Sylvain Gouguenheim’s "Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel: Les racines grecques de l’Europe Chrétienne" reviewed by Thomas F. Bertonneau

Long before the late Eduard Said invented “Orientalism” to exalt Arab culture and Islamic society at the expense of the West, bien-pensants like Voltaire inclined to express their rebellion against the dwindling vestiges of Christendom by representing Europeans as bigots or clowns and raising up exotic foreigners – Voltaire himself wrote about Turks and Persians of the Muslim fold – to be the fonts of wisdom and models of refined life in their tracts and stories. The sultan and dervish look with amused tolerance on the gaucheries of the European rubes. The rubes swing their elbows and knock over the pottery. It was the Eighteenth-Century philosophes and illuminati who coined the pejorative term Dark Ages to refer to the centuries immediately following the collapse of the Roman imperial administration in the West under pressure of the Gothic assertions of the Fifth Century. Liberal discourse often casually extends the same term to apply it to all of medieval European civilization up to the Renaissance. Specialist historians have, however, long since demonstrated that no such absolute discontinuity as the term Dark Ages insinuates ever existed, which means that the Enlightenment version of history is at least partly wrong. And yet the usual story retains its currency, as an item in a kind of liberal folklore.

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Demonstrations that make the car burnings of New Year's Eve look like a school picnic have been taking place all over France.

According to Le Parisien, 21,000 persons demonstrated in Paris against the Israeli offensive in Gaza. A few hundred attempted to get into the Israeli Embassy but were stopped by police barricades around Place Saint-Augustin and Boulevard Haussmann. Many were wearing a kaffyeh and chanted slogans such as "We are all Palestinians, Israel: Assassin". "Gaza, Gaza, we are with you".

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George Handlery about the week that was. The choice of facts determines the case. Can the Palestinians deliver on their contract? The uses of “distributory foreign policy”. Piracy is a low-risk enterprise. Bank robbers are around: liquidate the banks.
 
1. This is how CNN International commented (Dec. 27) the IDF’s action in Gaza: Israel attacked “just a week after the cease-fire ended”. This rendition is constructed upon two connected occurrences. Event A is the expiration of the cease-fire. Event B is the action against Hamas. If we only concentrate on these two components, we get the impression of a rather rash action taken in response to a development in which both sides might share responsibility. (Without pockets, there would be no pickpockets.) Thereby the case is made for the “overreaction” as some commenting governments label the sorties. Only the chain of events has a third component. It is the rocketing of Israeli settlements (call them indiscriminate attacks) by Hamas in control of Gaza, the area from which the action originates. In this case the chain of events ranges from an expired cease fire, then it proceeds through rocket attacks on civilians that are guilty of being Jews and finally the process is completed by the IDF’s attempt to bomb Hamas targets. Through the insertion of the additional component, the two cases become highly dissimilar. Therefore, so must be their evaluation. Anyone who, while aware of the second scenario sticks knowingly to the first one becomes guilty of distortion by suppressing a salient fact. It is not right that this happens but it is, at the same time, hardly surprising.

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"It is generally agreed that casinos should, in the public interest, be inaccessible and expensive. And perhaps the same is true of Stock Exchanges." — John Maynard Keynes

What is particularly fascinating with John Maynard Keynes is that he wrote a theory that only works on paper since it assumes that monetary, political and financial managers will never abuse the power of indebtedness. So, what to think of this worldwide credit squeeze and its implemented cure that is no more less the cause of the disease and could spiral at any moment into a 'Greater Depression'. This week Gregory Mankiw, a professor of economics at Harvard, wrote a piece in the NYTimes asking openly what Keynes would have done to deal with the crisis. Just another nice but failed attempt to praise the Keynesian fairy tales. Mankiw cites the observation which links the root cause of economic downturns to insufficient aggregate demand. What demand when the consumers are completly tapped out in the first place? How can world governments create demand when they are literally bankrupt?

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 “Rien n’aura eu lieu que le lieu.” - Mallarmé

Plato had a cyclic – or “spiraling” – view of history, in which the cycles bear the regular scars of catastrophe, the plural catastrophes being epochal in the root sense of articulating a dehiscence between one age and another. The most dramatic expression of Plato’s catastrophic theory of history comes with the story of Atlantis and the Prehistoric Athens in the two linked dialogues, Timaeus and Critias. The Atlantis story has a pedigree, which Timaeus supplies. The statesman Critias, who narrates the legend in the two dialogues, heard it in his youth from his grandfather, who knew it in turn from his source, the famous lawgiver Solon, who got it from certain records kept by the Egyptian priestly college at Saïs in the Nile Delta. Solon visited there in early career on an embassy from Athens. The filiations of memory that permit Critias to rehearse the story are important in context because Plato, putting his notion in the mouth of an Egyptian priest, believes that one effect of the regular cataclysmic events is periodically to interrupt the record of history and reset cultural development at its degree-zero.

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France has set a new record. One thousand one hundred forty-seven cars were burned during New Year's night. There are several news sources. The following is from Le Post:

A deceptive account. There is an impression of "calm", since there was no major incident to report. But this is counterbalanced by a negative find: 1147 burnt-out cars, or 30% more than last year, even though the police were out in force (35,000 men deployed). Two hundred eighty persons were arrested. Other than the burnt cars there was little to report. "Only four policemen were slightly injured," declared the Interior Ministry in its communiqué this morning, adding that "no damage to public or private property" was noted.

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Many Spaniards thought Spain had solved its “Jewish problem” in 1492, when by the stroke of a pen, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella ordered the expulsion of an estimated 800,000 Jews from the country, and thus put an end to the largest and most distinguished Jewish community in Europe.
 
But now, more than 500 years later, Spanish anti-Semitism is on the rise once again. According to a recent study published by the Pew Research Center, nearly half of all Spaniards have negative views of Jews, a statistic that marks Spain as one of the most anti-Semitic countries in Europe. According to Pew, 46 percent of Spaniards hold negative opinions of Jews, up more than double from the 21 percent of Spaniards with such views in 2005.

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Communism seems on the verge of conquering Germany. Individual former Marxist-Leninists already occupy high positions in the Federal Republic of Germany. Now it looks increasingly likely that the Left Party, the successor of the East German Communist Party, might be in government in the foreseeable future.

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The comedian and professional anti-Semite Dieudonné M'Bala M'Bala (left), who is currently performing at the Zénith Theatre in Paris, invited onto the stage to join him one Robert Faurisson, noted French Holocaust denier. This happened while Jean-Marie Le Pen was in the audience.

If this doesn't bring the Front National to an end, nothing will. I would almost venture to guess that Le Pen is doing this deliberately to sink his party so that no one, not even his daughter Marine, will ever take the reins of what he must consider his own private possession.

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George Handlery about the week that was. Cursed: from immediate bankruptcy to immediate bureaucracy. The dictatorial uses of democracy. Which rights to protect? Why government is worse than the governed. Who is assimilating whom? The careful choice of the conqueror.
 
1. Baling out Detroit. “Bankruptcy now” has been avoided. However, the measure might bring only temporary relief. As so often, support is likely to finance the continued manufacture of products that not enough people want. Avoiding immediate bankruptcy also means that this ruin’s place will be taken by “immediate bureaucracy”. The control of automobile manufacture will be made the co-responsibility of a state appointed “Car Czar”. This person will in theory know more about car-making than the CEO’s of the Big Three. Might pastry shops be next?

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European Commissioner for Enlargement Olli Rehn said earlier this month during a videoconference with Reykjavik from Oslo that the European Commission is already mentally preparing for a membership application from Iceland, and that a rapid treatment of the application could not be excluded. He mentioned specifically that the island could become a member of the European Union already before the end of 2009, even before Croatia.

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In the 2008 presidential elections, 69.5 million Americans voted for Barack Obama campaign’s slogan, “Change we can believe in.” Others also believed that Mr. Obama would bring change, but since it would not be change they could believe in, they could not vote for the agent of that change.

The European Union too has promised, and already wrought, much change.  The European Anthem is one of the main symbols of the change the EUrocracy and its enthusiasts can believe in.

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Looking at Britain in 2008 certain themes of course stand out more than others, and perhaps none more than the introduction of sharia law, the possibility of which had first been to public attention by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. The fall and rise of the Labour Party, the rise of the Conservatives, the dashed SNP hopes for Scottish independence characterize much of politics this year.

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Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have the right to use the premises of the parliament for their own activities. They can reserve conference rooms to give press conferences, invite speakers or show documentaries. So far the Parliament has never forbidden anyone from doing so. Until last week Gerard Batten, a British MEP, invited the Dutch politician Geert Wilders to show his movie Fitna to Batten’s colleagues.

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Be prepared for a homosexual parody of Christmas when you take a stroll through Amsterdam these days. The Dutch city, the self-declared “gay capital of the world,” is holding its first “Pink Christmas Festival.”

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