Mick Hartley

Jean-Francois Revel has an interesting article on the anti-globalisation movement and its twin, anti-Americanism (via AL Daily).

According to the anti-globalists, the global marketplace will breed ever-increasing poverty for the profit of an ever-richer minority. This is of course the outcome Karl Marx predicted in the middle of the nineteenth century for the industrialized nations of Western Europe and North America. But we all know how history has confirmed that brilliant prophecy. So the old prediction has been transferred to a new locale, new time, and new active agency. Ah, the genius of “scientific socialism.”

On the subject of French anti-Americanism, Revel comes up with this wonderful quote:

This crusade has deep roots. Back in May 1944, Hubert Beuve-Méry, the future founder and editor of Le Monde, the most influential journal in France today, was able to write that “The Americans constitute a real danger for France…. They cling to a veritable cult of the idea of liberty [and] don’t feel the need to liberate themselves from the servitudes that their capitalism entails.” The fact that an important Frenchman was able to argue this even while France was occupied by the Nazis, with the possibility of American liberation being their only hope for a different future, indicates the depth of both the hatred for economic liberty and the anti-American obsession in France.