Journalists From France

"Le mari et la femme doivent-être égaux."

"La féodalité n'est qu'un système d'Esclaves et de Tyrans; ma patrie veut-être libre, ne peut plus rien conserver dans ce qui tient à ce système."

"Réapprendre et plus difficile qu'apprendre."

"Je confesse aujourd'hui de bonne foi que je m'en veux d'avoir autrefois vu en noir, et le gouvernement révolutionnaire et Robespierre et Saint-Just. Je crois que ces hommes valaient mieux à eux seuls que tous les révolutionnaires ensemble."

"Nous distinguerons dans Robespierre deux hommes apôtre de la liberté et Robespierre le plus infâme des tyrans."

"Babeuf was made a public example by being taken to Vendôme in a cage—an indignity which not long before had filled the Parisians with fury when the Austrians had inflicted it on a Frenchman. His defense, which lasted for six sittings at the court and fills more than three hundred pages, is an impressive and moving document. Babeuf knew well that he was facing death and the Revolution was doomed. .. His defense is like a summary of the unrealized ideas of the Enlightenment and a vindication of their ultimate necessity. And it has moments of grandeur which it is not absurd to compare to Socrates' Apology."

"Je fais vœu de d'appeler prêtre c'est-à-dire charlatans, imposteurs tous ceux que je verrai dévier de la ligne des droits de l'homme."

"Il faut avancer... parce que le christianisme et la liberté sont incompatibles"

"François-Noël Babeuf, the self-educated son of a gabellou and himself a man whose business it was before 1789 to show the rich how they might become richer by squeezing the peasants for feudal dues, did somehow produce the first modern and coherent communist political strategy."

"L'éducation est une monstruosité lorsqu'elle est inégale, lorsqu'elle est le patrimoine exclusif d'une portion de l'association; puisqu'alors elle devient la main de cette portion, un amas de machines, une provisions d'armes de toutes sortes, à l'aide desquelles cette première portion combat l'autre qui est désarmé."

"Nul ne peut par l'accumulation de tous les moyens priver l'autre de l'instruction nécessaire pour son bonheur; l'instruction doit-être commune."

"Prior to the middle of the nineteenth century, the ideal of equality was an aspiration that occasionally produced social violence but lacked both a theory and a strategy. Thus, in seventeenth-century England, Gerrard Winstanley, the leader of a radical group called the Diggers, exhorted his followers to seize the commons and turn them into arable land. He formulated something like a communistic doctrine that denounced commerce in land or its product. During the French Revolution, a century and a half later, the French radical François-Noël Babeuf organized a “Conspiracy for Equality,” which called for the socialization of all property. Neither man, however, had a doctrine capable of demonstrating how the kind of social revolution he advocated would come into being. The same held true of socialist idealists active in the early nineteenth century, such as the Comte de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier, who pinned their hopes on persuading the rich to part with their wealth."

"...enfans de l'ignorance qui ont fait en tous tems le malheur des races humaines."

"Il ne s'est jamais rien fait de grand dans le monde que par le courage et la fermeté d'un seul homme qui brave les préjugés de la multitude."

"The ultimate ideal of Babeuf and his Conspiracy was absolute equality. Nature, they claimed, calls for perfect equality; all inequality is injustice: therefore community of property was to be established. ... In the ideal communist society sought by the Conspiracy, private property would be abolished, and all property would be communal and stored in communal storehouses. From these storehouses, the goods would be distributed “equitably” by the superiors — apparently, there was to be a cadre of “superiors” in this oh so “equal” world!"

"Que tes ennemis expirants Voient ton triomphe et notre gloire!"

"The intellectual ... must try never to forget the arguments of the adversary, or the uncertainty of the future, or the faults of one’s own side, or the underlying fraternity of ordinary men everywhere."

"The man who no longer expects miraculous changes either from a revolution or from an economic plan is not obliged to resign himself to the unjustifiable. It is because he likes individual human beings, participates in communities, and respects the truth, that he refuses to surrender his soul to an abstract ideal of humanity, a tyrannical party, and an absurd scholasticism. . . . If tolerance is born of doubt, let us teach everyone to doubt all the models and utopias, to challenge all the prophets of redemption and the heralds of catastrophe. If they can abolish fanaticism, let us pray for the advent of the sceptics."

"In short, Raymond Aron was a perfect bourgeois. I use the term invented by liberal democracy's critics and enemies to describe the kind of man typical of it. He was reasonable, immune to the great romantic longings in the light of which the present is denigrated and sensible calculation about the future is made to appear small-minded. Such a man is a reflective rather than a passionate patriot, a good husband and father whose attachment to the smaller community attaches him more securely to the larger one, and, above all, he believes in the liberating power of education."

"What strikes me as particularly undeniable is that the absence of the feeling of belonging to a class is characteristic of children of the bourgeoisie. People in a dominant class position do not notice that they are positioned, situated, within a specific world (just as someone who is white isn’t necessarily aware of being so, or someone heterosexual). Read in this light, Aron’s remark can be seen for what it is, the naive confession offered by a person of privilege who imagines he is writing sociology when all he is doing is describing his own social status. I only met him once in my life, and immediately felt a strong aversion towards him. The very moment I set eyes on him, I loathed his ingratiating smile, his soothing voice, his way of demonstrating how reasonable and rational he was, everything about him that displayed his bourgeois ethos of decorum and propriety, of ideological moderation. (In reality, his writings are filled with a violence that those at whom it is directed would not be able to avoid feeling were they ever to come across it. It suffices to read—but there are other choices too—the pages he wrote about the working-class strikes in the 1950s. People have praised his lucidity because he was anticommunist while others still blindly supported the Soviet Union. But this is wrong! He was anticommunist because of his hatred of the working class, and he set himself up as the political and ideological defender of the bourgeois establishment, defending against anything having to do with the aspirations or the political activities of the working class. Basically, his pen was for hire: he was a soldier in the service of those in power helping them to maintain their power. Sartre was right a thousand times over to insult him in May 1968. Aron had more than earned it. Let us salute the greatness of Sartre for daring to break with the conventions of polite academic “discussion”—which always works in favor of “orthodoxy,” and its reliance on “common sense” and what seems “self-evident” in its opposition to heterodoxy and to critical thought. Sartre did this at a moment when it had become important to “insult those who are the real insulters,” to recall a helpful reminder Genet offers us, a happy turn of phrase we should always be ready to take up as our motto.)"

"The optimism of the Left was created and maintained by a strong feeling: admiration for the power of reason, certainty that the application of science to industry would revolu­tionise the order of human society and the condition of its individual members. The ancestral aspiration towards human brotherhood was united with faith in practical science in order to inspire either nationalism or socialism or both."

"Like the Owl of Minerva, Aron brought wisdom to the French intellectual community in its twilight years; but the belated appreciation of his work and his long isolation have obscured the heroic scale of his contribution to French public life. Aron was no moralist. But his whole career constituted a bet on Reason against History, and to the extent that he has won he will in time be recognized as the greatest intellectual dissenter of his age and the man who laid the foundations for a fresh departure in French public debate."

"As neither of us is Politically Correct, "man" here means man + woman, and "mankind" means humankind."

"Managers try to make the workplace safer and less destructive (= more productive) of a precious capital: labour. Animal exploitation duplicates this process. It tends to experiment less on animals in order to get more from them, painfully if it must, painlessly if it can"

"Our critique of capitalism is precisely that value production turns everything, whether meat or poetry, into commodity, and that it's no use asking for more love poems and less hamburgers."

"Animals that kill usually have far more social relationships than those they prey upon."

"Nature awareness, ecological worries and reactions to animal abuse are not signs of mankind at last getting conscious of its impact on the rest of the planet, but of the necessity for capital to think globally, and to take all past and present into account, from Maya temples to whales and genes. Everything it dominates has to be controlled and classified in order to be managed. What is marketable must be protected. Capital owns the world and no owner can afford to be too careless about his possessions."

"It's no coincidence that an acute sensibility to the condition of animals comes up at the same time as industrialised food and concentration camp style farming."

"Communism knows no monster. ... Should abuse occur, the perpetrator would not be ostracized by his fellow human beings. They would not reject the social violator in order to reassure themselves of their humanity by comparing themselves to a non-human human, to a monster. They would be able to recognize what they have in common with him, and to realize that they could have done what he did. And this, we believe, is a much better way of reducing abuse to its lowest possible minimum than any search for normality."

"I am about to take a rapid review of the history of the French Revolution, which began the era of new societies in Europe, as the English Revolution had begun the era of new governments. This revolution not only modified the political power, but it entirely changed the internal existence of the nation. The forms of the society of the Middle Ages still remained. The land was divided into hostile provinces, the population into rival classes. The nobility had lost all their powers, but still retained all their distinctions: the people had no rights, royalty no limits; France was in an utter confusion of arbitrary administration, of class legislation and special privileges to special bodies. For these abuses the revolution substituted a system more conformable with justice, and better suited to our times. It substituted law in the place of arbitrary will, equality in that of privilege; delivered men from the distinctions of classes, the land from the barriers of provinces, trade from the shackles of corporations and fellowships, agriculture from feudal subjection and the oppression of tithes, property from the impediment of entails, and brought everything to the condition of one state, one system of law, one people."

"At the end of the interview, I was won over and I understood that this man, who never puts himself forward and seemed most humble, had cultivated kindness and compassion since his early childhood, tirelessly drawing from the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism."

"I believe that the ancient knowledge that stands behind Hinduism is a truth the world needs: why life ? What happens after death? What is karma, what is dharma ? How the divine manifests himself or herself, at different times under different names, with different scriptures…. That knowledge which once roamed the world, from Mesopotamia to Greece, only survives today in India."

"Gautier, in his book A History of India as it Happened—not as it has been written, tears into the questionable narratives of Marxist historians and quotes many examples of negationism. He says: “We will never be able to assess the immense physical harm done to India by the Muslim invasions. Even more difficult is to estimate the moral and the spiritual damage done to Hindu India”. Finally, Gautier explains why negationism must be challenged. He says “it is not about vengeance, or of reawakening old ghosts, but of not repeating the same mistakes”. This is indeed central to the argument of Elst, Frawley, Gautier, and Bhyrappa. Secular, democratic India must know the truth and make peace with it."

"Sonia has achieved such terrifying power, a glance of her, a silence, just being there, is enough for her inner circle to act; she has subverted so much of the instruments of Indian democracy and she controls such huge amounts of unlisted money that sooner or later this 'karma' may come back to her under one form or the other."

"Nevertheless, they did their fair share of harm to India, which has not yet really recovered from two centuries of Raj. Their brutality, whether the hangings of Indian nationalists, or the incredible ferocity which followed the great Indian Mutiny, or the massacre of Jallianwala Bagh, are today part of history. They ruled for two centuries with the unshakeable conviction of their own racial superiority which made Fitzjames Stephen, the philosopher of the Indian Civil Service, say: “Ours is essentially an absolute government, which has for base not the consent of the Indians, but their conquest. It does not want to represent the concept of the indigenous population of life and government and can never do, because then it would represent idolatry and barbarism. It represents a belligerent civilisation and nothing could be more dangerous than to have in one’s administration, at the head of a government founded on conquest—implying in all points the superiority of the conquering race, its institution, its principles, that men who hesitate to impose themselves openly.”"

"Indians today live in a country where mullahs can preach secession, while Hindu gurus revered by millions of Hindus are the target of ridicule, media attacks and police assaults."

"I often faced a lot of hostility from the sub-editors who would censor my articles."

"Now compare this with the attitude of the BBC during the Kargil war. Most of us foreign correspondents know by now that the Pakistanis are training, arming and financing Kashmiri mujahidins. We also know that Pakistan is sponsoring international terrorism, whether in New York or in Sinkiang and is a closed ally of the Taliban, one of the most fundamentalist and dangerous forces in the world today. Yet, for the last 10 years, the BBC has kept on with the old refrain : " India SAYS that Pakistan is training Kashmiri militants, an accusation which Islamabad refutes". By insisting on mouthing this absurd statement, even during the Kargil war, when the whole Western intelligence knew that most of the militants manning the heights were Pakistani soldiers in civil, the BBC thought that it is practising impartial journalism. But who are they fooling ? Everybody is aware of the strong Leftist bias of the BBC (nothing wrong in being Leftist, as long as you don’t pretend to be impartial), who has always defended Muslims separatists all over the planet, whether it is the Palestinians, the terrorists in Chechenya, or the Kashmiri militants. Unfortunately, the BBC has so much of a reputation in the world (and indeed their documentaries are first class), that it shapes the opinions of our editors in Paris or Bonn, who in turn put pressure on us to report on "Hindu fundamentalism", or the "poor persecuted Kashmiris"."

"Kalaripayat, literally "the way of the battlefield, still survives in Kerala, where it is often dedicated to Mahakali. The Kalari grounds are usually situated near a temple, and the pupils, after having touched the feet of the master, saluted the ancestors and bowed down to the Goddess, begin the lesson. Kalari trainings have been codified for over 3000 years and nothing much has changed. The warming-up is essential and demands great suppleness. Each movement is repeated several times, facing north, east, south and west, till perfect loosening is achieved. The young pupils pass on to the handling of weapons, starting with the "Silambam", a short stick made of extremely hard wood, which in the olden times could effectively deal with swords. The blows are hard and the parade must be fast and precise, to avoid being hit on the fingers! They continue with the swords, heavy and dangerous, even though they are not sharpened any more, as they are used . without guard or any kind of body protection; they whirl, jump and parry, in an impressive ballet. Young, fearless girls fight with enormous knives, bigger than their arms and the clash of irons is echoed in the ground. The session ends with the big canes, favourite weapons of the Buddhist traveller monks, which they used during their long journey towards China to scare away attackers."

"Finally, Westernisation through television and advertisements, is sweeping across India, and this may be the greatest danger, as westernisation has killed the souls of many Asian countries."

"I have never hidden behind a pseudonym to say what I think. I have been one of the rare western journalists to defend Hindus. I have done it openly, in my own name, with dedication and courage and that has cost me a lot."

"Christophe Jaffrelot is also one of several French India-watchers who have exerted pressure on the French daily Le Figaro to fire its (allegedly pro-Hindu) India correspondent François Gautier.. This stamps him a fine member of the select club of opinion hegemons who prefer to enforce their hegemony by silencing dissidents rather than facing them in debate."

"In Tripura, for instance, there were no Christians at independence, the maharaja of the state was a Hindu and there were innumerable temples all over the State. But from 1950, Christian missionaries (with Nehru’s blessings) went into the deep forests of Tripura and started converting the Kukis. Today, according to official figures, there are 120.000 Christians in Tripura, a 90% increase since 1991. The figures are even more striking in Arunachal Pradesh, where there were only 1710 Christians in 1961, but 115000 today, as well as 700 churches! What to say of Mizoram and Nagaland, where the entire local population is Christian! The amount of money being by poured by Christians into the North-East is staggering: The Saint Paul’s school of Tripura, for instance, gets an 80 lakhs endowment per semester. Which Hindu school can match this ? No country in the world would allow this. France, for instance, has a full-blown Minister who is in charge of hunting down "sects". And by sects, it is meant anything which does not belong to the great Christian family, particularly if it has Hindu "pagan" overtones…"

"When Vasco de Gama, landed in Kerala in 1498, he was generously received by Zamorin, the Hindu king of Calicut, who granted him the right to establish warehouses for commerce. But once again, Hindu tolerance was exploited and the Portuguese wanted more and more: in 1510, Alfonso de Albuquerque seized Goa, where he started a reign of terror, burning "heretics", crucifying Brahmins, using false theories to forcibly convert the lower castes, razing temples to build churches upon them and encouraging his soldiers to take Indian mistresses. Indeed, the Portuguese perpetrated here some of the worst atrocities ever committed in Asia by Christianity upon another religion."

"Christianity has always striven on the myth of persecution, which in turn bred "martyrs" and saints, indispensable to the propagation of Christianity."

"There must be at least three hundred foreign correspondents posted in Delhi, which should vouch for a variety of opinion. But if you give them a subject to write about - any subject - say Ayodhya, the RSS, fanatic Hindus, secularism, or Sonia Gandhi, and you will get two hundred and ninety eight articles which will say more or less the same thing, even if it is with different styles, different illustrations and various degrees of professionalism. This is not to say that there are no sincere western journalists who write serious stories which do homage to India’s greatness and immense culture; but they are usually the exception."

"Then, one of the devotees quietly started humming a bhajan, maybe as ancient as the city of Kashi itself:"Om namah Shivaya, Om namah Shivaya "; and soon all of us joined him softly, so as not to break the magic spell of the silent silver night. After a moment, Sri Sri closed his eyes and seeing him totally absorbed, perhaps in some mystical realm, touched our soul as nothing else could. There was an atmosphere of stillness and serenity. In a corner, a girl started shedding quiet tears of ecstasy an elderly man joined his hands in a silent prayer, a wordless gesture of deeply felt gratitude; everyone shone with intense inner joy, bliss and wonder. As for me, to my surprise, the constant chattering in my mind had become quiet; my soul soared high in the air. Only this perfect moment WAS."

"At some point, after years or even centuries of submitting like sheep to slaughter, Hindus—whom the Mahatma once gently called cowards—erupt in uncontrolled fury. And it hurts badly. It happened in Gujarat. It happened in Jammu, then in Kandhamal, Mangalore, and Malegaon. It may happen again elsewhere."

"This year, most of the sources have dried in Almora and there is hardly any water, when the summer is still far away. “It’s because of Global Warming”, we often hear. There is some truth in that, but what our friends do not say, is that unknown to the Indian general public, there has happened over the years a massive deforestation of the Himalayas. In Almora for instance, gone long ago are the oak and indigenous forests and in the twelve years I have come, I have not seen any afforestation done in the surrounding hills. Even worse, the locals could not care less ! Not a day passes by in the area where we live, without one of the few pine trees left being surreptitiously felled down and even the poor mimosas do not escape the villagers’s wrath. “It’s because they feel the forest belongs to the Government and not to them”, says a local NGO. Is it ? But we have witnessed the same phenomenon in Auroville, Tamil Nadu: every time the local villagers are angry after the foreigners there, they cut the trees planted for their benefit ! No doubt the Government of India, which allowed the massive deforestation of the country after Independence, is the main culprit; but in the Kumaon hills, there are also literally thousands of NGO’s, doing woman empowerment, village empowerment, this empowerment, that empowerment, this khadi, that khadi… But bare for two or three of them such as Chirag, Arohi, or NTGC, nobody does tree planting. “It’s the Forest Department’s fault, they are too corrupt”, many NGO’s claim…"

""Muslims are bullies and Hindus cowards," Mahatma Gandhi once said. He was right -- at least about Hindus."