"Nothing will take away the hysteria of those ones who have never stopped pouring contempt upon him, hounding him through hatred and asking for his punishment as if we were living the darkest and most ferocious hours of the McCarthysm era all over again. At least, the nightmare is about to end. At least the end of the hell is looming. And this, for the time being, is what does matter."
And can anything erase the immense, unbelievable fatuity of Bernard-Henry Lévy? Can anything take away the hysteria of this man who has never stopped pouring contempt upon Americans, hounding us through hatred as if we were living the darkest and most ferocious hours of the McCarthyism — McCarthysm? — era all over again?
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I'm guessing that's how he makes his living.
It looks like HP read your post because they've already fixed the "McCarthysm" typo.
If only HP edited as carefully for content.
Political Prisoner of the Right, my A$$!
Rich, well connected, absconding, guilty, sexual deviant
I suppose the French philosopher doesn't think Polanski is much of a *flight risk*.
To his credit, I think it’s safe to say that Bernard-Henri Lévy is a hollowed-out shell of a man who died inside a long time ago.
Lévy's a prat.
Ah yes, what's not to love, to hate? All that Polanski did was to drug a 13-year girl, rape her and then also sodomize her, a mild social encounter done in private. And, for that, we persecuting Polanski?
Heck, yes. Polanski had pled guilty and then fled rather than pay the price called for.
wv: anoglizi not for his crimes!
Immense! Encroyable!! Vite vite Cheri, avant mon peepee descend!!!
French intellectual. Says it all.
(the other kev)
quel outil
Oh I thought Levy was writing that about Barack Obama till I clicked through.
Wv: phamis. What you apparently have to be to get away with phucking a child.
Levy is clearly in the minority on this topic, even in France. A loud, obnoxious, and elitist minority.
Is this a cultural thing? Should I understand that it's perfectly legal to drug, rape, and sodomize underage girls in France?
Neither ism nor ysm is right. "McCarthy era" is fine. "McCarthyist" works too.
Hounded as he has been by womb-ridden hicks, the poor man may yet expire of an aortic mccarthysm.
I read the testimony, and rather than risk impregnating her, he considerately had his mccarthysm anally.
WV - outticlu - what any of the American unwashed like me are with- in posting about this matter.
"...this man who has never stopped pouring contempt upon Americans, hounding us through hatred..."
Huh? BHL in 2003:
The real problem today, the most burning, the one I doubt which is being taken with the necessary seriousness at the Elysee Palace or the Quai d'Orsay and within the political class, is that mad, unbounded, Pavlovian anti-Americanism which is currently surging across the world and in which one sees with alarm, here and there, France taking up the role of the standard-bearer.
Must we repeat what this phobic hatred of America has represented in our political culture?
Must we repeat how, from the extreme right to the extreme left, this hatred has always been one of the points of contact with the worst French ideology has been seen to produce?
Must we be reminded, taking the 1920s and 1930s alone, that it is the hatred of America for itself, which is the central article of the first French fascist programme, that of Georges Valois? Must we be reminded of the Anglophile Drieu falling into degradation the precise moment he chose to recognize, in Anglo-Saxon culture, the evil virus of the Aryan spirit? Must we return to the history of our national communists meeting the other extreme, even fusing with it, each time they yielded to the temptation to sum up in the mere word "America" everything they found detestable in this world? Must we call to mind the dark times of that other Belin-Moscow-Paris axis which, at the moment of the French defeat, was already preaching the rejection of an America which had become another name for Jews and black music, cosmopolitanism and wops, nascent Gaullism, democracy and liberty?
In a certain way, that's where we are at...
...Not that the real America does not deserve to be criticized, called into question, even confronted...
But the hatred of the other America, the one which is in our heads and is turning them feverish, is currently rediscovering, not only in France but in the whole world, its role an attractor of the worst, as a magnet for the very darkest elements in the passions of the moment.
Globally, the times are returning when, when hysterical crowds burn American flags or effigies of George Bush, it is not Bush they have in mind, nor the policies of the State Department, but an "internal America" (the phrase is from another French fascist of the 1930s, Robert Brasillach) where everything the fanatical haters of the West execrate with the utmost virulence is concentrated.
The times are returning, yes, of an anti-Americanism which is no longer a theme like any other participating, with others, in one ideology or another, but an ideology entire in itself, maybe the last, in which, as in a cauldron, all the scattered remains of the most disturbing discourses of the moment come to be fused: Islamisms, anti-Semitisms, various historical denials, hatred of the other and of the distant, sovereignisms and chauvinisms, anti-globalisms, the regressions of identity politics.
And I believe that France, in the matter, obviously has a role to play--I believe that our country which knows, better than any other, to what it is returning would do itself an honour, on this point, to speak against the current.
Having oneself applauded at Algiers is very nice. Having the confidence of the Arab world is very nice. And so much the better...if we manage to reintroduce the United Nations into the great game of post-war Iraq.
But at the same time we must say to those who are listening to us: beware of anti-Americanism; beward of that terrible, murderous passion, which we know so well because we invented it; let the people beware of the bad shephards who, rather than buckling down to the tasks of the new century, have not done with reinventing that all too convenient scapegoat, the alibi for their own failures, their abnegations, their acts of cowardice; and let these demagogues know, in any case, that there exists another France, that of the Enlightenment and the rights of man, to which their dubious crusade cannot lay claim.
See also:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4585027
And:
http://www.digitalnpq.org/global_services/global%20viewpoint/02-04-03levy.html
I'm sorry, but I guess I forgot who was the victim here. It was Polanski all along?
How droll.
California is a sane place where children are safe next to France?
Palladian said, "Oh I thought Levy was writing that about Barack Obama till I clicked through.
Wv: phamis. What you apparently have to be to get away with phucking a child."
I'm guessing many people think this is funny. What a bunch of over phucking privileged and ignorant remarks.
"Nothing will erase the immense, unbelievable injustice he has been subjected to."
No, but getting fucked up the ass by his cellmate, Bo, might give him some perspective.
BHL is a lightweight whose thoughts are better left ignored. He is the Camille Paglia of France.
Ppo Mmi, regarding your quoting:
Yes--AND Polanski still did what he did, and then ran away and dodged for decades.
Yes--AND Lévy's wrong, not to mention both overwrought and (yes) fatuous, on this one.
Ppo Mmi, how does, and more important why should, Lévy's--or, for that matter Polanski's--achievements, even brilliance, in one area *necessarily* function as a free pass in another?
sometimes I thiink--no doubt unfairly--that for the left, all moral judgments are in one way or another a form of self-entitlement.
reader_iam,
It doesn't, nor should it. I was only responding to the mischaracterization of BHL as someone "who has never stopped pouring contempt upon Americans, hounding us through hatred as if we were living the darkest and most ferocious hours of the McCarthyism."
sometimes I thiink--no doubt unfairly--that for the left, all moral judgments are in one way or another a form of self-entitlement.
Actually, for the left, all moral judgments are fluid and self-serving. The moral back-bone of the left can be described in one word:
Whatever.
but then again he could have served 15-20 years in a horrid prison, been raped and beaten all the time, tossed out on the street to make his way but always having to stay away from children and register so everyone knew where he was living and warned....
so please don't glorify a child molester. just give him his turn at justice.
More violence. Violence in perpetuity.
We watch Mad Men and are both facinated and horrified by 1963; but in many ways, France is still 1963.
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