[A-List] Fwd: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] False Choices

[Suzanne de Kuyper]

Once upon a time French was the language of diplomacy, the the believer in
the idea of 'le Droit' the Right' or, the Rights of Man, a dream to all
those who have it not, like later when France took over Algeria.  But that
it cannot recognise the end-run we all are deep within gives me more pain
that that is true of my two countries of citizenship, the US and
Netherlands.  France has a type of gallantry about it few others seem to
posses. And unparalleled wealth in the love of intellectual and deep
studied debate, much like Judaism used to have, Islam still does. The
closing down of the French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek and Italian
Universities for the US inspired fiscal depression is an unmitigated
tragedy.  The ranks of those who have no wish to prepare for the real
future will treble. Those brave enough to so debate and plan will be
punished for it.   Suzanne

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Bill Totten <shimogamo at ashisuto.co.jp>
Date: Fri, May 25, 2012 at 1:51 AM
Subject: [R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] False Choices
To: Suzanne de Kuyper <suzannedk at gmail.com>


by Damien Perrotin

A Breton's perspective on the world

The view from Brittany (March 10 2012)

It is election time in France. Five weeks from now, we will elect our
president for the next five years and unless he does something really
stupid, the socialist pretender, Francois Hollande, will win in a landslide
- albeit not necessarily with the insane margin polls predict. The most
striking feature of this election, however, is not the unpopularity of the
incumbent president but the similarity of their worldview.

French Presidents are chosen in a two-round runoff election, with the
candidates falling into four categories. First you have the two or three
contenders, who have a realistic chance of being elected. Generally those
are the candidate of the Socialist Party and whoever dominates the moderate
right at that particular moment. This time it will be Francois Hollande and
Nicolas Sarkozy.

Then you have the outsiders who most probably won't make it to the second
round, but might under the right circumstances. This time, it will be
Francois Bayrou (center), Jean-Luc-Melenchon (Left Front) and Marine Le Pen
(National Front).

Behind them stand the marginal candidates : Eva Joly (Greens), Jacques
Cheminade (the local Larouchie) Nathalie Arthaud (troskyist), Philippe
Poutou (another brand of troskyism) and Dominique de Villepin (moderate
right, with a serious grudge against Sarkozy).

Finally, there are those who will be denied ballot access because they
don't have at least 500 signed presentations from elected officials. They
are too numerous to be listed and their programs are often masterworks of
involuntary comedy.

All of them, however, want to restart growth.

Of course, there are differences, often significant ones. The Greens, for
instance, want a Green Growth, fueled by renewable energy. The socialists
want to lower nuclear share in our energy mix to a mere fifty percent. The
Naional Front wants a French Growth in French Francs (muslim people need
not apply). Nicolas Sarkozy ... well, Nicolas Sarkozy badly needs some
growth to be reelected, but that does not sound likely.

The idea that sustained growth might be a thing of the past, however, is
not something responsible people mention in a polite conversation, even if
those people happen to be green.

There are many reasons for that, but one of them is the way the Green
movement developed in France. Political ecology first entered French
politics during the early seventies, with the candidacy of Rene Dumont at
the 1974 presidential elections, two mere years after the founding of the
first ecological magazine La Gueule Ouverte. Nobody talked about the
climate then - it was assumed that at some point in the future it would
become colder, but that hardly mattered. The subjects du jour were resource
depletion, runaway pollution, demographic explosion and of course nuclear
warfare.

The Meadows report had just been published, and contrary to what is assumed
today, it triggered a huge debate within French society. Ecological themes
nearly became mainstream and in 1978 an educational animated TV series
called Once Upon a Time... Man was broadcast on the third channel. A whole
generation of children watched it, notably the last episode, which
described the future of our civilization ... and its demise because of
pollution and resource wars.

Yet this concern faded during the eighties and when the Greens resurfaced
as a cultural and political force, they had gone over to standard upper
middle class environmentalism. Ironically, one of the main causes of this
devolution was the 1973 oil shock. It convinced the French elites that
dependence on foreign oil was a dangerous thing. They quickly found a
solution : nuclear.

At the time, it was not as stupid as it sounds now. Chernobyl was still in
the distant future and the only alternative was importing gas from the USSR
or Algeria. We still produced uranium at that time, and there were in
Africa a number of producer countries both friendly and able to control
their territory.

Besides, everybody knows that accidents are unfrench and that our borders
are radiation-proof.

The Greens, of course, opposed this move, as well as some other movements.
It was a huge fight, but outside Brittany, they lost. Only the Breton
nuclear plants were canceled when the Socialist Party won the elections in
1981 but the fight itself focused the Green movement on the nuclear
industry and away from sustainability.

Meanwhile, France began to experience high unemployment during the late
seventies, the result of the first oil crisis, but also of the more or less
deliberate choice of favoring high wages and pensions over full employment.
The Keynesian policies of the first years of the presidency of Francois
Mitterand did not help either, and France was stuck with an unemployment
rate permanently over eight percent.

France was, and is still, a welfare state and unemployment benefits can be
quite generous - they depend on how much you were paid before you lost your
job. They don't last for ever, however, and when they do end, the fall can
be quite brutal and people who wonder whether they will still have a home
at the end of the year tend to put environment very low on their list of
priority.

The Greens having failed to make the connection between resource depletion
and economic decline, green politics became restricted to the left wing
upper middle class - in French, we call them the "bobos". Of course, the
upper middle class has its own demands and concerns. It wants to keep its
privileged position within the society, but wants also to be seen as the
progressive good guys. This has resulted in a focus on societal issues and
policies which look superficially left wing but actually reinforce the
status-quo, such as free immigration (aka brain and manpower pump) or "fair
trade", which in fact locks poor countries in their role of provider of
underpriced raw material.

The hedonistic world-view of the bobos, means that they will oppose any
policy aiming at reinforcing communities - as the Archdruid has stated,
healthy communities come to a price, a price the upper middle class is not
in a hurry to pay.

The result has been an ideological disaster mixing tokenism and, since the
bobos have a lot to lose from a true relocalization of economy or from a
true simplification of the society, an insistence that all our problems can
be solved if we invest heavily in the right green technologies and create a
lot of green jobs for the self-appointed green elite.

I am afraid those delusions won't survive their, arguably unfortunate,
collision with reality.

Curiously, a few parts of the traditional left may be more aware of the
problems ahead.

Less than a month ago, Michel Rocard published a book titled Mes points sur
les i - Propos sur la presidentielle et la crise, where he explains that
growth won't return and that the European Union is a non-entity in
international politics. For those who don't know French politics, Michel
Rocard is the closest thing to a an elder statesman we have. During the
seventies, he was the main rival of Francois Mitterand within the Socialist
Party and his prime minister from 1988 to 1991. He probably spared France a
colonial war in New Caledonia, but he and his followers were progressively
marginalized in the following years and he was finally exiled to the
European Parliament.

Having become a non-entity in French politics, he can now speak his mind
and say what other politicians cannot. That Francois Hollande prefaced his
book shows he is listened to, if not necessarily heeded.

Of course, Michel Rocard speaks from within the ideology of progress. He
sees the future as a time of difficulties, not as the long descent it will
be. Unable, or unwilling, to acknowledge the limits of our uranium supply,
he advocates keeping our nuclear plants "lest we enter degrowth", and of
course, his goal is not to accompany the coming descent, so as to make it
less brutal, but to keep the status quo as long as possible.

This half-lucidity will certainly influence my vote next month, especially
when I compare it to the Greens' delusions, but it makes the curtailed
character of our political choices painfully obvious. It is not that we
cannot see the coming crisis - Michel Rocard sees it clearly enough and the
Greens, for all their delusions are somewhat aware of it. The problem is
that the overwhelming majority of us shy away from its logical
consequences, because they contradict our ideology.

In fact, we have, during the last decades, more or less consciously chosen
to put our faith in progress before the survival of our civilization, and
this choice has made all other political choices, if not irrelevant - a
fascistic or communist regime in France would be an unmitigated disaster -
at least without long term consequences.

The only horizon is now collapse. The only question is how our communities
will adapt to it locally, far from the political rallies and the golden
halls of the senate.

http://theviewfrombrittany.blogspot.jp/2012/03/false-choices.html

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