France’s Macron denounces nationalism as a ‘betrayal of patriotism’ in rebuke to Trump at WWI remembrance

Macron image (from video in text)

By David Nakamura ,Seung Min Kim andJames McAuley, The Washington Post

November 11 at 12:20 PM; original article contains videos; see also: "In an exclusive interview on Fareed Zakaria GPS, French President Emmanuel Macron said he prefers having direct discussion' rather than discussing diplomacy through tweets with President Donald Trump. His remarks came hours after Trump, who had just landed in Paris, used twitter to criticize Macron for proposing days earlier that more European military cooperation would be a good thing (CNN)

PARIS — In the shadow of a grand war memorial here, French President Emmanuel Macron marked the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I by delivering a forceful rebuke against rising nationalism, calling it a “betrayal of patriotism” and warning against “old demons coming back to wreak chaos and death.”

His words during a solemn Armistice Day ceremony under overcast skies at the foot of the Arc de Triomphe in the heart of the French capital were intended for a global audience. But they also represented a pointed rebuke to President Trump, Russian President Vladi­mir Putin and others among the more than 60 world leaders in attendance.

Speaking in French, Macron emphasized a global order based on liberal values is worth defending against those who have sought to disrupt that system. The millions of soldiers who died in the Great War fought to defend the “universal values” of France, he said, and to reject the “selfishness of nations only looking after their own interests. Because patriotism is exactly the opposite of nationalism.”

[As the world marks 100 years since the end of WWI, nationalism is on the rise again]

Macron has attempted to stand as a vocal counterweight to Trump, who recently called himself a “nationalist” and has moved to set the United States apart from global treaties, including the Iran nuclear deal, the Paris climate accord and a U.N. program for refugees.

Amid growing divisions in Europe that have strained the European Union, Macron defended that institution and the United Nations, declaring the “spirit of cooperation” has “defended the common good of the world.”

Morocco's King Mohammed VI, far left, first lady Melania Trump, President Trump, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron attend a commemoration ceremony for Armistice Day. (Benoit Tessier/POOL/EPA-EFE)

“By putting our own interests first, with no regard for others, we erase the very thing that a nation holds dearest, and the thing that keeps it alive: its moral values,” Macron said.

He denounced fringe ideologies that have become more mainstream, warping religious beliefs and setting loose extremist forces on a “sinister course once again that could undermine the legacy of peace we thought we had forever sealed.”

The powerful remarks came as the world leaders gathered here have sought to mark the 100 years since the war by honoring those who served and died. Among those who participated were German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 

British Prime Minister Theresa May did not attend, remaining in London to preside over a war remembrance there, though she visited France last week to lay wreaths at military cemeteries and meet with Macron. Chinese President Xi Jinping also was not present.

[Critics pile on after Trump cancels visit to U.S. military cemetery outside Paris, citing weather] speech honoring WWI soldiers, Trump 

Putin told Russia’s RT network after the ceremony that he and Trump spoke during a leaders’ luncheon, but a formal meeting would wait until they cross paths at the Group of 20 Summit in Buenos Aries later this month. Putin said he and Trump agreed to a request from French officials not to overshadow the war remembrance ceremony.

“We are ready for dialogue,” said Putin, adding a dig at the Trump administration for announcing the United States would exit a landmark Cold War arms treaty. “We’re not the ones exiting the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.” 

Ahead of the ceremony, dozens of world leaders dressed in black strode shoulder-to-shoulder along the Champs-Elysees toward the Arc. Military jets streaked overhead, emitting red, white and blue smoke, the colors of France.

Trump and Putin did not participate in the processions. The group, which had first gathered at the Elysee Palace, had come to the Arc on tour buses along the 230-foot wide boulevard. Bells at Notre Dame cathedral tolled at 11 a.m., marking the signing of the armistice of a war in which 10 million military troops perished.

But Trump and Putin took their own motorcades to the event and made separate entrances a few minutes after the main group. A White House spokeswoman said Trump arrived separately due to “security protocols,” though she did not elaborate.

Trump and Putin shook hands with leaders, assembled on risers at the foot of the monument, and took their positions. Trump and first lady Melania Trump took spots next to Merkel, while Putin stood next to Macron.

The ceremony could begin.

To the sound of a military brass band, Macron inspected French troops standing at attention and a choir sang the national anthem. Cellist Yo-Yo Ma performed a solo piece.

For Trump, dressed in a dark blue suit and red tie, the ceremony marked the beginning of a day in which he also attended a luncheon with world leaders and then delivered a speech at the Suresnes American Cemetery and Memorial — a day after he skipped a visit to a different cemetery.

At Suresnes, Trump ditched an umbrella and spoke in the rain for 10 minutes, at one point joking the crowd was “getting drenched.”

“It is our duty to preserve the civilization they defended,” Trump said of the 1,541 buried there. “We renew our sacred obligation to memorialize our fallen heroes.”

He did not address Macron’s speech. 

The relationship between Trump and Macron has soured as the U.S. president has promoted an “America First” foreign policy that has unsettled allies on trade and defense. Macron has sought to counter some of Trump’s agenda, and he has organized a three-day Peace Forum that began Sunday afternoon, just as Trump headed home to Washington on Air Force One.

[The Broken Bromance? The Trump-Macron relationship is on the rocks.]

For European observers, the commemoration was a somber event — and not exclusively because of the dead it honored.

In a climate of resurgent nationalism — which has seen upheavals in Rome, Budapest, Warsaw and even London — Macron was alone on the dais, preaching the virtues of multilateralism. Merkel, his most loyal partner in this endeavor, has announced she will soon leave public life.

“Franco-German reconciliation was at the very heart of what we’ve been seeing together,” said Dominique Moïsi, a French foreign policy expert at the Paris-based Institute Montaigne and an informal adviser to the Macron campaign.

“But she’s out,” he said of Merkel, who announced she will step down in 2021. “The spirit in which we are commemorating the events is no longer fully present.”

Macron’s speech was full of literary allusions, including to the French poets Guillaume Apollinaire and Charles Péguy, both of whom served in World War I. (Péguy was killed in combat in 1914.)

Sunday’s address also contained a number of historical rebukes. He made a subtle reference to a well-known 1927 French book that decried the elites at the time, who embraced reactionary, nationalistic ideologies at the expense of a rational consensus. 

Taking the stage to applause at the Paris Peace Forum later Sunday, Macron avoided presenting the weekend’s event as a success. Instead, he said history would remember the image of multiple world leaders whose countries were once at war gathered in peace under the Arc.

The question, Macron said, was how that image would be interpreted.

“Will it be the symbol of a durable peace among nations?” he asked. “Or, on the contrary, a photograph of a final moment of unity before the world descends into a new disorder?”

Anton Troianovski in Moscow contributed to this report.

Why the French Don't Show Excitement

By Emily Monaco, 5 November 2018, bbc.com

When I was 19 years old, after five years of back-and-forth trips that grew longer each time, I finally relocated officially from the United States to France. Already armed with a fairly good grasp of the language, I was convinced that I would soon assimilate into French culture.

Of course, I was wrong. There’s nothing like cultural nuance to remind you who you are at your core: my Americanness became all the more perceptible the longer I remained in France, and perhaps no more so than the day a French teacher told me his theory on the key distinction between those from my native and adopted lands.

“You Americans,” he said, “live in the faire [to do]. The avoir [to have]. In France, we live in the être [to be].”

Writer Emily Monaco was told that the key difference between Americans and the French is that the 
French ‘live in the être’ 

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The moment he said it, it made perfect sense. I thought back to my life in New York, where every moment was devoted to checking tasks off a perpetual to-do list or planning for the days, weeks and years to come. In France, however, people were perfectly contented to just be.

During two-hour lunch breaks, they sat at sidewalk cafes and watched the world pass them by. Small talk was made up not of what they did for a living, but where they had recently been on holiday. Women working at the post office chatted lazily with one another as the queue ticked slowly forward, enjoying the company of their co-workers while I impatiently waited to buy stamps so that I could fulfil my self-assigned obligation of sending postcards home.

I wanted very badly to blend in and live in the être, but it was harder than it looked. It seemed that no matter what I did, I exposed myself as an American. I smiled too much. I spoke too loudly. And I got excited way too often.

In France, people are perfectly content just to be

I knew before moving that the French word ‘excité’ was verboten. It is one of the first ‘false friends’ that a student of the language becomes aware of. Most French learners can recall the day that a classmate first uttered the phrase ‘Je suis excité’ (which literally translates as ‘I am excited’) only to have their teacher hem and haw uncomfortably before explaining that the word excité doesn’t signal emotional but rather physical excitement. A better translation of the phrase Je suis excité into English would be ‘I am aroused’.

French doesn’t have the excited/aroused lexical pair that English does, so one word does both jobs. Excité technically denotes excitement both “objective (a state of stimulation) and subjective (feelings),” according to Olivier Frayssé, professor of American Civilization at Paris-Sorbonne University, but the physical sensation is the one most often implied. “If ‘aroused’ existed, it would be unnecessary to interpret ‘excité’ this way,” he explained.

Our cooler, calmer, more reticent sides come out when we're speaking French

Anglophones, meanwhile, blessed with both words, are free to use ‘excited’ as we please – which we (particularly Americans) do with reckless abandon. We’re excited for our weekend plans, for the summer holiday, to get home after a long day of work and relax in front of our favourite Netflix show. But English speakers who live in France have no way to express this sentiment in the language of our adopted country. As opposed to other false friends – like ‘Je suis pleine’, which means not ‘I’m full’, as its literal translation suggests, but ‘I’m pregnant’, forcing Francophones to use periphrases like ‘J’ai assez mangé’ (‘I’ve eaten enough’) – not only is ‘Je suis excité’ not the appropriate way to convey excitement, but there seems to be no real way to express it at all.

“I usually say ‘Je suis heureuse’ [‘I’m happy’] or ‘J’ai hâte de’ [‘I’m looking forward to’],” one bilingual friend said. Neither quite captures the intensity of excitement, but it seems these are the best substitutes that French has to offer.

“I think it's safe to say I express excitement often and outwardly,” said bilingual Australian Dr Gemma King, who teaches French language and cinema at the Australian National University in Canberra, noting that when she speaks French, it is another story entirely. “My students and I often joke that our cooler, calmer, more reticent sides come out when we're speaking French,” she said.

Not only is ‘Je suis excité’ not the appropriate way to convey excitement in France, but there seems
 to be no real way to express it at all

This is not, then, a mere question of translation, but rather a question of culture. Like other untranslatable terms like Japan’s shinrin-yoku (the relaxation gained from being around nature) or dadirri (deep, reflective listening) in aboriginal Australian, it seems as though the average French person doesn’t need to express excitement on the day to day.

For Julie Barlow, Canadian co-author of The Story of French and The Bonjour Effect, this is largely due to the implied enthusiasm in the word ‘excited’, something that’s not sought after in French culture. She notes that Francophone Canadians, culturally North American rather than French, find work-arounds such as ‘Ça m’enthousiasme’ (‘It enthuses me’).

“[The French] don't appreciate in conversation a kind of positive, sunny exuberance that's really typical of Americans and that we really value,” Barlow explained. “Verbally, ‘I'm so excited’ is sort of a smile in words. French people prefer to come across as kind of negative, by reflex.

My French husband agrees.

“If you’re too happy in French, we’re kind of wondering what’s wrong with you,” he said. “But in English, that’s not true.”

Julie Barlow: “The French don't appreciate in conversation a kind of positive, sunny exuberance
 that's really typical of Americans”

For some, however, it’s not necessarily negativity that the French seek, but reserve.

“I think there is something cultural about the greater level of reservation French people tend to show in everyday conversation,” Dr King said. “From my perspective, it doesn't mean they show less enthusiasm, but perhaps less of an emotional investment in things they are enthusiastic about.”

Indeed, those who are unable to show the proper emotional detachment within French society can even be perceived as being somehow deranged, something that is exemplified by the pejorative labelling of former President Nicolas Sarkozy as ‘l’excité’, due to the zeal he shows in public appearances.

The average French person does not need to express excitement on a day-to-day basis 

American Matt Jenner lived in France for several years and is bilingual. For him, it is not necessarily a matter of the French not being able to express their excitement, but rather that English speakers – and Americans in particular – tend to go overboard. The American public, he says, has been trained “to have a fake, almost cartoonish view on life, in which superficial excitement and false happiness are the norm.” By comparison, he notes, in France, “excitement is typically shown only when it is truly meant.”

Authenticity has been important to the French since the Revolution, according to Brice Couturier at France Culture. “The Ancien Régime, indeed, had cultivated a culture of the court and of salons, based on the art of appearances and pleasing,” he said. “This culture implied a great mastery of the behavioural codes of the time, as well as an ability to conceal one’s true emotions.”

Excitement is typically shown only when it is truly meant

In reaction, Couturier continued, the French revolutionaries fought back against these masks and this hypocrisy – something that the French maintain today by expressing their emotions as truthfully as possible to avoid appearing inauthentic.

This tendency was something that irked me when I first noticed it: French friends saying that a dish they tried in a restaurant was just ‘fine’, or shrugging nonchalantly when I asked if they were looking forward to their holiday. Their attitude struck me as unnecessarily negative. But on our first joint visit to the US, my husband opened my eyes to the somewhat forced hyperbole of American excitement. After our server cheerfully greeted us at a restaurant, he asked if she was a friend of mine; he could think of no other reason why her welcome would be so enthusiastic.

“I used to judge Americans because I thought they were always too ecstatic, always having disproportionate reactions,” he told me years later, though now, he added, “I feel like I have two worlds in my head, one in French and one in English. I feel like the English world is a lot more fun than the French one.”

The French express their emotions as truthfully as possible to avoid appearing inauthentic 

After 11 years of living in France, my innate desire to say “Je suis excitée” has faded. But I still fixate on the idea that the French live in the être.

When we were first dating, my husband used to watch me buzzing around like a busy bee, making plans for the future. He, meanwhile, was able to find not excitement, but contentment, in nearly everything. His frequent motto, whether we were drinking rosé in the sunshine or just sitting in a park, was: “on est bien, là” – we are good, here.

Excitement, after all, has a forward-thinking connotation, a necessary suggestion of the future. Ubiquitous in Anglophone culture, where we are often thinking about imminent or far-off plans, about goals and dreams, this is far less present among French people who, on the contrary, tend to live more in the moment. It’s not necessarily that they don’t think of the future but that they don’t fixate on the future. They consider it, cerebrally, but their emotions are in the present.

While English speakers often fixate on the future, French people tend to live more
 in the moment

“Life in France places you happily in the present tense,” Paris-based author Matthew Fraser told The Local, “unlike in Anglo-Protestant countries where everything is driving madly towards the future.”

Life in France places you happily in the present tense

The excitement that drives Anglophones to action, motivating us and driving us to look ahead is not nearly as present in France. But joie de vivre and contentment in simple pleasures certainly are. And when one is living in the moment, there’s no need to think about – or get excited about – what’s next.

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More on the illusion of cyberutopia ...

A Twitter sign outside of the company’s headquarters in San Francisco.

 (Jeff Chiu/AP)

By Manal al-Sharif, The Washington Post, November 9; see also (among an infinite number of examples) (1) (2) (3)

Manal al-Sharif, a Saudi women’s rights activist, is the author of “Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman’s Awakening.”

In May 2011, the secret police took me from my home in Saudi Arabia in the middle of the night, while my 5-year-old son was sleeping. I might have disappeared without a trace — if it wasn’t for one brave witness, Omar Aljohani, who took the risk of live-tweeting the details of the incident.

Twitter, the platform that once saved my life, is now putting it in danger. The events in the weeks following Jamal Khashoggi’s murder inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul showed that the lives of other journalists and activists are also at risk. Seven years after Twitter saved me, I recently made the choice to delete my Twitter account live on stage in front of an audience of 1,000 people. I had more than 295,000 followers, and I am disconnecting from them  for good.

I lived under Saudi Arabia’s totalitarian absolute monarchy, where the state controlled the air we breathe. Social media platforms created unprecedented opportunity for us to vent. And while the state tried its utmost to censor every new technology, including the Internet, it couldn’t do the same with social media platforms. Such platforms were out of their control, at least for a few years. One of my friends tweeted to me back in 2011 when Twitter became the symbol for freedom in Saudi Arabia: “I feel embarrassed that it took me watching mom joining twitter and follow your campaign before I [joined] too.” People joined these platforms to engage in causes they believed in. The Arab Social Media report has shown year after year how Saudi Arabia is the No. 1 Arab nation in the number of active Twitter users and daily tweets.

Once totalitarian governments realized the power of these tools, they opted to use them. Repressive governments use weapons of mass surveillance, manipulate the dialogue and push their own version of the story. Researchers have shown how the government of Saudi Arabia effectively shaped and molded the Twitter discourse by buying trolls and bots, while directly or indirectly threatening, harassing or arresting and jailing those who were influencers and didn’t speak favorably of the government. 

Twitter has became full of harassment, death threats, intimidation and false news for us who have chosen to speak out in the Arab world. Twitter has not enacted any real change in making Twitter safer for us, which has pushed so many I know to quit the platform. Still, I continued to voice my views there. I believed that those governments should be the ones to be afraid, not us. I believed that I finally had a voice, and that I should use it.

But things changed dramatically last year, when the Saudi government launched a crackdown on Twitter influencers in the kingdom. Saud al-Qahtani, the head of the Saudi Union for Cyber Security and Programming and a former adviser to the Saudi crown prince, is believed to be behind the Saudi cyber army, or as we human rights activists like to call them, “the Electronic Flies.” He launched a “Black List” hashtag last year after the Saudi embargo on Qatar, urging Twitter users to point out any account that sympathized with Qatar.

A number of prominent Twitter voices were pressured to take down their accounts or stop tweeting. We found out later that some had been arrested and thrown in jail under the guise of counter-terrorism. One of these Twitter personalities was Essam Al-Zamel, an entrepreneur and economist who criticized Aramco’s initial public offering and has now been charged with terrorism.

Some of those who have escaped the arrests were either contacted by phone or summoned and forced to sign pledges promising not to tweet. That same month, I received two phone calls on my Australian number from a member of the National Security, who was demanding the same from me. I refused to remain silent and continued tweeting about Saudi issues. During the same period, activists began to learn that the National Security was building cases against more Twitter users. Many of them started deleting the archives of their tweets. But the danger does not stop for us there because, even after tweets are deleted, Twitter’s website does not mention whether those same tweets are deleted from the archives, or whether the deleted tweets are still accessible to developers.

And while some anonymous Twitter accounts initially went on challenging the authorities, they suddenly went quiet in March this year. According to the New York Times, the Saudi intelligence services had infiltrated them through an insider in Twitter named Ali Alzabarah (A spokesman for Twitter declined to comment to the Times). Turki Aljasser, a columnist who was believed to be the owner of one such account,  was arrested on March 15. I have been contacted in person by anonymous individuals who confirmed the disappearance of the man behind @Sama7ti, another account that refused to back down despite pressure from authorities. (I also know the man’s full identity.)

When I followed Twitter trends in Saudi Arabia and worldwide in the weeks after Jamal Khashoggi’s disappearance, things became clear. In the first week, while the rest of the world was using the #JamalKhashoggi hashtag, the trending hashtags in Saudi Arabia were #Kidnapping_Ant_and_Cockroach and #Aljamal_Jamal_Alrouh, which translates to “Beauty consists in the beauty of the soul.” There were so many tweets with these hashtags that they effectively drowned out any hashtag with the word Jamal, which translates to “beauty” in English. For two weeks, while the rest of the world was entering a frenzy about Khashoggi’s disappearance and possible murder, it felt as though the Saudis were living in a bubble. When Saudi officials finally cracked under pressure and acknowledged the murder in late October, the third-most trending hashtag was the Arabic phrase, “I am Arab and Mohammed bin Salman represents me.” That day, it became evident to me that we had lost these social media platforms to the dictators.

Twitter, which was once a tool to change the discourse, give voice to the voiceless and push for social justice, is now becoming a trap — one that is used by our regimes to haunt and silence us. It is being used to propagate misinformation and spread regime propaganda on a greater scale than ever before. And although Twitter finally suspended 70 million fake and malicious accounts in May snf June of  this year, this action is still not enough.

I am pleading tech makers to build decentralized social media platforms that don’t store and sell our information, platforms that are built on the concept of fair use, and to reward authentic and organic content, instead of rewarding bots and fake accounts. They should not allow the powerful and wealthy to manipulate and dominate the conversation. Because freedom of speech safeguards all other freedoms, and it’s our responsibility to protect it.

The 2018 midterms told a tale of two weak parties - Note for a Discussion, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United."

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) listen as President Trump speaks on Capitol Hill in January. (Evan Vucci/AP)

By Yuval Levin, Washington Post, November 7

Yuval Levin is editor of National Affairs and vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

In the wake of an election, we naturally tend to be struck by the strength of the winning side. Who now has momentum in our politics, and what sort of mandate have they won? But the peculiar mixed result of Tuesday’s midterms should help us see the distinct and troubling character of our politics now: It is the weakness of all sides, and the strength of none, that shapes this moment.

This was evident in 2016, too. Both major-party presidential candidates were broadly unappealing people, and each was well-suited to lose. The question was who would turn off more voters. The binary character [JB emphasis] of presidential elections left us looking for explanations of the outcome in President Trump’s distinct strengths, but when you examine his razor-thin victory in a few decisive states, it’s his opponent’s weakness that really tells the tale. And Trump has since governed as a weak president alongside a weak Congress.

Tuesday’s elections revealed the same pattern. Republicans had a very friendly Senate map, with 10 Democrats facing reelection in states that Trump won handily. Republicans walked away with roughly three more seats, giving them a slightly less narrow majority in a body that still requires 60 votes for real legislative work. Meanwhile in the House, the Democrats had an opportunity for major gains throughout the country, but they made modest gains in friendly suburbs — winning almost exclusively districts that Hillary Clinton won two years ago.

In essence, each party won some marginal voters powerfully turned off by the other, but neither found a way to meaningfully broaden its coalition — which is what it would take to really show strength.

Each party has fallen into the comfortable habit of attributing its weakness to factors outside its control. Democrats insist they have a robust popular majority but that our constitutional architecture prevents the institutions from reflecting it. Purer majoritarianism, they argue, would prove the country is on their side. But by requiring overlapping majorities of different kinds, our institutions are designed to reflect the multilayered complexity of our society, compelling governing coalitions to reach out and broaden their appeals. The Democrats’ persistent inability to do that is not an argument against the Constitution.

Republicans, meanwhile, insist the bulk of the country would be with them if not for a sliver of urban elites using the powerful institutions they dominate (from media outlets to universities to culturally liberal corporations) to distort reality and shut down debate. But city dwellers are no less American than rural voters. And letting a party devolve into a frantic cult of personality around a recklessly divisive narcissist who turns off persuadable suburbanites is the fault of no one except those who do it.

To win and give direction to our politics, a party would need to build a relatively broad and durable coalition. But while the results of this election show the need for that, they do not make it more likely. The incentives of a divided Congress will drive each party to do what it can on its own — with House Democrats focusing on fighting Trump and Senate Republicans becoming full-time judicial confirmers.

The two parties now resemble their respective leaders, presumptive House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Trump: They are like two polarizing septuagenarians stuck doubling down on their inadequacies. One is a clever political tactician but blind to the intensity of her own parochialism. The other has an instinctive sense for the frustrations of working-class voters but is unable to escape his own darkest impulses or see the appeal of a welcoming tone and agenda.

Each party, like its leader, is seemingly unaware of how it appears to the larger society and so is guilty of inexcusable political malpractice. They are weak, and the resulting politics is best described as exhausted and exhausting.

We should be careful not to attribute this weakness to some unalterable polarization in our country. We are surely divided these days. But that division calls for creative, energetic political leadership — and such leadership could build real coalitions. Our institutions are designed to enable that. Frustrated voters could be far more open to it than cynical political professionals imagine.

We seem to be living at the end of a distinct phase in our politics but not yet at the beginning of a new one. This is an enormous opportunity for the party able to seize it, and yet for now, neither appears eager to try.