The Post-Partisan Emporium

 Although this essay discusses politics in France, the observations and analyses can be applied to most Western nations. Useful Shadows. Maybe creating the “Extreme Right”was a bad idea. Aurelien I don’t know what ideas Festival of Humanity would conjure up in the mind of the average Anglo-Saxon. Happy-clappy guitars, perhaps, peace and love? Desmond Tutu and Ursula von der Leyen? In fact, it’s all to do with a newspaper. L’Humanité was founded by the great French Socialist Jean Jaurès, and was the Party’s official newspaper until 1920, when after the Congress of Tours, the departing Communist faction took it with them. From then until reality dictated otherwise in 1994, it was the official newspaper of the PCF, and since then, it’s clung on as an all-purpose leftist publication. A tradition for almost a hundred years, is the annual Festival, largely based around music, taking advantage of the fact that popular French musicians have often had leftist sympathies. I haven’t been the...

  The Assisted Suicide of the Nation Thoughts from the Shire Yes I know I am prone to exaggeration, that’s the fisherman in me. Yet the more I look around, not at one scandal, one policy, one migration wave, one economic betrayal, or one grotesque little episode of bureaucratic lunacy, but at the whole direction of travel that the UK/Ireland/Europe are on, the phrase begins to look less like exaggeration. The Assisted Suicide of the Nation Nations can die in many ways. They can be invaded, bankrupted, starved, conquered, corrupted, or simply exhausted by luxury, decadence and father time. But there is another kind of national death, stranger, and even more humiliating than all of the above: the death of a nation persuaded to cooperate in its own disappearance. Not beaten in a heroic last stand, not crushed beneath the boot of some foreign invader, but coaxed, shamed, bribed, distracted, indebted, censored, managed, and re-educated into believing that its own survival itself is vulg...