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French philosopher turns anti-Green

· Environment · French affairs

French intellectuals are, on the whole, a rather annoying group of people, notorious for confusing obscurity and verbosity with profundity, and for whom the regular use of words ending in “-isation” is a substitute for rather than an aid to clear thinking.

Nevertheless, when French intellectuals change their minds about something of significance, it signifies. Whether this is because they actually influence any persons other than other French people, and mostly only each other, or whether it is that they influence nobody but do have a highly developed sense of which way the intellectual winds of the world are blowing and when they are shifting in direction, and hence how to sale with them, I do not know. But, one way or another, these people do count for something.

So the fact that one of this tribe, Pascal Bruckner (a “celebrated French philosopher from the centre left”), has decided that environmentalism has now become a load of despotic hooey is, I believe, quite significant.

I remember when these people turned en masse against Soviet Communism, either because it had “betrayed” Communism (bad) or because it was Communism (bad), in the late nineteen seventies. That meant something then.

And this (“Scorning the propaganda of fear”) means something now.

July 26th, 2012 |

3 comments to French philosopher turns anti-Green

  • 'Nuke' Gray
    July 27, 2012 at 1:55 am

    What took one of them so long? They can’t all be enthralled by Rousseau, can they?

  • Taylor
    July 27, 2012 at 2:47 am

    I wish this was more significant. Sadly Brukner is regarded by the real French left as “unsound’ . He may make sense but he will be cast into the outer darkness.

    Ecologie is a politically useful concept that unites the left with the extreme right whose worship of nature of the mystic qualities of the national soil brings them closer to the ideal of a national community.

    FN-EELV meme combat.

  • rantingkraut
    July 28, 2012 at 8:50 pm

    Bruckner has been offending left wing pieties for a while, here is a passage from The Tyranny of Guilt(Link):

    Islamo-Leftism was conceived chiefly by the British Trotskyites of the Socialist Workers’ Party: noting that the religion of the Prophet, although reactionary, is a factor of upheaval and not of passivity at the heart of our societies, they promote a reasonable entrisme, tactical, temporary alliances with Islam. A certain revolutionary fringe’s hope that Islam might become the spearhead of a new insurrection in the name of the oppressed is not without ulterior motives on both sides: Trotskyites, supporters of alternative forms of globalism, and adherents to Third Worldism are using the Islamists as a battering ram against free-market capitalism. The hatred of the market is worth a few compromises regarding fundamental rights, and especially that of the equality between men and women. The fundamentalists, disguised as friends of tolerance, are dissimulating and using the Left to advance their interests under the mask of a progressive rhetoric. There is a twofold deception here: one side supports the Islamic veil or polygamy in the name of the struggle against racism and neocolonialism. The other side pretends to be attacking globalization in order to impose its version of religious faith. Two currents of thought form temporary alliances against a common enemy: it is not hard to predict which one will crush the other once its objectives have been achieved. The Leftist intransigence that refuses any compromise with bourgeios society and cannot castigate too severely “little white men” actively collaborates with the most reactionary elements in the Muslim religion. But if the far Left courts this totalitarian thoecracy so assiduously, it is perhaps less a matter of opportunism than of a real affinity. The far Left has never gotten over communism and once again demonstrates that its true passion is not freedom, but slavery in the name of justice.

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