Quotulatiousness

October 11, 2019

The National Basketball Appeasement Association

Filed under: Business, Cancon, China, History, Liberty, Politics, Sports, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Colby Cosh discusses the moral squalor, cowardice, avarice, and reflex appeasement gesturing of the NBA and finds a Canadian angle to the whole mess:

The National Basketball Association has spent the week trying to control the effects of a tweet by Daryl Morey, general manager of the Houston Rockets, who jeopardized his job on Friday when he told readers “Fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong.” The tweet winked out of existence quickly, but it had prodded a sore spot. Morey faced immediate criticism from the Rockets’ owner and from the Chinese consul in Houston. Steps were taken within China to declare the Rockets personae non gratae and to cancel some NBA broadcasts.

[…]

Which leads to us to the true Canadian angle, copyright Colby J. Cosh 2019 (all rights reserved). Daryl Morey’s tweet was the 21st century’s “Vive le Quebec libre.”

All right, Morey isn’t a statesman, as de Gaulle was — but the NBA itself wants us to believe that it is a force for international harmony, and Morey is a prominent figure in the NBA. There is an amusing subplot here in that Morey has traditionally been regarded as an outsider in the league, a computer nerd who barged his way in by using technical analytics to improve team performance both on the court and at the gate. The natural assumption of a person who went to university in the 1990s is that he would be perfectly free as a matter of course to blurt out a political opinion — one that is in no way remotely controversial in the free world — on Twitter. Well, we are all learning to revise such assumptions.

When General de Gaulle uttered the 1967 version of an ill-advised, impulsive tweet, it created a small spasm of anger in English Canada, as Morey’s endorsement of an increasingly separatist protest movement in Hong Kong has. (Chinese sovereignty in Hong Kong is supposed to be as much an accepted fact as Canadian sovereignty in Quebec, and from the Party point of view, the Hong Kong protests are internal civil disorder. The same, of course, would go for China’s re-education camps full of Uyghurs, who represent the fate that pro-democracy Hong Kongers are trying to avert.)

But it was the Canadian political establishment that de Gaulle really provoked to rage with his sly, ambivalent remark. It was seen as an offence against hospitality. Canada’s mandarins — pardon the inadvertent pun — knew that de Gaulle’s resounding “liiibre” would give, above all, moral impetus to the enemies of Confederation. This proved to be the case, as far as history can tell. Et donc — vive Hong Kong! Vive Hong Kong libre!

June 7, 2019

QotD: Ruling France

Filed under: France, Government, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

From the French Revolution in 1789 to the ascension of Charles de Gaulle in 1958, France had an absolute monarchy, three constitutional monarchies, a directory, a consulate, two empires with one restoration, four republics, two provisional governments, a government in exile, and the hobnailed jackboot of Nazi occupation: 17 distinct regimes in 169 years.

De Gaulle, with his Fifth Republic, appeared to have settled the ancient argument between the monarchists and the republicans by creating a monarchy and calling it a republic. But the presidents of that republic — de Gaulle, Pompidou, Giscard d’Estaing, Mitterand, Chirac, Sarkozy, Hollande — have been a downward sequence. Each was at least slightly, and sometimes sharply, less talented than his predecessor.

In 2017, in utter exasperation, France embraced a 39-year old former banker and senior financial civil servant who had no more sought elective office than had Donald Trump before running for president, Emmanuel Macron. He achieved the office not by gaining control of a political party; French political parties are very fluid and rise and disappear and change their names every few years, but by standing as an independent and setting up a new party of rank political amateurs as legislators. It was magnificent in the country of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other triumphant theorists. It ran on a euphoric platform: a green revolution, lower taxes, a better social benefit system, completed unification of Europe, stronger armed forces, everything that was desirable and the quick elimination of all that was not.

The predictable happened and Macron is now diminished by the incoherent rioting every weekend of mobs of angry bourgeois crabbing about taxes, reinforced by outright hooligans, all wearing the silly yellow vests all French drivers are required to have in their automobiles so they can put them on to signify an emergency. It is that splendid French combination of the perfect goal and the absurd result.

Conrad Black, “What’s the Matter With Europe?”, New English Review, 2019-05-06.

April 15, 2019

QotD: De Gaulle and the BBC

Filed under: Britain, France, History, Media, Quotations, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Above all he loved France, or the idea of it. He saw in the defeat of 1940 a danger that his country would simply disappear, having failed to defend itself and having fled from the battle without properly drawing its sword. This was not a foolish fear. Great civilizations can and do vanish, and one of the best ways of doing so is to abandon the struggle to survive.

He must have greatly resented the fact that he owed so much to Britain. He was intelligent enough to know that Britain, a country few Frenchmen can ever fully trust, was his best hope and only refuge. He understood, as many French patriots could not, that the terrible attack on the French fleet by the British Navy at ­Mers-el-­Kébir in 1940 was in fact necessary, in case its great ships fell into the hands of the Germans. He would have done the same himself had the position been reversed, and he knew it. It was this generosity of mind that made him great. But how he must have loathed being dependent on the British Broadcasting Corporation for his access to the French people. For it was the BBC that made him. Until he finally appeared for the tumultuous, ecstatic liberation of Paris in 1944, he was only a voice, heard fleetingly on illegal broadcasts. Almost nobody in France had the faintest idea what he looked like. But all had a certain idea of de Gaulle, the spirit of France that refused to surrender. And when they finally saw this towering, ­fearless figure walking calmly down the Champs-Élysées amid the snipers’ bullets, he did not disappoint them. He was, it turned out, a giant so tall that one could imagine ice forming on his upper slopes when—as so often ­happened—he was annoyed or impatient with his people. His great height set him apart from the ­beginning. He once complained, “We ­giants are never at ease with others … the armchairs are always too small, the tables too low, the impression one makes too strong.”

Peter Hitchens, “A Certain Idea of France”, First Things, 2019-04.

March 15, 2019

Charles De Gaulle

Filed under: France, History, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Colby Cosh linked to an interesting Peter Hitchens review of a recent biography of Charles De Gaulle (De Gaulle by Julian Jackson):

General Charles de Gaulle, Commander of Free French Forces, seated at his desk in London during the Second World War.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

When it came to what de Gaulle thought was the pivotal moment in his life, when he could become virtual monarch of France under conditions chosen wholly by himself, he was as ruthless as Lenin. He had, it is often said, a “certain idea of France.” But the ultra-conservative lawyer, Jacques Isorni, whose clients included the collaborationist Vichy leader Marshal Philippe Pétain and de Gaulle’s would-be assassin, Jean-­Marie Bastien-Thiry, concluded that it was “an abstract idea of France, indifferent to the sufferings of the French people.” There is something to this. De Gaulle represented the steely warlike France, summoned up by Bonaparte and again a century later at Verdun, for which the French were required to die and mourn uncomplainingly. For him, Paris was well worth a lie or a betrayal, because his supremacy was so essential for the country he loved.

The costs of de Gaulle’s idea of France were high. As the general himself once mused, “There is no action in which the devil has no part.” The two massacres, and the charnel-house stench which clings to them, are evidence of the reliable rule that even — often especially — the greatest and best of men have terrible flaws and can do terrible things; and also of the other rule that power tends to corrupt. I have begun with them because they are a necessary antidote to the feelings of admiration and liking which any reader of this thrilling, witty, ceaselessly moving, beautifully written account of a truly great man is bound to feel.

Charles de Gaulle’s life would perhaps have been better lived in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, in times when personal courage, mystical imagination, chivalry, and religious fervor were more welcome than they are now. In this world of the United Nations, risk assessment, lawyers, Geneva Conventions, television and superpowers, there is not really enough room for such a man to swing his sword, just as there is no room for old-fashioned great powers in the shadow of superpowers. Had he not been so magnificent, he would have been ridiculous. He looked, more than anything else, like a camel, not least because of the superior expression on his face suggesting that he alone knew the secret One Hundredth Name of God, which camels are supposed to know.

He was filled with shining, old-fashioned beliefs about honor, courage, shame and humiliation, glory and infamy. And as those who conversed with him found, he was perhaps the last great man to make it his business to know those things that it is proper for a king to know. He could talk fluently with philosophers and literary novelists. He had a minute knowledge of history: not just that of France, but of Europe and the world. After many, many conversations with Winston Churchill, a large number of them furious quarrels, he concluded that England’s savior was not in fact very intelligent. He believed wartime, with its austerity and tests of manhood, was more virtuous than peacetime. He believed nothing important could be achieved without recklessness. He stood up to people with considerable courage, even when he was a powerless and lonely figure without soldiers, money, or supporters. He once justified his bloody-minded awkwardness by pointing out that if he were not so difficult, he would himself have been a collaborator. He said “If I were easy to work with, I would be on Marshal Petain’s staff.” He had no time for people like himself. He confessed, “I only esteem those who stand up to me but unfortunately I cannot stand them.”

De Gaulle possessed that great chivalrous virtue of being ready to walk unbowed and defiant in front of the powerful, while being gentle and even submissive to the defenseless and weak. He once became so angry with Churchill that he smashed a chair in his presence to emphasize his rage. Likewise, he defied Franklin Roosevelt over and over again. But he would go home after these battles to sing tender love songs to his daughter Anne, who suffered from Down syndrome. The tiny glimpses we have of this part of his life, obtained from the accidental observations of others, tear at the heart. His concern for Anne was entirely private and not at all feigned. After any long absence from home his first act was to rush up to her room. She died, aged twenty, in his arms. At her funeral, he comforted his wife Yvonne with the words, “Maintenant, elle est comme les autres” (“Now she is like the ­others”), which must be one of the most ­moving things said in the whole twentieth century.

June 8, 2018

D Day – III: La Résistance – Extra History

Filed under: Europe, France, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Extra Credits
Published on 20 Jun 2017

Although the French government surrendered to the German invasion, French people rose up and formed resistance groups to take their country back. Charles de Gaulle and his Free French took advantage of these independent movements to help organize actions that would greatly aid the Allied landings at Normandy.

June 5, 2014

QotD: Churchill, Roosevelt and de Gaulle

Filed under: Europe, France, History, Quotations, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:08

The central problem of relations with de Gaulle stemmed from President Roosevelt’s distrust. Roosevelt saw him as a potential dictator. This view had been encouraged by Admiral Leahy, formerly his ambassador to Marshal Petain in Vichy, as well as several influential Frenchmen in Washington, including Jean Monnet, later seen as the founding father of European unity.

Roosevelt had become so repelled by French politics that in February he suggested changing the plans for the post-war Allied occupation zones in Germany. He wanted the United States to take the northern half of the country, so that it could be resupplied through Hamburg rather than through France. “As I understand it,” Churchill wrote in reply, “your proposal arises from an aversion to undertaking police work in France and a fear that this might involve the stationing of US Forces in France over a long period.”

Roosevelt, and to a lesser extent Churchill, refused to recognize the problems of what de Gaulle himself described as “an insurrectional government”. De Gaulle was not merely trying to assure his own position. He needed to keep the rival factions together to save France from chaos after the liberation, perhaps even civil war. But the lofty and awkward de Gaulle, often to the despair of his own supporters, seemed almost to take a perverse pleasure in biting the American and British hands which fed him. De Gaulle had a totally Franco-centric view of everything. This included a supreme disdain for inconvenient facts, especially anything which might undermine the glory of France. Only de Gaulle could have written a history of the French army and manage to make no mention of the Battle of Waterloo.

Anthony Beevor, D-Day: The Battle for Normandy, 2009.

September 29, 2011

Charles de Gaulle as euro-skeptic

Filed under: Economics, Europe, France, Germany, History — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:13

Conrad Black provides a thumbnail sketch of de Gaulle’s real intentions regarding European integration:

Charles de Gaulle was born in Lille in 1890, to the family of a monarchist schoolteacher. De Gaulle was a Flaubertesque haut bourgeois, as well as an officer of the French army when it was rivaled only by the German army as the greatest in the world, and was unrivaled as the most storied army of all. He was imbued with the middle-class concept of the value of savings, frugality, pay-as-you-go. To him, greatness and security could never be bought or sustained on the installment plan. And mere politicians, whom he considered a lesser breed swimming in a sticky fondue of moral weakness and opportunism, could never be trusted to resist the temptation to pander, devalue, or seek short-term gain.

De Gaulle’s farsightedness was not confined to national projections of household economics; he also warned of the dangers of Euro-integration. He was the chief architect of the Franco-German friendship treaty of 1963, and — as a veteran of the terrible hecatomb of the Battle of Verdun and a World War I prisoner of war of the Germans, as well as the founder of the Free French in World War II — he knew as well as anyone the horrors of the centuries-long conflict along the Rhine. He also favored a common market and the end of violent ancient rivalries among the many European nationalities. But he always saw a homogenized, centralized Europe as a dangerous fantasy. He believed that a Continental interest, composed of as many as 20 or 25 languages and cultures, would be only an alphabet gruel, blended and stirred by faceless bureaucrats from the little countries, and not representing any real popular interest at all.

He thought that the original Common Market of France, West Germany, Italy, and Benelux could be used by France, effectively maneuvering between the U.S. and the USSR, and between Germany and the Russians, to project and amplify France’s — and, more particularly, his own — influence. Up to a point, while the U.S. was mired in Vietnam, and before European Communism became too enfeebled to challenge the West (which de Gaulle also foresaw), he was correct. But he believed that an unlimitedly accessible Europe would become an incoherent Tower of Babel, governed by bureaucratic intermeddlers in the name of feckless politicians, and liable to excessive outside influence, including from the U.S.

H/T to Monty at Ace of Spades HQ for the link.

August 7, 2010

QotD: De Gaulle

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, France, History, Quotations, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

De Gaulle was great because he knew how to act the part. Actually doing great things was someone’s else problem. The heavy lifting of the Second World War was done by the Russian foot soldier and the English speaking powers. Objectively, Canada did more to defeat Hitler than France. Being a nation of citizen soldiers, who desperately wanted to get home, we did our bit and went home. This allowed a prima donna like De Gaulle to take the credit for liberating France. In gratitude, the Liberator then travelled to Montreal, some twenty years later, and thanked Canada by trying to destroy it.

Publius, “The Saviour of the Nation”, Gods of the Copybook Headings, 2010-08-04

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