Otherjones.com: Big Napoleon and Little Napoleon

Thursday, July 13, 2017

Big Napoleon and Little Napoleon

Peter the Great's Throne at the Hermitage, St.Petersburg

MSNBC can’t seem to make up its mind whether Donald Trump and Emanuel Macron love or hate each other, but I will rest my case on the fact that Macron left his assigned placed for the G20 photo shoot to come and stand on the very outside of the group next to Trump who had been assigned that place as a newcomer.

Today, the two presidents reviewed the guard at Napoleon’s tomb, and Donald Trump never looked so presidential, standing ramrod straight in the courtyard of Les Invalides.

Macron — who has been taunted in the French press for trying to emulate Napoleon and the Sun King all at once — speaks good English and has a background in finance. Having brilliantly won the Presidency on his first try, then capped that by gaining a comfortable majority in Parliament, his slogan could be translated as France Forging Ahead, not very different from ‘Make America Great Again’. (Like Trump, Macron has an unusual personal history, having succeeded in getting a high school professor twenty-three years his senior to divorce her husband and marry him.)

Suffice it to say that Macron is a doer and a go-getter, but what does he want from Trump? The answer brings us to Angela Merkel, about to run for a fourth term as Chancellor of Germany. France and Germany have long been Europe’s leading duo, but unlike her predecessors, Merkel is recognized as primus inter pares. As a French patriot and upstart President, Macron aims to gain equal recognition for France, which has not been the case since the Mitterrand-Kohl duo (and even then….Mitterrand hoped until the last minute that somehow Germany would not be permitted to reunite…). If Macron could succeed, where Merkel has failed, in persuading Donald Trump to rejoin the Climate Agreement, that would go a long way toward suggesting that Europe has a new leader.

Angela Merkel has the advantage of being able to speak Russian to Vladimir Putin (benefitting from communist East Germany’s obligatory Russian studies in her youth), but Macron received the Russian president at the Versailles palace — where he proceeded to address a joint session of Parliament a few weeks later, causing the French media to loudly mock his royal instincts.

Europe as a whole is undergoing a fundamental mutation from left of center to who knows how far right. The key question will be whether a ‘New Right’ a la Alain de Benoit will take hold, putting paid to the vociferous anti-immigrant right that has been galvanized by the massive arrival of Muslim immigrants. Europe’s leaders seem to ignore the fact, recently reported by the Economist, https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2017/07/daily-chart-6 that absent immigration, their populations are doomed to decline. (Donald Trump probably ignores that fact, too.)

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Welcome to Otherjones!

The alternative press is replete with despair and ‘hope’, neither of which is helpful. ‘Squawking’ may alleviate some of the pain Americans experience at being identified with a government that brutalizes Others at will, but it doesn’t change the ‘facts on the ground’. As for hope, it is an easy cop-out: in the present state of the world, we can never be certain that tomorrow will come. Whether a barefoot child in Africa or a hedge-fund manager, all of us are the potential victims of hubris.

This blog aims to prepare readers in ways more important than stockpiling food and bandages for whatever happens, as we transition from an American century to a world century, helping them see through the web of lies with which we are being controlled.

Having lived for years at a time in half a dozen ‘foreign’, countries — learning their languages and histories — I have a unique ability to identify events that bear watching. That life, however, could not provide ‘retirement benefits’, so if you appreciate the unique combination of information and insight that characterizes my work, I hope you will integrate a small donation to Otherjones into your budget.

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My Latest Book: Russia's Americans

If you’re not quite prepared to believe that the US should go to war with Russia, or even that its President, Vladimir Putin, is a thug — or even if you simply believe that they mean the US harm, check out my new book Russia’s Americans, at Amazon. You will discover that there are many things you do not know about the Russia story, including the fact that thousands of Americans have chosen to live and work there. It is available in both paperback, at $22.25 and e-book, and is illustrated with many color photographs from my May 2017 trip.

About Me

Born in Philadelphia, I studied in Paris, became a French citizen by marriage, debuted at Agence France Presse in Rome, then, as Deena Boyer, followed Fellini’s creative process for The Two Hundred Days of ’81/2’. The proceeds from this book enabled me travel to Cuba to to interview Fidel Castro for a major French weekly, meeting with him again a week after the Kennedy assassination and several times in 1964 for a book, Cuba 1964: When the Revolution was Young, in which the other members of the government (including Che Guevara, Raul Castro and Celia Sanchez), tell in their own words why they made the revolution. My Cuba archive is on-line at Duke University.

In the seventies, I did graduate work in Global Survival, taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and was a speech writer in the Carter State Department, publishing an article on U.S.-Soviet relations in the in-house journal in 1976.

Returning to Paris in 1981, with assistance from the Centre National du Livre, I published Une autre Europe, un autre Monde, the only book that foresaw the reunification of Europe and the breakup of the Soviet Union. I returned to Philadel-phia in 2000, and have been a contributor and senior editor at various on-line journals.

A Taoist Politics: The Case for Sacredness hopes to change the way both seekers and skeptics look at good and evil - -and at the daunting problems of the 21st century. It shows that religious belief is not necessary to achieve serenity, but that awareness of the sacred as confirmed by modern science, is. It does this by viewing the world as a system and exploring what that means for the role of politics.

America Revealed to a Honey-Colored World is a primer for Americans and others who find the policies of successive US governments difficult to square with their image of the country and its founding documents. The decades I spent living on both sides of the Iron Curtain provided me with a unique awareness of America’s image abroad and of the mainstream media’s failure to convey news and ideas to the voters in whose name policies are carried out. References to work by other political writers illustrate little-known or forgotten features of American history that have contributed to the tragic face the country presents today.

Cuba 1964 provides the definitive answer to the question: “Was Fidel Castro a Communist before he carried out the revolution, or did he become one because of the way the United States reacted when he ousted pro-US dictator Fulgencio Batista? While following day by day events, I had extensive conversations with the men and women who had joined the Castro brothers as early as 1953 and were now members of the revolutionary government. Together with Fidel, Raul, Che and Celia Sanchez, they told me in their own words why and now they made the Revolution hat continues to inspire countries in Latin America and around the world. The text is illustrated with photographs from my black and white archive which can be seen on-line at Duke University.

Lunch with Fellini Dinner with Fidel: How did it happen that a fourteen year old American girl found herself living among the French in post-war Paris? The answer to that question also explains why I went on to live in half a dozen countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain, becoming mutti-lingual, writing first about the cinema, then about ‘the big picture’ while raising two children, mostly on my own. A religious grandmother and a hedonistic lover accompanied me on a journal which has been both spiritual and political, and is illustrated by many photographs from my personal album.

Thursday, July 13, 2017

Big Napoleon and Little Napoleon

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