Re: <nettime> The list of European neocon shills

[Carsten Agger <agger@modspil.dk>]

Actually I do respect some of the people on the list - or at least I
thought I did. Like Orhan Pamuk and Ian McEwan.

Of course I find it difficult to respect anyone who'd cosign as much as
a grocery list with a creep like BHL.


On 2/3/19 6:31 PM, Morlock Elloi wrote:
> (conveniently compiled by Guardian at
> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/25/fight-europe-wreckers-patriots-nationalist
> )
>
>
> Fight for Europe – or the wreckers will destroy it
>
> Fri 25 Jan 2019
> Bernard-Henri Lévy, Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, Elfriede Jelinek,
> Orhan Pamuk and 25 others
>
> The idea of Europe is in peril.
>
> From all sides there are criticisms, insults and desertions from the
> cause.
>
> “Enough of ‘building Europe’!” is the cry. Let’s reconnect instead
> with our “national soul”! Let’s rediscover our “lost identity”! This
> is the agenda shared by the populist forces washing over the
> continent. Never mind that abstractions such as “soul” and “identity”
> often exist only in the imagination of demagogues.
>
> Europe is being attacked by false prophets who are drunk on
> resentment, and delirious at their opportunity to seize the limelight.
> It has been abandoned by the two great allies who in the previous
> century twice saved it from suicide; one across the Channel and the
> other across the Atlantic. The continent is vulnerable to the
> increasingly brazen meddling by the occupant of the Kremlin. Europe as
> an idea is falling apart before our eyes.
>
> This is the noxious climate in which Europe’s parliamentary elections
> will take place in May. Unless something changes; unless something
> comes along to turn back the rising, swelling, insistent tide; unless
> a new spirit of resistance emerges, these elections promise to be the
> most calamitous that we have known. They will give a victory to the
> wreckers. For those who still believe in the legacy of Erasmus, Dante,
> Goethe and Comenius there will be only ignominious defeat. A politics
> of disdain for intelligence and culture will have triumphed. There
> will be explosions of xenophobia and antisemitism. Disaster will have
> befallen us.
>
> We, the undersigned, are among those who refuse to resign themselves
> to this looming catastrophe.
>
> We count ourselves among the European patriots (a group more numerous
> than is commonly thought, but that is often too quiet and too
> resigned), who understand what is at stake here. Three-quarters of a
> century after the defeat of fascism and 30 years after the fall of the
> Berlin Wall there is a new battle for civilisation.
>
> Our faith is in the great idea that we inherited, which we believe to
> have been the one force powerful enough to lift Europe’s peoples above
> themselves and their warring past. We believe it remains the one force
> today virtuous enough to ward off the new signs of totalitarianism
> that drag in their wake the old miseries of the dark ages. What is at
> stake forbids us from giving up.
>
> Hence this invitation to join in a new surge.
>
> Hence this appeal to action on the eve of an election that we refuse
> to abandon to the gravediggers of the European idea.
>
> Hence this exhortation to carry once more the torch of a Europe that,
> despite its mistakes, its lapses, and its occasional acts of
> cowardice, remains a beacon for every free man and woman on the planet.
>
> Our generation got it wrong. Like Garibaldi’s followers in the 19th
> century, who repeated, like a mantra, “Italia se farà da sè” (Italy
> will make herself by herself), we believed that the continent would
> come together on its own, without our needing to fight for it, or to
> work for it. This, we told ourselves, was “the direction of history”.
>
> We must make a clean break with that old conviction. We don’t have a
> choice. We must now fight for the idea of Europe or see it perish
> beneath the waves of populism.
>
> In response to the nationalist and identitarian onslaught, we must
> rediscover the spirit of activism or accept that resentment and hatred
> will surround and submerge us. Urgently, we need to sound the alarm
> against these arsonists of soul and spirit who, from Paris to Rome,
> with stops along the way in Barcelona, Budapest, Dresden, Vienna and
> Warsaw, want to make a bonfire of our freedoms.
>
> In this strange defeat of “Europe” that looms on the horizon; this new
> crisis of the European conscience that promises to tear down
> everything that made our societies great, honourable, and prosperous,
> there is a challenge greater than any since the 1930s: a challenge to
> liberal democracy and its values.
>
> • Copyright: Libération/Bernard-Henri Lévy. Milan Kundera, Salman
> Rushdie, Elfriede Jelinek and Orhan Pamuk are novelists. Bernard-Henri
> Lévy is a philosopher
>
> Other signatories: Vassilis Alexakis (Athens), Svetlana Alexievich
> (Minsk), Anne Applebaum (Warsaw), Jens Christian Grøndahl
> (Copenhagen), David Grossman (Jerusalem), Ágnes Heller (Budapest),
> Ismaïl Kadaré (Tirana), György Konrád (Debrecen), António Lobo Antunes
> (Lisbon), Claudio Magris (Trieste), Ian McEwan (London), Adam Michnik
> (Warsaw), Herta Müller (Berlin), Ludmila Oulitskaïa (Moscow), Rob
> Riemen (Amsterdam), Fernando Savater (San Sebastián), Roberto Saviano
> (Naples), Eugenio Scalfari (Rome), Simon Schama (London), Peter
> Schneider (Berlin), Abdulah Sidran (Sarajevo), Leïla Slimani (Paris),
> Colm Tóibín (Dublin), Mario Vargas Llosa (Madrid), Adam Zagajewski
> (Cracow)
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