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* Guy Millière: France: Macron Sides with Iran's Mullahs
* Josef Zbořil: A Tribute to the Late Václav Havel on the 30-Year Anniversary of the Velvet Revolution


** France: Macron Sides with Iran's Mullahs ([link removed])
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by Guy Millière • September 19, 2019 at 5:00 am
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* On September 14, just a few days after former National Security Advisor Ambassador John R. Bolton was comfortably disappeared from the administration, Iran inflicted major damage on a massive oil processing facility in Saudi Arabia,
* Macron, in short, has done as much or more than any other European country to favor the Iranian regime -- more than Germany, and even more than the European Union itself. He could have chosen to act as a reliable ally of the United States, but the choice he made was a different.
* The French officials act and speak as if the Iranian regime was totally honorable, and as if they did not discern the obvious: that the Iranian regime has destructive goals. The nuclear deal did not divert the regime from its goal of building nuclear weapons. The deal, in fact, floated the regime toward precisely that end. The American strategy of applying maximum pressure through economic sanctions seems the only non-military way to pressure this regime to change course.

During a visit to Washington in April 2018, French President Emmanuel Macron's main goal seemed to be convincing US President Donald Trump not to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal. He tried seduction, hugging Trump incessantly, before turning to arrogance, saying in a speech before Congress: "France will not leave the Iranian nuclear agreement because we signed it. Your President and your country will have to face their responsibilities." (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

On August 25, in Biarritz, France, the leaders of the Group of Seven (G7) reunited to discuss world problems. The situation in the Middle East was not on the agenda. French President Emmanuel Macron, the organizer of the summit this year, was about to force it in.

He had decided to invite to the summit Iran's foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif. Macron did not warn his guests of Zarif's attendance until the last minute. His goal, it seems, was to bring about a meeting between the Iranian minister and US President Donald J. Trump. President Trump declined. Zarif had an informal conversation with Macron and some French ministers, then flew back to Tehran. But Macron did not give up. At a press conference the next day, he publicly asked President Trump to meet Iranian leaders as soon as possible.

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** A Tribute to the Late Václav Havel on the 30-Year Anniversary of the Velvet Revolution ([link removed])
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by Josef Zbořil • September 19, 2019 at 4:00 am
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* "The less the state is required to have a say in everyday economic affairs, the better." — Václav Havel, Summer Meditations, p. 78.
* "[A] functioning market economy can never guarantee any genuine social justice. They point out that people have, and always will have, different degrees of industriousness, talent, and, last but not least, luck. Obviously, social justice in the sense of social equality is something the market system cannot, by its very nature, deliver." — Václav Havel, Summer Meditations, p. 17.
* [A]ll of us... face one fundamental task from which all else should follow. That task is one of resisting vigilantly...the power of ideologies... bureaucracy, artificial languages and political slogans. We must resist.... the wellspring of totalitarian thought." — Václav Havel, Summer Meditations, p. 84.

Václav Havel in 2003. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

November 2019 will mark the 30-year anniversary of the Velvet Revolution in former Czechoslovakia, led by the dissident author and playwright, the late Václav Havel (1936-2011), who subsequently became the first president of what became the Czech Republic. Havel's works reflected the evils of Communism and its inversion and twisting of morality.

In an address to the US Congress in February 1990, Havel said:

"The Communist type of totalitarian system ... unintentionally... has given us something positive: a special capacity to look, from time to time, somewhat further than someone who has not undergone this bitter experience. A person who cannot move and live a normal life because he is pinned under a boulder has more time to think about his hopes than someone who is not trapped in this way... We too can offer something to you: our experience and the knowledge that has come from it."

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