by Chris Hedges
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Truthdig
April 23, 2012
Image by Parti socialiste via Flickr
I went to Lille in northern France a few days before the first round of the French presidential election to attend a rally held by the socialist candidate François Holland. It was a depressing experience. Thunderous music pulsated through the ugly and poorly heated Zenith convention hall a few blocks from the city center. The rhetoric was as empty and cliché-driven as an American campaign event. Words like “destiny,” “progress” and “change” were thrown about by Holland, who looks like an accountant and made oratorical flourishes and frenetic arm gestures that seemed calculated to evoke the last socialist French president, François Mitterrand. There was the singing of “La Marseillaise” when it was over. There was a lot of red, white and blue, the colors of the French flag. There was the final shout of “Vive la France.” I could, with a few alterations, have been at a football rally in Amarillo, Texas. I had hoped for a little more gravitas. But as the French cultural critic Guy Debord astutely grasped, politics, even allegedly radical politics, has become a hollow spectacle. Quel dommage.
[…]
via Truthdig
Copyright © 2012 Truthdig
Chris Hedges spent two decades as a foreign reporter covering wars in Latin America, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. His latest books are Death of the Liberal Class, and The World as It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress.
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[DS added the video.]
Apr 22, 2012 by AlJazeeraEnglish
Socialist challenger Francois Hollande is leading the race for the French presidency ahead of right-wing incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy, setting up the probability of a May 6 runoff between the two. Andrew Simmons reports.
Hollande wins first round in France vote
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Sadly true, Mr. Hedges. Living in Turkey, I see no difference in the level of demagoguery between our politicians and those in the US or Europe. The only nuance is that our “elected Sultan” is more philistine and uncivilized than his western counterparts. Mr. Erdogan here panders to the primitive Bronze Age dogmas called religion and reaches new heights every day in exploiting religious and nationalist fervor. All over the world, politics turned into a circus of incapable clowns and puppets. It’s like “an air-conditioned nightmare” worldwide.
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FASCISM – divide and conquer those you colonize. And now, it’s on the home front …
It will take DECADES to undo all the damage, I am afraid. I think Dmitry Orlov is RIGHT. We are in for a horrible ride. (and I don’t wanna go to a FEMA camp to make ammo, which some days I think will be my fate.)
Well said, as always Mr. Hedges.