The papers are pitching the speech as an attack on President Trump, with Macron saying 'Patriotism good, Nationalism bad' but it was really a little more nuanced than that. It was an explicit plea for the UN, the EU and for collective globalist government. It declared that nations which sacrificed their own interests to the collective good were 'moral' whilst those that did not were a threat to peace. It was as much an attack upon Brexit as Trump.
So eager is the press to portray this speech as a public rebuke for Trump, few have managed to recall what Trump actually said to provoke it. On 22nd October, Trump said "A globalist is a person that wants the globe to do well, frankly not caring about our country so much, and you know what, we can’t have that. I’m a nationalist. OK? I’m a nationalist. Nationalist. Use that word."
Trump went on to say "We’re giving all of our wealth, all of our money, to other countries and then they don’t treat us properly. For many years other countries that are allies of ours... they have not treated our country fairly. So in that sense, I am absolutely a nationalist and I’m proud of it."
Macron raised the spectre of nationalism fomenting war, and praised the role of the EU and UN in the past 70 years in maintaining peace. The same old tripe, in other words, with nary a mention of NATO, or of the costs to nations such as Britain of maintaining an army on the Rhine for forty-three years. Europe's failure to pay for its own defence, and its 'leaching' of US money and goodwill, have also angered President Trump.
I couldn't help but conclude that Macron's whole speech was no more than a chauvinist plea for everyone else to make sacrifices to help France. Without British taxpayers subsidising French farmers, American taxpayers subsidising French defence commitments and German taxpayers paying for France's economic inefficiency, France would return to being the poor, rural, open dungheap and Gites nation of our youth, with squat toilets and tap water unsafe to drink.
Do you know, I actually preferred that France - the crumbly, pavé, Gitanes-tinted formica skintness of her. Better than the global sponger.
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| Surrounded by a sea of Tricolours, Macron criticises Nationalism |
23 comments:
I actually preferred that France - the crumbly, pavé, Gitanes-tinted formica skintness of her. Better than the global sponger.
Moi aussi.
I prefer Italy: disorganised, chaotic, bumbling from one weak government to another, but the Italian people are finally asserting themselves and standing up to the dysfunctional, bullying dictatorial EU.
Unlike the sponging French.
The peace in Europe until now is due to the strength of a US funded NATO, the presence of US troops in Europe and the USSR keeping Germany divided for 44 years.
In 'Decline and Fall', Gibbon spoke of the plight of people who fell out of favour with Octavian/Augustus. Now that he was master of the (Roman) world, where could any dissident Roman go to be beyond his clutches?
Macron, this would-be Octavian, wants a World Government. Where could any person guilty of wrong think go to be beyond its clutches?
I heard Nigel Farage use the (Sarah) Palinesque word "nationism"... A strange allusion considering his public school background, but nonetheless a far more apt description of what I reckon Trump and Brexit are really about.
Rather than flag waving competition or byjingoism, it is a celebration of the wonderful differences that the various tribes invent for themselves.
Cross border trade in goods, services and information should be easy, not be made more difficult by aggressive government. Movement between these countries for people that want adventure, should be straightforward, so-called government dependence should be something that people should stop government trying to foist on an unwitting public and central bureaucracy should be kept to a minimum.
As such, President Trump's idea (don't know how that is going now) of insisting that for every new regulation, at least two have to be removed, is such a great idea, it reduces dependence on bureaucracy.
Vive la difference!
It's the People vs Globalists now, isn't it? The oft-dismissed-as-conspiracy-theory NWO is becoming real in peoples minds and it is being seen for what it is - totalitarianism.
Trump will, at some time soon, have to stand up and expose the Globalists/NWO directly and all pretense of the issue being 'tin foil hat' will be gone.
Will Trump be allowed to do so - indeed, will the likes of Orban et al also be allowed - or will we be seeing a spate of accidents? Maybe a 'last stand' by the Globalist/NWO clique to reverse their losses?
It all points to conflict. And that's without the financial issues yet to be resolved. Add that to it all and war is the only future.
Macron makes no bones about the plans for a Global Government, Merkel has tried to keep it under wraps but her immigration stance has blown her cover. Trump is the cuckoo in the nest.
One could be forgiven for thinking that this is a nationalist move by Macron to salvage some French pride. They need never again surrender on their own.
The European Army would be so named because that's the people they would be controlling. As their Fuhrer said, there's a Farage in every country. Not for much longer.
As their Fuhrer said, John Miller
Actually it was Barnier .
decnine has it - if countries like the UK get absorbed into the technocratic, NGO-driven New World Order, where do people go then for asylum?
I'm coming around to the belief that religious fundamentalism may be our only defence against this ghastly new order.
Frightening thought.
The internet must come up with a sarcasm flag.
Perhaps Jezza could draw one?
Trouble is, I can remember when De Gaulle was muttering "Non" at us whenever we wanted to come and play in Europe's game.
I think he bcame a bit of a bore, and had to back down, so that went swimmingly!
Then Heath screwed us all up big time, and from then on, it was Blair, Major and Brown to finish of the disaster, with Cameron and that idiot Clegg finalising the placing of the deckchairs.
Like many good people above, who have posted about the older French way of life, Senora O'Blene and I would love to revert to those days, with a few glasses of a reasonable white wine at six francs...
But we don't have passports any more so booze-trips are out of the question!
Brexit Trump and Italian budget.
Isn't this really people saying, "We pay an awful, awful lot for something we don't get much benefit from." ?
It appears that employees being chipped like dogs is the new normal. Soon we will all be chipped in order to just buy and sell - the mark of the beast.
BQ said: "We pay an awful, awful lot for something we don't get much benefit from". Indeed.
Thatcher's plan for the EU single market was essentially zero tariffs and mutual recognition of standards: a treaty but no bureaucracy, nor centralisation, nor central (Brussels) government.
We could have had the same benefits for free. And freedom.
I find it very odd that anyone might feel nostalgic for some of the grimmer aspects of France in former times! Except for their perverse importation of millions of Muslims - even more than we have - and the multi-culti propaganda pushed by authority, I like being in the new France very much. In fact I spend around 30% of my year there. Getting to my house starts with a long road trip facilitated by the excellent Autoroutes, distinctly superior (better engineered, far better surfaces) to UK Motorways; and I like the French approach to life. I've often heard Brits asserting that the French are rude, but that's nonsense: they are IME at least as polite as the Brits, more sociable and outgoing too. The climate down South helps, too...
Mr. Macron may like to expand further his “Nationalism is not patriotism” statement to include :
Serfdom is not slavery
War is not conflict
Lawlessness is not chaos
Kinship is not harmony
Elections are not democracy
Self-determination is not freedom
PC and control of the internet is not censorship
For the want of a one eyed nationalistic, patriot, with a telespopic sight.
@Tony Harrison: "Getting to my house starts with a long road trip facilitated by the excellent Autoroutes, distinctly superior (better engineered, far better surfaces)
Enjoy it, you paid for it. Just as my sister-in-law once said "French farms seem so much neater and tidier than English farms"...yep, you paid for that too.
The rude French are in Paris, which isn't France; just as London isn't England/Britain.
"...and the multi-culti propaganda pushed by authority, I like being in the new France very much"
TPTB love you, they wish we were all like you.
The incoherent "patriotism" that is supposed to be so much better than nationalism has spread to Donald Tusk. He is correct though in identifying this movement as a fundamental threat to the EU. As such, I support it.
These fools are really afraid of Salvini, Farage, Orban, Le Pen and countries that have ditched the UN Migration Plan-Hungary, Poland, Austria, Czech Republic, Croatia, Bulgaria realising that a free-for-all gimmegrant plan is definitely not in their nations best interest, having witnessed the disasters of yUK, Sweden, Norway, Germany, France, Belgium, Netherlands.
That the president of the EU has defined nationalists as a threat tells you how deluded these fools are, he goes so far as to call nationalists brownshirts alluding to nazis. We can now be certain that the EU president is a scare-monger, scared to the very core that their socialist experiment has failed and a Ceaucescu moment may yet await these self-important morons who have ruled and stolen from the plebs too long.
Michael commented that "Trouble is, I can remember when De Gaulle was muttering "Non" at us whenever we wanted to come and play in Europe's game.
I think he bcame a bit of a bore, and had to back down, so that went swimmingly!"
The background to De Gaulle's volte-face was entirely predictable. He'd been suffering some domestic problems in the late 1960, involving the French farmers and thought he could buy them off by introducing guaranteed pricing for their produce through the Common Agricultural Policy. France was by far the largest player in the then EEC, so the inevitable implication of the CAP was to impose a significant financial burden on the other 5 members to pay for De Gaulle's deal with his farmers. It was at that point that the other 5 member states insisted that the EEC needed to be enlarged to share the load, hence the original invitation to the UK and Ireland (and Norway) to join the club. Heath was so desperate to join that he, with the support of the UK's establishment and media, misled the public about the wider implications of the European project, but the real reason we joined was that France needed us to pay for its farmers.
"Span Ows": you seem to be saying the French have their priorities right. There's no reason our motorways couldn't be much better, and our roads in general maintained to a standard approaching that of France - if it were given greater national priority. As for the CAP's benefiting French agriculture disproportionately, this has been the case for decades, and successive UK governments failed to do anything about it just as they failed to do anything about correcting other EU excesses or indeed leaving the thing altogether... One cannot blame the French for profiting from the incompetence & weakness of the UK political class.
Mystified by your closing comment, unless it signifies a naïve belief that liking another EU country = liking the EU - a misapprehension drearily equivalent to extreme Remainers' insistence that the Leave vote was driven by xenophobia.
Tony Harrison said: "... successive UK governments failed to do anything about" the CAP.
No, no, surely not? Our strong charismatic Premier Tony Blair reformed the CAP by paying with part of the Thatcher rebate.
Didn't he??
Budgie: thanks for reminding me that the sainted Tony fixed it all, for the bargain price of seven billion quid...
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