Dissident Veteran For Peace

The image below on the left is an actual magazine cover published by the controversial French magazine Charlie Hebdo in the aftermath of terrorist attacks in Belgium in March 2016 that killed 32 people and wounded hundreds of others.

The person caricatured is the Belgian singer Stromae, who, in 2013, released a song entitled "Papaoutai" or "Papa où t'es" which is French for "Dad, where are you?". Surrounding the image of Stromae are severed body parts answering his question "here" (ici)  (là) and "here also" (et là aussi). Stromae's father was reportedly killed in the Rwandan "genocide" in 1994.*

The image on the right is a parody of the Charlie Hedbo cover asking "Shoah (i.e. holocaust) where are you?" It appears to feature Charlie Chaplin at center (though I'm not sure why). In any case, hair (or a wig), a shoe, a bar of soap (?), and a lamp shade all answer. The Chutzpah Hebdo image appeared on the web site of Égalité et Réconciliation.

Alain Soral co-founded Égalité et Réconciliation (E&R) in 2007. Soral claims he did not draw the cartoon and that he is not the "publication director" nor the "editor-in-chief" of the E&R web site, where it appeared. Nevertheless, on April 15, 2019, a French court sentenced Soral to one year in prison "for denying the existence of the Holocaust" via the cartoon. There is an informative write-up of the case on unz.com and it features Soral in a video discussing the affair (watch it before YouTube removes it).



Note
*I've place genocide in quotes because the term is highly politicized. There is also reason to believe that the events in question are more accurately described as war crimes in the context of a long-term Rwandan civil war that was not a simple inter-ethnic conflict. The evidence suggests Hutus and Tutsis were both variously victims of atrocities, including acts of genocide (see e.g. here and here and here and here). Western and Tutsi (the victors) narratives have generally obscured the complexity of these events. For what it's also worth, in 2016, Israel's Supreme Court ruled that documents pertaining to "Israels arms sales to Rwanda during the 1994 genocide there will remain sealed and concealed from the public".

Labels: Africa, censorship, civil liberties, Europe, Israel, thoughtcrime, Zionism

Ignorance of French national character was for Scharnhorst the major reason for the Allied defeat [in the War of the First Coalition]. He found it inconceivable that the princes accepted without any verification the false reports of French opinion by the Émigrés ... "It seems at first sight incredible that such a great and important enterprise could be launched on the basis of such partisan witnesses as were the Émigrés."

Source: Charles E. White, The Enlightened Soldier: Scharnhorst and the Militarische Gesellschaft in Berlin, 1801-1805 (New York: Praeger, 1989), p. 61.

One wonders if Scharnhorst ever considered the possibility that "the princes" knew the reports of the Émigrés were bogus, it seems so. The case of Ahmed Chalabi and his sham Iraqi National Congress come to mind. Chalabi has been characterized as "the powerful source who ... succeeded in persuading the Pentagon that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that the Shiites would welcome the American forces with flowers and rice, and that in a twinkling the Iraqis would manage their country without Saddam and would free the U.S. armed forces from their commitment."

However, I think it would be far more accurate to characterize Chalabi as a willing partner in the deliberately trumped-up 2003 war for Israel. The neoconservatives leading the Pentagon in the Bush administration were not deceived by Chalabi and they needed no persuasion to invade Iraq, they needed plausible cover and that was what he provided.


The belief that in war forces must be kept together, that it is a principle of the art of war not to disperse, is therefore false. On the contrary, it is a general rule—but only to the skillful—to disperse with caution and to force the enemy to do likewise, and then to fall concentrated on a single part.

Source: Gerhard Johann David von Scharnhorst, "Ueber die Schlacht bei Marnego," Proceedings, 1:54-55 as quoted in White, op. cit., p. 71.

See also: "Wrong Tzu"

Labels: Europe, history, Iraq, military, Neoconservatives, quotations, Scharnhorst, War