An excellent week for liberal thinking. Its champions were able to pour their venom over the graves of Stéphane Hessel and Hugo Chavez. These two men are hardly fit for comparison, except for the reactions triggered by their deaths. They were violent and direct for Chavez, and just as violent for Hessel, but blandly and hypocritically concealed. In both cases, we were forced to deal with subversives (Régis Debray referred to Hessel as “an inconvenient man”), and yet there was no posturing, which is exactly what caused our great liberal thinkers to break out in a rash.
It’s the tenth anniversary of the idiotic American invasion of Iraq, all based on a lie! To mark this disastrous occasion, The Guardian actually spoke with photojournalists and even published pictures... Luckily the same thing didn’t happen in the French media, which was too busy covering Fashion Week and poor unfortunate artists like Gerard Depardieu, who made the cover M magazine! 
The latest issue of Libération-Livres wrote about the book Contre-histoire du libéralisme by Domenico Losurdo (from where the workhouse photo is taken), which included this quotation: “We have to make our help unpleasant, make workhouses into prisons, and make charity repulsive.” Who said it? None other than Tocqueville himself, admired by the whole liberal class, the one that teaches at Science Politique, among others, the institution that has trained so many of our journalists... QED. Who’s talking about a pensée unique?

Michel Philippot.
Philippot.m@wanadoo.fr