By Russell A. Berman · Wednesday, November 11, 2020 The President of France, Emmanuel Macron, delivered this speech on September 4, 2020. I discussed it in a TelosScope post here, putting it in dialogue with President Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech of July 4. There has been interest on the part of some readers in a full translation of Macron’s text, so it is offered below.
The context: Macron is welcoming a group of newly naturalized citizens into the national community. Hence his double agenda: on the one hand, highlighting the diversity of France as an immigrant nation, while on the other insisting on the unity of French history, culture, language, and above all the Republic. This is a speech about the Republican values that Macron expects all French citizens to share and, what’s more, to uphold actively and vigorously. “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” have a standing in French political culture similar to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” from the American Declaration of Independence.
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By Russell A. Berman · Tuesday, November 10, 2020 In the wake of recent killings in Paris and Nice, as well as in Vienna, the debate over “Islamism” has regained prominence in Europe, especially in France. Islamism as a political ideology must of course be rigorously distinguished from Islam, the religion. That conceptual distinction ought to be readily understandable and familiar from previous iterations of responses to terrorism. What however appears to be new in the current French discussion is the perceived linkage between Islamism, terrorist violence, and academic post-colonialism, regarded as providing a justification for the violence. That association is being made at high levels in the Macron government, generating considerable controversy. That is the context for the open letter published in Le Monde, translated below. Do academic ideas have consequences in the world?
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By Elham Manea · Monday, November 9, 2020 Elham Manea teaches Political Science at the University of Zurich. Her forthcoming book The Perils of Nonviolent Islamism will be published by Telos Press in the spring and can be pre-ordered today in our store. The following talk was delivered as a keynote speech in German at the Convention of the Schader Foundation in Darmstadt (online) on November 6, 2020.
It is becoming difficult lately to turn on the news. And I do not just mean the American presidential elections. The year 2020 was and still is a hard one. COVID-19 has dominated our lives with its limitations. But it has also welded people together in every corner of the world in the fight against a persistent and ultimately deadly virus. This struggle, this common challenge, has united us and yet divided us. We are still irritated by the lockdowns, afraid of their economic repercussions, and divided in our ideological fronts. Times like these are worrying and provide fertile ground for conspiracy theorists and right-wing and left-wing extremist groups.
In times like these, our societies can all too easily become polarized, and we run the risk of being trapped in a discourse of division, trapped in identity boxes. “Us” versus “Them.”
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, October 26, 2020 From the beginning of Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency and throughout his administration, the most consistent point of orientation in his politics has been the priority of the nation. It informed the slogan “Make America Great Again,” which initially shocked political sensibilities, since it implied the accusation that previous bipartisan political leadership had stood by during a decline or even facilitated a loss of greatness. The priority of the nation similarly underpinned the formula of “America First,” as the designation of a foreign policy that would give greater attention to national interest and therefore break with established patterns of multilateralism. Trump himself has embraced the term “nationalist,” and this marks his difference from both the free trade internationalism that used to define the neoliberal Republicans as well as from the multiculturalism that dominates the identity-political Democrats.
Between those two alternatives, globalism and fragmentation, Trump has opted for the nation. With that choice, he put his finger on the forgotten category—class—in an era of growing inequality. “Nation” serves as the organizing principle for programs purporting to achieve vertical integration, the “whole nation,” i.e., a promise—whether fulfilled or not—of an inclusive nationalism. Trump’s nationalism therefore is better described as a national populism. This aspiration for inclusion outweighs a simultaneous function of exclusionary nationalism, the differentiation from other nations, although that aspect clearly plays a role as well, especially in immigration policies.
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By Alain de Benoist · Friday, April 10, 2020 The following essay originally appeared in Valeurs actuelles on April 2, 2020, and is published here in English translation by permission of the author. Translated by Russell A. Berman.
 History is always open, as everyone knows, and this makes it unpredictable. Yet in certain circumstances, it is easier to see the middle and long term than the near term, as the coronavirus pandemic shows well. For the short term, one surely imagines the worst: saturated health systems, hundreds of thousands, even millions of dead, ruptures of supply chains, riots, chaos, and all that might follow. In reality, we are being carried by a wave and no one knows where it will lead or when it will end. But if one looks further, certain matters become evident.
It has already been said but it is worth repeating: the health crisis is ringing (provisionally?) the death knell of globalization and the hegemonic ideology of progress. To be sure, the major epidemics of antiquity and the Middle Ages did not need globalization in order to produce tens of millions of dead, but it is clear that the generalization of transportation, exchanges, and communications in the contemporary world could only aggravate matters. In the “open society,” the virus is very conformist: it acts like everyone else, it circulates—and now we are no longer circulating. In other words, we are breaking with the principle of the free movement of people, goods, and capital that was summed up in the slogan “laissez faire,” i.e., let it go, let it pass. This is not the end of the world, but it is the end of a world.
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By Caroline Valentin · Thursday, September 28, 2017 The following essay was originally published in French at Le Figaro Vox on July 14, 2017, and is published here by permission. Translated by Russell A. Berman.
In the night of April 4, 2017, in Paris, Sarah Halimi, a 65-year-old Jewish woman, was savagely killed. Her murderer, Kobili Traoré, a radicalized Muslim with a Malian background and a long police record, assaulted her for forty minutes, first in her living room and then on her balcony. He shouted “Allah Akbar,” while degrading his victim, called her a “fat whore” and a “shaitan” (a demon in Arabic). From their windows and later from the courtyard, several neighbors heard and then witnessed, in disgust, the massacre. In Noémie Halioua’s excellent article in Causeur, she reports the testimony of one of them: “First I was woken by the moans of a creature in suffering. It was torture. First, I thought it was an animal or a baby. But then, lifting the blinds and opening the window, I recognized that it was a woman moaning as she was being beaten. With each blow, I heard a moan; she did not even have the strength to cry out anymore.” Kobili Traoré strikes her so hard that his fist is swollen. When he sees the light of the police flashlights in the courtyard, he yells, “watch out, there is a woman here about to commit suicide,” as he seizes his victim, still alive, by her wrists and throws her over the banister of her balcony. Sarah Halimi lays in the courtyard, dead, covered in blood.
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