Un prodige humain

Un jeune autiste possède un talent extraordinaire, une mémoire photographique qui lui permet de reproduire avec exactitude le panorama d'une ville après quelques minutes de survol. Étonnant.

Journaliste ignorant

Dans ce savoureux extrait, un journaliste de télévision remet à sa place un vociférant animateur radio. Ce dernier, un rabique soutien de George W. Bush et un adversaire acharné de Barack Obama, attaque le candidat démocrate en l'accusant de « munichois » parce qu'il envisage de parler aux ennemis de l'Amérique, comme par exemple le Hamas.

Durant près de dix minutes, le journaliste demande à l'animateur ce que Chamberlain a donc fait à Munich pour mériter le nouveau qualificatif de de « munichois », un mot dont l'animateur radio se sert à longueur de journée pour attaquer Obama.

Après un long dialogue de sourds, l'animateur finira par avouer… qu'il ne s'est pas ce qu'il s'est passé à Munich en 1938.

Le journaliste lui clouera le bec en lui rappelant que Chamberlain avait été critiqué, non pas avoir rencontré et parlé avec Hitler, mais pour les concessions faites au Führer du Reich allemand sur le sort de la Tchécoslovaquie.

Le journaliste conclura en disant à l'animateur :

— A l'avenir, avant d'utiliser une référence historique, prenez la peine de vous renseigner !

Et si les journalistes français en prenaient de la graine ?

Les horreurs de la guerre

Le quotidien le Monde a publié dix photos en provenance des archives de la Hoover Institution qui rappellent les horreurs des bombardements atomiques sur le Japon.

Mais en quoi ces photographies seraient-elles « controversées » comme l'indique le quotidien de gauche français ?

On trouve les mêmes par milliers dans les archives allemandes sur les bombardements de terreur alliés sur le Reich, on en trouve aussi quelques unes au Royaume-Uni ou en France.

En fait, le scandale résiderait-il dans le fait que les victimes soient japonaises ? En d'autres termes, pour le Monde c'est très bien de publier des photos des Chinois massacrés à Nankin par les Japonais ou des civils anglais morts à Londres sous les bombes de la Luftwaffe.

En revanche, ce n'est pas bien du tout de révéler au public les photos des morts causés par l'US Air Force ou la RAF au Japon, en Allemagne ou en France.

Vae victis.

Des pensées hérétiques

Dans les colonnes du Daily Mail, l'écrivain et journaliste Peter Hitchens rend compte de la parution de deux ouvrages aux Etats-Unis qui remettent en cause les idées reçues sur la seconde Guerre mondiale.

Il est fort douteux qu'aucun des deux ne soit traduit et publié un jour en français et encore moins en allemand.

Was World War Two just as pointless and self-defeating as Iraq, asks Peter Hitchens
It makes me feel like a traitor to write this. The Second World War was my religion for most of my life.
Brave, alone, bombed, defiant, we, the British, had won it on our own against the most evil and powerful enemy imaginable.

Born six years after it was over, I felt almost as if I had lived through it, as my parents most emphatically had, with some bravery and much hardship in both cases.

What do you think? Tell in the comments section at the bottom of the page

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Heroism: Tommies commandeer a German machine gun during battle for Caen in 1944

With my toy soldiers, tanks and field-guns, I defeated the Nazis daily on my bedroom floor.

I lost myself in books with unembarrassed titles like Men Of Glory, with their crisp, moving accounts of acts of incredible bravery by otherwise ordinary people who might have been my next-door neighbours.

I read the fictional adventures of RAF bomber ace Matt Braddock in the belief that the stories were true, and not caring in the slightest about what happened when his bombs hit the ground. I do now.

After this came all those patriotic films that enriched the picture of decency, quiet courage and self-mocking humour that I came to think of as being the essence of Britishness. To this day I can't watch them without a catch in the throat.

This was our finest hour. It was the measure against which everything else must be set.

So it has been very hard for me since the doubts set in. I didn't really want to know if it wasn't exactly like that. But it has rather forced itself on me.

When I lived in Russia at the end of the Soviet era, I found a country that made even more of the war than we did.

I even employed a splendid old Red Army war veteran to help me set up my office there: an upright, totally reliable old gentleman just like my father's generation, except that he was Russian and a convinced Stalinist who did odd jobs for the KGB.

They had their war films, too. And their honourable scars.

And they were just as convinced they had won the war single-handed as we were.

They regarded D-Day as a minor event and had never heard of El Alamein.

Once I caught myself thinking: "They're using the war as a way of comforting themselves over their national decline, and over the way they're clearly losing in their contest with America."

And then it came to me that this could be a description of my own country.

When I lived in America itself, where I discovered that the Second World War, in their view, took place mainly in the Pacific, and in any case didn't matter half as much as the Civil War and the Vietnam War, I got a second harsh, unwanted history lesson.

Now here comes another. On a recent visit to the USA I picked up two new books that are going to make a lot of people in Britain very angry.

I read them, unable to look away, much as it is hard to look away from a scene of disaster, in a sort of cloud of dispirited darkness.


Same story? British soldiers at Basra Palace during the Iraq War - a conflict justified on the precedent of the Second World War

They are a reaction to the use - in my view, abuse - of the Second World War to justify the Iraq War.

We were told that the 1939-45 war was a good war, fought to overthrow a wicked tyrant, that the war in Iraq would be the same, and that those who opposed it were like the discredited appeasers of 1938.

Well, I didn't feel much like Neville Chamberlain (a man I still despise) when I argued against the Iraq War. And I still don't.

Some of those who opposed the Iraq War ask a very disturbing question.

The people who sold us Iraq did so as if they were today's Churchills. They were wrong.

In that case, how can we be sure that Churchill's war was a good war?

What if the Men of Glory didn't need to die or risk their lives? What if the whole thing was a miscalculated waste of life and wealth that destroyed Britain as a major power and turned her into a bankrupt pensioner of the USA?

Funnily enough, these questions echo equally uncomfortable ones I'm often asked by readers here.

The milder version is: "Who really won the war, since Britain is now subject to a German-run European Union?"

The other is one I hear from an ever-growing number of war veterans contemplating modern Britain's landscape of loutishness and disorder and recalling the sacrifices they made for it: "Why did we bother?"

Don't read on if these questions rock your universe.

The two books, out in this country very soon, are Patrick Buchanan's Churchill, Hitler And The Unnecessary War and Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke.

I know Pat Buchanan and respect him, but I have never liked his sympathy for "America First", the movement that tried to keep the USA out of the Second World War.

As for Nicholson Baker, he has become famous only because his phone-sex novel, Vox, was given as a present to Bill Clinton by Monica Lewinsky.

Human Smoke is not a novel but a series of brief factual items deliberately arranged to undermine the accepted story of the war, and it has received generous treatment from the American mainstream, especially the New York Times.

Baker is a pacifist, a silly position open only to citizens of free countries with large navies.

He has selected with care to suit his position, but many of the facts here, especially about Winston Churchill and Britain's early enthusiasm for bombing civilian targets, badly upset the standard view.


In his element: Churchill preferred war to peace. claims U.S. author Patrick Buchanan
Here is Churchill, in a 1920 newspaper article, allegedly railing against the "sinister confederacy" of international Jewry.

I say "allegedly" because I have not seen the original. I also say it because I am reluctant to believe it, as I am reluctant to believe another Baker snippet which suggests that Franklin Roosevelt was involved in a scheme to limit the number of Jews at Harvard University.

Such things today would end a political career in an instant.

Many believe the 1939-45 war was fought to save the Jews from Hitler. No facts support this fond belief.

If the war saved any Jews, it was by accident.

Its outbreak halted the "Kindertransport" trains rescuing Jewish children from the Third Reich. We ignored credible reports from Auschwitz and refused to bomb the railway tracks leading to it.

Baker is also keen to show that Hitler's decision to exterminate the Jews of Europe came only after the war was fully launched, and that before then, although his treatment of the Jews was disgusting and homicidal, it stopped well short of industrialised mass murder.

The implication of this, that the Holocaust was a result of the war, not a cause of it, is specially disturbing.

A lot of people will have trouble, also, with the knowledge that Churchill said of Hitler in 1937, when the nature of his regime was well known: "A highly competent, cool, well informed functionary with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile, and few have been unaffected by a subtle personal magnetism."

Three years later, the semi-official view, still pretty much believed, was that Hitler was the devil in human form and more or less insane.

Buchanan is, in a way, more damaging. He portrays Churchill as a man who loved war for its own sake, and preferred it to peace.

As the First World War began in 1914, two observers, Margot Asquith and David Lloyd George, described Churchill as "radiant, his face bright, his manner keen ... you could see he was a really happy man".

Churchill also (rightly) gets it in the neck from Buchanan for running down British armed forces between the wars.

It was Churchill who, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, demanded deep cuts in the Royal Navy in 1925, so when he adopted rearmament as his cause ten years later, it was his own folly he was railing against.

Well, every country needs men who like war, if it is to stand and fight when it has to. And we all make mistakes, which are forgotten if we then get one thing spectacularly right, as Churchill did.

Americans may take or leave Mr Buchanan's views about whether they should have stayed out, but the USA did very well out of a war in which Britain and Russia did most of the fighting, while Washington pocketed (and still keeps) most of the benefits.

Surveying Buchanan's chilly summary, I found myself distressed by several questions.

The First and Second World Wars, as Buchanan says, are really one conflict.


Blood brothers: By Christmas 1940, Stalin (right) had murdered many more people than Hitler, and had invaded nearly as many countries

We went to war with the Kaiser in 1914 mainly because we feared being overtaken by Germany as the world's greatest naval power. Yet one of the main results of the war was that we were so weakened we were overtaken instead by the USA.

We were also forced, by American pressure, to end our naval alliance with Japan, which had protected our Far Eastern Empire throughout the 1914-18 war.

This decision, more than any other, cost us that Empire. By turning Japan from an ally into an enemy, but without the military or naval strength to guard our possessions, we ensured that we would be easy meat in 1941.

After the fall of Singapore in 1942, our strength and reputation in Asia were finished for good and our hurried scuttle from India unavoidable.

Worse still is Buchanan's analysis of how we went to war.

I had always thought the moment we might have stopped Hitler was when he reoccupied the Rhineland on March 7, 1936. But Buchanan records that nobody was interested in such action at the time. Nobody? Yes.

That includes Churchill, who said fatuously on March 13: "Instead of retaliating by armed force, as would have been done in a previous generation, France has taken the proper and prescribed course of appealing to the League of Nations."

He then even more wetly urged "Herr Hitler" to do the decent thing and withdraw.

Buchanan doesn't think that Britain and France could have saved Czechoslovakia in 1938, and I suspect he is right.

But this is a minor issue beside his surgical examination of Britain's guarantee to help Poland in March 1939. Hitler saw our "stand" as an empty bluff, and called it.

The Poles were crushed and murdered, and their country erased from the map. Hitler's eventual defeat left Poland under the Soviet heel for two generations.

We then embarked on a war which cost us our Empire, many of our best export markets, what was left of our naval supremacy, and most of our national wealth - gleefully stripped from us by Roosevelt in return for Lend-Lease supplies.

As a direct result we sought membership of a Common Market that has since bled away our national independence.

Would we not have been wiser to behave as the USA did, staying out of it and waiting for Hitler and Stalin to rip out each other's bowels?

Was Hitler really set on a war with Britain or on smashing the British Empire?

The country most interested in dismantling our Empire was the USA. Hitler never built a surface navy truly capable of challenging ours and, luckily for us, he left it too late to build enough submarines to starve us out.

He was very narrowly defeated in the Battle of Britain, but how would we have fared if, a year later, he had used the forces he flung at Russia to attack us instead?

But he didn't. His "plan" to invade Britain, the famous Operation Sealion, was only a sketchy afterthought, quickly abandoned.

Can it be true that he wasn't very interested in fighting or invading us? His aides were always baffled by his admiration for the British Empire, about which he would drone for hours.

Of course he was an evil dictator. But so was Joseph Stalin, who would later become our honoured ally, supplied with British weapons, fawned on by our Press and politicians, including Churchill himself.

By Christmas 1940, Stalin had in fact murdered many more people than Hitler and had invaded nearly as many countries.

We almost declared war on him in 1940 and he ordered British communists to subvert our war effort against the Nazis during the Battle of Britain.

And, in alliance with Hitler, he was supplying the Luftwaffe with much of the fuel and resources it needed to bomb London.

Not so simple, is it? Survey the 20th Century and you see Britain repeatedly fighting Germany, at colossal expense.

No one can doubt the valour and sacrifice involved.

But at the end of it all, Germany dominates Europe behind the smokescreen of the EU; our Empire and our rule of the seas have gone, we struggle with all the problems of a great civilisation in decline, and our special friend, the USA, has smilingly supplanted us for ever. But we won the war.

• Human Smoke, by Nicholson Baker, is published on May 6 by Simon and Schuster. Churchill, Hitler And The Unnecessary War, by Patrick Buchanan, is published on May 13 by Crown Publishing.

Découvrir les gauchos

Une selle traditionnelle utilisée par les gauchos de la sierra de Michilingue.

Nicolas Perrenot, le jeune Français que j'ai rencontré en Argentine, tient parole. Il vient de créer un blog dans lequel il va raconter ses aventures sud-américaines au contact des derniers gauchos qui travaillent de manière traditionnelle.

Que tous les Amoureux des grands espaces rendent visite à ce blog.

Bienvenue à bord du Nimitz

La télévision publique américaine PBS vient de commencer la diffusion de Carrier, une remarquable série documentaire consacrée à l'équipage d'un porte-avions nucléaire.

Le voyage commence quand les cinéastes embarquent le 7 mai 2005 à bord de l'USS Nimitz alors que le bâtiment quitte le port de Coronado en Californie pour le golfe Persique. Après un périple de 57 000 milles, il reviendra aux Etats-Unis six mois plus tard.

Cette mission était la onzième pour un navire portant le nom d'un des grands amiraux de la seconde Guerre mondiale. Mis en service en mai 1975, il a participé aux grandes opérations navales américaines du dernier quart du XXe siècle.

En laissant une liberté totale aux cinéastes, la marine américaine a contribué à rendre possible le meilleur portrait de la vie à bord d'un grand navire de guerre moderne.

L'axe choisi par la chaîne est de s'intéresser à des destins individuels. Chaque homme et chaque femme offrent avec une relative naïveté à la caméra leurs vies en partage. C'est beau, très émouvant et instructif.

Une superbe série (disponible sur iTunes) dont la Marine française devrait s'inspirer. Mais ne rêvons pas trop.

Le Figaro Magazine se fout du monde !

Cette photo ne provient pas de l'ECPAD mais des archives américaines. Tout comme quatre autres millions de clichés elle est gratuite. Son équivalent français coûte le même prix qu'une photo d'agence. Politique à courte vue qui condamne l'histoire de l'Armée française à rester dans l'ombre.

Les archives oubliées de la Wehrmacht

EXCLUSIF – Environ 350000 clichés de la propagande de l’armée allemande sont conservés au fort d’Ivry depuis 1947. Des images inédites qui constituent une mine documentaire d’une qualité exceptionnelle.

Il est parfois des Une et des titres qui dépassent l'entendement. Tout est bon pour racoler les lecteurs mais comment justifier le titre du Figaro Magazine de cette semaine qui prétend offrir en exclusivité à ses lecteurs des photos extraites par les rouletabille de sa rédaction des donjons mal éclairés du fort d'Ivry ?

Ces photos sont accessibles aux chercheurs, aux iconographes, aux curieux, bref… à tout le monde depuis plus de trente ans. Fruit de la rapine de l'Armée française en Allemagne, ces tirages, parfois accompagnés de leurs négatifs, sont le fruit du travail des fameux PK, les photographes de l'Armée allemande et offrent un reflet assez vrai de la vie au sein de cette institution militaire. Les appeler « photos de propagande » est aussi stupide que de qualifier pareillement les photos du Service cinématographique des Armées durant la Première Guerre mondiale ou encore celles du Signal Corps de l'US Army.

Le vrai scandale ce ces photographies, ainsi que de l'ensemble du stock de l'ECPAD, est leur coût. Il est impossible pour un éditeur français de se payer ces photos car l'organisme public qui les gère a reçu pour mission d'être rentable. Alors qu'aux National Archives de Washington l'usage des photos publiques est gratuit, il faut en France sortir de gros picaillons pour utiliser des clichés payés par les contribuables.

Cette situation absurde fait qu'il est plus rationnel de publier un livre sur l'Armée américaine en France que d'investir dans l'histoire de l'Armée française.

Certes, les plus gros utilisateurs de ces photos, comme l'excellent magazine 39/45 ont passé des conventions avec l'ECPAD mais les conditions ne sont pas assez généreuses pour assurer la survie d'un magazine au lectorat modeste.

Après un article calamiteux consacré au pilote qui prétend avoir abattu Saint-Ex le jour où son escadrille n'a enregistré aucune sortie (ou celui sur les FARC du Figaro quotidien), le Figaro-Magazine vient une nouvelle fois de nous démontrer non seulement qu'il prend ses lecteurs pour des imbéciles mais qu'il ne cultive aucune des vertus du journalisme d'investigation.

Belle décadence pour un titre qui fut à ses origines un beau souffle d'air frais dans l'espace confiné de la presse française.