HOARY JOKE OF THE WEEKEND (TOLD YOU THEY WERE DUMB)

Last weekend, June 3, 4 and 5, the French Trotskyists held their yearly family gathering in Presles, north of Paris, and the fantastic crew of NoPasaran! managed to sneak in, UBooting as you have never seen!!!

"Karl Marx Tent"? "Women's Liberation Lane"? "Political Town"? "European Workers Lane"? "Toilets"? Yes, that's right. I must be at the annual celebration of Lutte Ouvrière, France's Marxist-Trotskyist party aka Workers' Struggle.

Oh and, attention! We're talking here about the French Trotskyists, NOT the French Communists!!! Although, of course, in the end it all boils down to semantics (and a similar body count numbering in the millions....)

If you visit NoPasaran! regularly, you will know that one of the posters there is a certain Erik Svane, who is actually a Danish-American freelance journalist who also seems to be eking out a living as an actor. Erik and his pal mingled among the Guevara-T-shirt-clad loons, with Erik wearing this shirt, and apparently nobody noticed who was really on Erik's chest!!!



But the best is yet to come! Lutte Ouvrière's strongwoman and perennial candidate for the French presidency, Arlette Laguiller, was naturally also at the gathering. Miss Laguiller, on the barricades ever since France's war in Algeria (which she of course opposed) really started to put a mark on French politics in 1974, when she became the leader of that year bank workers' strike which began with actions of employees at Crédit Lyonnais. All her political life she was an ardent adversary of capitalist mechanisms and the free market, and she is also an accomplished writer who produced a.o. the following masterpieces:

* "Moi, une militante" (I, a militant, 1973)
* "Une travailleuse révolutionnaire dans la campagne présidentielle" (A female worker in the presidential campaign, 1974)
* "Il faut changer le monde" (The world has to be changed, 1988)
* "Paroles de prolétaires" (Words of Proletarians, 1999)
* "Mon communisme" (My communism, 2002)

ROFL!!! I don't know how he did it, probably she was momentarily stunned by the good looks of our Nordic warrior, but that evil Erik Svane managed to get on the same photo with Laguiller, the French Trotskyites' candidate for the 2007 Presidential elections, with his Reagan T-shirt on AND holding his latest book in his hand!!! It's "La Bannière Etalée", in which he points out, like Revel did, that French anti-Americanism really has much deeper grounds than occasional loathing for a Republican US President.



I don't want to downplay Erik's writing qualities, but maybe he should get Madame Laguiller another book.


MFBB.