• Sentenza per il corteo a #milano in solidarietà a #cospito e contro il #41_bis
    https://radioblackout.org/2025/06/sentenza-per-il-corteo-a-milano-in-solidarieta-a-cospito-e-contro-il-

    La Procura di Milano ha richiesto pene che vanno da 6 mesi a 6 anni per gli 11 accusati in relazione agli scontri avvenuti durante il corteo in supporto ad Alfredo Cospito l’11 febbraio 2023

    #L'informazione_di_Blackout #carcere
    https://cdn.radioblackout.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/sentenza_mi_corteocospito.mp3

  • Au concert du chanteur israélien Eyal Golan à Paris, des visuels à la gloire de l’armée israélienne projetés sur scène
    Publié le 20 mai 2025 - L’Humanité
    https://www.humanite.fr/monde/bande-de-gaza/au-concert-du-chanteur-israelien-eyal-golan-a-paris-des-visuels-a-la-gloire

    (...) Le chanteur israélien Eyal Golan s’est produit en concert lundi soir au Dôme de Paris, devant plus de 4 000 personnes.
    (...)
    Il avait suscité l’indignation pour avoir appelé à « effacer Gaza » et à « ne laisser aucune âme qui vive » dans l’enclave après les attaques du 7 octobre 2023. Le jour même de la tragédie, sur son compte Instagram, il avait également écrit : « Gaza doit brûler ». Le chanteur israélien Eyal Golan s’est produit en concert lundi soir au Dôme de Paris, devant plus de 4 000 personnes.

    Sur la base de vidéos de spectateurs diffusées sur les réseaux sociaux et que l’Humanité a recoupé, des visuels à la gloire de l’armée israélienne ont été projetés durant le show. On y distingue notamment des soldats et des chars, ainsi qu’un message en hébreu : « Israël est vivant ».
    (...)
    Eyal Golan montera de nouveau sur scène mardi 20 mai, toujours au Palais des Sports. Comme lundi soir, un important dispositif de sécurité a été mis en place par la Préfecture de police aux abords de la salle. Dès le mois d’avril, le groupe La France insoumise à l’Assemblée nationale avait appelé à l’interdiction de ces deux événements, les qualifiant de « porte-voix pour les soutiens du génocide ».

    Un appel également relayé par le mouvement Union juive pour la paix (UJFP) et le collectif juif décolonial Tsedek. Une manifestation réunissant une cinquantaine de personnes s’est tenue lundi dans le XVe arrondissement de Paris, en présence des députés LFI Jérôme Legavre et Thomas Portes, pour dénoncer le maintien des concerts.

    #4000

  • Des prisons haute sécurité…
    https://nantes.indymedia.org/posts/144229/des-prisons-haute-securite

     Dès le début de l’année 2025, le ministre de la justice Darmanin a multiplié les annonces concernant le durcissement des conditions d’enfermement et la création de prisons de haute sécurité. Des travaux et un renfort d’effectif en maton sont d’ores et déjà prévus pour cet été afin d’adapter la…

    #41bis #Prison #PrisonnierEs #Condé-sur-sarthe #France #Global

  • Perm méca velo queer/en questionnement
    https://nantes.indymedia.org/events/143897/perm-meca-velo-queer-en-questionnement

    Dimanche 20 avril 2025 c’est la permanence d’autoréparation #Vélo en mixité choisie queer et en questionnement ! Ce mois-ci c’est de 14h à 18h (une demi-journée) C’est pas une journée complète, alors si t’as des gros chantiers, on te conseille de pas te lancer dedans ce jour-là, tu pourras probablement faire…

    #Autonomie #méca_vélo #Mécanique #44200_Nantes #Petit-port

  • Récits à deux voix sur le deuil pendant le confinement
    https://laparoleerrante.org/recits-a-deux-voix-sur-le-deuil-pendant-le-confinement

    Du 17 mars au 11 mai 2020, nous avons dû vivre sans pouvoir nous déplacer, ni nous retrouver. Les hôpitaux, les EHPAD, et autres lieux de soins ont mis sous cloche leurs patient/es et résident/es, les privant de tout contact avec leurs proches. Dans ce contexte où les possibilités d’organiser des obsèques sont limitées, où il est impossible de se rassembler ou de traverser le pays pour assister à une cérémonie, qu’est-ce que l’État impose comme travail de deuil aux vivants ? On a voulu faire entendre les récits d’Elsa et Ivan qui ont dû faire face au même moment aux décès de leur proche pendant le premier confinement ; et comprendre à travers leurs voix comment morts et vivants ont été maltraités, et quels combats il a fallu mener.

    Ce podcast fait partie de l’émission L’écoute et L’écho#4, enregistrée et réalisée le 11 juin 2022 par le studio son de #la_Parole_Errante, et entièrement fabriquée autour du dernier numéro de la revue Jef Klak, Feu Follet

    #audio #récit #deuil #confinement

  • Lo Stato contro i militanti della #lotta_armata – cinquant’anni dopo
    https://radioblackout.org/2025/03/lo-stato-contro-i-militanti-della-lotta-armata-cinquantanni-dopo

    Leonardo Bertulazzi è stato un militante irregolare della colonna genovese delle BR. Per il sequestro Costa del 1977 e per banda armata, pur non avendo fatti di sangue a suo carico, è stato condannato in contumacia a 27 anni di galera, ma è riuscito a riparare in Sudamerica. Dopo 45 anni, di cui 20 passati […]

    #L'informazione_di_Blackout #41_bis #Brigate_Rosse
    https://cdn.radioblackout.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/mariodivito.mp3

  • Balkans : Tout le pouvoir aux plénums !
    https://ecologiesocialeetcommunalisme.org/2025/03/17/balkans-tout-le-pouvoir-aux-plenums

    paru dans lundimatin#467, le 17 mars 2025 Depuis maintenant 4 mois, à la suite de l’effondrement du auvent de la gare de Belgrade, les serbes manifestent et occupent contre la corruption et donc le gouvernement. Samedi 15 mars, ils étaient plus de 300 000 à tenir les rues de Belgrade. Il y a deux semaines, nous […] L’article Balkans : Tout le pouvoir aux plénums ! est apparu en premier sur Atelier d’Écologie Sociale et Communalisme.

  • Guerre d’Algérie : France Télévisions déprogramme un documentaire sur l’usage des armes chimiques par l’armée française

    https://www.liberation.fr/international/afrique/guerre-dalgerie-france-televisions-deprogramme-un-documentaire-sur-lusage

    Le documentaire, qui s’appuie sur le travail minutieux de l’historien Christophe Lafaye et sur les archives qu’il a pu réunir, offre pour la première fois une analyse approfondie du recours aux gaz toxiques par l’armée française dès les premiers mois de la guerre d’Algérie. Il met en lumière la stratégie délibérée de l’armée française pour déloger les combattants algériens cachés dans les grottes, une tactique qui s’est rapidement transformée en une véritable guerre chimique. « Avec la torture et le déplacement des populations, la guerre chimique est le dernier élément d’une série de brèches dans les engagements internationaux de la France que celle-ci a bafoués pour mener sa guerre coloniale, précise le documentaire. De 1954 à 1959, la France coloniale n’a pas hésité à gazer, notamment dans les zones montagneuses difficiles d’accès, des populations sans défense. »

    Après une phase d’expérimentation de plusieurs gaz pour en déterminer l’efficacité, l’armée a procédé à au moins 400 interventions chimiques à grande échelle, exposant ainsi des dizaines de milliers de personnes à des substances extrêmement dangereuses. Parmi elles, le gaz CN2D, pourtant interdit par la convention de Genève de 1925. « Il s’agissait d’une stratégie militaire pensée, avec la création d’une section spécialisée dans les armes chimiques au sein de l’armée française, explique la journaliste indépendante Claire Billet, qui a tourné le documentaire l’été dernier dans les régions reculées de la Kabylie et de l’Aurès. L’objectif initial était de faire sortir les combattants des grottes, mais en réalité, les gens mouraient. »

  • Huit mythes de l’intelligence artificielle pour déconstruire la « hype »
    https://maisouvaleweb.fr/huit-mythes-de-lintelligence-artificielle-pour-deconstruire-la-hype

    Dans leur article intitulé « Ne croyez pas à l’hype. Les mythes de l’IA et la nécessité d’une approche critique dans l’enseignement supérieur », publié dans le Journal of Applied Learning & Teaching, les chercheurs Jürgen Rudolph, Fadhil Ismail, Shannon Tan et Pauline Seah déconstruisent pas à pas quelques grands mythes de l’intelligence artificielle (IA) : « Nous démontrons que l’IA n’est pas une entité intrinsèquement autonome, intelligente ou objective, mais plutôt un produit de l’ingéniosité humaine, dépendant d’un travail considérable, souvent sous forme d’exploitation, et de pratiques d’extraction de données. »

    Table des matières
    1 Mythe #1 : « L’IA est artificielle »
    2 Mythe #2 : « L’IA est intelligente »
    3 Mythe #3 : « l’IA rendra le monde meilleur – plus démocratique, plus égalitaire, plus écologique, plus progressiste, plus “ce-que-vous-voulez” »
    4 Mythe #4 : « L’IA est objective et impartiale »
    5 Mythe #5 : « Les États-Unis sont la seule superpuissance en matière d’IA »
    6 Mythe #6 : « L’IA n’affectera pas significativement le marché du travail »
    7 Mythe #7 : « L’IA révolutionne l’enseignement supérieur »
    8 Mythe #8 : « Les enseignants du supérieur peuvent détecter l’IA avec ou sans IA »
    9 Conclusion

  • Souveraineté alimentaire : un scandale made in France – Synthèse rapport #4 - Terre de liens - Février 2025
    https://ressources.terredeliens.org/les-ressources/souverainete-alimentaire-un-scandale-made-in-france-synthes

    28 millions d’hectares, c’est assez pour nourrir la population française et même plus. Mais en dédiant 43 % de ses terres à l’exportation, la France hypothèque sa souveraineté alimentaire : la surface disponible par habitant pour se nourrir est réduite à 2 100 m2, soit à peine la moitié de ce qu’il faudrait pour nourrir une personne. Pour combler le déficit, l’augmentation de nos importations contredit le discours ambiant d’une puissance agricole qui nourrit le monde. Notre modèle agricole est si absurde que nos terres ne nourrissent ni ceux qui la travaillent, ni ceux qui vivent autour.

    #souveraineté_alimentaire #politique_agricole

  • Elon Musk accusé d’avoir fait un salut nazi, ou comment la culture 4chan entre à la Maison Blanche , Damien Leloup, Martin Untersinger
    https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2025/01/22/elon-musk-accuse-d-avoir-fait-un-salut-nazi-ou-comment-la-culture-4chan-entr

    Musk n’est pas un idéologue ordinaire. C’est avant tout un troll. Et pour le troll, issu de 4chan, du Gamergate et de toute cette culture de la provoc’ et de l’ironie trash où la souffrance de l’autre est toujours plus ou moins réductible à une blague, la seule question est celle des limites. Plus les modérateurs sont coulants, plus il se permet de choses. Via @parpaing, là
    https://seenthis.net/messages/1093838#message1094119

    Le geste du patron de X lors de la cérémonie d’investiture de Donald Trump est le prolongement de ses appels du pied à l’#antisémitisme et au #suprémacisme_blanc. Imprégné de la culture du forum 4chan, il en reprend les techniques de provocation : choquer, tout en semant le doute sur la nature réelle de ses intentions.

    « C’est usant, ce truc de comparer tout le monde à Hitler. » C’est en ces termes, et donc sans aucunement chercher à rassurer sur la nature de son geste, qu’Elon Musk a choisi de réagir aux critiques qui lui sont adressées depuis qu’il a exécuté ce qui s’apparente à un double #salut_fasciste, lundi 20 janvier, à l’occasion de son discours dans une enceinte sportive de Washington, au soir de la cérémonie d’investiture de Donald Trump.

    « Un salut hitlérien est un salut hitlérien », a tranché mardi l’hebdomadaire allemand Die Zeit, alors qu’une partie de la presse continue de débattre sur la manière d’interpréter la scène. Mais chez les militants d’#extrême_droite du monde entier, en tout cas, la question fait consensus. Patrick Casey, le fondateur du groupuscule néonazi Identity Evropa, en a, par exemple, publié un extrait assorti d’une plaisanterie sur le fait qu’il n’en croyait pas ses yeux. Les mêmes images ont été diffusées par Andrew Torba, le fondateur de la plateforme d’extrême droite Gab, avec la mention « des choses incroyables se produisent déjà ». Sur un groupe Telegram néonazi américain, les images de la gestuelle d’Elon Musk sont accompagnées d’un enthousiaste « ON EST DE RETOUR PUTAIN », a constaté le mensuel américain Wired.

    Le geste du multimilliardaire ne sort pas de nulle part. Cela fait des mois que le propriétaire du réseau social X multiplie les références à l’antisémitisme et l’idéologie nazie. En plus de plusieurs plaisanteries douteuses, il remet en question en mai 2023 le caractère antisémite d’une fusillade perpétrée par un homme arborant des tatouages en forme de croix gammée. Quelques jours plus tard, c’est le milliardaire juif George Soros qu’il accuse, dans un sous-entendu antisémite clair, de « détester l’humanité » et d’« éroder le tissu même de la civilisation ».

    En novembre 2023, il tweete son approbation à un message accusant les juifs de « haine contre les Blancs », une obsession antisémite largement documentée. En septembre 2024, il recommande le visionnage d’un documentaire réalisé par un historien autoproclamé aux théories révisionnistes sur la Shoah. En prenant les manettes du réseau social, il a aussi rétabli le compte du plus célèbre néonazi d’Amérique, le fondateur du site The Daily Stormer Andrew Anglin, ainsi que celui du rappeur Kanye West, suspendu de X après des messages antisémites, ou encore celui de Patrick Casey.

    Provocation absolue et sans limite

    Cette symbolique nazie est aussi très ancrée dans la culture d’un espace en ligne bien particulier et qu’Elon Musk admire : 4chan. Ce gigantesque forum, anonyme et à la modération quasi inexistante, est depuis plus de quinze ans l’un des viviers en ligne des discours les plus extrémistes, racistes, antisémites ou masculinistes, notamment dans son sous-forum « 4chan/pol », consacré aux discussions « politiquement incorrectes ». Au début du mois de janvier, l’homme d’affaires avait changé son profil sur le réseau social X pour y devenir brièvement « Kekius Maximus », une référence à plusieurs mèmes emblématiques de #4chan.

    Cet espace communautaire a ses propres règles : il se pense comme celui de la provocation absolue et sans limite, où l’on peut trouver, dans un même fil de discussion, des images à la gloire du nazisme, des blagues sur les Pokémon et de la pornographie « hardcore ». Sa règle cardinale est la transgression. Mais force est de constater que dans cet espace où tout est permis, où « jouer au nazi » est normalisé, on trouve aussi beaucoup d’authentiques nazis. C’est là une tactique bien connue des militants extrémistes : la normalisation par la provocation, sous couvert d’humour, de références et d’idées que l’on cherche à insérer dans le débat public, tout en se ménageant une porte de sortie rhétorique, une possibilité de nier, pour introduire davantage de confusion.

    Elon Musk a déjà eu recours à ce procédé. Le 27 octobre 2024, à l’occasion d’un meeting du candidat Donald Trump au Madison Square Garden de New York, il arborait une casquette noire sur laquelle le slogan « Make America Great Again » était écrit en lettres gothiques. [Voir ici : https://www.livemint.com/news/us-news/us-election-2024-dark-gothic-donald-trump-elon-musk-wears-hat-with-fraktur Un débat s’en est suivi : s’agissait-il d’une police de caractères utilisée par les nazis ? Pendant que certains s’échinaient à des comparaisons pixel par pixel, le message, pas si subtil, était déjà passé.

    Une culture politique forgée en ligne

    L’homme le plus riche du monde ne s’en cache guère : il admire 4chan, incarnation à ses yeux d’une liberté d’expression absolue, et se considère comme faisant partie de cette communauté. Il répond ainsi parfois à des comptes X consacrés au forum et plaisantait, en mai 2024, sur le fait que son outil d’intelligence artificielle Grok allait désormais s’entraîner sur le contenu de la plateforme. Fin 2024, il promouvait aussi sur X une théorie masculiniste née sur 4chan, selon laquelle la meilleure forme de gouvernement est celle qui donne le pouvoir aux « hommes ayant un taux de testostérone élevé ».
    Sur 4chan, le sens de la provocation du milliardaire est parfois salué. Mais son besoin compulsif de plaire à cette communauté, ou la manière dont il met en scène ses performances exagérées sur plusieurs jeux vidéo, le placent aussi souvent dans la position, honnie sur le forum, de « tryhard » : celui qui veut tellement plaire qu’il en fait trop. Un péché mortel sur 4chan, où l’on se doit d’être indifférent à tout.

    Sans compter que cet espace en ligne abrite aussi les franges les plus radicales des mouvements Incels ou doomer, des communautés construites entre autres sur la haine des femmes, le pessimisme, la solitude, la pauvreté et le nihilisme. Quelle place peut vraiment y avoir l’homme le plus riche du monde, qui a été en couple avec la star Grimes et qui est désormais le bras droit du président de la première puissance mondiale ?

    Les saluts de M. Musk ne sont donc ni un accident ni un moment isolé. Ils sont à l’image de sa culture politique, forgée bien davantage dans des recoins peu recommandables d’Internet que dans les livres. Des espaces qui influencent désormais directement le paysage politique américain, maintenant que 4chan a trouvé son émissaire à la Maison Blanche.

    #masculinisme #Musk

  • Donald Trump est-il fasciste ? Comment l’historien américain Robert Paxton a changé d’avis
    https://www.courrierinternational.com/long-format/idees-donald-trump-est-il-fasciste-comment-l-historien-americ

    Éminent spécialiste du fascisme et de la France de Vichy, l’historien américain Robert Paxton pensait l’appellation galvaudée et inadéquate pour décrire Donald Trump. Aujourd’hui, il s’alarme de ce qu’il voit monter sur l’échiquier politique mondial – et en particulier du phénomène “trumpiste” aux États-Unis.

    [Cet article a été publié le 3 novembre 2024 et republié le 19 janvier 2025]

    L’historien Robert Paxton a passé la journée du 6 janvier 2021 rivé à son poste de télévision. Depuis son appartement de Manhattan, il a vu cette foule hostile marcher sur le Capitole, forcer les cordons de police et pénétrer à l’intérieur de l’édifice du Congrès américain. Beaucoup d’intrus portaient des casquettes floquées du sigle Maga [“Make America Great Again”, “rendre sa grandeur à l’Amérique”], d’autres des bonnets orange vif signalant leur appartenance au groupuscule d’extrême droite des Proud Boys. D’autres des accoutrements plus fantaisistes encore. “J’étais totalement hypnotisé par la scène”, me confesse Paxton, que j’ai rencontré cet été chez lui, dans la vallée de l’Hudson. “Je n’imaginais pas une telle chose possible.”

    #paywall

    • Is It Fascism ? A Leading Historian Changes His Mind.
      https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/magazine/robert-paxton-facism.html

      Oct. 23, 2024

      The historian Robert Paxton spent Jan. 6, 2021, glued to his television. Paxton was at his apartment in Upper Manhattan when he watched a mob march toward the Capitol, overrun the security barriers and then the police cordons and break inside. Many in the crowd wore red MAGA baseball caps, while some sported bright-orange beanies signaling their membership in the Proud Boys, a far-right extremist group. A few were dressed more fantastically. Who are these characters in camouflage and antlers? he wondered. “I was absolutely riveted by it,” Paxton told me when I met him this summer at his home in the Hudson Valley. “I didn’t imagine such a spectacle was possible.”

      Paxton, who is 92, is one of the foremost American experts on fascism and perhaps the greatest living American scholar of mid-20th-century European history. His 1972 book, “Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944,” traced the internal political forces that led the French to collaborate with their Nazi occupiers and compelled France to reckon fully with its wartime past.

      The work seemed freshly relevant when Donald Trump closed in on the Republican nomination in 2016 and articles comparing American politics with Europe’s in the 1930s began to proliferate in the American press. Michiko Kakutani, then the chief book critic for The New York Times, was among the first to set the tone. She turned a review of a new Hitler biography into a thinly veiled allegory about a “clown” and a “dunderhead,” an egomaniac and pathological liar with a talent for reading and exploiting weakness. In The Washington Post, the conservative commentator Robert Kagan wrote: “This is how fascism comes to America. Not with jackboots and salutes,” but “with a television huckster.”

      In a column for a French newspaper, republished in early 2017 in Harper’s Magazine, Paxton urged restraint. “We should hesitate before applying this most toxic of labels,” he warned. Paxton acknowledged that Trump’s “scowl” and his “jutting jaw” recalled “Mussolini’s absurd theatrics,” and that Trump was fond of blaming “foreigners and despised minorities” for ‘‘national decline.’’ These, Paxton wrote, were all staples of fascism. But the word was used with such abandon — “everyone you don’t like is a fascist,” he said — that it had lost its power to illuminate. Despite the superficial resemblances, there were too many dissimilarities. The first fascists, he wrote, “promised to overcome national weakness and decline by strengthening the state, subordinating the interests of individuals to those of the community.” Trump and his cronies wanted, by contrast, to “subordinate community interests to individual interests — at least those of wealthy individuals.”

      After Trump took office, a torrent of articles, papers and books either embraced the fascism analogy as useful and necessary, or criticized it as misleading and unhelpful. The polemic was so unrelenting, especially on social media, that it came to be known among historians as the Fascism Debate. Paxton had, by this point, been retired for more than a decade from Columbia University, where he was a professor of history for more than 30 years, and he didn’t pay attention to, let alone participate in, online debates.

      Paxton was reluctant to join other historians in equating Trumpism with fascism. Jan. 6 changed his mind.Credit...Ashley Gilbertson/VII, for The New York Times
      Jan. 6 proved to be a turning point. For an American historian of 20th-century Europe, it was hard not to see in the insurrection echoes of Mussolini’s Blackshirts, who marched on Rome in 1922 and took over the capital, or of the violent riot at the French Parliament in 1934 by veterans and far-right groups who sought to disrupt the swearing in of a new left-wing government. But the analogies were less important than what Paxton regarded as a transformation of Trumpism itself. “The turn to violence was so explicit and so overt and so intentional, that you had to change what you said about it,” Paxton told me. “It just seemed to me that a new language was necessary, because a new thing was happening.”

      When an editor at Newsweek reached out to Paxton, he decided to publicly declare a change of mind. In a column that appeared online on Jan. 11, 2021, Paxton wrote that the invasion of the Capitol “removes my objection to the fascist label.” Trump’s “open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crosses a red line,” he went on. “The label now seems not just acceptable but necessary.”

      Until then, most scholars arguing in favor of the fascism label were not specialists. Paxton was. Those who for years had been making the case that Trumpism equaled fascism took Paxton’s column as a vindication. “He probably did more with that one piece than all these other historians who’ve written numerous books since 2016, and appeared on television, and who have 300,000 Twitter followers,” says Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, an assistant professor at Wesleyan and the editor of a recent collection of essays, “Did it Happen Here?” Samuel Moyn, a historian at Yale University, said that to cite Paxton is to make “an authority claim — you can’t beat it.”

      This summer I asked Paxton if, nearly four years later, he stood by his pronouncement. Cautious but forthright, he told me that he doesn’t believe using the word is politically helpful in any way, but he confirmed the diagnosis. “It’s bubbling up from below in very worrisome ways, and that’s very much like the original fascisms,” Paxton said. “It’s the real thing. It really is.”

      Calling someone or something “fascist” is the supreme expression of moral revulsion, an emotional impulse that is difficult to resist. “The temptation to draw parallels between Trump and the fascist leaders of the 20th century is understandable,” the British historian Richard J. Evans wrote in 2021. “How better to express the fear, loathing, and contempt that Trump arouses in liberals than by comparing him to the ultimate political evil?” The word gets lobbed at the left too, including by Trump at Democrats. But fascism does have a specific meaning, and in the last few years the debate has turned on two questions: Is it an accurate description of Trump? And is it useful?

      Most commentators fall into one of two categories: a yes to the first and second, or a no to both. Paxton is somewhat unique in staking out a position as yes and no. “I still think it’s a word that generates more heat than light,” Paxton said as we sat looking out over the Hudson River. “It’s kind of like setting off a paint bomb.”

      Paxton, who speaks with the lilt of a midcentury TV announcer or studio star, is an elegant, reserved man, with a dapper swoop of hair, long gone white, his face etched with deep lines. He and his wife, the artist Sarah Plimpton, moved out of New York City, where they lived for 50 years near the Columbia campus, only a few years ago. He told me that what he saw on Jan. 6 has continued to affect him; it has been hard “to accept the other side as fellow citizens with legitimate grievances.” That is not to say, he clarified, that there aren’t legitimate grievances to be had, but that the politics of addressing them has changed. He believes that Trumpism has become something that is “not Trump’s doing, in a curious way,” Paxton said. “I mean it is, because of his rallies. But he hasn’t sent organizers out to create these things; they just germinated, as far as I can tell.”

      Whatever Trumpism is, it’s coming “from below as a mass phenomenon, and the leaders are running to keep ahead of it,” Paxton said. That was how, he noted, Italian Fascism and Nazism began, when Mussolini and Hitler capitalized on mass discontentment after World War I to gain power. Focusing on leaders, Paxton has long held, is a distraction when trying to understand fascism. “What you ought to be studying is the milieu out of which they grew,” Paxton said. For fascism to take root, there needs to be “an opening in the political system, which is the loss of traction by the traditional parties” he said. “There needs to be a real breakdown.”

      Paxton was not quite 40 when he published his groundbreaking book about the Vichy regime. In demonstrating that France’s leaders actively sought collaboration with the Nazis and that much of the public initially supported them, he showed that the country’s wartime experience was not simply imposed but arose from its own internal political and cultural crises: a dysfunctional government and perceived social decadence.

      Later in his career, Paxton began to write comparatively about fascist movements across Europe in the 1920s and ’30s: what caused them to grow and win power (as in Italy and Germany) or to fail (as in Britain). The work was a response to what he saw as a fundamental misconception on the part of some of his peers, who defined fascism as an ideology. “It seems doubtful,” Paxton wrote in The New York Review of Books in 1994, “that some common intellectual position can be the defining character of movements that valued action above thought, the instincts of the blood above reason, duty to the community above intellectual freedom, and national particularism above any kind of universal value. Is fascism an ‘ism’ at all?” Fascism, he argued, was propelled more by feelings than ideas.

      Fascist movements succeeded, Paxton wrote, in environments in which liberal democracy stood accused of producing divisions and decline. That remains true not just of the United States today but also of Europe, especially France, where the far-right National Rally party of Marine Le Pen has inched closer and closer to power with each election cycle. “Marine Le Pen has gone to considerable lengths to insist that there is no common ground between her movement and the Vichy regime,” Paxton told me. “For me, to the contrary, she seems to occupy much the same space within the political system. She carries forward similar issues about authority, internal order, fear of decline and of ‘the other.’”

      Fifty years after “Vichy France” was published, it remains a remarkable book. It offers jarring details on the material and practical support provided to Nazi Germany by France, the largest supplier to the German war economy of both food and foreign male laborers in all of occupied Europe. But it also illuminates, with clarity and a degree of even-handedness that feels astonishing today, the competing historical and political traditions — progressive versus Catholic traditionalist, republican versus ancien-régime — that created the turbulent conditions in which Vichy could prevail and that continue to drive French politics today.

      “Vichy France,” published in France in 1973, profoundly shook the nation’s self-image, and Paxton is still something of a household name — his picture appears in some French high school history textbooks. He often comes up in the mudslinging of French politics. Éric Zemmour, a far-right pundit and one-time presidential candidate, who has sought to sanitize far-right politics in France by rehabilitating Vichy, has attacked Paxton and the historical consensus he represents.

      In “Vichy France,” Paxton asserted that “the deeds of occupied and occupier alike suggest that there come cruel times when to save a nation’s deepest values one must disobey the state. France after 1940 was one of those times.” The book was a “national scandal,” Paxton said. “People were quite horrified.” Paxton’s adversaries called him a naïf: He was American and had no history of his own. “I said, ‘Oh, boy, you don’t know anything,’” Paxton told me.

      Paxton was born in 1932 and raised in Lexington, a small town in the Appalachian hills of western Virginia. As he wrote in the introduction to “Vichy France” when it was reissued in 2001, his own family “still brooded, a century later, about its decline after the death of my great-grandfather in the Battle of Chancellorsville on May 3, 1863.” Paxton’s father was a lawyer and publisher of the local newspaper, and his family was liberal, but nonetheless they could see the “substantial house on a hilltop” that had belonged to his father’s grandfather, a brigadier general in the Confederate Army, occupied by another family since 1865. “The bitterness of the defeated South tended to express itself in the study of history,” he wrote. “My fellow Southerners spent their time researching, debating, commemorating, rewriting, even re-enacting their four-year ‘war for Southern independence.’” Surely, he thought, he would find in France “an equally active fascination with the history of Vichy.”

      Paxton chose to study European history to get away from American history, especially the South, which “felt rather stultifying,” he said. His parents sent him to Exeter for his last two years of high school, but instead of going on to Harvard or Yale, he decided to return to Lexington to attend Washington and Lee University, like generations of Paxtons before him. After graduating, he won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, did two years of military service, working for the Navy leadership in Washington, and then went to Harvard to earn a Ph.D. In 1960, he arrived in France to begin research for his dissertation.

      Paris at the time was brimming with rumors of an impending coup by French generals who were fighting to keep Algeria, then a colony, French, and who were angry that the government in Paris was not supporting them. The notion of an Army officer class that was loyal to the nation but not to its current government was, to Paxton, a resonant one. He wanted to write about how the officers were trained, but when he went to search the military academy’s archives, he was told they were bombed in 1944. A French adviser suggested that he focus instead on the Vichy period, a time of great confusion. But it had been only 15 years since the end of the war, and France had a rule about keeping archives closed for 50 years. Fortunately, Paxton also spoke German, and so there was another resource: the German archives, which had been captured by Allied forces and made accessible on microfilm.

      As he sorted through documents, Paxton began to question the narrative about Vichy that became dominant after the war. The French held that the Nazis maintained total dominion over France, and that Vichy was doing only what was necessary to protect the nation while waiting for liberation — the so-called double game. But this did not correspond to the records. “What I was finding was a total mismatch,” Paxton told me. “The French popular narrative of the war had been that they’d all been resisters, even if only in their thoughts. And the archives were just packed with people clamoring, defense companies wanting to construct things for the German Army, people who wanted to have jobs, people who wanted to have social contacts.”
      Image

      In his book, Paxton argued that the shock and devastation of France’s 1940 military defeat, for which many French blamed the four years of socialist government and the cultural liberalization that preceded it, had primed France to accept — even support — its collaborationist government. After World War I, France was a power in decline, squeezed between the mass production of the United States and the strength of the newly formed Soviet Union. Many French citizens saw the loss of France’s prestige as a symptom of social decay. These sentiments created the conditions for the Vichy government to bring about what they called “the national revolution”: an ideological transformation of France that included anti-Jewish laws and, eventually, deportation.

      Every major French publication and broadcast reviewed the book. One reviewer sarcastically congratulated Paxton for solving France’s problems. Another offered “hearty cheers to this academic sitting in his chair on the other side of the Atlantic, 30 years later.” Many commentators, however, recognized that perhaps only an outsider could have accomplished what he did. It was true that the postwar narrative was already being publicly challenged: “The Sorrow and the Pity,” a searing 1969 documentary about French collaboration, and the controversial pardon of a Vichy parapolice leader raised questions among the younger generation about what actually happened during that period. But it was Paxton who “legitimized changes that were in the process of happening in French society,” Henry Rousso, a French historian and expert on Vichy, told me. “He had the allure of a Hollywood star. He was the perfect American for the French.”

      Paxton’s scholarship became the foundation for an entirely new field of research that would transform France’s official memory of World War II from one of resistance to one of complicity. It came to be known as the Paxtonian revolution. Yet even at the time, Paxton was judicious about the uses and misuses of “fascism.” In “Vichy France,” he acknowledged that “well past the halfway point of this book, the term fascism has hardly appeared.” This was not, he continued, “to deny any kinship between Vichy France and other radical right regimes of the 20th century,” but because “the word fascism has been debased into epithet, making it a less and less useful tool for analyzing political movements of our times.”

      To describe the French case as “fascism,” Paxton went on, was to dismiss “the whole occupation experience as something alien to French life, an aberration unthinkable without foreign troops imposing their will.” This, he warned, was a “mental shortcut” that “conceals the deep taproots linking Vichy policies to the major conflicts of the Third Republic.” That is, to everything that came before.

      In determining what counts as fascism, many historians still rely on parameters that came from Paxton. Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, historians argued about how best to understand and define it. Paxton wasn’t much involved in those debates, but by the early ’90s, he found himself dissatisfied with their conclusions. Their scholarship focused on ideas, ideology and political programs. “I found it bizarre how every time someone set out to publish a book or write an article about fascism, they began with the program,” Paxton told me when we met again, at Le Monde, a French bistro near the Columbia campus. “The program was usually transactional,” he said over our very French lunch of omelets and frites. “It was there to try to gain followers at a certain period. But it certainly didn’t determine what they did.”

      In 1998, Paxton published a highly influential journal article titled “The Five Stages of Fascism,” which became the basis for his canonical 2004 book, “The Anatomy of Fascism.” In the article, Paxton argued that one problem in trying to define fascism arose from the “ambiguous relationship between doctrine and action.” Scholars and intellectuals naturally wished to classify movements according to what their leaders said they believed. But it was a mistake, he said, to treat fascism as if it were comparable with 19th-century doctrines like liberalism, conservatism or socialism. “Fascism does not rest explicitly upon an elaborated philosophical system, but rather upon popular feelings about master races, their unjust lot, and their rightful predominance over inferior peoples,” he wrote in “The Anatomy of Fascism.” In contrast to other “isms,” “the truth was whatever permitted the new fascist man (and woman) to dominate others, and whatever made the chosen people triumph.”

      Whatever promises fascists made early on, Paxton argued, were only distantly related to what they did once they gained and exercised power. As they made the necessary compromises with existing elites to establish dominance, they demonstrated what he called a “contempt for doctrine,” in which they simply ignored their original beliefs and acted “in ways quite contrary to them.” Fascism, Paxton argued, was best thought of as a political behavior, one marked by “obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood.”

      The book, already a staple of college syllabuses, became increasingly popular during the Trump years — to many, the echoes were unmistakable.

      *

      When Paxton announced his change of mind about Trump in his 2021 Newsweek column, he continued to emphasize that the historical circumstances were “profoundly different.” Nonetheless, the column had a significant impact on the ongoing, and newly fierce, debate over whether Trump could be labeled a fascist. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian of Italian Fascism at New York University, says that the column’s importance lay not only in the messenger, but also in marking Jan. 6 as a “radicalizing event.” In his 1998 article, Paxton outlined how fascism evolved, either toward entropy or radicalization. “When somebody allies with extremists to get to power and to sustain them, you have a logic of radicalization,” Ben-Ghiat says. “And we saw this happening.”

      Not everyone was persuaded. Samuel Moyn, the Yale historian, told me it was impossible not to admire Paxton — “he’s a scholar’s scholar, while also making a huge political difference” — but he still disagreed. In 2020, Moyn argued in The New York Review of Books that the problem with comparisons is that they can prevent us from seeing novelty. In particular, Moyn was concerned about the same “mental shortcuts” that Paxton warned against more than 50 years earlier. “I wanted to say, Well, wait, it’s the Republican Party, along with the Democratic Party, that led to Trump, through neoliberalism and wars abroad,” Moyn told me. “It just seems that there’s a distinctiveness to this phenomenon that maybe makes it not very helpful to use the analogy.”

      Michael Kimmage, a historian at Catholic University who specializes in the history of the Cold War and worked at the State Department, told me that even when it comes to Putin, a good candidate for the “fascist” label, the use of the word often generates a noxious incuriousness. “It becomes the enemy of nuance,” Kimmage says. “The only thing that provides predictive value in foreign policy, in my experience, is regime type,” Kimmage says. He argues that Putin has not behaved as a full-blown fascist, because his regime depends on maintaining order and stability, and that affects how he wages war. It should affect how the United States responds too.

      But for those who use the label to describe Trump, it is useful precisely because it has offered a predictive framework. “It’s kind of a hypothesis,” John Ganz, the author of a new book on the radical right in the 1990s, told me. “What does it tell us about the next steps that Trump may take? I would say that as a theory of Trumpism, it’s one of the better ones.” No one expects Trumpism to look like Nazism, or to follow a specific timeline, but some anticipated that “using street paramilitary forces he might do some kind of extralegal attempt to seize power,” Ganz said. “Well, that’s what he did.”

      Some of the most ardent proponents of the fascism label have taken it quite a bit further. The Yale historian Timothy Snyder offers lessons on fighting Trumpism lifted from totalitarian Germany in the 1930s in the way that many other historians find unhelpful. But the debate is not just an intellectual one; it’s also about actual tactics. Some on the far left accuse prominent figures in the political center (whom Moyn calls “Cold War liberals”) of wielding the label against Trump to get them to fall in line with the Democratic Party, despite having strong differences with parts of its platform. Steinmetz-Jenkins told me that he objects to the attitude that “what matters is winning, so let’s create an enemy, let’s call it fascism for the purpose of galvanizing consensus.” And this kind of politics, Kimmage notes, also comes with its own dangers. “Sometimes waving that banner, ‘You fascists on the other side, and we the valiant anti-fascists,’ is a way of just not thinking about how one as an individual or as part of a class might be contributing to the problem,” he says.

      Paxton has not weighed in on the issue since the Newsweek column, spending much of his time immersed in his life’s second passion, bird-watching. At his home in the Hudson Valley, I read back to him one of his earlier definitions of fascism, which he described as a “mass, anti-liberal, anti-communist movement, radical in its willingness to employ force . . . distinct not only from enemies on the left but also from rivals on the right.” I asked him if he thought it described Trumpism. “It does,” he said. Nonetheless, he remains committed to his yes-no paradigm of accuracy and usefulness. “I’m not pushing the term because I don’t think it does the job very well now,” Paxton told me. “I think there are ways of being more explicit about the specific danger Trump represents.”

      When we met, Kamala Harris had just assumed the Democratic nomination. “I think it’s going to be very dicey,” he said. “If Trump wins, it’s going to be awful. If he loses, it’s going to be awful too.” He scoured his brain for an apt historical analogy but struggled to find one. Hitler was not elected, he noted, but legally appointed by the conservative president, Paul von Hindenburg. “One theory,” he said, “is that if Hindenburg hadn’t been talked into choosing Hitler, the bubble had already burst, and you would have come up with an ordinary conservative and not a fascist as the new chancellor of Germany. And I think that that’s a plausible counterfactual, Hitler was on the downward slope.” In Italy, Mussolini was also legitimately appointed. “The king chose him,” Paxton said, “Mussolini didn’t really have to march on Rome.”
      Trump’s power, Paxton suggested, appears to be different. “The Trump phenomenon looks like it has a much more solid social base,” Paxton said. “Which neither Hitler nor Mussolini would have had.”

      #Trump #Robert_Paxton #fascisme #fascisme_par_le_bas #subjectivité

    • (...) Trump, dont [un des] ouvrages préférés, est un livre de discours d’Adolf Hitler (comme l’avait révélé, dans une interview pour Vanity Fair, Ivanna Trump, la première épouse du magnat).

      Tout comme Mencius Moldbug, Donald Trump pense que le dictateur du IIIème Reich a "aussi fait de bonnes choses", comme l’a confié au New York Times le général à la retraite John Kelly, ex-chef de cabinet de Trump lors de son premier mandat. L’une des premières décision de Donald Trump aura été de lever l’interdiction aux États-Unis de la plateforme chinoise #TikTok. Pour amadouer l’ours Xi Jinping ? Peut-être, mais pas seulement.

      Comme l’a révélé un rapport publié le 17 septembre dernier par l’ONG américaine Media Matters, prolifèrent sur l’application TikTok (depuis avril 2024) des discours d’Adolf Hitler, traduits en anglais par l’IA, qui le font passer pour un homme qui aurait été diabolisé, en niant ou en minimisant la gravité de ce qu’il a fait. Ces vidéos ont été vues des millions de fois.

      https://www.leshumanites-media.com/post/heil-trump

      (une remise en selle qui jouxte avec celle, plus ancienne, du Protocole des Sages de Sion dans d’autres contrées où ce qui est Russe a le mérite de ne pas être « occidental »)

    • Édito

      Par Ambroise Garel

      Je me dis souvent qu’il serait chouette que Diderot, revenu d’entre les morts, débarque dans mon bureau, où je lui montrerais Wikipédia. Passée la sidération provoquée par sa brusque résurrection puis par l’exposition à une technologie qui échappe totalement à tous les référentiels dont dispose son esprit, il serait probablement très enthousiaste et me demanderait comment fonctionne pareille technologie que j’utilise au quotidien. Ce à quoi je répondrais « mwwehhh, euh, c’est des paquets de données TCP/IP qui, euh... c’est magique ! », réponse qui ne saurait satisfaire un homme des Lumières.

      De la même façon, je me demande comment j’expliquerais à Adam Smith ce qui s’est passé ce week-end. Mettons de côté la partie préliminaire, où je devrais expliquer à l’auteur de La Richesse des nations ce qu’est un memecoin (comptez un jour ou deux), pour nous concentrer sur le cœur de cette histoire, à peine croyable : en lançant ce memecoin dont la capitalisation a immédiatement explosé, Donald Trump, en l’espace de même pas un week-end, aurait plus que décuplé sa richesse.

      C’est bien sûr plus complexe que cela : comme l’explique très bien la spécialiste des cryptos Molly White, multiplier la valeur d’un trumpcoin, à son cours actuel, par le nombre total de tokens (dont 80 % des tokens n’ont pas encore été émis et restent sous le contrôle de ses diverses holdings) n’a guère de sens. Néanmoins, en plus d’avoir créé une bulle spéculative qui a permis à des petits malins de se faire des millions en quelques heures, le trumpcoin constitue un précédent aussi fascinant qu’inquiétant. Tout d’abord parce qu’il s’agit d’un outil permettant de transformer, littéralement, le pouvoir en or. Mais surtout parce qu’avec son coin, Trump a fait entrer la corruption dans une nouvelle ère : au cours des trois prochaines années, 24 millions de trumpcoins seront mis en vente chaque mois, donnant l’occasion à n’importe qui de déposer, là aussi littéralement, de l’argent sur le compte bancaire du président des États-Unis d’Amérique. Qu’est-ce qui pourrait mal se passer ?

      Tout, en fait. Y compris pour Trump. Par l’odeur du pognon alléchée, l’équipe de Melania Trump a lancé son coin à son tour, torpillant du même coup la valeur de celui de son mari et la crédibilité des cryptomonnaies. Si même les sites procrypto et les cryptobros le disent, il reste des raisons d’espérer que toute cette tambouille s’effondre vite.

      P.S. : En guise de grosse coda (#masculinisme) à cet édito, un petit mot sur le salut nazi adressé par Musk à la foule durant la cérémonie d’investiture de Trump et une tentative de répondre à la question qui me hante : pourquoi a-t-il fait ça ?

      Non que je doute que Musk ait des sympathies nazies (qui peut encore oser le nier après sa conversation avec Alice Weidel ?) ou que je me demande s’il s’agissait bien d’un salut hitlérien (là aussi, il paraît difficile d’en douter). Mais parce que je reste convaincu que, même sous une administration Trump et dans le contexte géopolitique qu’on connaît, faire un salut nazi devant les caméras du monde entier reste un move stupide, auquel aucun idéologue d’extrême-droite « sérieux » ne se serait risqué.

      Mais Musk n’est pas un idéologue ordinaire. C’est avant tout un troll. Et pour le troll, issu de 4chan, du Gamergate et de toute cette culture de la provoc’ et de l’ironie trash où la souffrance de l’autre est toujours plus ou moins réductible à une blague, la seule question est celle des limites. Plus les modérateurs sont coulants, plus il se permet de choses. Et là, sur scène, devant une foule galvanisée, alors que Trump a gagné, que la victoire idéologique semble totale, qu’aucun pisse-froid de démocrate ne risque de lui taper sur les doigts, mods are asleep. Alors il se lâche.

      Peut-être est-ce un bon résumé de ce vers quoi nous allons : un monde où personne, sur les plateformes comme ailleurs, n’est là pour modérer le défoulement pulsionnel des trolls.

      source : https://lepavenumerique.substack.com

  • #Emmanuel_Macron was the great liberal hope for France and Europe. How did it all go so wrong?

    The French president’s failures offer an object lesson in what happens when liberalism is stripped of its morality and values.

    When Emmanuel Macron was first elected in the spring of 2017, we were told that he was the future of liberal pluralism. The BBC said his victory was “a repudiation of the populist, antiestablishment wave” of that time. He was “the next leader of Europe” according to a Time Magazine cover. The Economist went one further. Its cover asked if he was Europe’s “saviour” and declared that he was mounting a revolution in democratic politics “without pike or pitchfork”.

    Seven years later, and Macron’s “peaceful”, “democratic” “revolution” is in ruins, as the president struggles to navigate a political crisis of his own making. In June, he called legislative elections that were unnecessary, lost them, and refused to concede defeat. Over the summer, France went through the second-longest period without a government in its recent history. The resulting Michel Barnier-led government was only able to survive for as long as it did thanks to a compact with the far right, before it crumbled after a vote of no confidence held on 4 December. Although Macron has now named François Bayrou as prime minister, it is unclear how this solves the fundamental problem that both the president and his agenda are widely hated in the country, and broadly opposed in the parliament.

    The balance sheet of Macronism explains his losing streak. When he took office, France’s deficit was 2.6% of GDP, in October 2024 it was at 6.2%. Who were the beneficiaries of such profligacy? They certainly aren’t public-school students and their stressed-out teachers having to work with the biggest classes in Europe. Nor are they the growing numbers of people living in “medical deserts”, where there is insufficient access to doctors or surgeons. The ultra-rich however, have done very well, with the top four fortunes in France increasing by 87% since 2020 according to Oxfam. Macronomics resembles Trussonomics in slow motion. It was a programme of unfunded tax cuts for the wealthy that the Macronists wrongly assumed would increase economic activity and therefore the tax take. According to Macron’s own economy guru, “this was not a bad strategy, but it didn’t work”.

    If his economic record undermines the narrative that Macron was the candidate of innovation and sound finances, his social and political record demonstrates that the Macron revolution was neither peaceful, nor particularly democratic, and it calls into question the labels of “liberal” and “centrist”, so often applied to the French president. Police violence has got markedly worse under Macron, with the number of bullets fired and people killed by police increasingly slightly, and the number of rubber bullets fired on crowds skyrocketing. He has also helped normalise the far right, talking up their preferred themes, using their language and passing an immigration law that Marine Le Pen hailed as an “ideological victory”.

    On top of this, he has governed in an increasingly anti-democratic manner, pushing through wildly unpopular measures using article 49.3 of the constitution to pass laws without a parliamentary vote, and trying to shut the leftwing New Popular Front (NPF) alliance out of government, despite it winning the most seats in this summer’s legislative elections. The activist Ugo Palheta writes about the process of the fascistisation of French society as parts of the media, civil service and business elite are radicalised to the right. Macron has handily helped this process along, with the far right achieving their best electoral results ever this summer.

    Recently, Macron has been fighting to try to keep the Netflix hit Emily in Paris in France. It is a fittingly absurd quest. Emily in Paris, like the summer Olympics, is a fantasy image of the France that Macron wants to rule, and intended to create. But the archetypal subject of Macron’s France is not Emily, the denizen of a startup nation inhabited exclusively by the rich and sexy, but rather more like Vanessa Langard, a yellow vest protester I met recently. Langard had been a decorator, and had to take a second job to help pay for her grandmother’s care. Langard was shot in the face and blinded by a rubber bullet at a protest in December 2018. When we spoke, she was distraught, sobbing as she described her anger at the refusal of the French state to designate her a victim of police violence, and how her mother comments that she has become more subdued since the assault.

    Vanessa’s life shows us the effects of Macronism in miniature. She was caught up in his crackdown on dissent and blinded by the increasingly militaristic weapons the state deploys against its citizens. Now 40, she is unable to work, and lives on the meagre benefits paid out to disabled people in France, one of hundreds of thousands pushed into precarity under Macron. She requires care, and so relies on an increasingly strained health system that the government wants to cut further. She is one of the 56% of French people who say life has become more difficult due to low incomes and rising costs, one of the 85% of people who fear that the next budget will negatively affect their financial situation, and one of the 77% who understand this to be the result of political decisions.

    Macron has more than two years to go until the next election, but he shows no sign of changing course. Over the summer, Libération revealed that there had been a series of secret meetings between Macronists and members of the far-right National Rally party brokered by Macron’s close adviser, Thierry Solère, helping normalise them further. Edouard Philippe, an ally of Macron and potential successor, is reported to have told Le Pen that he wants the next election to be a contest of “project against project” without “moral critique”.

    It does not bode well for liberalism that its pro-EU poster boy has become like King Lear, blinded by narcissism and wilfully handing the kingdom to a destructive force he helped create. Macron offers an object lesson in the exhaustion of liberalism. When the form and appearance of liberalism remains, but its content and values are evacuated, what remains is a hollow, brittle thing. It becomes unable to improve the lives of anyone but the wealthy, unable to respond to inconvenient facts such as disappointing election results, unable to articulate even a moral critique of the far right which seeks to usurp it, and unable politically to stop its rise. Macronism has failed.

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/02/emmanuel-macron-liberal-france-europe
    #Macron #libéralisme #moralité #valeurs #crise_politique #macronisme #économie #riches #pauvres #violences_policières #49.3 #fascistisation #portrait #bilan #Macron_vu_de_l'étranger #échec

  • Sans titre
    https://anarchism.space/@gorekhaa/113664311355377477

    Leïla Al-Shami: “The future of Syria will be decided by the Syrians and nobody else”https://autonomies.org/2024/12/leila-al-shami-the-future-of-syria-will-be-decided-by-the-syrians-and-nobody-else/"An interview with Leïla al-Shami, from Lundi Matin #456, 16/12/2024. Leïla al-Shami and Robin Yassin-Kassab are the authors of Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War, an important book in which they recounted the early years of the revolution and … Continue reading →"

  • Luigi Mangione’s Anger Wasn’t Neatly Ideological
    https://jacobin.com/2024/12/luigi-mangione-unitedhealthcare-thompson-ideological

    L’article original contient plein de liens intéressants pour qui a envie de comprendre la manière de penser des états-uniens pas complètement incultes.

    By Branko Marcetic - Far from an ideologue, Luigi Mangione seems more akin to an average swing voter: holding a hodgepodge of political views yet resolutely enraged by the barbarities of a for-profit health care system.

    The profile and background of Luigi Mangione, the man accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last week, is coming into sharper and sharper focus. For one, after days of speculation, we can now more confidently say the motive was health care–related, beyond the words “deny,” “defend,” and “depose” written on the bullet shell casings found at the scene. Mangione had a two-page statement on his person when he was arrested, which complained that “the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy,” and that companies like UnitedHealthcare “have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit.”

    A number of irresponsible voices have jumped on details like this to declare that he is a “leftist” and even “clearly a fan of” Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Mangione had gripes with the US health care system and private insurers, the Left criticize both of those things; ergo, he must be of the Left — this seems to be the extent of the sophistication going in this analysis.

    But a scouring of Mangione’s digital footprint shows the reality is very different, and much more interesting. Far from a stereotype of a Zoomer leftist radicalized to violence by BreadTube and Sanders that obsesses the conservative imagination, Mangione appears to have been, like many Americans, someone with a hodgepodge of views and political beliefs that don’t neatly map onto any one category on the political spectrum.

    All too many atomized Americans have taken up arms and carried out shocking acts of violence over the past decades, usually without anything more than the desire to harm and kill for their own sake. Mangione might be a sign of something new: a political moderate with no movement behind him, no history of activism, and no strong ideology, seemingly radicalized by a failing system — and led to believe murder is the way to fix it.
    The Swing Voter as Shooter

    If you wanted, you could cherry-pick your way through the digital trail Mangione left behind him to make his politics look like whatever you’d like. Want him to be a left-winger? You could point to the part of his now-inaccessible Goodreads account, where he “liked” a Kurt Vonnegut quote about how “poor Americans are urged to hate themselves,” and where he professed interest in reading Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. You could even underline his distaste for Jordan Peterson, who he said “overcomplicates everything he says aloud, wasting everyone’s mental bandwidth in having to decipher it.”

    Want him to be a radical environmentalist? Highlight his five-star rating of Dr Seuss’s environmental fable The Lorax, his interest in reading climate crisis books like Merchants of Doubt and How to Avoid Climate Disaster, or his retweets noting coal’s contribution to climate change and celebrating the acquittal of animal rights activists who stole piglets from a farm.

    Prefer him as a libertarian tech bro? Well, there are his many tweets and retweets about artificial intelligence (AI) that reflect both awe and concern about the emerging technology. There is the presence of a fawning biography of Elon Musk on his favorite books list, his retweeting of a Peter Thiel talk, or his interest in books about Steve Jobs, start-ups, as well as Atlas Shrugged. You might also look to his retweet of an endorsement of billionaire philanthropy, his passion for cellular agriculture (an “unreal opportunity for retail investors”), or his retweet of a thread charging that Ancient Rome fell because it “became an unsustainable welfare state,” turning much of the population into entertainment-addicted parasites.

    If you’d like to pin his actions on the men’s rights movement, you could selectively single out a few different data points. Mangione wanted to read Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It, and retweeted things that could be read as overlapping with that movement: tweets charging that “toxic masculinity is a harmful myth”; lamenting that “it’s sad that the question of ‘are men important?’ can’t be answered with a simple ‘yes’”; and affirming that “men are made for impossible situations and daring feats” and “born with a heroes [sic] heart,” which “society is trying so hard to quash.”

    You could also pin it on the politics of right-leaning podcasts popular with young men. Mangione was into working out and wellness, seemed passionate about psilocybin and other mind-altering substances, was a fan of controversial scientist and podcaster Andrew Huberman — often accused by liberals of, among other things, spreading pseudoscience and anti-vaccine sentiment — and seemed to generally be against COVID lockdown policies. For instance, he retweeted a story about Chinese people rebelling against their country’s “‘zero-Covid’ terror-state” and “reassert[ing] their human dignity in the face of the most dehumanizing machine of control in the world today.”

    For those who would like to paint him as a more traditional right-wing reactionary, there’s material for you too. Mangione frequently tweeted and retweeted things critical of wokeness, and was a fan of New York University professor Jonathan Haidt, author of The Coddling of the American Mind, a critique of cancel culture that was among Mangione’s “want to read” list. Mein Kampf also pops up on that list, if you’re feeling particularly ungenerous.

    Then again, you could easily peg him as something much more middle of the road. “I believe this book will go down in history as the most important philosophical text of the early twenty-first century,” Mangione tweeted about Tim Urban’s What’s Our Problem, something of a centrist manifesto arguing that tribalism caused by the takeover of political parties by their extremes is the fundamental problem of our era, extolling former New Democrat Coalition chair Rep. Derek Kilmer, and saying things like, “without the burden of rigid attachment to any one ideology, [people] can combine ideas from across the spectrum to form a nimble political superbrain that can respond in nuanced ways to changing times.” He retweeted things about the dangers of political polarization and wanted to read Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized.
    A Normal American

    Mangione, it turns out, has a whole mess of different political opinions (at least as far as we can piece together right now) that make it hard to place him on the typical political compass. He seems to have felt passionately for health, fitness, and hallucinogens and alarm at the dopamine-addicting effects of modern technology and social media. He expressed a not-untroubled interest in the emerging technology of AI. He expressed a dislike of “wokeness” and concern about climate change and food quality; and, ultimately, a hatred of the rapacious health insurance industry. His all-over-the-map politics are, in other words, those of a fairly normal American.

    More to the point, he is a normal American who seems to have had his own personal experience with that widely loathed industry. A number of individuals who knew Mangione have now told news outlets and reporters he suffered from serious back pain, and his Twitter/X banner is an X-ray of what is, presumably, his spine. Several of the books that he listed as wanting to read — Healing Back Pain, Back in Control, Do You Really Need Spine Surgery?, among others — were on that topic. It was a matter for which he appears to have sought advice on Reddit, as reported by Forbes, and other posts dug up by CNN show him talking about the debilitating effects the spinal issues and other medical problems had on his life.

    Could that be what led him to the view, as laid out in his two-page statement, that health insurers were “parasites,” and that the murder he committed “had to be done” as a way of facing their “corruption and greed” with “brutal honesty”? Clearly, the opinion that an act of shocking violence was his only option was one that had been bubbling up in his mind in the past year.

    Internet users have been circulating his February 2024 review of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto, where he called him “a violent individual” who was “rightfully imprisoned,” but nevertheless was still “an extreme political revolutionary” before sharing a quote he said he found “interesting”: about how peaceful protest had been ineffective, and that only “cowards and predators” said that violence didn’t solve anything. He retweeted a parody version of an exchange between Batman and the Joker, one that suggests the superhero is wrong to hold to his famous refusal to kill his nemesis, because it meant condemning “a bunch of innocent families” to death.

    It’s not hard to draw the connection between reasoning like this and Mangione’s actions. Of course, unlike with the Joker in the Batman universe, Mangione’s murder of Thompson hasn’t saved any lives, nor will it; it won’t make UnitedHealthcare any more rapacious or lead to the establishment of Medicare for All in the United States. Its only effect has been the death of Thompson.
    Something New?

    We tend to think of political violence as being committed by zealots: radicals on the extreme end of one or the other half of the political spectrum, whose ideology leads them to carry out acts most people would never contemplate, shooting or bombing to advance the goals of a movement or group. But we’re starting to see in twenty-first-century America violence carried out not by ideological extremists, but by individuals with the profile of your typical swing voter.

    The twenty-year-old who nearly killed Donald Trump was similarly alone and all over the political map, donating to a pro-Democratic PAC on the day of Joe Biden’s inauguration before registering as a Republican eight months later, and whose classmates remembered him either not having strong political opinions or being a staunch conservative. The congressional task force investigating his attempted assassination still has no idea why he did what he did.

    It remains to be seen if this ends up being a wider trend, of nonideological Americans becoming radicalized and taking up arms to further some kind of political goal, detached from any wider movement. If so, you can’t help but suspect it’s a measure of the frustration and hopelessness that every recent US election result seems to highlight, of an unfair and corrupt system that Americans know and feel is failing them, but that seems stubbornly immune to change no matter how they vote or organize.