the use of the white phosphorus chemical by US-led coalition troops in the Iraqi city of Mosul.

New Zealand Brigadier General Hugh McAslan admitted the potentially lethal substance had been used as they attempted to free civilians trapped in neighbourhoods controlled by Isis.

He said that around 28,000 civilians have travelled out of Isis strongholds in the city over the last few days.

Iraqi troops assisted by US-led coalition forces were in control of 90 per cent of the western area of Mosul, he added. But Isis is still holding out and using people as human shields, according to the United Nations

Brigadier General McAslan told NPR: “We have utilised white phosphorous to screen areas within west Mosul to get civilians out safely”.

However, the deployment of the chemical was criticised by Human Rights Watch.

“No matter how white phosphorus is used, it poses a high risk of horrific and long-lasting harm in crowded cities like Raqqa and Mosul and any other areas with concentrations of civilians,” said Steve Goose, arms director at Human Rights Watch. “US-led forces should take all feasible precautions to minimise civilian harm when using white phosphorus in Iraq and Syria.”

In early June, an internet café in Raqqa was hit by white phosphorus, killing approximately 20 people, a local resident told The New York Times.

Use of white phosphorus has been called into question, as it puts civilians in danger, but Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) claimed on 4 June that it was used to create a smoke screen.

A US-led coalition statement said: “While protecting civilians fleeing from the Jamouri Hospital the Coalition used smoke and precision munitions to suppress the enemy and provide cover for fleeing civilians.

“In conjunction with Iraqi Security Forces, the Coalition used appropriate munitions to suppress and obscure ISIS snipers so that the civilians could reach friendly forces.”

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/white-phosphorus-us-led-coalition-forces-iraq-injuries-burn-muscle-bone-mosul-humanitarian-groups-a7789431.html

On the use of ‘Depleted Uranium‘ in Iraq:

Headline : US fired depleted uranium at civilian areas in 2003 Iraq war, report finds

Sub-headline: Dutch peace group Pax says findings show US was in breach of official advice meant to prevent suffering in conflicts

US forces fired depleted uranium (DU) weapons at civilian areas and troops in Iraq in breach of official advice meant to prevent unnecessary suffering in conflicts, a report has found.

Coordinates revealing where US jets and tanks fired nearly 10,000 DU rounds in Iraq during the war in 2003 have been obtained by the Dutch peace group Pax. This is the first time that any US DU firing coordinates have been released, despite previous requests by the United Nations Environment Programme and the Iraqi government.

According to PAX’s report, which is due to be published this week, the data shows that many of the DU rounds were fired in or near populated areas of Iraq, including As Samawah, Nasiriyah and Basrah. At least 1,500 rounds were also aimed at troops, the group says.

This conflicts with legal advice from the US Air Force in 1975 suggesting that DU weapons should only be used against hard targets like tanks and armoured vehicles, the report says. This advice, designed to comply with international law by minimising deaths and injuries to urban populations and troops, was largely ignored by US forces, it argues.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/19/us-depleted-uranium-weapons-civilian-areas-iraq

More contemporaneously, this report from Foreign Policy on the use of ‘Depleted Uranium’ in Syria:

Headline: The United States Used Depleted Uranium in Syria

Sub-headline : The airstrikes on oil trucks in Islamic State-controlled areas employed the toxic material, which has been accused of causing cancer and birth defects.

Officials have confirmed that the U.S. military, despite vowing not to use depleted uranium weapons on the battlefield in Iraq and Syria, fired thousands of rounds of the munitions during two high-profile raids on oil trucks in Islamic State-controlled Syria in late 2015. The air assaults mark the first confirmed use of this armament since the 2003 Iraq invasion, when it was used hundreds of thousands of times, setting off outrage among local communities, which alleged that its toxic material caused cancer and birth defects.

U.S. Central Command (Centcom) spokesman Maj. Josh Jacques told Airwars and Foreign Policy that 5,265 armor-piercing 30 mm rounds containing depleted uranium (DU) were shot from Air Force A-10 fixed-wing aircraft on Nov. 16 and Nov. 22, 2015, destroying about 350 vehicles* in the country’s eastern desert.

…

It remains unclear if the November 2015 strikes occurred near populated areas. In 2003, hundreds of thousands of rounds were shot in densely settled areas during the American invasion, leading to deep resentment and fear among Iraqi civilians and anger at the highest levels of government in Baghdad. In 2014, in a U.N. report on DU, the Iraqi government expressed “its deep concern over the harmful effects” of the material. DU weapons, it said, “constitute a danger to human beings and the environment”and urged the United Nations to conduct in-depth studies on their effects. Such studies of DU have not yet been completed, and scientists and doctors say as a result there is still very limited credible “direct epidemiological evidence” connecting DU to negative health effects.

The potential popular blowback from using DU, however, is very real. While the United States insists it has the right to use the weapon, experts call the decision to use the weapon in such quantities against targets it wasn’t designed for — such as tanks — peculiar at best.

http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/02/14/the-united-states-used-depleted-uranium-in-syria/

Mr. Divine was in 2003 a Neo-Conservative. So the reader just might look to the Project for the New American Century and its august membership,  as clue to Mr. Divine’s fellow travelers, and their signatures to PNAC’s Statement of Principals:

• Elliott Abrams^[5]

• Gary Bauer^[5]

• William J. Bennett^[5]

• John Ellis “Jeb” Bush^[5]

• Dick Cheney^[5]

• Eliot A. Cohen^[5]

• Midge Decter^[5]

• Paula Dobriansky^[5]

• Steve Forbes^[5]

• Aaron Friedberg^[5]

• Francis Fukuyama^[5]

• Frank Gaffney^[5]

• Fred C. Ikle^[5]

• Donald Kagan^[5]

• Zalmay Khalilzad^[5]

• I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby^[5]

• Norman Podhoretz^[5]

• J. Danforth Quayle^[5]

• Peter W. Rodman^[5]

• Stephen P. Rosen^[5]

• Henry S. Rowen^[5]

• Donald Rumsfeld^[5]

• Vin Weber^[5]

• George Weigel^[5]

• Paul Wolfowitz^[5]

All of this cumulative evidence points directly to Mr. Divine’s culpability in advocating /defending the War In Iraq, The War on Terror. Or  simply refer to it as the political realization of  Huntington’s paranoia, named the Clash of Civilizations.

No matter how cogently Mr. Divine may argue his polemic against Haspel, she is a torturer, who destroyed the evidence of that torture, she is a criminal.  Mr. Divine was once an apologist for her crimes, and many more: yet he can’t escape, he can’t mitigate nor can he expunge,  his political/moral culpability. His attempt at self-rescue is still-born in his logorrhea. He also luxuriates in a kind of an unseemly rhetorical pornography of torture, as a kind of melodramatic enhancement.

Enough!

Philosophical Apprentice

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/04/trump-isnt-merely-tolerating-torture-hes-celebrating-it.html

I saw this essay by Mr. Luce last week and have tried to ignore it , yet it keeps returning to my thoughts. Like that grain of sand in an oyster? Perhaps the spectacle of this Neo-Liberal advocate/apologist  pointing to ‘our’ complicity with the scheming indeed murderous Putin,  places the regular reader of Mr. Luce’s jejune political commentaries, that hew to the Neo-Liberal Party Line, into the unintended, by its author, territory of the seriocomic.

The motivations of the US president and British prime minister deserve scrutiny. The brazenness of the nerve agent poisonings in the UK this month made them impossible to ignore. It was as though Mr Putin left his signature.

With this report from The Globe and Mail via Reuters:

Headline:  U.K. research centre can’t yet say if nerve agent was made in Russia

The head of Britain’s military research center said on Tuesday it was unable yet to say whether the military-grade nerve agent that poisoned a Russian double-agent last month had been produced in Russia.

“We were able to identify it as Novichok, to identify that it was military-grade nerve agent,” Gary Aitkenhead, chief executive of the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down in England, told Sky News.

“We have not identified the precise source, but we have provided the scientific info to government who have then used a number of other sources to piece together the conclusions you have come to.”

However, he confirmed the substance required “extremely sophisticated methods to create, something only in the capabilities of a state actor.”

He added: “we are continuing to work to help to provide additional information that might help us get closer to [the source] but we haven’t yet been able to do that.”

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-uk-research-centre-cant-yet-say-if-nerve-agent-was-made-in-russia/

Even with the caveat of However, he confirmed the substance required “extremely sophisticated methods to create, something only in the capabilities of a state actor.” Or just call it CYA? Boris Johnson could not be wrong ! Hindsight ? Yet Mr. Luce presented this as fact on what grounds? The word of a government official, now subject to an erasure. Mr. Luce presents a bit of speculative fiction to close his paragraph: It was as though Mr Putin left his signature.  

Not content with just a of bit of what the American CIA dubbed Conspiracy Theory: with the bit between his teeth Mr. Luce, at full gallop:

Perhaps that was because the UK had done so little to investigate at least 14 suspicious Russian deaths on its soil in the previous decade. Many, such as that of the exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky in 2013, were written off as suicide. Others were ruled to be from natural causes, such as the 2012 death of whistleblower Alexander Perepilichny.

In many cases, the UK’s Home Office, which was run by Mrs May for six years, dragged its feet. Mrs May refused on national security grounds to release government files to the Perepilichny inquest. This was in spite of the fact that traces of Gelsemium, a toxic plant that induces cardiac arrest, had been found in his body. Those seeking insight into the UK police’s insouciance should read Buzzfeed’s exemplary investigations.

Mr. Luce then adds to this mix a bit of May adoration and its corollary Corbyn shaming:

Britain has now been jolted into a display of resolve. Having corralled a show of western unity, Mrs May is looking good. Compared with Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader and an habitual Russophile, she looks positively Thatcherite. Yet the expulsions will alter little. A large chunk of the value of London property transactions is estimated to be Russian. Too many London banks, real estate agents and luxury service providers thrive on Russian money.

What follows is more of Conspiracy Theory involving Hillary Clinton, Putin believed that she was involved in the 2015 leak of the Panama Papers.  And the mysterious death of  former Putin friend Mikhail Lesin. But not content with this, Mr. Luce offers more of the same:

Is it any surprise Mr Putin has grown so bold? Russia’s attempts to sway the 2016 US election were partly payback for the Panama Papers.

On what evidence does he base his speculation? The charges brought by Hillary Clinton and her allies in the National  Security State apparatus?

Then Mr. Luce, a defender of the Western Liberal Tradition offers this:

On top of that the west offers a dictator’s bargain: the greed of a system that has lost its moral compass. All that was true before the gift of Mr Trump’s election. How much juicier is it now?

Yet the history of that Liberal Tradition, and its defenders like Mr. Luce, surrendered without so much as a protest, as the Neo-Liberals in the New Democrats in America, and New Labour in Britain, emasculated, indeed supplanted that Tradition, with the self-justifying lawlessness of the Free Market. Mr. Luce’s polemic, against the opportunism of economic actors, willing to do business with anyone, that offers an opportunity for profit, is not just self-deluding but awash in the bad faith of a callabo!

Political Reporter

https://www.ft.com/content/feda2630-31dc-11e8-b5bf-23cb17fd1498

With Macri in Argentina, Macron in France, and Moreno now in power in Ecuador fulfills the Neo-Liberal wet dream. The object lesson of North America and most of Europe with the destructive, indeed nihilistic power of that Free Market, is lost on these front men? That Moreno betrayed his political ally Correa just sweetens it for the Free Market Darwinist: Red in Tooth and Claw is the very nature of that Free Market Mythology.

In February, Mr Moreno won a key referendum that in effect barred Mr Correa from returning to the presidency. He has started to unpick his predecessor’s socialist legacy, making overtures to the business community and members of the rightwing opposition.

Even as those editors and writers, at this propaganda sheet, write as if the immiseration of the lower orders, dubbed ‘inequality’ by respectable academic apologists, and their bourgeois reportorial  allies, is non-existent. Neo-Liberalism is by its very nature is Stalinist: historical erasure its tool of choice

Yet the rise of Jeremy Corbyn continues unabated, even in the face of concerted campaign of defamation against him, waged in the pages of this newspaper,with the enthusiastic cooperation of the Tories and New Labour: they won’t go quietly!

What of  the political fate of  Moreno? A man, and politician, who not only betrayed a political ally and comrade, but the very campaign he waged to win election, was also subject to an utter betrayal .  Can the reader speculate, that as in France, the Unions and other civic organizations will wage their campaign against Moreno by using ‘rolling strikes’ and other forms of  civic protest to check his plan to  ‘promote private enterprise’ ?

Almost Marx

https://www.ft.com/content/394a1848-3719-11e8-8b98-2f31af407cc8

The readership of Andy Divine needn’t worry. He returns today ,in all his self-defensive verbosity: he wants to assure his readers that his beliefs about the natural inferiority of black people is scientifically based. He manages to sound the rhetoric of a British colonialist of another age, or the notes sounded by The National Review’s 1955 editorial on the vexing questions of the end of British colonialism, and the Civil Right struggles in America. Based upon the belief that black people were ill equipped for political/moral autonomy. Andy Divine’s beliefs  on the question of race ,and the genetically demonstrated inferiority of blacks as presented in ‘The Bell Curve’. And other expressions of an utterly corrupt Conservative Sociology and Genetics make the critical reader wince!

This ‘seismic op-ed’ by geneticist David Reich,  as characterized by Mr. Divine, provides  him with the latest provocation from The Left :

For many on the academic and journalistic left, genetics are deemed largely irrelevant when it comes to humans.

Call Mr. Divine’s belief that once might have been framed in Social Darwinist terms, via the Conservative Sociology  in The Bell Curve,  will  now to be framed in the newest more scientifically based Genetic Determinism. This provides another opportunity to inveigh against one of his prime targets of his hysterical rantings: The Left  in its many nihilist iterations.

Another  attraction of Mr. Divine’s weekly encyclical: he assures his readership, as he pronounces on  the Anti-Semitism of Jeremy Corbyn, that he too can follow the Party Line  of the New Labour hacks: note that he has two very prestigious fellow travelers, in Bret Stephens at The New York Times  (@BretStephensNYT) and Jonathan Freedland at The Guardian (@Freedland). The hysteria mongering of the Neo-Liberals, about to be replaced by  a resurgent Labour Party, that has rebuked the New Labour of Tony Blair and his epigones, has sent the faithful into a state of political panic, not seen since the initial rise of this ‘Back-Bencher’.

As the Financial Times once presented the case for the political rise of Corbyn, now discarded, it was a manifestation of The Rebellion Against The Elites. The rising popularity of Corbyn, and the surge in the number of the young voters joining the Labour Party, is the proximate cause of the panic/hysteria of Andy Divine, Bret Stephens and Jonathan Freedland and their political allies, like the for rent Tony Blair.

Old Socialist

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/03/denying-genetics-isnt-shutting-down-racism-its-fueling-it.html#comments

P.S. Note that the search for Apostates is a Christian Tradition, but of more relevance is that the Catholic Church’s history of burning-at-the-stake, of religious non-conformists as late as 1600 : Giordano Bruno being the last. Andy Divine’s appetite for producing an endless supply of hysterical indictments, of those non-conformists of the political present, is just part of a benighted tradition:

Editor’s note: Following is a list of Catholic theologians and others disciplined by the Vatican during the papacy of John Paul II. Though not an exhaustive list, it is a substantial representation of the range of people subject to papal discipline during the past 26 years. The list was compiled by Tara Harris, assistant to the editor.

http://natcath.org/NCR_Online/archives2/2005a/022505/022505h.php

Nothing can rescue Mr. Tim Harford’s jejune chatter,  as a pastiche of economic wisdom, but the Gallup’s annoyingly chirpy question goes a long way to explaining the utter trivialization of  the implied question in the headline :

A monetary remedy for the midlife crisis

All this becomes abundantly clear when we ask people about how they feel their lives are going. Gallup uses the following question: “Please imagine a ladder, with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally stand at this time?”

That implied question in Harford’s esssay, or at least its headline, might have been answered by a return to prosperity, in sum the manifestation of the Self-Correcting Market: where is that mythical concept,idea or object of faith ten years later?  The Gallup question reads like what David Brooks would write in his periodic ‘Life Evaluations’ comments on his readers communication with The Great Man, himself. And equally fruitless!

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/1da277e4-3100-11e8-ac48-10c6fdc22f03

According to Mr. Giles the law of cause and effect has somehow been annulled, as an @FT propagandist, he follows the Party Line with a few enhancements. Or should the reader call his extemporizing on, by now, shopworn  themes of Free Market Nihilism ? According to a 2016 report there are at least seven million British citizens living in poverty:

Headline: Study finds 7m Britons in poverty despite being from working families