Former French President Jacques Chirac is almost certain to be accused in a major court proceeding in Paris of being part of a scheme to overcharge the kingdom of Saudi Arabia for French military equipment during his presidential term. The allegation will be that he was doing this for the benefit of himself and his political party. A complaint has been filed in the French courts over commissions due from arms sales, which is likely to lead to a trial that will be highly embarrassing for the French and Saudi governments.

In a departure from Duly Noted’s usual format, this installment is devoted to the affairs of a single region and it will essentially examine only one single issue.
 
The problems of central and east central Europe were significant  among the causes of the last two world wars. (“The last two” is a deliberate  phrasing.) This rendition is unlikely to conform to what you have been taught in  school. The West's awareness, and the publications there, try to avoid  “complicated” presentations. Therefore, France’s “revanche”, the compensatory  drives of the “Kaiser”, and then Germany’s frustration for having lost too much,  as well as Mussolini’s annoyance because Italy had not gained enough, finally French-British appeasement of insatiable aggressors, stand in the foreground. Admittedly, only a fool would question the importance of these factors. The complaint is that by ignoring further fitting components, the historical picture presented becomes skewed. So are, accordingly, some of the contemporary analyses of the “Asia” (implying “unimportant” and “primitive”) that, according to an old phrase, begins at the eastern city limits of Vienna.
 

It's never been clear what really happened on that foggy morning of April 10 when a Polish airplane crashed on a Russian runway, killing all 96 people aboard including Polish President Lech Kaczynski, cabinet ministers, military service chiefs, intelligence officials, the central bank president, parliamentarians, historians, decapitating the conservative government and gutting the country's elite.

The blurb on the thirty-five cent Ace paperback likens Charles Eric Maine’s 1958 novel World without Men to George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’sBrave New World.  Ordinarily – and in consideration of the genre and the lurid cover – one would regard such a comparison skeptically.  Nevertheless, while not rising to the artistic level of the Orwell and Huxley masterpieces, World without Men merits being rescued from the large catalogue of 1950s paperback throwaways, not least because of Maine’s vision of an ideological dystopia is based on criticism, not of socialism or communism per se nor of technocracy per se, but rather of feminism.  Maine saw in the nascent feminism of his day (the immediate postwar period) a dehumanizing and destructive force, tending towards totalitarianism, which had the potential to deform society in radical, unnatural ways.  Maine grasped that feminism – the dogmatic delusion that women are morally and intellectually superior to men – derived its fundamental premises from hatred of, not respect for, the natural order; he grasped also that feminism entailed a fantastic rebellion against sexual dimorphism, which therefore also entailed a total rejection of inherited morality.

1. After a delay of several decades, Comrade Duch has been convicted. The man was one of the participants of Communist Cambodia’s efforts to commit self-genocide. Today everybody condemns Duch. His party affiliation, which is as relevant for the crime as, is his person, however, gets little mention. Except perhaps that, the talk is about “stone-age Communism. The term implies an excuse. It insinuates that people such as Duch have somehow abandoned the real humanistic party line. Accepting the killer’s condemnation has a related reason. It helps to avoid the kind of look in the mirror that would bring the past and its record back.
 

This time, Duly Noted places the economic role of the state in it into its focal point. This warrants an affirmation of the writer’s own position. The state is not a necessarily a negative force with regard to the economy or basic freedoms. Admittedly, modern dictatorship can only unfold once its operators grab control of national states and economies. Equally true is that democracy presupposes a properly regulated state. The issue then is the limit imposed upon state power and the scope of its activities in areas in which its role can be constructive. Essentially then, the dispute with the Statist is about the exact role to be assigned to the state and the extent of the power that should be delegated to it. Therefore, the negative references to the “state” do not stem from a fundamental opposition to it. The reservations merely reflect the dangers inherent in an excessive role of the state. This comes about when that role is paired with the ability of special interest groups to kidnap the state to serve their interests.

European politicians and journalists visiting Iceland in recent months have been quite astonished to experience first hand how little interest Icelandic MPs and Icelanders in general have in joining the European Union. So astonished in fact that Icelandic lawmakers have repeatedly been asked if the EU application delivered by the Icelandic government in 2009 is really serious. Well, quite frankly it isn't. It is a door bell prank. No one really is there when the bell rings and the door is opened.

When a piece of current news surfaces I like to know whether there exists any kind of Flemish connection. Saturday, Chelsea Clinton was married in the quaint village of Rhinebeck, New York. As luck would have it, there is indeed a Flemish connection.

The exploited toilers of the executive suite. If traditions collide: Whose way should be respected?

1. Bashir is a mass murderer who devotedly combats the signs of overpopulation in his realm.  The International Court of Criminal Justice recognized his efforts. As a sign of appreciation of al Bashir’s talent, the court indicted him for trivia such as genocide. Today, (July 21) the Sudanese tyrant has visited Chad. Ironically, it so happens that, the host country is a signatory of the treaty that creates the ICC.

As the West is being destroyed by its own elected leaders, its smartest and most creative, its most successful and prettiest, and the great majority of the population follows as though after the Piper of Hamlin, the salient question is how to save what remains and the people who carry what remains. Very few of the latter are in the political or managerial leadership caste, and you could count on one hand the ones whose exceptional talents or beauty set a large number of hearts aflutter.

An even greater problem is that the destroyers and looters have been in sole purview of culture and education for so long that hardly any under-50 Whites remain who have retained their own mind and its link to their uniquely magnificent Western heritage. That link has been replaced either by a permanent hairshirt for the real and imagined transgressions of the West against the (broadly speaking) East and South, or by a moronic multiculti rainbow pastiche expressed, among others, in the pumping loins of white rappers and pop divas that are but inferior copies of stuff black people do better.