Society

The Boy President Shows His Hand

by The Europeans
The Boy President Shows His Hand

2018-00-00 widgets.001 The sanctimonious shades of Hillary visit the Boy President in his undisturbed and righteous sleep. In his waking hours, bombast and the acquired high moral tone of the investment-banker-turned-statesman, replace the gravitas of office. The Basket of American Deplorables has been restocked with the Populist Lepers of Italy — and by extension, also with those of the United States, who elected Donald Trump. Since Trump failed to deliver on the promise of their recent public amour, the Boy President evidently now feels free to make a bonfire of all the lepers everywhere. #LeGarçonPrésident shows his hand, stooping even to conjure the ghost of Nazism from the new Italian government’s defensive actions, taken against a migratory tide that is aided and abetted by some of the NGOs.

LE FIGARO : The countries of Central Europe will boycott the summit meeting on the migration crisis set for Sunday (24th June) in Brussels.

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Society

Don Harvey No Match For Carmen

by The Europeans
Don Harvey No Match For Carmen

2018-00-00 widgets.001Progressivism, as is little if ever observed, is a deeply immoral project — both in its structural assumption that personal values can be processed on an industrial scale, and in its spiralling consequences. ‘Western Values’ have been trading while insolvent on the global morality-market for decades, with the result that European culture is now threatened, amongst other things, by an implacable army of new Bowdlerites.

His name has passed into the language. Thomas Bowdler, an English physician, re-processed Shakespeare to render him inoffensive to genteel 19th century women and children. And in contemporary Europe, it is powerful ‘progressive’ women particularly, who have taken up the crusade to place European high culture beyond reproach from any quarter. Cherchez la femme. From their respective citadels in the French national government, Françoise Nyssen (Minister of Culture) and Marlène Schiappa (Minister with Responsibility for Gender Equality) are pushing moral vanity towards its imaginary limits. In this anecdote from Le Figaro, it is the Florence Opera that twists the end of Carmen — in order to oblige a hashtag. #MeToo.

FIGAROVOX/ANALYSIS : To avoid showing the death of a woman, the opera Carmen has been rewritten. Welcome to the era of thought-policing through art.

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Society

Praise the Lord and Pass the Moralin

by The Europeans
Praise the Lord and Pass the Moralin

2018-00-00 widgets.001Friedrich Nietzsche was probably the first humorist to satirise self-righteousness in terms of pharmaceutically induced mental states. Moralin. Mixed in full strength for the European Left, and in various homeopathic concentrations for the Right and Centre. Dull conservatives have always preferred to take Umbrage, and are now doing so in ever greater numbers. The Swedes traditionally consume more Moralin per head of population than any other European country. This has allowed their great leaders to pocket the credit for their nation’s humanitarian generosity, while at the same time unloading all blame for the disastrous social results onto the Umbrage-takers. Now comes the turn of Germany’s Die Linke party to sniff the rapture of righteousness-without-responsibility.

SPIEGEL ONLINE : At their Congress, delegates of Die Linke [The Left Party] have voted by a large majority for a motion put forward by the party executive in favour of open borders for refugees. Yet the debate on this issue will continue.

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Society

Jacques Attali’s Hotel

by The Europeans
Jacques Attali’s Hotel

2018-00-00 widgets.001According to Jacques Attali, cosmopolitan social theorist, and bête noire of cultural conservatives, “Every country should think of itself as a hotel and of its people as hoteliers”. This is indeed the era of the Idiot Sage, and of the policy-vacuum that delivers reality to their prescriptions. Attali might have noticed that it is the discriminating guest who is now being paid by the hotelier, as the following analysis from Le Figaro bears out. In Attali’s world, migrants — Homo electans — are encouraged to choose between countries because choice is a philosophical and practical Good in itself; one that creates new and powerful economic combinations. Ceteris paribus. And yet Attali, doyen of ‘influential thinkers’, and for all his attachment to the arts, remains merely a more-than-ordinarily conspicuous example of the cosmopolitan crank who lacks the deep personal culture that can be acquired only through residence, allegiance, and the painstaking curatorial mentality that goes with them. Limitless cosmopolitanism evacuates the mind.

FIGAROVOX/TRIBUNE : In declaring that asylum-seekers compare the various legislative regimes on offer before choosing a country to go to, the Minister of the Interior, Gérard Collomb, has merely stated the obvious, explains Jean-Thomas Lesueur, delegate-general of the Thomas More Institute.

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Society

Dressing for pique-nique chic

by The Europeans
Dressing for pique-nique chic

FIGARO/LIFESTYLE : Dinner in White. On the 30th anniversary of this pique-nique chic in Paris, 17,000 guests from the four corners of the world set up their tables and chairs in front of Les Invalides. The vast lawns became entirely white. At the very last minute, about 8 p.m. on Sunday [3rd June], the organisers revealed the venue for the dinner: the Esplanade des Invalides. It broke all records. The 30th ‘pic-nic for polite society’ in Paris attracted, according to the organisers, 17,000 participants: of whom some 6,000 had come from abroad especially for the occasion.

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Society

Heute Tolerant, Morgen Fremd

by The Europeans
Heute Tolerant, Morgen Fremd

2018-00-00 widgets.001“Tolerant today, strangers in our own country tomorrow. Strong borders. Merkel must go!” In the wake of the ‘BAMF-scandal’, in which asylum applications were improperly approved by the Bremen office of the Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge¹, a poll conducted for Cicero Magazin für Politische Kultur shows that a majority of Germans now want a federal Committee of Enquiry into the conduct of migration policy since 2014. Germany’s generous Willkommenskultur — its still-current policy of welcoming migrants — is coming more and more to be seen as “ein Luftschloss ohne Ausweg”. A daydream with no exit.

CICERO MAGAZIN FÜR POLITISCHE KULTUR : A majority of Germans want a Committee of Enquiry on refugee policy. That is the finding of an INSA poll undertaken on behalf of Cicero. Even amongst those with a migration background, almost half were in favour.

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Society

The Europeans : The Ideal & The Real

by The Europeans
The Europeans : The Ideal & The Real

2018-00-00 widgets.001Was it accident or prescience, that in his celebrated fresco Raffaello Sanzio drapes Plato in red, Aristotle in blue? The lofty but malleable Ideal in disputation with the mysterious Real, which is always economical with the Truth. Flexible theology versus rigid natural law. Sentiment versus observation. The Up There contra The Here, Now & Then. Left versus Right. To borrow a cosmological principle, Raffaello seems to capture the Greek singularity from which European life and culture have flowed ever since in their prodigal variety, building breadth and depth with every century’s turn. The Europeans, to cut the matter short, identifies with Aristotle — while of course remaining in charmed and quizzical contact with the contemporary descendants of his mentor.

Society

1968 En Marche !

by The Europeans
1968 En Marche !

2018-00-00 widgets.001❝Be partial… Hold a prejudice in favour of the wife against the husband; the child against the father; the debtor against the creditor; the worker against the employer; the injured against the offender’s insurance company; the sick against the Social Security; the thief against the police; the plaintiff against the judiciary.❞ Thus the “harangue of Oswald Baudot”, one of the youthful soixante-huitard “red judges” of the Syndicat de la magistrature [Judges’ Union], whose ideology, distributed as common currency during the upheaval of 1968, still drives the alliance between media and judiciary in contemporary France. The case of François Fillon, former prime minister and candidate for Les Républicains at the presidential election of 2017, provides the most egregious recent confirmation of the alliance’s ability to strike decisively. As in chess, there are configurations in which white wins against any defence. Fillon was of course playing black: too conservative, too catholic. Then came the torpedo from Le Canard enchaîné…

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