“Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”
While many of our countrymen are celebrating July 14 and observing the traditional celebrations of the French Revolution, this is a book that should cause renewed controversy, 25 years after the publication of A French Genocide: The Vendee (by the same author).
‘Have you read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion?’ he asked me. ‘It’s very good, I’ll find you a copy.’ He started to rummage around in his drawers, muttering something about how, a century ago, it had had the foresight to predict war in underground tunnels.
Newspapers that denounce the Murdoch press for phone hacking happily sign exclusive deals to disseminate Wikileaks’ stolen documents on world affairs or to print details of MPs expenses that were obtained by theft.
America is also the most racially egalitarian society in human history. Most Americans don’t recognize this because Americans, being the cultural children of Calvinism, are very good at self-flagellation. Compare the United States today with Europe and Latin America, however.
In 2007, here in Asheville, North Carolina, two flag-related incidents received a lot of press and public attention.
Anthony O’Hear: We should consider whether the extreme unpredictability of the crowds we are seeing to-day in quite a number of places (including even London, as it happens) is not just an extreme illustration of what is actually always the case. Beneath its apparently smooth surface and underpinning the leaders who appear to shape it, human history is built on shifting sands, on countless inherently unstable actions and decisions of millions of individual people.
IT WASN’T UNTIL JULY of 1969 that Elliott Coleman wrote to tell me that someone had withdrawn from the coming Fall semester and there was a Gilman Fellowship he could offer me. I was thrilled and delighted traveling east from San Francisco, with two changes of clothes in a backpack, along with an overblown post-Beatnik [...]
Those in responsible positions are getting bogged down in crisis management, as they seek to placate the public and sugarcoat the problems. They say that there is only a government debt crisis in a few euro countries but no euro crisis, citing as evidence the fact that the value of the European common currency has remained relatively stable against other currencies like the dollar.
Just as in New York, it was a culture of lawlessness that had been tolerated for decades. If any of these researchers had bothered to go into the streets, they would have seen that.
In our days, it is not so much the possibility of betrayal or violation of privacy that frightens us, but its opposite: shutting down the exits.
Victoria Woodhull was quite a gal. Having once been an actress and prostitute in Gold Rush San Francisco, she moved on to New York and was ‘reborn’, becoming the first female broker on Wall Street, then founding her very own newspaper to promote her political dream – which was to stand for the presidency in 1872, fighting under the banner of suffrage, free love and equal rights for all.
President Obama: “We don’t have a stronger friend and stronger ally than Nicolas Sarkozy, and the French people.”
The ruling party hardliners who coordinated the latest crackdowns, like Air Marshal Perence Shiri (“The Butcher of Matabeleland”), are also guilty of carrying out Mugabe’s massacres against minority amaNdebele people in the 1980s. They rightly fear prosecution as war criminals.
Denis Boyles: Strauss-Kahn’s erasure from French politics and the IMF, will have almost no effect on international finance. Its only effect will be on French domestic politics. Sakozy’s failure as a politician was to distance himself from France’s ruling élite. That’s why he was elected in 2007 – his victory was a victory over the incestuous, self-serving énarques who had driven French voters from indifference to despair. Now there are more énarques in Sarkozy’s government than there were in Chirac’s. He has become one of them.
Historicism and the great beast.
Anthony O’Hear: We should consider whether the extreme unpredictability of the crowds we are seeing to-day in quite a number of places (including even London, as it happens) is not just an extreme illustration of what is actually always the case. Beneath its apparently smooth surface and underpinning the leaders who appear to shape it, human history is built on shifting sands, on countless inherently unstable actions and decisions of millions of individual people.