Friday 29th of March 2024

mon dieu .....

mon dieu .....

As the war in Libya drags on, this piece in the Daily Beast fully explains the role of French President Sarkozy and the supposed French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy (BHL), a man who loves a good Western-led war to allegedly protect the innocent but he reveals his true side by blindly backing Israel at the expense of the Palestinians:

From the uprising's outset, the French president's objective was to take down Gaddafi, says an intelligence source close him. "We almost decided to do it ourselves," he adds. The French have a long history of unilateral interventions in Africa, including against Gaddafi in Chad in the 1980s. This time, however, they quickly found partners. The British under Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron were very much on board. So were the leading members of the Arab League, who had their own grudges against Gaddafi. But Sarkozy seemed practically obsessed.

It's worth remembering that Sarkozy once made a mission of bringing Gaddafi into the world's good graces. Just weeks after his election in 2007, the new French president outbid his European partners to ransom five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who had been imprisoned in Libya for eight years and threatened with execution. And late that year, clearly hoping for huge contracts from a supposedly rehabilitated Gaddafi, Sarkozy spent almost a week playing host to him, only to be humiliated daily by the Libyan leader's outlandish demands. Gaddafi pitched his famous tent next to the presidential palace, at the 19th-century Hôtel de Marigny, and when Gaddafi decided to visit the Louvre on the spur of the moment, Sarkozy ordered the museum cleared. Still, the really big contracts did not materialize. Helping Libyans to get rid of their dictator might help wipe that memory clean.

But you can't just support an amorphous "uprising." You need somebody to call. Who could speak for the New Libya? Sarkozy had no idea.

At just that moment, BHL rang the Elysée Palace switchboard to tell the president he'd decided to go to the rebel capital of Benghazi. Sarkozy told BHL to let him know if he found any leaders among the fighters, and the self-styled intellectual swashbuckler needed no further encouragement. From Bosnia to Afghanistan, Iraq to Pakistan, BHL has always taken the side of those he saw as oppressed - and never failed to promote himself in the process. "BHL did the usual," says a close friend of Sarkozy. "You know, 'Save this! Save that!' But he did manage to push the system to do something that cannot now be undone."

Sarkozy and BHL used to be good friends. They went skiing together in Alpe d'Huez and vacationed on the Riviera. When BHL was pushing for intervention in Bosnia in the early 1990s, Sarkozy (a relatively junior minister in the cabinet of then prime minister Jacques Chirac) took BHL's side against formidable opponents like Alain Juppé, who was then, and is again, France's minister of foreign affairs.

The BHL-Sarkozy friendship turned icy during Sarkozy's 2007 presidential run. BHL backed the Socialist candidate and, adding ink to injury, published the story of Sarkozy's failed efforts to recruit him. "Now I hear the clannish, feudal, possibly brutal Sarkozy that his opponents have denounced, and which I never wanted to believe in," BHL wrote: "a man with a warrior vision of politics, who hystericizes relations, believes that those who aren't with him are against him, who doesn't care about ideas, who thinks interpersonal relations and friendship are the only things that matter."

Then Sarkozy's wife ditched him and Sarkozy hooked up with Carla Bruni, who had previously stolen the husband of BHL's daughter. To describe relations among the French elite as incestuous is almost literally true.

Even as BHL took off for Libya at the beginning of last month with Sarkozy's blessing, the relationship between the two remained uneasy. It was a mission on a wing and a prayer. Inveterate networker BHL knew no one in the country, in fact. He had to hitch a ride in a vegetable vendor's panel truck to get to Benghazi. And once he was there the protestors seemed to be losing the revolutionary fervor that had enabled them to seize half the populated areas of the country with scarcely a shot fired in the previous weeks. "What I smelled was the democratic revolution cooling down," BHL recalls. His cause was slipping away from beneath him. And at the same time, Gaddafi's forces had begun to regroup for a counteroffensive. So BHL grew bolder. With a lot of name-dropping, he got himself invited to a meeting of the newly named Interim National Transitional Council.

On a sketchy old satellite phone that shut off every few minutes, BHL repeatedly called Sarkozy - who put up with the interruptions - and brokered a deal for a Libyan delegation to be received in Paris at the presidential palace.

Two days later, on Monday, March 7, BHL was back in Paris, meeting with the president. Sarkozy said he'd take the extraordinary step of recognizing the rebels' government the following Thursday. Then BHL took an extraordinary step of his own. He asked Sarkozy to keep the whole thing a secret from the Germans, who were already expressing reservations about supporting the Libyan uprising - and also from French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé, who would, BHL insisted, "throw a wrench in the works."

Antony Loewenstein

futés comme des fous...

Unless there is an improvement in the weather, the Sydney Fireworks will drown like rats’ farts… but we expect no less than a miracle. Meanwhile, Stan Grant reminds us of BHL, the French philosopher...



We all know (we all should) by now, how Sarkozy was playing a double game. He was getting cash from Gaddafi while planning to get rid of him. For anyone studying the secret not-so-secret history of Sarkozy, he was an American stooge who loved money. Back in 2006, we were told:

During outgoing President Jacques Chirac’s tenure, transatlantic relations have been the worst in decades. The low point came amid France’s boisterous opposition to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.


It spoke volumes that Sarkozy was the only French presidential candidate to visit the United States. On a highly publicized trip to Washington, he was photographed with President Bush. He also gave a strongly pro‐​American speech. Sarkozy told his audience that, “
Friendship is respect, understanding, affection but not submission … I ask our American friends to let us be free, free to be their friends.


In response, former Socialist Prime Minister Laurent Fabius proclaimed that Sarkozy was seeking to replace British Prime Minister Tony Blair as Bush’s “poodle.” A Royal aide labeled Sarkozy “an American neoconservative with a French passport,” a criticism that stuck to him for the campaign’s duration.

Read more:

https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/french-president-sarkozy-american

———————————

Here one could suspect that Sarkozy had been annointed by Washington to do the US dirty work in Europe. Was Sarkozy linked to the CIA? This is not such a stupid question. Patrick Basham went on:

Second, there will be a new American president within 21 months. Circumstance will force the next president, Republican or Democrat, to present a more pragmatic American face to the world.


The White House’s next inhabitant will occupy an office diminished in stature by his or her predecessor’s diplomatic failures. President Sarkozy will quietly offer to help his ally pick up the pieces.



By 2011, Sarkozy, Obama and UK’s David Cameron bombed Libya to remove Gaddafi — under false pretences, like the war on Saddam.

We don’t really know what was the true influence of BHL on this affair. or was he there to confirm the US resolve to eliminate Gaddafi — the petrodollar slayer and the Pan-African builder… For Sarkozy, what a better way to erase an illegal 45 million Euro debt — money “given to him” by Gaddafi for re-election — than get Gaddafi out of the picture… From the above article:


Then Sarkozy's wife ditched him and Sarkozy hooked up with Carla Bruni, who had previously stolen the husband of BHL's daughter. To describe relations among the French elite as incestuous is almost literally true.


Even as BHL took off for Libya at the beginning of last month with Sarkozy's blessing, the relationship between the two remained uneasy. It was a mission on a wing and a prayer. Inveterate networker BHL knew no one in the country, in fact. He had to hitch a ride in a vegetable vendor's panel truck to get to Benghazi. And once he was there the protestors seemed to be losing the revolutionary fervor that had enabled them to seize half the populated areas of the country with scarcely a shot fired in the previous weeks. "What I smelled was the democratic revolution cooling down," BHL recalls. His cause was slipping away from beneath him. And at the same time, Gaddafi's forces had begun to regroup for a counteroffensive. So BHL grew bolder. With a lot of name-dropping, he got himself invited to a meeting of the newly named Interim National Transitional Council.


On a sketchy old satellite phone that shut off every few minutes, BHL repeatedly called Sarkozy - who put up with the interruptions - and brokered a deal for a Libyan delegation to be received in Paris at the presidential palace.


Two days later, on Monday, March 7, BHL was back in Paris, meeting with the president. Sarkozy said he'd take the extraordinary step of recognizing the rebels' government the following Thursday. Then BHL took an extraordinary step of his own. He asked Sarkozy to keep the whole thing a secret from the Germans, who were already expressing reservations about supporting the Libyan uprising - and also from French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé, who would, BHL insisted, "throw a wrench in the works.”


——————————

What was the works? It was to bullshit to destroy Libya… So one should not trust BHL like a fallen bar of soap on the wet tiles of a prison shower… This is my beef today with Stan Grant who quotes BHL:

Philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, in his book The Virus in the Age of Madness, said: "Health becomes an obsession; all social and political problems are reduced to infections that must be treated."

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-27/covid-dominated-2020-democracy-at-a-crossroads/13010694

BHL is a rightwing bomber of ideas. Leave him alone to rot in his Jewish caca.

And oh, Stan please avoid the concept “...but the world is at a crossroads…” 

Fuck! The world has been at a crossroad every five minutes since humanity fell from its tree and started to become furless. That the crossroads are apparently more chaotic now is only due to the number of us and the size of our idiocy that has not changed our personal mix of goodness/nastiness, both being both learnt and inate. 

In a group we can behave badly as well. You mention a good guy, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who wrote of the "brutal character of the behaviour of all human collectives”. Is a deluded church a human collective? Is a brutal kingdom a human collective? Or is friendship society like the Quakers a human collective? Do we need a peaceful ruler at the top of a human collective and a media that promotes serenity ahead of crap? Stan writes:

Who have I turned to as a guide to process this year of upheaval? I have gone back to the 1930s and that time of roiling change and war, to a man who stood up to the worst of tyranny and paid for it with his life.

 


Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor and philosopher who was imprisoned by the Nazis and later executed
.



Here again, Dietrich Bonhoeffer would have been conflicted by his religious mentor, Martin Luther who hated the Jews and the Muslims with equal rage. Bonhoeffer did not like the cheap comforts of religious beliefs:

"Cheap grace is preaching forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession. … Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate."

... Bonhoeffer signed up with the German secret service (to serve as a double agent—while traveling to church conferences over Europe, he was supposed to be collecting information about the places he visited, but he was, instead, trying to help Jews escape Nazi oppression). Bonhoeffer also became a part of a plot to overthrow, and later to assassinate, Hitler… A good man. Captured in 1943, on April 9, 1945, one month before Germany surrendered, he was hanged with six other plotters.

His friend, Pastor Martin Niemöller is famous for “First They Came….”


First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.


Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a trade unionist.


Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Jew.


Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.



That’s the most well-known version and construction of this statement about the consequences of standing by while something immoral is happening, of the responsibility of the bystanders. And it implies the burden of guilt that these bystanders live with in the wake of such events.


Pastor Martin Niemöller was a German Lutheran pastor, and a theologian, who had a very intriguing and complex life. Born in 1892, the son of a Lutheran pastor, Niemöller’s first career was as a submarine commander for the German Navy during World War I. Apparently, he was a pretty good sub commander, and was awarded the Iron Cross at the end of the war. 


Rather than stay in the Navy, he decided to become a pastor in the Lutheran church after the war, and was ordained in 1924. Given that he was the author of the famous “First they came…” “poem,” it will probably surprise many of you that he was an early supporter of Hitler and the National Socialists (the Nazis). Like a great many Lutheran pastors and churchmen, Niemöller was a social and political conservative, and was greatly distressed by what he saw as the decline in German prestige in Europe after World War I. He thought that Hitler’s emphasis on German national pride and his promises to bring about a recovery of its national pride and respect among other European countries was what was needed.


https://professorbuzzkill.com/niemoller-first-they-came/

—————
Stan tells us:

The killing of an Iranian general threatened war; a virus took our lives; China is poised to write the future; and the West wonders what the future will be.

What will 2021 bring? We know one thing, after this year we should know now what we face. As Levy says "humanity can choose between denial and delirium, neurosis and psychosis.

———————

Gus to Grant: Levy is a French pessimist idiot. We need more than a delirious miracle… I mean we need to become a bit smarter, not only this WE ARE SMARTER ALREADY… But most of our politicians are as smart as rats going down inside drainpipes, while escaping the deluge. “Futés comme des fous” ("smart like mad people") says my friend Jules Letambour.

Read from top.

sarko-le-peddler...

sarko

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has been found guilty of trying to bribe a judge and of influence peddling and has been sentenced to three years in jail, with two years suspended.

 

...

 

The confidentiality of communications between a lawyer and his client was a major point of contention in the trial.

"You have in front of you a man of whom more that 3,700 private conversations have been wiretapped," Sarkozy said during the trial.

"What did I do to deserve that?" 

Sarkozy's defence lawyer, Jacqueline Laffont, argued the whole case was based on "small talk" between a lawyer and his client.

The court concluded that the use of wiretapped conversations was legal as long as they helped show evidence of corruption-related offenses.

Sarkozy withdrew from active politics after failing to be chosen as his conservative party's presidential candidate for France's 2017 election, won by Emmanuel Macron.

He remains very popular amid right-wing voters, however, and plays a major role behind the scenes, including through maintaining a relationship with Mr Macron, whom he is said to advise on certain topics.

Sarkozy's two co-defendants were also found guilty and given the same sentence as Sarkozy.

Sarkozy will face another trial later this month along with 13 other people on charges of illegal financing of his 2012 presidential campaign.

 

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-03-02/former-french-president-nicolas-sarkozy-guilty-corruption/13204944

 

Read from top...

BHL exposed...

 

It is quite startling and very worrying to note that some pseudo-philosophers with loony views can have influence on politics. This isn’t new. Some articles warn us that even Socrates would be cancelled by "cancel culture" should the great man be alive today. (https://www.rt.com/usa/524451-socrates-cancel-culture-twitter/).

 

 

 

Our friend Jules Letambour thus expands his views about the influence of the idiot philosophers who use big words like an armour of turds, while rats have better ways to explain the sewer maze of their communal lives. Here the main pseudo-“thinker/stinker" in question is a certain Bernard-Henri Lévy, a glorious purveyor of fake ideas and poor arguments that should have stayed on the Paris pavements to be walked upon by well-heeled classy scholars with their dogs on a leash. But the media (mostly right-wing…) being whatever they are, eager to appear intellectual in a sea of bad news, are still maintaining the false flames of cognitive bullshit, including those of glory for stupid war. Jules is responsible for the translation from his native French.

 

 

 

Here is Jules:

 

---------------------

 

 

Some "young kid” or nerd salon covid-refugee whatever-intellectual at Foreign Policy tells us:

 

It’s Time to Take Bernard-Henri Lévy Seriously

 

A close reading of the philosophical career, and influence, of France’s most ridiculed public intellectual.

 

By Blake Smith

 

APRIL 9, 2021, 2:23 PM

 

Bernard-Henri Lévy’s first appearance on the French television program Apostrophes in May 1977 set the tone for his career. Responding to left-wing critics of his fellow “New Philosophers,” a group of young thinkers who denounced communism and socialism, the 29-year-old Lévy galvanized viewers with his signature décolleté—the bare chest displayed through his unbuttoned shirt—his elegant mane, and his smirking dismissal of his interlocutors’ leftist pieties. It was the first time, but not the last, that he fixed in France’s national consciousness the traits of his personal image and flair for shifting debates from their ostensible subject to his own scintillating persona.

 

 

https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/04/09/bernard-henri-levy-bhl-france-philosophy-public-intellectual/

 

 

Scintillating? A turd painted with gold paint is still a little shitty… Basically, in order to justify his arguments, the young Bernard-Henri told porkies with brilliance, either deliberately or by sheer cultivated ignorance. Blake Smith finished his intellectual serious drivel in support of Lévy with:

 

 

This pose of cosmopolitan radicalism, which refuses the identities and institutions that structure everyday politics and the common sense of ordinary people, is far removed from the role of the intellectual defined by thinkers like Émile Durkheim during the Dreyfus affair of the 1890s. In his epochal essay “Individualism and the Intellectuals,” Durkheim argued that liberalism must be defended by thinkers who could make the case to their fellow citizens that individual rights were compatible with national traditions and collective self-interest. Lévy, in contrast, treats the latter pair as parochial concerns. His postmodern politics is in this sense not so much a skeptical liberalism as a kind of Nietzschean project of self-creation.

Discarding collective beliefs that restrain the individual authority of singular thinkers—and particularly of Lévy himself—he has made his own indignation appear to be an infallible means of understanding, and instrument for producing, historical events. But Lévy’s rise to intellectual stardom has accompanied disastrous trends for liberalism: the weakening of state economic power, disorientation of geopolitical thinking, and transformation of politics into an arena of rival claims to victimhood. If postmodern liberalism is to have any future, its intellectuals must renew its foundations and reimagine their role.

 

 

I am a bit harsh towards young Blake Smith. He is trying hard to lift the “liberalism” from its own contradictions. To my mind he failed by using Bernard-Henri Lévy as a sample of such “liberalism”. Like Gus, I am an existentialist...

 

It was thus by accident that I also fell onto an original discussion of 42 years ago, republished by Les Crises — a decent website where the truth is most important and double-triple checks its articles to make sure of authenticity. Note that Les Crises does not take prisoners and exposed the crooked dealings of a Joe Biden in Ukraine, by going to the sources of such — something other media never did. 

 

Here the debate, possibly posted in response to Blake Smith poor lift of Bernard-Henri’s bootstraps is about an essay by a young Lévy (published in 1979) which according to Pierre Vidal-Naquet, another French Jewish philosopher (a great one, mind you), was full of shit (say mistakes because Naquet was polite). And there were many… We have searched the yourdemocracy website for Bernard-Henry Lévy and the only link that came up is about how Bernard-Henry Lévy convinced Sarkozy to attack Libya. Idiot.

 

We knew that “Sarko” was on the take and has since been taken to court. We also knew that Sarkosy got many millions of dollars from Gaddafi, possibly as “insurance moneys” but “Sarko” did the dirty on him, trying to bury the fact of the illegality of the amounts of cash which contravened the French election laws.

 

Anyway, BHL (Bernard-Henry Lévy) did not have to work hard to convince Sarkozy to be the main part of an illegal war on Libya — a feast organised by no other than Hillary Clinton, for the Americans.

 

Meanwhile in 2006… 

 

The French historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, who has died aged 74, was famous for his denunciations of the torture practised by the French army during the Algerian war of independence (1954-62). He was one of the most distinguished contemporary exemplars of the French tradition, dating back to Zola and the Dreyfus Affair (if not indeed to Voltaire), of the intellectual engaged in politics.

 

Vidal-Naquet was born into a cultivated and bourgeois Jewish family. His father, Lucien, was a lawyer. The Vidal-Naquets had long abandoned religious practice, and like many assimilated French Jewish families, their religion, if they had one, was attachment to the democratic values of the French Republic. Vidal-Naquet's grandfather had been involved in the struggle to prove Dreyfus innocent; his uncle was named Georges (after Georges Picquart, the army officer who had helped uncover the affair), Emile (after Zola), and Alfred (after Dreyfus himself). The moral of the Dreyfus Affair was seen to be that the republic had triumphed over the army; truth over raison d’état.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2006/aug/10/guardianobituaries.france

 

 

 

All this preamble to introduce the famous altercation:

 

The Testament de Dieu (God’s testament) written by Bernard-Henri Lévy was reviewed by Pierre Vidal-Naquet in a letter published in Le Nouvel Observateur, June 1979, then followed by BHL's pitiful response, then Pierre Vidal-Naquet's reply, in a classic punch-up, now republished by Les Crises.

 

--------------------

 

From the debate which agitated Parisian intellectuals around the birth of a “new philosophy”, we present to the reader the following pieces: a) Pierre Vidal-Naquet to the editor of the Nouvel Observateur (June 18, 1979): we give here the Full Text ; b) response from Bernard-Henri Lévy (Le Nouvel Observateur, June 18, 1979); c) Pierre Vidal-Naquet replies to Bernard-Henri Lévy (Le Nouvel Observateur, June 25, 1979).

 

In a review like ours which gives a large place to philology and its history, it seems interesting to us to report on a debate which begins under the auspices of philosophy but which ends with a philological question: how do we use it? How do we use the biblical and classical tradition?

 

...

 

Pierre Vidal-Naquet in the editorial staff of Nouvel Observateur (June 18, 1979):

 

 

"Mr. Director,

 

Your publication recently had the opportunity to echo in a favourable manner the book by Bernard-Henri Lévy, Le Testament de Dieu, published by Éditions Grasset in the "Figures" collection. I think your good faith was surprising. [It suffices, in fact, to take a quick glance at this book to realise that far from being a major work of political philosophy, Le Testament de Dieu is literally teeming with massive errors, false quotes, or/and delusional statements. Faced with the enormous publicity from which this work benefits, and independently of any political question and in particular the necessary fight against totalitarianism, it is important to re-establish, through intellectual discussions, a minimum of probity.

 

I do not intend to provide here a complete list of the errors of Bernard-Henri Lévy, that would require a huge volume; I'll settle for a simple anthology of "pearls" worthy of a mediocre baccalaureate candidate. Whether it is biblical history, Greek history or contemporary history, Mr. Bernard-Henri Lévy displays, in all fields, the same appalling ignorance, the same astonishing arrogance, as we can judge: 

 

Mr. Bernard-Henri Lévy places the original sin on the “7th day” (p. 238) of creation. It must be believed that Adam and Eve enjoyed the Lord's rest; but this precision will surprise the readers of Genesis;

 

taking Piraeus for a man, he makes (p. 79) of Halicarnassus a Greek author;

 

of Sophocles’s Antigone, a tragedy performed in Athens in 442 BC. AD and whose action takes place in Thebes of the second millennium, he makes a play that informs us about Thebes at the end of the fifth century (p. 87); it is as if Racine's Phaedra was used as a document on Crete in the time of Louis XIV;

 

he makes (p. 79) texts that range from the 1st century BC. AD and the 1st century AD. AD testimonies dating from the time of "expiring Romanity"; it's just three or four centuries wrong;

 

Robespierre, who organised the cult of the Supreme Being, is accused of "putting the One and Sovereign God to death" (p. 106);

 

a text by Benjamin Constant (1818) and another by Fustel de Coulanges (1864) are declared (p. 42) "almost contemporary" and it is even the first which "spectacularly echoes" the second. On this account, one could declare "almost contemporaneous" the J’accuse of Zola (1898) and the Appeal of June 18 of General de Gaulle;

 

of Stalin, Leevy said that, “in the middle of the year 1928, […] he launched the masses on Red Square, to attack a party which had placed him in the minority and for the time being delayed the procession of socialism ”(p. 23). And this minority and this manifestation are a pure invention;

 

Bernard-Henri Lévy quotes (p. 278, note 49) the "deposition of Himmler" at the Nuremberg trial. It must have been a ghostly deposition, for Himmler committed suicide after his arrest by British troops on May 23, 1945;

 

It seems to me that this little statement is sufficient and that it is likely to interest your readers. The real problem is therefore not to "criticise" Bernard-Henri Lévy's book, because it falls short of all criticism; 

 

it is all to wonder: 

 

1) How a normalien [from l’Ecole Normale, a university in Paris], aggregate of philosophy according to what we learn from the cover of the book, can he despise himself and despise his readers to the point of inflicting such a "science" on them and behave , to use his own vocabulary (pp. 78-79), like an “illiterate juggler”? 

 

2) How can it be that, without exercising the slightest control, a publisher, newspapers, television channels launch such a product, as one launches a bar of soap, without taking the guarantees of quality that are precisely demanded of? a bar of soap? Is this “atrocity with a human face”?

 

 

Please accept, Mr. Director, my best regards.

 

Pierre Vidal-Naquet

 

 

--------------------

 

Response from Bernard-Henri Lévy (Le Nouvel Observateur, June 18, 1979)

 

Pierre Vidal-Naquet has, perhaps, invented a new genre in the Republic of Letters: the philosophical police report.

 

How in fact can one qualify a text which, halfway between public denunciation and learned corporalism, claims to censor all words that have not first appeared before the grand tribunal des agrégés [PhDs]? Does he know what he is saying, and the weight of the words that say it, when he urges "a publisher, newspapers, television stations" to strengthen their "control" over the production of ideas and their circulation? Has anyone ever seen an intellectual take the trouble to send the same letter, on the same day, to all the heads of all the "publications" who have had the "opportunity" to favourably "echo" the book of? another intellectual? This is what one of our most eminent historians is concerned with today.

 

And, since he claims to take away from me, it seems, my "science" certificate, I gladly award him his medal as prosecutor. Because finally, let's get into the cooking game for a moment. I willingly confess a gross reference error in the note where I mention Himmler. But I am not sure, on the other hand, that in the light of a story that runs from Thomas More to Pol Pot, Constant and Fustel cannot be considered "more or less contemporary".

 

I do not think it absurd to consider, since Hegel at least, that the Christian cultural revolution is the place of a rupture where the pagan world topples over and begins to "expire" decadent "Romanity". I do think that Sophocles, the 5th century Greek poet, tells us, through the myths and the high memory he uses, the truth of the world view in force in Greece where he lives, thinks and writes. And as for Robespierre, I find it difficult to see how to refuse him militant atheism, the hatred of "God One and Sovereign", which he never tired of claiming in his hunt for Christians, their priests, and even their calendar…

 

There is more serious and, on the last three points, the denouncing rage leads to the strangest, the most bewildering blindness. I pass on the pure and simple falsification which, in connection with "original sin", lends me an absurd thesis and largely contradicted elsewhere (pp. 235-236). But I am surprised, on the other hand, that we should remind a Hellenist that Dionysius of Halicarnassus is indeed a Greek writer, originally from Caria, settled in Rome in 30 BC, and author of famous Roman Antiquities. 

 

I am surprised that an intellectual, probably anti-Totalitarian, seems to ignore everything about the political crisis which shook the Bolshevik party in 1928, at a time when - with the support of Kalinin and Voroshilov - Rykov, Tomsky and Bukharin held, against Stalin , the majority in the Politburo and the central committee. And I allow myself, on this point, to recommend that he read Ante Ciliga's great book, Voyage au pays du mensonge, [a Journey to the country of lies] where he will find this crisis recounted in the menu (pp. 50-51): unless, of course , that Ante Ciliga, dissident and martyr, is also, according to Vidal-Naquet, a "mediocre candidate for the baccalaureate".

 

Bernard-Henri Levy

 

————————

 

 

Pierre Vidal-Naquet replies to Bernard-Henri Lévy (Le Nouvel Observateur, June 25, 1979)

 

Like a little pupil of yesteryear, unfairly wearing a donkey’s cap [Jules: In French schools un bonnet d’âne was given to the last of the class as a symbol of his/her stupidity], by his teacher, Bernard-Henri Lévy, protests, and as we can understand. Agrégé [PhD] himself, and saying it aloud, he says that I would have liked to have him appear "at the great tribunal of agrégés".

 

Sculpting, with the help of the media, his own statue, he claims that I wrote a "philosophical police report" because I compiled a small anthology of his innumerable errors, an anthology that I sent to a few newspapers , not to all, since I wrote, for example, neither to the Figaro-Magazine of Alain de Benoist and Michel Droit, nor to Minute, nor to the communist press. Because I suggested that intellectual production should not come purely and simply from commodity production, whatever the inevitable interferences, I am accused of wanting to establish control "over the production of ideas and their circulation", and to be animated with a "denouncing rage".

 

It is nevertheless good to analyse the arguments of Bernard-Henri Lévy. There are four types:

 

 

He admits a "big mistake": he had Himmler, as a dead man, testify at the Nuremberg trials. But that's his whole note, p. 278, note 49. It is is a fabric of inventions. Doesn't he also go so far as to write that it was the Gestapo, not the SS, that took care of the gas chambers?

 

What is all this in the eyes of the "Hegelian" philosopher who falsely reasons on the scale of the centuries? 

 

And it is in this way that we can make a text by Benjamin Constant in 1818 and a text by Fustel de Coulanges in 1864 contemporary, starting the era of "expiring Romanity" even before the time of Augustus. I'm afraid the explanation is simpler and is called: lightness. If he declared Constant's text almost contemporary with Fustel, is it not simply because he read it in an 1861 edition?

 

"Reading done, persistant and signalled?”. 

 

And it is thus that Robespierre, who organised a vote, on 18 floréal, year II (May 7, 1794), that "the French people recognise the existence of the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul" and condemned atheism and atheists, in bloody terms, is accused of "militant atheism” by BHL?. 

 

This is how Bernard-Henri Lévy invokes the authority of Ciliga for the mass demonstration that Stalin is said to have organised in 1928 against the Party which outnumbered him in Red Square. On the indicated pages (50-51) of Ten Years in the Land of Disconcerting Lies, Ciliga says no such thing, and for good reason: he simply echoes rumours circulating in Troskyite circles about what would happen ... if Stalin was placed in minority — something besides, I would point out, perfectly inconceivable.

 

"I [BHL] did not say that" 

 

The misfortune is precisely that he said it, or rather wrote it. Having taken Piraeus for a man and Halicarnassus for a family name, as they say Chevreuse or Saint-Simon, Bernard-Henri Lévy thinks he tells me who Dionysius of Halicarnassus is, would we call, in French, the medieval novelist "Chrétien de Troyes" simply: Troyes, or the tyrant Dionysius of Syracuse simply: Syracuse? Has this philosopher evoked in connection with the Antigone of Sophocles, the Thebes of the end of the fifth century before Jesus-Christ — being mistaken, if it is about the city, of a millennium, and it's about the play, from several decades away — he pretends he's only been talking about 5th century Greece. 

 

Finally, if this specialist of the Bible did not speak, pages 235-236, of the “absurd thesis” of the original sin committed “on the seventh day”, he did indeed speak of it on the page I cited, which is page 238.

 

Are all these grimauds' [Jules: ruthless people wearing a face mask] quarrels, fakery? But no, The Testament of God is not a novel or even a pamphlet, it is intended to be a work of scholarship and, as such, is subject to criticism, in large and in detail. But wait, there is worse. Bernard-Henri Lévy spoke about me as of "pure and simple falsificator". It’s a hard expression for a historian by trade and vocation like me to hear. Let's see what we learn from the analysis of some other text.

 

In Le Monde of January 5, 1978, Bernard-Henri Lévy gives an interview to Gilbert Comte. We read this, which was dictated by BHL himself, about the French language: "I believe that the French language is both my dearest illness and my only possible homeland. The asylum and den par excellence. The ultimate armour and weapon. One of the places, in any case, where I stand in this world.” Beautiful text. But there is a previous version, no doubt, "more or less contemporary", dating from December 23, 1941, that "spectacularly echoes" it.

 

Here it is: “Even if I were not an essentially French animal, […] the French language would still be for me the only imaginable homeland, the asylum and the den par excellence, the armour and the weapon par excellence, the only “geometrical place” where I can stand in this world in order to understand nothing, to want or give up anything.” This appears in a letter from Saint-John Perse (Alexis Saint-Léger-Léger) to Archibald MacLeish, and can be found in the Complete Works of the Poet (collection of the Pleiads , page 551. "Pure and simple plagiarism”, wouldn't you say?

 

Pierre Vidal-Naquet

 

Source: Pierre Vidal-Naquet, 18-06-1979

 

 

———————————

 

https://www.les-crises.fr/critique-du-testament-de-dieu-de-bernard-henry-levy-1979-par-pierre-vidal-naquet/

 

 

 

Most of the readers’ comments attached to this exposé explain how a young Bernard-Henry Lévy was a naive idiot, a plagiarist and a forger of knackeries for donkey’s mediocrity… Unfortunately, since then, BHL has had too much influence on the psyche of the French people and the decisions of their government, through various (right-wing?) media. The comments posted on Les Crises are scathing:

 

 

emmanueL // 29.05.2021 at 8:16 am

 

Magnificent. And [to consider] that the old "new philosopher", invented by the media 45 years ago, still speaks there and still today, shows us that the "fake" does not date from yesterday or anti-social networks ...

 

 

Davout // 05/29/2021 at 9:52 a.m.

 

On the contrary, there was infinitely more Fake News before the ants of the net that we are started to prevent villains of all stripes from misinforming in circles.

Like a good pervert, the latter applied the reflexive method specific to their pathology: accusing others of their own turpitudes. They therefore invented the concept of Fake News to discredit dissenting speech.

With the same aim, they invented the concept of a conspirator, who has only one other characteristic of the pervert questioned: to treat their victims as paranoid.

It's a shame, I forgot the name of this researcher who said in the 1990s that we were moving from an era of paranoia to one of perversion. Here we are.

The whole social spectrum becomes perverse, political, social, business, everything.

Totally disgusting.

 

 

Calvez // 29.05.2021 at 08:23

What Pierre Vidal-Naquet had not seen — can we blame him — is that it was already the first attacks of botulism, this terrible disease that was going to ravage this brilliant new,… er… this brilliant new philosopher, gnawing at his brain, neuron after neuron, until it leads him to what he is now: a clown that the TV shows show off to distract us.

 

 

—————————

 

So, we have BHL exposed in full light for the philosopharing buffoon he is...

 

Here the Botulism is a reference to a way Bernard-Henri Lévy interviewed a certain Botul, who at the time was a funny spoof writer/philosopher that the young Bernard-Henri Lévy took seriously…

 

Finally, I cannot go pass Jacques Perret once more, this under-sung master of words and retro philo-ideas, who in his Cheveux sur la Soupe floats some expert dissertations like carrots slices on the surface of a potage, in which he mentions a schoolmaster skilfully testing some ideas:

 

….

 

This ingenious master completes his teaching with the pleasures of conversation, which is old like Socrates, but “the choice of themes,” he specifies, “obeys the laws of school democracy, that is to say that of the caprice in the greatest number”. One might ask why the choice of school-masters does not obey the said laws, but this quarrel would be gross. Here are some of the conversation topics [the ingenious master] selected in this way: “Sport, moonlight sonata, feminism, should we kill all the bourgeois?” To this last question, the answer was unanimously affirmative, declared with affection our escolibrius [the class assembly]. It is permissible to imagine that after this experience of constructive pedagogy, our childish elites would have proposed other themes: "Should we kill all the Jews? Should we kill all the artists? Should we kill all the proletarians? Should we kill all the thugs?" And each time, of course, would come a unanimously affirmative answer, as it should be, as in any class obeying the inevitable precepts of lived, mimed, or even funny school democracy.

 

...

 

 

I will leave you here to contemplate your navel, while enjoying the companionship of other humans with a glass of whine… We, the French are good with our whines and wines...

 

 

—————————

 

Thank you Jules. I am off the wagon, for now. Gus.

 

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le filosopheur merdic...

 

Cheerleader of NATO wars spotted in Ukraine

 

Bernard-Henri Levy’s presence in Odessa should give pause to those who still believe NATO is not involved in Ukraine

 

BY Rachel Marsden — a columnist, political strategist and host of an independently produced French-language program that airs on Sputnik France. 

 

French intellectual and philosopher, Bernard-Henri Lévy (commonly referred to as “BHL”), has an odd propensity for appearing alongside western proxy fighters in war zones. And new reports now place him on the ground amid the conflict in Ukraine. 

The day after the February 24 launch of Russia’s attack on Ukraine, France 2, the main state-owned television network, hosted a debate featuring, on one side, former prime minister Dominique de Villepin, perhaps best known worldwide for his role during the run up to the Iraq war in 2003. Back then, he served as the foreign minister and represented France’s opposition to the American efforts under then president Jacques Chirac at the United Nations Security Council. 

After then US Secretary of State Colin Powell made his now infamous speech imploring the international community to back an invasion of Iraq to prevent Saddam Hussein’s use of weapons of mass destruction, De Villepin argued in favor of inspections. 

“Given this context, the use of force is not justified at this time. There is an alternative to war: Disarming Iraq via inspections. Moreover, premature recourse to the military option would be fraught with risks,” he said. 

History has now proven him correct in his assessment. 

De Villepin’s call for prudence and avoidance of military escalation in Ukraine was loaded with historical lessons learned. “Military interventions never yield the expected results,” recalled the former French prime minister. “History has taught us this in Libya, Iraq and the Sahel.”

On the other side of the France 2 debate table was BHL, who has a rather interesting relationship to some of the conflicts evoked by De Villepin. “[Russian President Vladimir Putin] launched this crazy war, without reason, against a people who had done nothing to him,” replied the philosopher. 

 

 « Il a lancé cette guerre folle, sans raison, contre un peuple qui ne lui avait rien fait » @BHL, écrivain et philosophe, s’exprime sur l’invasion russe de l’Ukraine #SpécialeUkraineFrance2pic.twitter.com/L3IQ1DOM0O

— Info France 2 (@infofrance2) February 24, 2022

 

It seems that in BHL’s world, wars start like magic with a need to protect completely innocent parties that just happen to be on NATO’s side, and not because of covert shenanigans that predate them — something that BHL should certainly know about. 

During the NATO-backed war in Yugoslavia — the war in Europe that those commenting on the current situation in Ukraine seem to forget — BHL, who just happened to be hanging out in the region, overtly backed the NATO proxy, then Bosnian president Alija Izetbegović, who, his opponents believed, was a Muslim fundmentalist. Izetbegović was allegedly used by western forces to helm Islamist fighters against Serbia and ultimately carve out a zone of influence and military control in the Balkans. Later, in a 2019 tweet, BHL referred to the al-Qaeda-linked Izetbegović as “one of the great, luminous figures of the 20th century.”

 

Cette image, je l’ai découverte au musée #Izetbegovic de #Sarajevo. Alija Izetbegović, président de la Bosnie, musulman et tolérant, contraint à la guerre et la gagnant, fut une des grandes figures, lumineuses, du XXeme siècle. Salut à lui. Hommage à lui. Honneur à sa mémoire. pic.twitter.com/QoD4tzgMO4

— Bernard-Henri Lévy (@BHL) May 14, 2019

 

Then, in March 2011, ahead of the NATO invasion of Libya, which led to an overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi that October, BHL was spotted in Libya meeting with “Libyan rebels,” footage of which can be seen in BHL’s documentary, “The Oath of Tobruk.” It would be easy to chalk up Levy’s presence among the western-backed proxy fighters ahead of Gaddafi’s ultimate demise at their hands as just journalistic interest or intellectual curiosity. But that theory is betrayed by French reports of an activist role at the highest level of the French government. 

BHL succeeded in bringing three members of the future Libyan government in waiting to meet with then French President Nicolas Sarkozy at the Elysée Palace on March 10, 2011 — seven months before Gaddafi’s demise, according to Le Figaro. The newspaper also reported that BHL, who met with then US Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton, at a Paris hotel and noted an American disinterest in military intervention, subsequently took to French airwaves to pressure Sarkozy into having the French take the lead in the invasion by telling the French audience that, “If Gaddafi takes Benghazi, the huge French flag flying on the Corniche will literally be spattered with the blood of the massacred Libyans.” Four days after the media appearance, NATO began its military intervention in Libya. 

In 2012, as the NATO-led invasion of yet another country, Syria, raged in an (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad with “Syrian rebels” backed by CIA and Pentagon covert programs, BHL took to the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival with both Libyan and Syrian rebels, to symbolize “the passing of the torch of Liberty,” according to Le Point magazine. Just a few months later, BHL was calling for France to also send weapons to the western’s proxy “rebels” to fight the Syrian army, specifically, “cannons, anti-aircraft missiles, defensive weapons, for Aleppo, Homs and the rest of Free Syria.” 

Then, in February 2013, BHL wrote on his blog, “La Règle du Jeu,” praising then French president Francois Hollande for launching French military operations in Mali, which were ultimately an unsurprising result of the destabilization of Libya caused by the earlier French-led, NATO-backed invasion cheered by BHL himself. “For the first time, in Mali and Libya, force was put at the explicit service of freedom and justice; for the first time – since Valmy!  – there is a desired link … between the exercise by France of its power and the defense of values that go beyond it.” In defense of the “values” of leaving countries in tatters for years after hopelessly destabilizing them because their leaders refuse to kowtow to the agenda of Washington and its allies, apparently.

And now, BHL — symbolic of a certain caviar leftist that sells wars and invasions of benefit to the military industrial complex from the lofty perch of humanitarianism — wants action in Ukraine. And after calling for it prominently via French mainstream media, he is hanging out in Odessa — coincidentally, just in time for the launch of the new “Ukraine fighters”, once again doing NATO’s dirty work, but this time comprised of foreign and domestic western-armed warriors, both regular troops and irregular combatants, cheered from the sidelines by the west against Russian troops.

 

Yes, I am in #Odessa. How could I not be here, with my #Ukrainian friends and heroes, fighting for our freedom? For me, it was a question of principle. For my actions to match my words. #SlavaUkraini#StandWithUkrainepic.twitter.com/GaK1fdDGI2

— Bernard-Henri Lévy (@BHL) March 16, 2022

 

Random BHL sighting! (In Odessa…) pic.twitter.com/bIEWKGMmxa

— Mark MacKinnon (@markmackinnon) March 14, 2022

 

A regular and welcome fixture all over English and foreign western establishment media from America to Europe, BHL tends to show up wherever there’s armed conflict between interests of the western establishment intent on clinging to the current unipolar world order, against those more representative of a more competitive multipolar alternative. His very presence in Odessa should give pause to anyone who still honestly believes that NATO isn’t a directly involved player, using Ukraine as a platform for its ongoing fight against an new and emerging world order over which it risks losing control.

 

 

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

 

READ MORE:

https://www.rt.com/news/552168-french-bhl-odessa-ukraine-nato/

 

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of mediocre filosofy...

 

futés comme des fous...

  

BHL exposed...

 

 

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brain damage….

President Vladimir Zelensky's motorcade was involved in a crash in Kiev on Wednesday evening, but he was not seriously injured, Ukrainian media reported, citing his press secretary Sergei Nikiforov. The driver of the other vehicle was reportedly hospitalized. Zelensky was examined by a doctor but not taken to a hospital, according to Nikiforov. 

Zelensky was apparently on his way back from a day trip to Izyum, a city in Kharkov Region that was until recently held by Russian troops. Ukrainian forces claimed it over the weekend, after Moscow announced a “redeployment” of forces into the Lugansk People’s Republic.

The Ukrainian president was accompanied by French celebrity Bernard Henri-Levy. Photos from the visit shared by Zelensky on social media showed one of his bodyguards sporting a patch used by the SS-Totenkopfverbande units in Nazi Germany.

 

READ MORE:

https://www.rt.com/russia/562815-zelensky-kiev-car-crash/

 

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BHL is a right-wing nutter, possibly a jewish nazi — like short sighted dick-piano playing unintelligent Zelensky. Lévy is proudly Jewish, and he has said that Jews ought to provide a unique Jewish moral voice in society and politics. Lévy has been friends with Nicolas Sarkozy since 1983. Nicolas Sarkozy is a thief... In terms of intellectualism, BHL is stupid below par. 

 

 

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BHL denies having a helmet, though he's got one in his hand…..

BHL (Bernard Henri-Levy) is a right-wing nutter, possibly a jewish nazi — like short sighted dick-piano playing unintelligent Zelensky. Lévy is proudly Jewish, and he has said that Jews ought to provide a unique Jewish moral voice in society and politics. Lévy has been friends with Nicolas Sarkozy since 1983. Nicolas Sarkozy is a thief... In terms of intellectualism, BHL is stupid below par. 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-igAtepRdc

 

BHL EST UN GROS MENTEUR..... (GET A FRENCH PERSON — OR JULES LETAMBOUR TO TRANSLATE THE KERFUFFLE)....

 

 

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