Friday, October 19, 2001

The Times UK: Peggy Noonan, ex conseiller de Reagan et Bush père, avait signé un article prophétique selon certains en novembre 1998, jugez en vous même : "when you think of the terrorist places and the terrorist countries . . . who do they hate most? The Great Satan, the United States. What is its most important place? Some would say Washington. I would say the great city of the United States is the great city of the world, the dense, ten-mile-long island called Manhattan, where the economic and media power of the nation resides (....) The psychic blow — and that is what it will be as people absorb it, a blow, an insult that reorders and changes — will shift our perspective and priorities, dramatically, and for longer than a while. Something tells me more of us will be praying, and hard, one side-benefit of which is that there is sometimes a quality of stopped time when you pray. You get outside time.".

La journaliste Kate Muir complète sa pensée : "America, where I lived until recently, had taken on the style of the late Roman Empire, ready for a fall, or at least reassessment. We were in Washington for the millennium, and I recall the fin de siècle fears expressed then, which passed with the all-night parties and death of the Y2K bug. One or two dissenting voices held up a mirror to our civilisation, and questioned how civilised it was. They were ahead of the game."

Thursday, October 18, 2001

NDLR: si vous avez des commentaires, suggestions d'articles à faire partager, n'hésitez pas à me contacter par mail à: fredericguarino@yahoo.com

Financial Times: Michael Bonsignore, ex PDG d'Honeywell, livre sa critique de l'autobio de Jack Welch. Extrait:"I nodded off during the minutiae and trivia that linked the main events and wondered at times if the GE BS detector was switched on. (..) lacks greatness because it does not address the role of the global corporation in a much smaller and more complex world. No one was better prepared to take on this pressing question than Jack Welch, so it is disappointing that, in the book, he dodges it."

J.R.s Acid Trip Down Memory Lane: Larry Hagman, l'interprète de JR Ewing raconte dans ses Mémoires ses trips au LSD....

New York Times (repris ds IHT): le Portugal, producteur de 85% des bouchons-lièges mondiaux est au centre de la bataille féroce entre tenants du plastique et du liège dans l'industrie vinicole; stratégique pour le Portugal qui dégage 3% de son PIB de la production de bouchons...

TIME Magazine: James Poniewozik expose ses théories sur les responsables des attaques bio-terroristes à l'anthrax.
Extrait:"If it was al-Qaeda, some have suggested it was a fiendishly clever idea: hit the media through a means just scary enough to cause panic, but not deadly enough to kill off the messenger. The theory — especially popular among media members themselves, self-loathing as we are — is that the self-absorbed media would hype an attack in its own offices much more loudly than strikes anywhere else."

Wednesday, October 17, 2001

The Guardian: L'auteur d'un livre sur le déclin culturel américain dresse un parallèle fouillé entre la fin de Rome et la situation actuelle.

Le Monde (Wall St Journal pour la version anglaise): Francis Fukuyama tente lamentablement de justifier son pronostic de la fin de l'histoire. Un exemple de l'aveuglement culturel américain.

Washington Post: Les sans-abris d'Osaka, symptôme de la récession japonaise.

Au coeur de la psychose bio-terroriste étatsunienne, les premiers suspects de canulars à l'anthrax sont inculpés, détails du Washington Post.

Le Herald Tribune du jour nous apprend que dans son plan de relance le gvt de Singapour va attribuer des New Singaporean Shares à tous les citoyens pour les faire participer à la reprise de l'activité. A quand les oblig' France ?

Tuesday, October 16, 2001

Lothar Machtan, historien allemand, sort Hitler's Secret: The Double Life of a Dictator :sa thèse, l'homosexualité d'Hitler et ses conséquences. Compte-rendu dans le Guardian-Observer du 7 octobre.

L'état de santé du Pape inquiète le Vatican selon le Washington Post. A suivre....

Le Washington Post (repris par l'International Herald Tribune) revient sur les liens troubles entre Saoudiens, Talibans et Ben Laden. Instructif....

Seymour Hersh publie une info exclusive dans le New Yorker du 22 octobre:les avions américains avaient l'opportunité d'abattre le mollah Omar lors du premier raid et ne l'ont pas fait, faute d'une chaîne de commandement efficace.
A suivre. Extrait des bonnes feuilles: "Hersh reports, that the instability of the Saudi regime is "the most immediate threat to American economic and political interests in the Middle East," and that "the Bush Administration, like the Clinton Administration, is refusing to confront this reality." Hersh also reports that a number of conversations between members of the Saudi Arabian royal family that were electronically intercepted by the National Security Agency, beginning as early as 1994, "demonstrated to analysts that by 1996 Saudi money was supporting Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda and other extremist groups." The intercepts, Hersh writes, "depict a regime increasingly corrupt, alienated from the country's religious rank and file, and so weakened and frightened that it has brokered its future by channelling hundreds of millions of dollars in what amounts to protection money to fundamentalist groups that wish to overthrow it."

Newsweek dans son numéro du 15 octobre, a compilé un dossier très complet sur les raisons profondes des attentats du 11 septembre.

Le Québec a toujours été une énigme pour les Américains, et Anthony DePalma, correspondant du NY Times au Canada, a provoqué une petite polémique chez nos cousins à la suite de son HERE, A BIOGRAPHY OF THE NEW AMERICAN CONTINENT . Mon ami Antoine Robitaille a rendu compte de l'ouvrage dans Le Devoir et la polémique a démarré: son article, et ses suites. Antoine a également signé un édito post-11 septembre dans Le Devoir sur Le sophisme de la culpabilité de la victime

Le Sud étatsunien est devenu un des grands pôles d'immigration, noyant sa culture et notamment sa langue. Sue Ann Pressley du Washington Post nous parle d'un écrivain de 86 ans qui compile idiomes et expressions pour les préserver.

George Will, "columnist" du Washington Post, dans sa tribune du 12 septembre à chaud sur les conséquences des attentats: The End of Our Holiday From History

David Halberstam, journaliste et historien, vient de publier "War in a Time of Peace", un commentaire de la politique étrangère étatusienne des années 1990. Interviewé par Salon.com, il revient sur les raisons de ce qu'il appelle la "sieste" de cette décennie.

La journaliste pakistanaise Asra Nomani, en congé du Wall St J pour écrire, s'est rendu à Peshawar dès les premiers jours après le 11 septembre. Elle publie sur Salon.com une chronique quotidienne dont la première livre un portrait intime d'un des représentants des Taliban à Peshawar, Mohammad Sohail Shaheen, et de ses femmes. A lire pour contrebalancer ce qui s'écrit ailleurs.

Robert Fisk, reporter pour The Independent de Londres a rencontré Ben Laden à plusieurs reprises, son analyse dans Le Monde après le 11 septembre.

L'intellectuel noir-américain Henry Louis Gates, Jr. avait fait le portrait de Colin Powell pour le New Yorker en 1995, à l'époque où le général réfléchissait à une candidature à l'élection de 1996: une lumière intéressante sur le personnage, et des commentaires peu reproduits ailleurs depuis.

Malcom Gladwell, auteur du Tipping Point (extraits et ref), examen à la loupe des modes en tant qu'"épidémies sociales", rassemblent tous ses articles sur son site http://www.gladwell.com/. Un de mes préférés reste le portrait de Ron Popeil, dernier d'une dynastie d'inventeurs-vendeurs géniaux d'ustensiles de cuisines.

Le New Yorker republie sur son site un article de 1994 examinant les tensions entre la famille royale saoudienne et le pays:

Le New Yorker du 8 octobre offre un article-phare du grand journaliste d'investigation Seymour Hersh sur les carences de la CIA, un complément intéressant aux vues de Marc Gerecht: http://www.newyorker.com/FACT/?011008fa_FACT (Le Monde a traduit l'essentiel de l'article)

Dans la très sérieuse New York Review of Books , Robert Malley et Hussein Agha, participants aux discussions israélo-palestiniennes de Camp David, reviennent sur ce qu'ils qualifient de "Tragedy of Errors" : http://www.nybooks.com/articles/14380 . Le négociateur US Dennis Ross a répondu à cet article avec sa version des faits: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/14529

Samantha Power revient sur le génocide rwandais et sur les valses-hésitations des dirigeants des grandes puissances et leur absence de volonté d'agir pour arrêter le massacre:http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/09/power.htm

Extrait: " In reality the US did much more than fail to send troops. It led a successful effort to remove most of the UN peacekeepers who were already in Rwanda. It refused to use its technology to jam radio broadcasts that were a crucial instrument in the coordination and perpetuation of the genocide. And even as, on average, 8,000 Rwandans were being butchered each day, U.S. officials shunned the term "genocide," for fear of being obliged to act. The United States in fact did virtually nothing "to try to limit what occurred." Indeed, staying out of Rwanda was an explicit U.S. policy objective. "

Retour en Somalie avec Peter Maas de l'Atlantic Monthly, où l'anarchie n'empêche pas les affaires, ou comment l'ultralibéralisme à la Ayn Rand peut fonctionner sans Etat et structures: http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/05/maass.htm

Extrait: " Telecom Somalia is the largest company in Mogadishu. It has 700 employees, and it offers some of the best and cheapest phone service in Africa. Mogadishu also has new radio and television stations, along with computer schools and an airport that serves several airlines (although these fly the sorts of airplanes that Americans see only in museums). The city's Bekara market offers everything from toilet paper, Maalox, and Colgate toothpaste to Viagra, sarongs, blank passports (stolen from the Foreign Ministry a decade ago), and assault rifles. Mogadishu has the closest thing to an Ayn Rand-style economy that the world has ever seen—no bureaucracy or regulation at all. The city has had no government since 1991, when the much despised President Mohammed Siad Barre was overthrown; his regime was replaced not by another one but by civil war.

Eugen Weber commente un ouvrage consacré à Vichy, France: The Dark Years 1940-1944, de Julian Jackson http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/10/weber.htm
Extrait: "Difficult economic conditions—unemployment before World War I, devaluation in the 1920s, depression in the 1930s—along with greater-than-usual political instability, the challenges of modernity, the threat of decadence, all evoked foreign scapegoats, particularly those scapegoats of choice, the Jews. The association of Jews with usury and capitalism excited both left and right. The Jews' association with Germany (Yiddish sounds much like German) sparked jingoistic ire. Jewish hostility to Germany provoked the hostility of embattled pacifists. Jewish identification with modernity in cinema and the arts evoked howls against Negro-Judeo-Saxon corruption. Long before Vichy named him ambassador, first to Bucharest and then to Berne, the sophisticated stylist Paul Morand had blamed national decadence on foreign plagues: "Italian eczema, Romanian blemishes, American boils, Levantine pus." "

James Fallows, ancien rédac chef de US News&World Report, sur les bouleversements à venir du transport aérien nord-américain, particulièrement intéressant à la lumière du 11 septembre:http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/06/fallows.htm
Freedom of the Skies

Everyone knows about the horrors of modern air travel. What almost no one knows is how inventors, entrepreneurs, and government visionaries have teamed up to create new kinds of small planes that can take off from and land almost anywhere. "Escape From Airline Hell" the scenario might be called, and it's coming soon to an airport near you.
Extrait: "For trips of 500 miles or less, which include the majority of air journeys, going by commercial airline is effectively no faster than traveling by car. "Think about it," the administrator of NASA, Daniel Goldin, said in a speech in 1998. "You are flying through the air at three hundred to five hundred miles per hour during the part of your trip that is in the commercial airplane. But your average speed from when you left your home to when you arrive at your destination is only fifty or sixty miles per hour."

Monday, October 15, 2001

Michael Wolff de New York Magazine sur la place de la couverture internationale assurée par les media américains: http://www.nymag.com/page.cfm?page_id=5251
Until September 11, the media didn't bother much with international news. Could it be because bad news is earnest, boring -- and incredibly hard to monetize?

"All this shit is gone ineradicably," said my friend Rory O'Connor over lunch the other day. He was speaking about business news -- the market-is-everything kind of business news that became the cash cow of journalism during the prewar go-go years. But more generally, he meant that the whole non-news news slant was finished. News as a product, or by-product, of media organizations, as pure P&L, ratings-driven programming, was over. Old-fashioned news values -- reflecting a kind of seriousness not seen in a generation -- were coming back.

Un très bon article de Reason Online sur le livre de John McWhorter, Losing the Race: qui aborde de façon non conventionelle la question de la place de la communauté afro-américaine: http://www.reason.com/0110/fe.cy.internal.html
The genesis of McWhorter’s book lies in his first childhood memory. It was 1968 and playtime in West Mount Airy, an integrated Philadelphia neighborhood. "A group of black kids, none older than eight, asked me how to spell concrete," writes McWhorter. "I spelled it, only to have the 8-year-old bring his little sister to me and have her smack me repeatedly as the rest of the kids laughed and egged her on. From then on, I was often teased in the neighborhood for being ‘smart.’"

Si vous n'avez pas encore lu cet excellent article du vénérable Atlantic Monthly (traduit dans Le Monde) qui résume assez bien la situation pré-11 septembre: http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/07/gerecht.htm

"The Counterterrorist Myth" (July/August 2001), Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former high-level CIA operative, argued that the CIA's efforts to infiltrate bin Ladin's anti-American terrorist organization in Peshawar have been ineffective and misguided. The article highlights the difficulty of obtaining good intelligence about any tightly organized fringe group that may be targeting the United States.
"No case officer stationed in Pakistan can penetrate either the Afghan communities in Peshawar or the Northwest Frontier's numerous religious schools, which feed manpower and ideas to bin Ladin and the Taliban, and seriously expect to gather useful information about radical Islamic terrorism—let alone recruit foreign agents.
Even a Muslim CIA officer with native-language abilities (and the Agency, according to several active-duty case officers, has very few operatives from Middle Eastern backgrounds) could do little more in this environment than a blond, blue-eyed all-American.... An officer who tries to go native, pretending to be a true-believing radical Muslim searching for brothers in the cause, will make a fool of himself quickly."