Read this interview and you may actually feel history shifting. He is someone I’ve long admired, and he still has a few interesting things to say, but I had the terrible realization that this is the most irrelevant man in all of France. He is now a man of the past, history is moving on. I’ll make my case with some select quotes – they do not appear in this order. The first sets the stage, perhaps properly.
“You can sense that we are on the brink of civil war,” Mr. Lévy says. “The worst part is that the country’s two main political forces now have an interest in the riots—Le Pen because she would take power, Mélenchon because he would take control of the streets.
And where does this thought take him? Here.
Finally he says that in the event of a Le Pen-Mélenchon runoff, “I will never force myself to choose between them. I will never cast a vote for either of them.”
”The same, he says, is true of the U.S. “You too have two extremes joining hands: MAGA and the new Democrats who make anti-Zionism—that is, antisemitism—the alpha and omega of their politics. You know very well that this face-off would be fatal to American democracy. Well, exactly the same is true of France.”
And then it gets downright pathetic.
Shouldn’t Emmuanel Macron, the president since 2017, take some blame for leading his country to this pass? Mr. Lévy pushes back. He says the portrayal of Mr. Macron “in diabolical terms by both right and left is, as far as I’m concerned, terribly unfair.” Mr. Lévy has been intensely critical of Mr. Macron for the “unilateral recognition of the state of Palestine, which gifts a political victory to Hamas and rewards the worst terrorism.” But there is “at least one area in which Macron has been impeccable: his support for Ukraine.
It’s a painful thing to do, but I’d encourage you to read the whole thing.
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The Weekend Interview in today’s WSJ is with Bernard-Henri Lévy.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/france-on-the-brink-of-civil-war-ed743a69?st=mJJob5
Read this interview and you may actually feel history shifting. He is someone I’ve long admired, and he still has a few interesting things to say, but I had the terrible realization that this is the most irrelevant man in all of France. He is now a man of the past, history is moving on. I’ll make my case with some select quotes – they do not appear in this order. The first sets the stage, perhaps properly.
And where does this thought take him? Here.
And then it gets downright pathetic.
It’s a painful thing to do, but I’d encourage you to read the whole thing.