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 Sweden Syndrome A case study in euphoric national suicide John Carter In 2008,  Sweden castrated the heraldic lion of its Nordic Battle Group . While riding a municipal bus in Uppsala, I had the opportunity to observe a group of high school students. In one seat were a few Swedish boys, of the bespectacled, well-behaved, and soft-spoken variety typical of Sweden’s intermediate professional classes. In the seat next to them was a small group of Swedish girls. Behind the girls were some Arab boys, who were engaged in pulling the girls’ hair and otherwise tormenting and teasing them, much to the girls’ displeasure. In other circumstances this might have been an innocent, even light-hearted scene, and there was a part of me that was amused by the Arab boys’ antics and the girls’ protests, but the rigid posture of the Swedish lads, the way they carefully looked anywhere but at the Arab boys, gave the scene a tense, dark aura. Here in microcosm was a holographic fragment of Sw...