Saturday, April 22 [2000, note from the webmaster]. There are two different things adored democracies, provided that they come from a potentate classified "progressive" or actually still communist, or at least, at the head of a poor country (ie say, in general, depleted by the potentate in question): These two things are being insulted and being swindled. Thus Vladimir Putin this week, on one side threat: "Europe could pay dearly its position on Chechnya ", on the other accuses the G7 does not pay fast enough money to complete the closure of Chernobyl and the construction of two new reactors in Ukraine.
In exchange, the democratic leaders before him tremble with ecstasy. Blair forced the queen to invite him to tea. He is expected to Paris, let us be certain, our leaders will not be short of flattery - or money, ours, that of citizens. Nobody will ask the new Kremlin-gate, its links with Milosevic mafia, or government networks with Moscow in glove with organized crime. When I
lunch with Hugues Aufray in January, he gave me two books of Elie Faure that I was very pleased to receive a gift because it works by this author I had not read. Discoveries are Archipelago, published in 1929 (so just after the completion of the Art History), and other land in sight, which is 1932. (Elie Faure died in 1937.)
What strikes me in these two texts, also, once again, imitation mimicry that will push up Malraux in Les Voix du silence , sentence faurienne, with waves rising higher each time as the flow on strike, is how, before the war, and since the nineteenth century the explanation of civilization civilizations by race seemed self-evident and does not going to incitement to hatred or discrimination. Discovery in the archipelago , Elie Faure, discoursing on Italy, speaks of the Po basin, which, he says, "for twenty-five centuries, has remained almost completely populated by Celtic scholar brachycephalic, bringing race in Italy its most positive element. " He added: "The whole South is inhabited, as in the same time in Rome by the Greeks and sémitisés melanized, which the Arab element of Sicily could only improve the skills philosophical and it is through them that has crept into the northern and central dissolving this action which helped to corrupt the morals while maintaining the critical faculties and, ultimately, once it has dominated politics, Italy was prepared to servitude. "Apart from the fact
obviously supremely whimsical rantings of these amazing from a doctor who had a background still a very scientific, you imagine the howls that would arise if Umberto Bossi is now allowed to move tenth of such statements in favor of racial superiority Po. A new tribunal at Nuremberg is not too much to crush the infamous. But Elie Faure was not thinking of evil and no one thought to blame him. Is that the Holocaust has not struck any explanation by race, not because it is unverifiable and arbitrary, but because it is regarded as an appeal to racism. The even mention race in France is taboo when you stop an offender. In the last census, the United States, among dozens of questions, the only one that was asked in the forms was: "What is your race? "We could have put a way not open to misunderstanding, for example: "Are you from Europe? Asian? African? Latin American? North American Indian? Middle Eastern? "Without that, how to assess the composition of the population of the United States? Sociological intelligence does not in itself no discriminatory intent.
This consequence of the trauma of the Holocaust - and, to a lesser degree, the fight against anti-black racism in the USA - has created a complete break with the pre-war in this area. And I remember Elijah Faure was during his lifetime, all there is left . Dreyfus militant he wrote in 1898 in L'Aurore an article to support Zola. He is 25 years. At 64, just before his death, his last public act will be to send a letter to Blum to protest against the non-intervention of France alongside English Republicans during the civil war.
Jean-Francois Revel, in Dishes of Season
