This is much worse than Munich

In Munich in 1938, Chamberlain and Daladier made the wrong decision, but they were driven by honorable motives. Chamberlain was weak but wanted to preserve short-term peace at all costs; Daladier was entirely lucid, but he had taken a look at the state of preparation of the French forces and wanted to buy time to rearm (as he did).

Trump and his clique of incompetent, nasty sycophants are an entirely different matter. Without any pretense of doing the right thing, following the clue of the worst figures in history, they are exercising raw, unchecked power, using the sheer language of might. Two and a half centuries of US democracy and its defense (however imperfect) of human rights have been discarded overnight. So have the lessons of WWII and the bitterly-reached triumph of civilization against dictatorship and barbarism.

It is Europe’s turn to step in. Defending Ukraine is defending us all.

The path wrongly taken

The dominant discourse right now is “Calm down, this is just the normal game of democracy”. Actually, “this” is not the normal course of democracy. Everyone has experienced the disappointment of a favored candidate losing. The result of Tuesday is something else, not seen before in our lifetime: the triumph of indecency and the rout of decency.

There is in the world a general category of decent people, who as one of their characteristics seek out the company of other decent people. (“Elective affinities”.) They have been massively and perhaps decisively defeated.

What makes people decent is not that they never do bad things (although they perhaps strive not to do more of them than necessary), but that as much as possible they prefer certain things over their obverses. For example, they prefer:

  • Telling  the truth over lying.
  • Elegance over vulgarity.
  • Education over arrogant ignorance.
  • Arguments over insults.
  • Beauty over ugliness.
  • Joy over gloom.
  • Progress over regress.
  • Health over disease.
  • Financial well-being over widespread poverty.
  • Reason over mania.
  • Science over fables.
  • Helping others over hurting them.
  • Encouraging others over denigrating them.
  • Peace over war.
  • Respect over contempt.
  • Calm over violence.
  • Tolerance over intolerance.
  • Honesty over dishonesty.
  • Democracy over totalitarianism.
  • Freedom over slavery.
  • As an example of the last pair, women’s freedom over their submission to hateful men.
  • Kindness over cruelty.
  • Fairness over injustice.
  • Sanity over insanity.

(Again) those preferences do not mean that decent people never indulge in any of the second terms of these pairs, but that given a choice they will lean towards the first terms,  that they prefer the world to evolve in the direction of these first terms, and that they naturally associate with other people with similar preferences. The first terms all go well with each other (after all, what is science if not the dogged pursuit of truth? What is democracy if not the reign of tolerance?), and all the second terms go well with each other too, but until now it was exceedingly rare to see a  widely popular leader in a civilized country, and his zealots, deliberately embrace everything indecent and reject everything decent. At worst they would on the sly adopt a few indecencies here and there.

The pair elected yesterday is unique in the history of the United States by having deliberately, ostensibly and proudly chosen every second term. Every single one, many times, in the public’s full view, and under the cheers of their supporters.

That is why all decent people are desperate today. The desperation has nothing to do with matters of left versus right, or democrat versus republican, or higher taxes versus tax cuts, or the price of eggs, or any other political issue of substance.  It has everything to do with decency over indecency.

And particularly with truth over falsehood. The first of the above pairs largely subsumes the others: when society starts tolerating constant, blatant, enormous lies as if they were part of expected discourse, everything else falls out. Dictators understand this process well.

We hear that “no one knows what is going to happen”. Not so. We know something with certainty: catastrophes are coming our way. The only unknown is how many of them will hit us. For one thing the fight against climate change is doomed: all experts tell us that the change is not linear and that we have (we had) at best a few years to avoid the worst. As the US, the biggest  source of warming and emissions (although by no means the only large one), turns away from climate action, everyone else, beginning with China, will have an excellent excuse to do nothing. The consequences are horrendous to contemplate, and will be with us soon.  Another certain catastrophe is chaos in the US, merrily encouraged by its enemies. The part of the country that voted for sanity is defeated and despondent but not gone; come the first round of anti-constitutional measures, we may expect no end to clashes. Tens of millions of Americans are almost certainly going to lose their health insurance, going back to a situation unique in developed countries.  Women, denied abortion and resorting to back-alley substitutes, will die by the thousands. It is better not to think too much of what will happen to Ukraine now (and through a possible ricochet effect to Poland and the Baltic states).  Or of what would ensue in the case of a new health crisis, with loony anti-vaccine, anti-mask activists at the helm. Of what will take place at all levels of governments, with none of the “adults in the room” around: the cool-headed conservative professionals who saved us from some disasters the first time around (and this time exhorted the country to vote for the sane candidate). We are back to the dark years of 2016 to 2020, when we would wake up almost every morning to the news of the latest crazy initiative, except that now there will be a rock-solid majority (presidency, Senate, Supreme Court, with the House still not decided as of this writing) and the entire party’s total subservience to the whims, however extreme, of one man.

The founders of the Republic had warned against exactly the kind of outrageous demagogues that will now assume power, but they could never imagine such a combination of circumstances as has now overwhelmed the country; if they had they would surely have put in more checks and balances. (For one thing, convicted felons cannot vote; why in the world can they be elected?)

The USA is, or was until now, the world’s oldest continuously functioning democracy. Does it have enough resilience to continue as a democracy? Do not hold your breath. For one thing, there is no democracy without civilized debate. Yet another certain and unprecedented catastrophe is the debasement of public discourse, step by step until destruction, in the past few years. Everyone now seems to have accepted that it is OK for a major party candidate, a past and now future president, to resort again and again and again to personal insults, to mocking disabled persons for their disability, war heroes for having been heroes, soldiers for having been soldiers, and opponents for being supposedly stupid. The press calls these insults “schoolyard bullying”, but a 12-year-old who says any of these things in  a school’s yard promptly gets a dressing-down from the principal and a suspension.

We in the West have been living, whether we realized or not, a wonderful 80 years. We have suffered traumas (the repeated Paris attacks, 9/11, October 7, February 2022) but we have also enjoyed peace and prosperity. We are at the end of an era. Particularly those among us who aspire to decency.

 

Europe asleep (a key-not)

This week, Informatics Europe, the association of European computer science departments and industry research centers, is holding its annual ECSS event, bizarrely billed as “20 years of Informatics Europe”. (Informatics Europe was created at the end of 2006 and incorporated officially in 2011. The first ever mention of the name appeared in an email from Jan van Leeuwen to me with cc to Christine Choppy, received on 23 October 2006 at 21:37 — we were working late. Extract from Jan’s message: “The name `Informatics Europe’ has emerged as as a name that several people find appealing (and  www.informatics-europe.org seems free).” So this year is at most the 18th anniversary.)

I would have liked to speak at this week’s event but was rejected, as explained at the end of this note. I am jotting down here a partial sketch of what I would have said, at least the introduction. (Engaging in a key-not since I was not granted a keynote.) Some of the underlying matters are of great importance and I hope to have the opportunity to talk or write about them in a more organized form in the future.

Informatics Europe came out of a need to support and unite Europe’s computer science (informatics) community. In October 2004 (funny how much seems to happen in October) Willy Zwaenepoel, chair of CS at EPFL (ETH Lausanne) wrote to me as the CS department head at ETH Zurich with an invitation to meet and discuss ways to work together towards making the discipline more visible in Switzerland. We met shortly thereafter, for a pleasant Sunday dinner on November 14. I liked his idea but suggested that any serious effort should happen at the European level rather than just Switzerland. We agreed to try to convince all the department heads that we could find across Europe and invite them to a first meeting. In the following weeks a frantic effort took place to identify, by going through university web sites and personal contacts, as many potential participants as possible. The meeting,  dubbed ECSS for European Computer Science Summit, took place at ETH Zurich on (you almost guessed it) 20-21 October 2005. The call for participation started with:

The departments of computer science at EPF Lausanne and ETH Zurich are taking the initiative of a first meeting of heads of departments in Europe.

Until now there hadn’t been any effort, comparable to the Computing Research Association in the US with its annual “Snowbird” conference, to provide a forum where they could discuss these matters and coordinate their efforts. We feel it’s time to start.

The event triggered enormous enthusiasm and in the following years we created the association (first with another name, pretty ridiculous in retrospect, but fortunately Jan van Leeuwen intervened) and developed it. For many years the associated was hosted at ETH in my group, with a fantastic Executive Board (in particular its two initial vice presidents, Jan van Leeuwen and Christine Choppy) and a single employee (worth many), Cristina Pereira, who devoted an incredible amount of energy to develop services for the members, who are not individuals but organizations (university departments and industry research labs). One of the important benefits of the early years was to bring together academics from the Eastern and Western halves of the continent, the former having still recently emerged from communism and eager to make contacts with their peers from the West.

This short reminder is just to situate Informatics Europe for those who do not know about the organization. I will talk more about it at the end because the true subject of this note is not the institution but European computer science. The common concern of the founders was to bring the community together and enable it to speak with a single voice to advance the discipline. The opening paragraphs of a paper that Zwaenepoel and I published in Communications of the ACM to announce the effort (see here for the published version, or here for a longer one, pre-copy-editing) reflect this ambition:

Europe’s contribution to computer science, going back seventy years with Turing and Zuse, is extensive and prestigious; but the European computer science community is far from having achieved the same strength and unity as its American counterpart. On 20 and 21 October 2005, at ETH Zurich, the “European Computer Science Summit” brought together, for the first time, heads of computer science departments throughout Europe and its periphery. This landmark event was a joint undertaking of the CS departments of the two branches of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology: EPFL (Lausanne) and ETH (Zurich).

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The initiative attracted interest far beyond its original scope. Close to 100 people attended, representing most countries of the European Union, plus Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, Russia, Israel, a delegate from South Africa, and a representative of the ACM,
Russ Shackelford, from the US. Eastern Europe was well represented. The program consisted of two keynotes and a number of panels and workshops on such themes as research policy, curriculum harmonization, attracting students, teaching CS to non-CS students, existing national initiatives, and plans for a Europe-wide organization. The reason our original call for participation attracted such immediate and widespread interest is that computer science in Europe faces a unique set of challenges as well as opportunities. There were dozens of emails in the style “It’s high time someone took such an initiative”; at the conference itself, the collective feeling of a major crystallizing event was palpable.

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The challenges include some old and some new. Among the old, the fragmentation of Europe and its much treasured cultural diversity have their counterparts in the organization of the educational and research systems. To take just three examples from the education side, the UK has a system that in many ways resembles the US standard, although with significant differences (3- rather than 4-year bachelor’s degree, different hierarchy of academic personnel with fewer professors and more lecturers); German universities have for a long time relied on a long (9-semester) first degree, the “Diplom”; and France has a dual system of “Grandes Écoles”, engineering schools, some very prestigious and highly competitive, but stopping at a Master’s-level engineering degree, and universities with yet another sequence of degrees including a doctorate.

And so on. The immediate concerns in 2024 are different (Bologna adoption woes are a thing of the past) but the basic conundrum remains: the incredible amount of talent and creativity present in Europe remains dormant; research in academia (and industry) fails to deliver anywhere close to its potential. The signs are everywhere; as this note is only a sketch let me just mention a handful. The following picture  shows the provenance of papers in this year’s International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), the premier event in the field. Even if you cannot read all the details (it’s a photo taken quickly from a back row in the opening session, sorry for the bad quality), the basic message is unmistakable: all China, the US, then some papers from Singapore, Australia and Canada. A handful from Germany and Switzerland, not a single accepted paper from France! In a discipline that is crucial for the future of every European nation.

icse_2024

Venture capital? There is a bit more than twenty years ago, but it is still limited, avaricious and scared of risks. Government support? Horizon and other EU projects have helped many, with ERC grants  in particular (a brilliant European exclusive) leading to spectacular successes, but the bulk of the funding is unbelievably bureaucratic, forcing marriages of reason between institutions that have nothing in common (other than the hope of getting some monies from Brussels) and feeding a whole industry of go-between companies which claim to help applicants but contribute exactly zero to science and innovation. They have also had the perverse effect of limiting national sources of funding. (In one national research agency on whose evaluation committee I sat,  the acceptance rate is 11%. In another, where I recently was on the expert panel, it’s more like 8%. Such institutions are the main source of non-EU research funding in their respective countries.)

The result? Far less innovation than we deserve and a brain drain that every year gets worse. Some successes do occur, and we like to root for Dassault, SAP, Amadeus and more recently companies like Mistral, but almost all of the top names in technology   — like them or loathe them  — are US-based (except for their Chinese counterparts): Amazon, Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Apple, Meta, X, or (to name another software company) Tesla. They benefit from European talent and European education: some have key research centers in Europe, and all have European engineers and researchers. So do non-European universities; not a few of  the ICSE papers labelled above as “American” or “Canadian” are actually by European authors. Talk to a brilliant young researcher or bright-eyed entrepreneur in Europe: in most cases, you will hear that he wants to find a position or create a company in the US, because that is where the action is.

Let me illustrate the situation with a vivid example. In honor of Niklaus Wirth’s 80th birthday I co-organized a conference in 2014 where at the break a few of us were chatting with one of the speakers, Vint Cerf. Someone asked him a question which was popping up everywhere at that time, right in the middle of the Snowden affair: “if you were a sysadmin for a government organization, would you buy a Huawei router?”. Cerf’s answer was remarkable: I don’t know, he said, but there is one thing I do not understand: why in the world doesn’t Europe develop its own cloud solution? So honest, coming from an American — a Vice President at Google! — and so true. So true today still: we are all putting all our data on Amazon’s AWS and Cerf’s employer’s Google Cloud and IBM Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Total madness. (A recent phenomenon that appears even worse is something I have seen happening at European university after university: relinquishing email and other fundamental solutions to Microsoft! More and more of us now have our professional emails at outlook.com. Even aside from the technical issues, such en-masse surrender is demented.) Is Europe so poor or so retarded that it cannot build local cloud or email solutions? Of course not. In fact, some of the concepts were invented here!

This inability to deliver on our science and technology potential is one of the major obstacles to social and economic improvement in Europe. (Case in point: there is an almost one-to-one correspondence between the small set of countries that are doing better economically than the rest of the Europe, often much better, and the small set of countries that take education and science seriously, giving them enough money and freeing them from overreaching bureaucracy. Did I mention Switzerland?) The brain drain should be a major source of worry; some degree of it is of course normal — enterprising people move around, and there are objective reasons for the magnetic attraction of the US — but the phenomenon is dangerously growing and is too unidirectional. Europe should offer its best and brightest a local choice commensurate with the remote one.

Many cases seem to suggest that Europe has simply given up on its ambitions. One specific example — academia-related but important — adds to the concerns raised apropos ICSE above. With a group of software engineering pioneers from across Europe (including some who would later help with Informatics Europe) we started the European Software Engineering Conference in 1987. I was the chair of the first conference, in Strasbourg that year, and the chair of the original steering committee for the following years (I later organized the 2013 session). The conference blossomed, reflecting the vibrant life of the European software engineering community, and open of course to researchers from all over the world. (The keynote speaker in Strasbourg was David Parnas, who joked that we had invited him, an American, because the French and Germans would never agree to a speaker from the other country. That quip was perhaps funny but as unfair as it was wrong: founders from different countries, notably including Italy and Belgium, even the UK, were working together in  a respectful and friendly way without any national preferences.) Having done my job I stepped aside but was flabbergasted to learn some years later that ESEC had attached itself to a US-based event, FSE (the symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering). The inevitable and predictable happened: FSE was supposed to be ESEC-FSE every other year, but soon that practice fell out and now ESEC is no more. FSE is not the culprit here: it’s an excellent conference (I had a paper in the last edition), it is just not European. My blood boils each time I think about how the people who should have nurtured and developed ESEC, the result of many years of discussions and of excellent Europe-wide cooperation, betrayed their mission and let the whole thing disappear. Pathetic and stupid, and terrible for Europe, which no longer has an international conference in this fundamental area of modern technology.

The ESEC story helps think about the inevitable question: who is responsible? Governments are not blameless; they are good at speeches but less at execution. When they do intervene, it’s often with haste (reacting to hype with pharaonic projects that burn heaps of money before running out of favor and delivering nothing). In France, the tendency is sometimes to let the state undertake technical projects that it cannot handle; the recipes that led to the TGV or Ariane do not necessarily work for IT. (A 2006 example was an attempt to create a homegrown search engine, which lasted just long enough to elicit stinging mockery in the Wall Street Journal, “Le Google”, unfortunately behind a paywall.)

It is too easy, however, to cast all the blame on outsiders. Perhaps the most important message that I would have wanted to convey to the department heads, deans, rectors and other academic decision-makers attending ECSS this week is that we should stop looking elsewhere and start working on the problems for which we are responsible. Academia is largely self-governed. Even in centralized countries where many decisions are made at the national level in ministries, the staff in those ministries largely consists of academics on secondment to the administration. European academia — except in the more successful countries, already alluded to, and by the way not exempt either from some of the problems of their neighbors — is suffocating under the weight of absurd rules. It is fashionable to complain about the bureaucracy, but many of the people complaining have the power to make and change these rules.

The absurdities are everywhere. In country A, a PhD must take exactly three years. (Oh yes? I thought it was the result that mattered.) By the way, if you have funding for 2.5 years, you cannot hire a PhD student (you say you will find the remaining funding in due time? What? You mean you are taking a risk?) In country B, you cannot be in the thesis committee of the student you supervised. (This is something bequeathed from the British system. After Brexit!) Countries C, D, E and F (with probably G, H, I, J and K to follow) have adopted the horrendous German idea of a “habilitation”, a second doctorate-like process after the doctorate, a very effective form of infantilization which maintains scientists in a subservient state until their late thirties, preventing them during their most productive years from devoting their energy to actual work. Universities everywhere subject each other to endless evaluation schemes in which no one cares about what you actually do in education and research but the game is about writing endless holier-than-thou dissertations on inclusiveness, equality etc. with no connection to any actual practice. In country L, politicized unions are represented in all the decision-making bodies and impose a political agenda, censoring important areas of research and skewing scientist hires on the basis of political preferences. In country M, there is a rule for every elementary event of academic life and the rule suffers no exception (even when you discover that it was made up two weeks earlier with the express goal of preventing you from doing something sensible). In country N, students who fail an exam have the right to a retake, and then a second retake, and then a third retake, in oral form of course. In country O, where all university presidents make constant speeches about the benefits of multidisciplinarity, a student passionate about robotics but with a degree in mechanical engineering cannot enroll in a master degree in robotics in the computer science department. In country P (and Q and R and S and T) students and instructors alike must, for any step of academic life, struggle with a poorly designed IT system, to which there is no alternative. In country U, expenses for scientific conferences are reimbursed six months later, when not rejected as non-conformant. In country V, researchers and educators are hired through a protracted  committee process which succeeds in weeding out candidates with an original profile. In country W, the primer criterion for hiring researchers is the H-index. In country X, it is the number of publications. In country Y, management looks at your research topics and forces you to change them every five years. I would need other alphabets but could go on.

When we complain about the difficulties to get things done, we are very much like the hero of Kafka’s Before the Law, who grows old waiting in front of a gate, only to learn in his final moments that he could just have entered by pushing it. We need to push the gate of European academia. No one but we ourselves is blocking it. Start by simplifying everything, but there are more ways to enter; they  are what I would have liked to present at ECSS and will have to wait for another day.

Which brings me back to the ECSS conference. I wrote to its organizers asking for the opportunity to give a talk. Naïvely, I thought the request would be obvious. After all, while Informatics Europe was at every step a group effort, with an outstanding group of colleagues from across Europe (I mentioned a few at the beginning, but there were many more, including all the members of the initial Executive Board), I played the key role as one of the two initiators of the idea, the organizer of the initial meeting and several of the following ECSS, the founding president for two terms (8 years), the prime writer of the foundational documents, the host of the first secretariat for many years in my ETH chair, the lead author of several reports, the marketer recruiting members, and the jack-of-all-trades for Informatics Europe. It may be exaggerated to say that for the first few years I carried the organization on my shoulders, but it is a fact that I found the generous funding (from ETH, industry partners and EPFL thanks to Zwaenepoel) that enabled us to get started and enabled me, when I passed the baton to my successor, to give him an organization in a sound financial situation, some 80 due-paying members, and a strong record of achievements. Is it outrageous, after two decades, to ask for a microphone to talk about the future for 45 minutes? The response I got from the Informatics Europe management was as surprising as it was boorish: in our program (they said in February 2024!) there is no place left. To add injury to insult they added that if I really wanted I could participate in some kind of panel discussion. (Sure, fly to Malta in the middle of the semester, cancel 4 classes and meetings, miss paper deadlines, all for 5 minutes of trying to put in a couple of words. By the way, one of the principles we had for the organization of ECSS was always to be in a big city with an important local community and an airport with lots of good connections to the principal places in Europe — and beyond for our US guests.) When people inherit a well-functioning organization, the result of hard work by a succession of predecessors, it is hard to imagine what pleasure they can take in telling them to go to hell. Pretty sick.

For me Informatics Europe was the application to my professional life of what remains a political passion: a passion for Europe and democracy. On this same blog in 2012 I published an article entitled “The most beautiful monument of Europe”, a vibrant hymn to the European project. While I know that some of it may appear naïve or even ridiculous, I still adhere to everything it says and I believe it is worth reading. While I have not followed the details of the activities of Informatics Europe since I stopped my direct involvement, I am saddened not to see any trace of European sentiment in it. We used to have Ukrainian members, from Odessa Polytechnic, who participated in the first ECSS meetings; today there is no member from Ukraine listed. One would  expect to see prominent words of solidarity with the country, which is defending our European values, including academic ones. Is that another sign of capitulation?

I am also surprised to see few new in-depth reports. Our friends from the US Computing Research Association, who were very helpful at the beginning of Informatics Europe (they included in particular Andy Bernat and Ed Laszowka, and Willy Zwaenepoel himself who had been a CRA officer during his years in the US), told us that one of the keys to success was to provide the community with factual information. Armed with that advice, we embarked on successive iterations of the “Informatics in Europe: Key Data” reports, largely due to the exhaustive work of Cristina Pereira, which provided unique data on salaries (something that we often do not discuss in Europe, but it is important to know how much a PhD student, postdoc, assistant professor of full professor makes in every surveyed country), student numbers, degrees, gender representation etc. etc., with the distinctive quality that — at Cristina’s insistence —we favored exactness over coverage: we included only the countries for which we could get reliable data, but for those we guaranteed full correctness and accuracy. From the Web site it seems these reports — which indeed required a lot of effort, but are they not the kind of thing the membership expects? — were discontinued some years ago. While the site shows some other interesting publications (“recommendations”), it seems regrettable to walk away from hard foundational work.

New management is entitled to its choices (as previous management is entitled to raise concerns). Beyond such differences of appreciation, the challenges facing European computer science are formidable. The enemies are outside, but they are also in ourselves. The people in charge are asleep at the wheel. I regret not to have had the opportunity to try to wake them up in person, but I do hope for a collective jolt to enable our discipline to bring Europe the informatics benefits Europe deserves.

And what if everything went well?

I do not have a crystal ball and disaster may still strike. A terrorist attack, disruption by the hateful scoundrels of the extreme left. (Meaning I would have to eat the words below, since they will be here for the record, but then we will have worse things to deplore.)

After initial doubts I have had an increasingly good feeling, as we got closer to the event, about the Olympic games. A few months ago I feared that unions would stage irresponsible strikes, but that does not seem to be happening; if peace was bought it was worth it.

It looks like the organization has been truly efficient and professional, with the right dose of controlled craziness (for the opening ceremony). After all, for the first time in decades France has had a competent government since 2017, still in place even if on the way out, and it shows.

What if everything went according to plan and beyond expectations? What if the unimaginable just happened now?

A skillfully orchestrated production, national unity even if temporary, smiles and welcomes — two weeks of bliss?

It is permitted to hold one’s breath and cross one’s fingers.

Bienvenue à Paris.

Descente aux enfers

[English version forthcoming.]

Que peut-on faire ? Un pays vieux d’un millénaire et demi est en train de se suicider. Pour tentant que soit le désespoir, il est encore temps d’agir.

Le pire scénario, c’est la menace de la gauche. Ce qu’il restait de sociaux-démocrates s’est prosterné devant une bande d’extrémistes décidés à détruire toute structure sociale, défendant ouvertement les terroristes les plus sanguinaires, et conduits par un apprenti dictateur assoiffé de pouvoir absolu et de vengeance dans la pure tradition stalinienne. Les contrer est la priorité absolue : faire barrage à la gauche.

Ceux d’en face, s’ils sont moins immédiatement dangereux, ne valent guère mieux. À peine dégagés de leurs origines pétainistes, ils sont soudoyés par Moscou et leur arrogance n’a d’égale que leur incompétence. En faisant chavirer la France ils risquent d’entraîner l’Europe dans le naufrage, ouvrant la porte à l’agression russe. D’abord les pays baltes, puis la Pologne, et qui ensuite ?

Pour la première fois depuis des décennies la France avait un président et un gouvernement dévoués, honnêtes et compétents. Des gens sérieux, éduqués, mus par le souci du bien public et décidés à résoudre les problèmes structuraux du pays, ayant déjà en peu d’années vaincu le cancer du chômage, rééquilibré un régime de retraites voué à la catastrophe, rétabli la crédibilité internationale de la France, rendu le pays attractif pour les investisseurs, géré efficacement la crise sanitaire, assaini les conditions de l’immigration, attaqué l’islamisme et évité les attentats des quinquennats précédents… La liste pourrait continuer longtemps. Face à cette action massivement réussie les moyens d’information privés et publics, bien pires que les réseaux sociaux tant décriés, se sont déchaînés contre ce président et son gouvernement année après année, mois après mois, jour après jour. Les historiens qui analyseront la débâcle sauront faire la part de la presse dite de référence, et d’une grande partie des intellectuels, ceux-là même qui auraient dû être le rempart de la raison et n’ont su être que les acteurs d’une impardonnable trahison des clercs.

Aberrant, impensable et abominable.

Toute indulgence vis-à-vis des extrémistes du pire bord ou de l’autre vous rendrait complice de l’inévitable débâcle historique qui suivrait leur élection. Pour éviter le désastre absolu, chaque personne sensée doit voter dimanche pour le candidat local de la liste Renaissance.

 

Upside down

What is going on?

In the US, the leading presidential candidate is a vulgar crook, a serial business failure and convicted business fraudster; more ominously, he acts like a vassal to Putin. His first term was an endless string of catastrophes, including the deaths of hundreds of thousands of his compatriots through gross mismanagement. And yet he mesmerizes the entire Republican party and half of the population, which despises his adversary, one of the most skilled presidents ever, surrounded by an A-team of aides, who brought back financial stability  — taking the Dow to unheard levels  —, defended Israel’s right to exist against the extremists in his own camp, and re-established respect for the US. But no, the electorate is ready to elect again the sinister buffoon and thereby to bring to an end the longest-running democratic run in the history of the world.

Have the American people gone mad?

France has its best government in 50 years; a young, energetic, smart president, he too surrounded by an incredible team of passionate men and women dedicated to the public good and to solving the country’s ills, one at a time. And whom does the common folk, for once united with a large segment of the educated class, deeply hate? That president and his team. Whom do they idolize? The extreme right, led by Kremlin-funded ignorant demagogues, unable to manage anything but prompt to fan any discontent anywhere. Also the extreme left, which has turned into the official antisemitic party in the hope of winning the vote of the banlieues by pronouncements that seem to come out of der Stürmer. In-between, the moderate left and the moderate right are representatives of the governments which for decades have not dared to address any of France’s structural problems. The press and mass media, including the previously neutral references of record, eager to prove their independence, savage the government day in and day out, good initiatives and bad. (Mostly good actually, but who cares? Nasty headlines make you look cool.) For the European elections of next Sunday, Macron has fielded an outstanding slate of determined professionals in his image; and yet all the polls suggest a landslide for the extreme-right list, led by a know-nothing who in years at the European parliament missed most sessions and did not produce a single law, report or result.

Have the French people gone mad?

Meanwhile top universities in Western Europe, the US and Australia fall prey to supporters of terrorism, defenders of the rapists and killers and butchers of women and children. The oh-so-nice bourgeois leftist press publishes ignoble articles glorifying the enemies of peace who advocate of the destruction of the only democracy in the Middle East. (The Guardian, the favorite reading of intellectuals in the English-speaking world, deserves a special mention in abjection. Its uppity journalists cannot  let Rishi Sunak state that two plus three equals five without firing a volley of attacks and mockery. And as soon as an anti-Israel bigot makes a statement, they religiously amplify it, shedding any semblance of a critical mindset and rational analysis.) Young people are being brainwashed with words like Apartheid (they apparently do not know that one fifth of Israeli citizens are Arabs, most of them Muslim or Christian, with a strong place in society, representatives in Parliament and at the Supreme Court) and Genocide (they apparently do not know that Israel voluntarily relinquished Gaza, removing every reluctant Israeli by force, and that the Palestinian population has grown by a factor of five since 1950). Disinformation generously fanned by authoritarian regimes relentlessly tries to convince us that the aggressor is the victim and the victim is the aggressor. To make us forget that the terrorists immerse themselves in the civilian population, so as to maximize casualties which they then attribute to Israel. That they bar those civilians from their immense underground network, reserving it for combatants and hostages. That in cold blood and out of sheer hatred they tortured and murdered hundreds of innocent civilians, gang-raping the women with proud sadism. That they refuse to release those they are still holding. That they relied on the world’s compassion and subsidies to plan and implement their murderous rampage. They hide the fate of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who were forcibly expelled from Arab countries (any “right of return” there?) and had to find new countries and build new lives. And yet from Columbia in New York to Sciences Po in Paris, activist students insult democrats and promote obscurantism. (One of the most extreme examples, which would be funny if it were not tragic, is the “LGBTQ for Gaza” movement, apparently oblivious to what happens to homosexuals in Gaza: torture first, then usually being thrown from the roof. As someone wrote, the slogan evokes notions of “Turkeys for Thanksgiving”.) The truth is that the Israelis, by defending themselves, are defending us from fanatics who want to bring the Western world back one thousand years, to a society of religious absolutism, power of the warlords, constant fear of violence and abuse, subjugation of women, and absence of any form of freedom.

Have the supposed future elites of the West gone mad?

Others too are defending us by defending themselves: the Ukrainians. Resisting the savage onslaught of a neighbor many times bigger and richer, they are shedding their blood to defend their right to freedom and democracy, values that we in the West have taken for granted. And yet many people in that same West grumble about the money that we are giving them and the risk of provoking Putin. (As if he needed provocation to launch what we thought would never happen again in Europe, an imperialistic attack motivated only by a thirst for power and domination.) The West’s mixed reaction is emboldening China’s own tyrant, intent on destroying a thriving democracy. Republicans in the US, egged on by Trump, delayed by half a year the provision of supplies needed as a matter of survival (even though much of that money comes back to the US in the form of weapon purchases!). Here too Macron, today’s European statesman  in the lineage of Adenauer, Monnet, Schuman and de Gaulle, is showing the way, along with the leaders of Eastern Europe an countries (the Baltic republics, Czechia, Poland, who on top of all their existential issues have to cope with the systematic obstruction of Hungary). The miserable German chancellor is, for his part, scared of his own shadow. Germany, with its addiction to Russian oil stemming from an idiotic and criminal rejection of nuclear power two decades ago, was a significant enabler of Putin’s ability to start monstrous war, but today it refuses to play its part in coping with the consequences.

Have the Germans gone mad?

The world seems to be upside down.

This blog started out as a “technology blog” and branched into “technology+” as I started including topics from other domains, but mostly I have stayed away from politics. One major exception was an
extensive article about Europe twelve years ago, to which I would not change anything today, especially days before crucial European elections. I prefer to write about what I know best: programming languages, programming methodology, software engineering, with occasional incursions into music, and once in a while some observation about the little ironies of life. But there are circumstances under which anyone who has had the benefit of learning to think — we do not even need the word “intellectual” — has to raise the alarm and explain that we risk losing everything.

Yes, we are at risk of losing everything that we have gained in the past millennium and which (along with economic progress, which it has enabled) makes life worth living: freedom of thought and action, tolerance, respect, democracy, generosity, protection of the weakest members of society, the prevalence of reason over arbitrary might, checks and balances on every kind of power, gender equality and other forms of giving everyone a chance. In the 1930s Julien Benda talked of La Trahison des Clercs, the treason of the educated, when he saw his peers endorse authoritarian (and ultimately murderous) theories from the left and the right. Something similar is happening today. We have been spoiled by those very advances of freedom, spoiled into thinking that we can show off by smugly promoting contrarian ideas, without realizing that they are not clever retorts in fancy conversations but part of a demolition process. Something like this happened in a previous generation: in 1968, it was fashionable for bourgeois youth to advocate Trotskyist or Maoist precepts. That was a lot of fun and made you look cool for a few years, before you became a professor, a middle manager or a capitalist. Today the stakes are much higher because the ruthless adversaries are at the door, with considerable means of physical destruction, threatening the very basis of modern, stable, pleasant society. They do not tolerate us, actually they despise us, but they have noticed that we tolerate them and they take every advantage of our cherished tolerance.

Let us not help them. If you ever feel tempted to forget our own collective interest, please remember that the surest feature of rational thinking (I do not even need to say “intelligence”) is the ability to distinguish the auxiliary from the essential. Today:

  • Biden is old: auxiliary. (He is as sharp as ever and has a brilliant team to support him.) Trump is unhinged and eager to become a dictator: essential.
  • Macron is arrogant: auxiliary. (Also, not true. He is just smarter than most and does not quite know how to hide it.) Le Pen, Bardella and co. are incompetent and nefarious: essential.
  • You do not agree with everything that Macron or Biden does: auxiliary; in a way, comforting. (Only in dictatorship is the Supreme Leader always right, supposedly.) Trump wants to ban abortion to please the most extreme religious absolutists in his camp: essential.
  • The clever columnists from the Guardian and Le Monde find something awful in every carefully thought–government initiative: auxiliary. The French extreme left and extreme right want to jeopardize the incredibly successful European project and pave the way for hostile, autocratic foreign powers: essential.

We cannot stay away. You cannot stay away. If you are in the US, a vote for Trump (as I have heard otherwise serious people advocate, out of absurd arguments seemingly meant to make them sound cutely contrarian), or some boutique competitor, is a catastrophe; it is crucial that you go cast your ballot for Biden and for other rational candidates. If you are in France, go vote for the Macron list this Sunday. In those countries and everywhere else, support politicians who are not subservient to an authoritarian regime.

Do your part. Vote for the competent and level-headed candidates against the crazies of all hues. Explain patiently to less educated and less informed people what is at stake and where right and wrong, evil and good truly lie.

Treat the defense of reason and freedom as if it were a matter of life and death, because it is.

 

The “NATO expansion” canard

Are you not tired, too, of those endlessly repeated arguments that, sure, it was not very polite of Putin to invade Ukraine, but you have to understand the situation, it’s all the fault of NATO’s aggressive westward expansion which, you know, was provoking the Russians!

You see this argument everywhere on social networks and also from people such as the former French prime minister Jospin (in March of 2022!). Plus of course Noam Chomsky, for whom there is no atrocity committed by a dictator anywhere that cannot be justified by some real or imagined American turpitude. (Evidence that (1) a great scientist is not immune to shameful delusions and (2) Chomsky, the kind of person who would not last two weeks in one of the regimes he praises, is really fortunate that his family landed in a country where he can safely spew out whatever theory he likes, however outrageous.) Most recently in an opinion piece of the New York Times.

Come on. NATO is a defensive alliance. It has no offensive designs on any part of the world. It does not gobble up any countries: its members all decided to join NATO for their own security.

As to the supposed provocation: if I have an aggressive neighbor with attack dogs and my other neighbors have built a fence to shield themselves from him, am I “provoking” him if I ask them to extend the fence to encompass my house?

It is obvious to all who is aggressive and who is aggressed. Shame on those who insinuate otherwise.

Toute la rage du Monde

Un chef d’état donne une conférence de presse ; par exemple Emmanuel Macron, président de la république française, le 17 avril dernier. Les journaux publieront des commentaires louangeurs ou critiques, mais en premier lieu, si ce sont des journaux d’information, ils rendront compte de ce qui a été dit. Leur manchette sera du genre de celle du Guardian ce jour-là :

guardian

Dans ses autres articles et éditoriaux le Guardian, très à gauche et très remonté contre Macron, ne se gêne pas pour exprimer ses critiques. Mais il commence par faire son travail d’information : M. Macron a donné tel jour une conférence de presse sur tel thème, il a expliqué ceci et annoncé cela. Quelle différence avec le quotidien autrefois « de référence » dans le pays même de Macron, Le Monde. Inutile en « une » de chercher à s’informer sur l’exposé ; à la place, le lecteur a droit à l’opinion des journalistes, un arrêt définitif et cinglant :

engagées

Ce qu’il a dit ? Quels sont ces chantiers ? Mystère. Et aucune importance. Sans doute le lecteur serait incapable de former sa propre opinion sur la nouveauté, ou non, des annonces de Macron. Ou il y perdrait trop de temps. Les grands experts du Monde lui évitent cette fatigue en interprétant pour lui le discours, plutôt que de le décrire. Tout ce qui compte est leur jugement.

Jour après jour,  au lieu d’informer, Le Monde mène une campagne de démolition du gouvernement actuel qui n’a rien à envier aux plus beaux (ou mauvais) jours de l’Humanité d’antan. Cantonons-nous à quelques exemples pris au hasard dans le mois d’avril 2023, reflétant comment un quotidien autrefois sérieux compose aujourd’hui ses  Unes. Le 5 avril, le gouvernement ayant annoncé vouloir dissoudre un groupuscule violent, « Les Soulèvements de la Terre », responsable de millions d’euros de destructions et déprédations les mois précédents et cherchant en permanence l’affrontement avec les forces de l’ordre, voici ce que Le Monde trouve de mieux à titrer :

Pasted

Aucune nuance, aucun recul. Le terme « méga-bassine » est lui-même tendancieux. Il s’agit d’une réserve d’eau, destinée à préserver cette ressource pour faire face aux étés de plus en plus chauds que nous connaissons. On peut être pour ou contre mais force est de noter que dans aucun autre pays d’Europe occidentale ce genre de discussion ne passe par des émeutes d’une telle violence (47 gendarmes blessés ce jour-là). La « bataille » principale n’est pas celle des arguments mais une bataille au sens propre entre les forces de l’ordre et des extrémistes déchaînés. Rien de tout cela dans le titre et le résumé, seulement l’annonce que le mouvement a « réfuté point par point » — la cause est entendue et jugée ! — les raisons du gouvernement. Comme s’il s’agissait d’une aimable discussion d’idées (où l’un des partenaires a raison par définition) et non du contrôle d’une organisation subversive (contestable ou non, la décision de construire la réserve a été votée par les pouvoirs régionaux normalement élus).

Le titre publié deux jours avant est lui, plutôt amusant dans son obsession critique :

bourdieu

Populiste en plus de ses autres tares, il est le représentant de la Noblesse d’État ! Ah tiens, François Hollande, que Le Monde traita toujours avec de grands égards, n’en était pas, lui ? Fils de médecin, élevé à Neuilly, ancien élève de Saint-Jean Baptiste de la Salle puis HEC, Sciences Po et l’ENA, ayant commencé sa carrière à la Cour des Comptes, ensuite militant et responsable politique pendant toute sa carrière, oui, Hollande est de gauche, donc c’est le Peuple, le vrai ! Et Macron l’affreux représentant du Système.

Mais ne nous inquiétons pas trop, dans ce cas précis il s’agissait d’une « Tribune », présentée comme telle. Revenons à l’information, ou plutôt ce qui devrait en être. Le 10 avril Le Monde traite en Une d’écologie, sujet que vous croyez peut-être sérieux mais sur lequel votre quotidien préféré choisit son parti — comme Pierre Dac et Francis Blanche, le parti d’en rire :

parti

Absolument. Rien de sérieux dans ce gouvernement, tout ce qu’il fait, quand ce n’est pas scandaleux, doit être risible. Le lendemain on revient au scandaleux :

étouffer

Si Macron voulait vraiment « étouffer » quelque chose, bonne chance dans un pays où les moyens d’information de masse (Le Monde n’étant que l’un d’eux) sont ligués contre lui. (Note lexicale : « peuple » tel qu’employé ici est une abréviation pour « émeutiers et incendiaires ». Quant à la « légitimité » des syndicats, parlons-en : 10% des salariés français sont syndiqués, moins de 8% dans le privé et, même dans le secteur public, moins de 20%. En outre, de quels « syndicats» s’agit-il au juste ? Dans les autres pays, les salariés d’une entreprise ou d’une branche se groupent en un syndicat pour défendre leurs intérêts. Un seul syndicat, bien sûr. En France, il y a 4 ou 5 syndicats rivaux dans une même entreprise, petits partis politiques subventionnés se disputant les voix des quelques votants.)
Le 13 avril, un point vraiment lumineux sur la situation :

colère

Nulle trace de ce que le supposé sentiment d’injustice et de colère n’est le fait que d’une partie de la population, chauffée à blanc par les extrémistes de gauche et de droite. Quant au 49.3, il est difficile de voir en quoi ce mécanisme prévu par la Constitution —précisément pour les cas difficiles, comme celui-ci, où une partie de la droite classique a été intimidée voire terrorisée par les menaces reçues de toute part — est injuste ou prompt à susciter la colère. Il est après tout sujet à un vote de défiance (qui a eu lieu et a échoué). Du reste ce mécanisme a été surtout utilisé par la gauche sous Mitterrand: 3 fois par Pierre Bérégovoy, 8 fois par Édith Cresson et 28 fois par Michel Rocard (vingt-huit fois !). Je n’ai pas souvenir que lors de ses 6 utilisations par Manuel Valls, sous Hollande, Le Monde ait crié à l’injustice et compati à la légitime colère du Peuple. Ce qui frappe dans ce titre c’est une fois de plus le matraquage quotidien : le scandale et la malfaisance sont toujours du même côté, et l’injustice subie et la colère justifiée toujours de l’autre.

Le 13 avril, suite des grèves à répétition. Un journal même minimalement soucieux de la vie quotidienne de ses lecteurs parlerait des complications incessantes, des attentes interminables dans les gares et aéroports, des trésors d’invention auxquels sont réduits ceux qui doivent faire garder leurs enfants, des nouvelles pertes colossales pour l’économie du pays, de l’annulation de la première visite d’État que le nouveau roi britannique avait choisi de réserver à la France. (D’avoir peu d’admiration pour la monarchie actuelle et encore moins pour l’Angleterre du Brexit n’empêche pas de ressentir la gifle monumentale qu’a constituée cette annulation.) Non, il ne s’agit que des luttes glorieuses du Peuple en révolte :

intransigeance

Intransigeance ? Qu’attend-on au juste : qu’un gouvernement élu sur la promesse d’une réforme et l’ayant fait passer au Parlement décide tout à coup de l’annuler ? Peut-être pour rassurer les Libraires en Colère (si l’on devine correctement le mot tronqué sur la photo de banderole) ? Cette Une du Monde et des dizaines d’autres comme elles sont de purs appels à manifester ; jour après jour le journal explique aimablement à ses lecteurs quant et où participer. Comme s’ils n’avaient rien de mieux à faire.

Le même jour, un autre sommet de l’élite intellectuelle éclairant le monde :

veutpas

En d’autres temps Le Monde était attaché aux principes constitutionnels. Notez l’illustration menaçante. Côté constitution, avec sa sagacité habituelle le journal avait annoncé dès le 26 mars ce qui allait se passer :

rousseau-3

Les opposants à la réforme, ayant perdu à toutes les étapes, se rattachaient à l’espoir que le Conseil Constitutionnel annulât tout. Bien entendu il n’avait aucune raison de le faire. Son rôle n’est pas de substituer la volonté des manifestants du jour à celle du Parlement élu. Peut-être y jouait-il  « en quelque sorte son destin » mais aux dernières nouvelles il existe encore. Le 26 mars il pouvait encore y avoir débat, mais un journal objectif et sérieux aurait publié une analyse factuelle et prudente.

Tout cela n’empêche pas Le Monde de continuer de tirer sur tout ce qui bouge du côté du gouvernement. Le 21 avril, Macron ayant rencontré des enseignants :

crispe

Si quelqu’un crispe, il semblerait que ce soit plutôt Le Monde, mais bon. Ce qui compte, bien sûr, ce ne sont pas les avancées forcément viciées du gouvernement mais la réaction des 18,4%, les syndicats. Conjecture oiseuse : s’il n’y avait pas eu le  « pacte enseignant », est-ce que plus rien n’aurait « terni » la joie débordante desdits syndicats et leur soutien désormais enthousiaste aux projets éducatifs du gouvernement ?

Après le passage de la réforme des retraites (au grand soulagement de beaucoup), Macron et Borne ont annoncé vouloir continuer avec les réformes. Quel dommage, selon Le Monde, qu’ils soient en situation si difficile ! Le 24 avril, pauvre Macron :

doute

Pour Borne ce n’est pas mieux (26 avril) :

spectre

À ce point d’affaiblissement rien ne pourrait être pire, mais si, on peut s’affaiblir encore :

affaiblit

Le 1er mai, reportage sur les manifestations, dans le même genre que les précédents, par exemple :

violence

Le « mais » est vraiment adorable. Un« mais » dans le style bien connu de « je ne suis pas raciste, mais… ». En réalité, depuis des mois (et dès la crise des gilets jaunes) Le Monde affiche une attitude de compréhension presque affectueuse vis-à-vis des pires excès. Macron, pour qui l’écoute, n’est en rien méprisant et son attitude est le contraire de celle de quelqu’un qui prendrait les gens pour des imbéciles. Ses discours sont de très haute tenue (comme l’étaient, du reste, ceux de François Hollande) ; il explique et il justifie. Ne se sentent méprisés que ceux qui en réalité le méprisent, pour des raisons qu’on n’a pas de mal à imaginer (il est passé par la banque Rothschild , comme Pompidou du reste, il parle bien, il joue du piano, il n’a pas besoin de « prendre de haut » pour qu’on détecte en lui le premier de la classe). Et d’ailleurs s’il l’était, méprisant, en quoi cela justifierait-il de mettre le feu à la brasserie La Rotonde ? Dans les pays développés seule la France est en proie à ces manifestations régulièrement violentes qui dégénèrent. Les activistes du Monde n’ont rien à y redire ; il préfèrent réserver leur indignation pour ceux qui essayent de moderniser le pays.

La rage anti-Macron et anti-Borne se déchaîne jour après jour dans ce qui fut le quotidien respecté de Beuve-Méry et (malgré ses défauts) une source d’informations souvent fiables et de commentaires pondérés. Il semble avoir été pris en otage par une poignée de propagandistes peu soucieux de journalisme. On voit bien que les éléments les plus responsables en sont gênés ; Sylvie Kaufmann publie dans le New York Times des analyses raisonnées et raisonnables, Françoise Fressoz écrit des éditoriaux équilibrés. On se demande si c’est pour maintenir une façade respectable pour les lecteurs étrangers qui ne voient pas le déferlement quotidien de bile anti-Établissement remplaçant l’information de base.

Dommage vraiment qu’on en soit venu là. Je ne sais pas ce qu’on enseigne aujourd’hui dans les écoles de journalisme en France, mais tous les autre grands pays démocratiques ont leurs journaux de référence qui appliquent (ou essayent d’appliquer, avec d’inévitables ratés) la distinction fondamentale entre nouvelles et opinions. Que faudrait il pour que les lecteurs français aient à nouveau un journal sérieux, objectif et crédible ?

 

Macron and Borne: profiles in courage

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, and prime minister, Elizabeth Borne, are showing incredible political courage in promoting an indispensable reform of the pension system. The international press (with the exception of one recent reasonable Washington Post editorial) has largely taken the side of the strikers, explaining sententiously that the proper answer would be to tax companies more (as to the efficiency of that approach, here is an old but still valid example, from a left-wing paper). The unions have vowed, in the words of one of their leaders, to “bring the country to its knees” and seem intent on reaching this goal literally. (It may be useful  to point out that unions in France are not what the term suggests. In other countries a union represents the workers at a company or administration. In France every organization has several unions, usually 4 or 5, competing for, typically, a small minority of the workers, but with a role enshrined in the constitution. They are really state-supported political organizations, of various political hues, several of them openly hostile to employers and to capitalism. Interesting approach.)

The reform of the pension system was part of Macron’s electoral program and has been amended repeatedly to take into account the special characteristics of manual or otherwise difficult worth. Months of attempted negotiations took place with those union representatives who were willing to talk. The extreme left and extreme right were united to defeat the reform and at the last minute, after innumerable debates in Parliament which had resulted in a majority-backed solution, intimated enough moderate-right deputies to force the government to use a special constitutional mechanism (“article 49-3”) to ram it through. Who knows how many disruptions of basic services the country will have to endure in the coming months as saboteurs of various kinds try to make good on their promise to prevent the country from functioning. The attitude of the international bien-pensant press, who fans the flames (as they did with the Gilets Jaunes protests 5 years ago),  while castigating the January 6 Washington rioters, who are of the same ilk, is unconscionable.

The entire political class knows that a reform is indispensable, and has been delayed far too long, out of the cowardice of previous governments. Macron’s and Borne’s goal is simple: to preserve France’s pension system (the very system that the opponents deceitfully accuse them of destroying), based on solidarity between generations, workers paying for retirees, as opposed to a capitalization-based system with its dependence on the ups and downs of the stock market. Thanks in particular to a generous health service, people live ever longer; the new plan makes them work a couple of years more to help ensure the sustainability of the approach. Macron is in his second, non-renewable term and has decided that he would not leave office without having carried out this part of his duty. Borne, an outstanding manager with a distinguished record, has taken the risk of sacrificing her political career by bringing the reform through. (In the Fifth Republic’s mixed presidential system, the conventional wisdom is that the prime minister is the president’s “fuse”, an expendable resource for implementing difficult tasks. Cynical and tough, but a direct consequence of the constitution designed by De Gaulle and his deputy Debré 60 years ago.)

In the meantime, Macron and Borne are showing Europe and the world what true dedication and leadership mean.

Le courage de Macron

(An English variant will appear tomorrow.)

La presse nationale et internationale est déchaînée contre Borne et Macron. Les extrémistes et factieux de tous bords jurent de “mettre le pays par terre” (comment, au passage, peut-on accepter ce genre de langage de la part d’un responsable “syndical”?).

Toute la classe politique sait bien sûr que la réforme est indispensable. Elle est le seul moyen de protéger le système français de retraites par répartition. Elle tient compte de la pénibilité des travaux. Elle remet la France au niveau des pays voisins. Elle est le bon sens même. Elle suit des années de tergiversation de la part des gouvernements précédents effarouchés, et des mois de consultation avec les “partenaires sociaux”, si l’on peut parler de concertation pour une tentative de dialogue avec des gens qui ne cherchent que le tintamarre politique.

Quel courage, quelle détermination chez le président et la première ministre, qui au milieu des insultes sacrifient leur intérêt personnel au bien public. Les émeutiers — dans la tradition des ligues des années trente, des gilets jaunes, des voyous du 6 janvier 2021 à Washington — essayent de les faire reculer par la force, mais la raison et le droit triompheront.