Obama est-il musulman ?

Il était inévitable que le tournant de la politique américaine à l'égard d'Israël commence à susciter des réactions hostiles à l'égard du président Barack Hussein Obama (BHO) parmi ses concitoyens.

Nous avons longuement évoqué dans le passé les questions soulevées par l'absence d'extrait de naissance complet, révélant le lieu précis de sa mise au monde, et qui semblent pour le moment dormir du sommeil du juste dans la société américaine.

En revanche, le discours prononcé au Caire par BHO destiné aux musulmans du monde non seulement contient des erreurs historiques monumentales comme, par exemple associer l'islam en Espagne à la tolérance et le christianisme à l'Inquisition, mais l'usage d'un vocabulaire islamique permet à quelques commentateurs de s'interroger sur la véritable identité religieuse de BHO.

Dans un article publié ce matin par Frank J. Gaffney Jr. président du Center for Security Policy dans les colonnes du Washington Times, l'auteur fait une analyse fine de cette allocution et aboutit à des conclusions qui méritent d'être méditées.

l'auteur aurait pu insister davantage sur l'absence de traces de baptême dans l'itinéraire vers le christianisme de BHO. Un musulman (comme il l'était comme fils de musulman ayant été élevé dans un pays musulman) ne peut devenir chrétien par un coup de baguette magique. Il doit être baptisé.

America's first Muslim president?

Obama aligns with the policies of Shariah-adherents


During his White House years, William Jefferson Clinton -- someone Judge Sonia Sotomayor might call a "white male" -- was dubbed "America's first black president" by a black admirer. Applying the standard of identity politics and pandering to a special interest that earned Mr. Clinton that distinction, Barack Hussein Obama would have to be considered America's first Muslim president.

This is not to say, necessarily, that Mr. Obama actually is a Muslim any more than Mr. Clinton actually is black. After his five months in office, and most especially after his just-concluded visit to Saudi Arabia and Egypt, however, a stunning conclusion seems increasingly plausible: The man now happy to have his Islamic-rooted middle name featured prominently has engaged in the most consequential bait-and-switch since Adolf Hitler duped Neville Chamberlain over Czechoslovakia at Munich.

What little we know about Mr. Obama's youth certainly suggests that he not only had a Kenyan father who was Muslim, but spent his early, formative years as one in Indonesia. As the president likes to say, "much has been made" -- in this case by him and his campaign handlers -- of the fact that he became a Christian as an adult in Chicago, under the now-notorious Pastor Jeremiah A. Wright.

With Mr. Obama's unbelievably ballyhooed address in Cairo Thursday to what he calls "the Muslim world" (hereafter known as "the Speech"), there is mounting evidence that the president not only identifies with Muslims, but actually may still be one himself. Consider the following indicators:

• Mr. Obama referred four times in his speech to "the Holy Koran." Non-Muslims -- even pandering ones -- generally don't use that Islamic formulation.

• Mr. Obama established his firsthand knowledge of Islam (albeit without mentioning his reported upbringing in the faith) with the statement, "I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed." Again, "revealed" is a depiction Muslims use to reflect their conviction that the Koran is the word of God, as dictated to Muhammad.

• Then the president made a statement no believing Christian -- certainly not one versed, as he professes to be, in the ways of Islam -- would ever make. In the context of what he euphemistically called the "situation between Israelis, Palestinians and Arabs," Mr. Obama said he looked forward to the day ". . . when Jerusalem is a secure and lasting home for Jews and Christians and Muslims, and a place for all of the children of Abraham to mingle peacefully together as in the story of Isra, when Moses, Jesus and Muhammad (peace be upon them) joined in prayer."

Now, the term "peace be upon them" is invoked by Muslims as a way of blessing deceased holy men. According to Islam, that is what all three were - dead prophets. Of course, for Christians, Jesus is the living and immortal Son of God.

In the final analysis, it may be beside the point whether Mr. Obama actually is a Muslim. In the Speech and elsewhere, he has aligned himself with adherents to what authoritative Islam calls Shariah -- notably, the dangerous global movement known as the Muslim Brotherhood -- to a degree that makes Mr. Clinton's fabled affinity for blacks pale by comparison.

For example, Mr. Obama has -- from literally his inaugural address onward -- inflated the numbers and, in that way and others, exaggerated the contemporary and historical importance of Muslim-Americans in the United States. In the Speech, he used the Brotherhood's estimates of "nearly 7 million Muslims" in this country, at least twice the estimates from other, more reputable sources. (Who knows? By the time Mr. Obama's friends in the radical Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN) perpetrate their trademark books-cooking as deputy 2010 census takers, the official count may well claim considerably morethan 7 million Muslims are living here.)

Even more troubling were the commitments the president made in Cairo to promote Islam in America. For instance, he declared: "I consider it part of my responsibility as president of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear." He vowed to ensure that women can cover their heads, including, presumably, when having their photographs taken for passports, driver's licenses or other identification purposes. He also pledged to enable Muslims to engage in zakat, their faith's requirement for tithing, even though four of the eight types of charity called for by Shariah can be associated with terrorism. Not surprisingly, a number of Islamic "charities" in this country have been convicted of providing material support for terrorism.

Particularly worrying is the realignment Mr. Obama has announced in U.S. policy toward Israel. While he pays lip service to the "unbreakable" bond between America and the Jewish state, the president has unmistakably signaled that he intends to compel the Israelis to make territorial and other strategic concessions to Palestinians to achieve the hallowed two-state solution. In doing so, he ignores the inconvenient fact that both the Brotherhood's Hamas and Abu Mazen's Fatah remain determined to achieve a one-state solution, whereby the Jews will be driven "into the sea."

Whether Mr. Obama actually is a Muslim or simply plays one in the presidency may, in the end, be irrelevant. What is alarming is that in aligning himself and his policies with those of Shariah-adherents such as the Muslim Brotherhood, the president will greatly intensify the already enormous pressure on peaceful, tolerant American Muslims to submit to such forces - and heighten expectations, here and abroad, that the rest of us will do so as well.

Afrique du Sud, la face cachée du Mundial

Ida Nel, épouse d'un agriculteur, apprend à ses servir d'un fusil d'assault pour défendre son foyer.

L'Afrique du sud s'apprête à accueillir en 2010 la coupe du Monde de football. Mais la vraie situation dans laquelle se trouve le pays est trop éloignée des idées fixes de la gauche européenne et des médias pour qu'elle soit exposée. Mais, parfois, un journal anglais raconte les choses sous leur vrai jour.

A lire dans le Daily Mail cet excellent reportage d'Aidan Hartley. Dans nos banlieues ça commence déjà.

Le quotidien de gauche espagnol Publico rend compte de la situation des joueurs et des futurs visiteurs. Mais il ne dit mot des meurtres racialement motivés.



South Africa World Cup 2010... and the shooting's already started
Only 70 miles from a 2010 World Cup football stadium, a farmer's wife and a boy aged 13 learn to defend themselves with lethal weapons. They say thousands of white landowners have been killed by Zimbabwe-style marauders; their black rulers accuse them of belligerence and right-wing tendencies. Aidan Hartley reports on the war of words you won't read about in your World Cup holiday brochure.

Bella wakes. She hears a strangled, gurgling sound. It’s the dog, she thinks.

‘Peter, there’s something wrong,’ she says to her husband. Noises emerge from the room of her mother-in-law, who’s 98 and confined to a wheelchair.

It’s 1am. Bella gets up and walks out of the bedroom. In the hall she sees a young man who at first she thinks is her son. Except he’s black, wears a balaclava and is pointing a gun at her.

‘He comes for me,’ says Bella, her hand before her tear-stained face.

‘He’s going to shoot me! I trip as I run back to the bedroom. Peter comes to the door but he has nothing in his hand, no pistol. I hear a gun go off. I hear my mother-in-law screaming. I lock the door and telephone my son. I tell him: “I think they shot Pa!”’

Two men are outside the bedroom window with a rifle. She loads the pistol Peter keeps by the bed.

‘I take the gun and say, “Come on! I’ll shoot you!”’

Back in the hall she finds Peter dead, a trail of blood across the kitchen floor. Her mother-in-law Gerda is bruised and beaten.

‘I can’t tell you how hopeless I felt,’ Bella says. ‘I will see it in front of me for weeks, months, years.’

Days after Peter is cremated, the attackers return. The survivors are sleeping elsewhere by now, so the gang finds only the dogs in the house. They torture the animals with boiling water before soaking them in petrol and setting them on fire.

I ask Bella for a motive and she says a group of black South Africans who are squatting on their farmland have repeatedly threatened them.

After the family find the dogs, Bella’s son Piet calls the police. Weeks later the attackers are still at large; police arrested one man in connection with the killing but he was later released.

I am in her home. The bullet holes are still clearly visible. I ask her what she is going to do.

‘If we stay here they will kill us. You can’t say this was a dream, or rewind what happened. They want our land.’

This is Bella’s account of an attack that happened last month in South Africa, in the north-east of the country. Her home is a long way from the vineyards and beaches of Cape Town, but South Africa is to host the 2010 World Cup and five of the centres for players and the hundreds of thousands of tourists who will come with them are here in the north.

Preparations are in hand but this is against the backdrop of a country gripped by ultra-violence. Officially there are about 50 murders a day, and three times that number of rapes. Most victims are poor blacks in South Africa’s cities: reported deaths last year totalled more than 18,000.

But among the casualties of the violence are white farmers, whose counterparts in Zimbabwe are singled out for international press coverage; here in the ‘rainbow nation’ their murders, remarkable for their particular savagery, go largely unreported.

There are no official figures but, since the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994, farmers’ organisations say 3,000 whites in rural areas have been killed. The independent South African Human Rights Commission, set up by Mandela’s government, says the number is 2,500.

Its commission’s report into the killings does not break down their figures by colour; but it says the majority of attacks in general - ie where no one necessarily dies - are against white people and that 'there was a considerably higher risk of a white victim of farm attacks being killed or injured than a black victim.'

It states that since 2006, farmer murders have jumped by 25 per cent and adds: 'The lack of prosecutions indicates the criminal justice system is not operating effectively to protect victims in farming communities and to ensure the rule of law is upheld.'

La carte de la violence contre les fermiers en Afrique du Sud avec les sites des futures rencontres.

I have lived and worked in Africa for 20 years, reporting from countries all across the continent. I know that the truth is very hard to find here. Stereotypes are everywhere. Blacks give no credit to successful white businesses. Whites give no credit to the black populace, refusing stubbornly to acknowledge that they themselves are physical reminders of a brutal colonial past.

What is certain is this: since the mid-Nineties, 900,000 mainly white South Africans have emigrated from South Africa - about 20 per cent of the white population - most of them due to soaring crime rates. In an eerie parallel with Zimbabwe, farms have been reclaimed by unqualified workers.

The police say don't fight back. You must fight. It's the bullet or be slaughtered

Commercial agricultural production has taken a massive hit where land reform has occurred. And as the attacks on white farmers continue, the police seem increasingly powerless and ineffective, and farmers are turning to vigilante behaviour as their way of life comes under violent assault.

The ANC government's response to this has been largely defiant. As Charles Ngacula, Safety and Security Minister under the previous administration of Thabo Mbeki, said: 'They can continue to whinge until they're blue in the face, be as negative as they want to, or they can simply leave this country.'

Ida Nel is learning to shoot an AK-47 and a pistol on a 'farm protection weekend'. The course is being held only 70 miles from the 2010 World Cup venue of Polokwane. Ida is married to farmer Andre. They farm guavas and macadamia nuts near Levubu in Limpopo province.

Sonette Selzer a violinist, on her farm near Ermelo. She is trained to use a variety of guns and always carries a rifle over a shoulder and a pistol on her belt

'I'm used to guns,' she says. 'My dad taught me how to use one when I was a kid but I need to get confident and to know what warning signs to look out for in a farm attack.'

On the course with her are farmers, and their wives and children. Among the children is 13-year-old Barend Harris, the son of a vet, who brought his family 9mm gun. Those taking part in the weekend courses for about 50 people at a time learn to leopard-crawl with a gun and are taught self-defence (with knives and guns), how to look for signs that their homes are being targeted, bush tracking and how to shoot from a moving vehicle. They are given target practice with AK-47s, pistols, R4 and R5 assault rifles and 308 hunting rifles.

Driving around Mpumalanga Province, east of Johannesburg, in what used to be the Transvaal, I found myself called by the farmers to a string of grisly murder scenes. In some the blood was still drying on the furniture or the street. In others, witnesses gave me accounts of killings involving rituals of extreme brutality: of victims boiled alive, forced to kneel and shot execution style and tortured in ways so unimaginable they are too horrendous to print. The same goes for the many pictures I have been shown of the barely identifiable corpses and horrific crime scenes.

Sonette Selzer, who lives on a forestry holding with her husband Werner, has made sure that she and her two boys are weapons-trained. At home in Mpumalanga province, Sonette, who is a trained medic, claims she usually gardens with a pistol at her side and a rifle strapped to her back. She is fully armed as I arrive - rather conveniently, I think.

'It's very tiring but even in the garden you have to be alert to what's happening around you all the time. You can never, ever relax your guard,' she says.

When she hears of a man who got into a gunfight with three robbers she shakes her head: 'I'd hate to get into that situation. You need to finish it quickly.'

She gestures to her vicious-looking Ninja knives and I realise the chilling intent behind her words - you need to finish 'them' as quickly as possible.

She says she and Werner sleep in separate beds at either end of the house, with their guns and knives within easy reach. Their children Francois, 18, and Jaques, 16, are at boarding school in the nearby town.

'When they were very small they learned how to use guns and how to reload,' Sonette says of her boys.

Each dawn and evening the Selzers check in on the VHF radio with other members of the Farm Watch organisation, neighbours whom they find more reliable than the South African Police Service (SAPS). The couple are heavily armed, but what good will that do them if a group of attackers assault the house in the dead of night? The home is an ill-fortified outpost 40 minutes' drive from the nearest Farm Watch neighbours or SAPS station that could respond in the event of an attack.

'You must carry your gun and your Bible together at once,' says Werner Selzer.

And at the farmers' houses I visited, when grace was said at table, a semi-automatic rifle or pistol with extra magazines was prominently on display. (Once again, it's hard to say if they are just placed there for effect.)

Werner is adamant that only he can protect his family: 'The police say don't fight back. But you must fight back. It's the bullet or be slaughtered. If you're going to rape my wife and kill my children you must understand I have nothing to lose. But you can run away. And if I shoot back you will run away.'

Since the 19th century, Boer farmers were organised into farm militias known as Commandos. These defended rural communities from assault and, just over a century ago, they formed the vanguard of the rebellion against the hated British Empire.

'We kept the British busy until they killed our women and children in the concentration camps,' one man told me. The two Boer wars were as much of a catastrophe in their minds as the crisis now facing them.

'The Afrikaner Boer doesn't like war but we will fight if we have to - and the Africans are scared of us.'

Such right-wing sentiments have done the Boers no favours under the ANC, which suspected them of links to white extremist groups such as the neo-fascist AWB. In recent years the government has moved to disband the Commando units as part of a security plan to improve policing nationwide.

The Commandos had been accused of brutality towards black farm workers; indeed, there have been reports of belligerence and abuse by white farmers, leading to a sense of reciprocity about some of the recent attacks.

Danzel Van Zyl, a senior researcher at the Human Rights Commission, says: 'There is a feeling among black people that many white people have not come to the party yet. Reconciliation has only come from one side, and this is felt especially with regard to the farming communities. They are perceived to be conservative, with a block of them voting right-wing and for parties like (the ultra-right wing) Freedom Front Plus.

'Old ways still play out in a lot of rural South Africa, where you will see farmers keeping the seat next to them in their truck for their dog, while workers sit in the back. A lot of farmers were killed by disgruntled farm workers who had been maltreated by them.'

Even in the garden you have to be alert to what's happening around you

He adds: 'The increase in farm murders is also due to the removal of the Commando system. They were notorious and feared by farm workers. But the problem is, nothing came in place of them.'

He insists there is no concerted political campaign to drive out white farmers; but all parties agree on one thing: land ownership is the burning issue.

Twenty years after the end of apartheid, whites still own about three-quarters of the country's agricultural land. The ANC has sought to redistribute land to black South Africans by legal means. In this it has followed a radically different path to that of Robert Mugabe in neighbouring Zimbabwe, where the rule of law collapsed in the last decade as gangs of state-sponsored thugs drove off 6,000 white families.

In Mpumalanga, black South Africans are lodging hundreds of legal 'land claims' in which they must prove their rights to property based on family historical records. The land claims are adjudicated in court and, if successful, the state buys out white farmers at what the property owners themselves told me was a fair price.

But as a tribe of farmers, the Boers are resisting the loss of their land because, they say, it spells the end of a way of life for a community.

And this is what they claim has sparked bloody violence that they say is politically motivated all the way to the top of the ANC. The TAU, or Transvaal Agricultural Union, draws a link between land claims and attacks.

'When there is a farm claim I say "Look out!" because attacks may follow to scare the farmers,' says TAU regional director Piet Kemp.

This after all is the country where the President, Jacob Zuma, used as his election campaign song an old war chant from his days in the ANC's military wing, Mshini wami - 'Bring me my machine-gun'. And where YouTube posts include footage of Mandela singing another song, 'Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer'.

Mugabe may be a pariah across the world but in South Africa he has long been given standing ovations and rapturous applause at ANC events.

Widow Tracey Pemberton is 41 but looks 20 years older and appears to be malnourished. She dreams of emigrating to the UK but her British husband died five years ago and she lives on a 200-hectare farm in a ramshackle cottage. The area, set among huge forests of planted pine, is so dangerous that on the main road outside Tracey's gate there are big signs that warn CRIME ALERT - NO STOPPING!

'I'm stupid to stay but I don't know where to go,' she says. 'It's awful to have to say "Who's that over there? What's that noise?" I definitely want to go. Because you're a woman and alone they take advantage of you. My husband had a British passport when he passed away. He'd had enough of struggling and failing in this country...'

By the eve of the elections that brought Zuma to power earlier this year the family had already been robbed six times over the years. Then one night Tracey was woken by noises from her mother Yvonne's room. She found a man sitting on top of the 65-year-old woman. 'I can't get that picture out of my mind.'

The attacker stabbed her mother 17 times, but miraculously she survived. Sonette Selzer rushed to the scene to help save her. But, insists Tracey, the harrassment continues. 'They switch on all the taps outside in the middle of the night to try to persuade you to go outside.' And she thinks they climb about on the roof, although it could be the branches from the oak tree brushing against the tiles.

My visit to Mpumalanga came immediately after crossing the frontier from Zimbabwe and what struck me was how similar the landscapes were after redistribution had taken place. Once productive maize fields now grow only weeds. Citrus orchards are dying, their valuable fruit rotting on the branches. Machinery lies about rusting. Irrigation pipes have been looted and farm sheds are derelict and stripped of roofing. Windbreak trees have been hacked down and roads are potholed.

Few of those being resettled on former white farms are qualified to work them. Commercial properties are becoming slums where the poor live a hand-to-mouth existence in mud huts, surrounded by subsistence patches of maize. Meanwhile, black workers are put out of their jobs without compensation.

'Now we are in big trouble,' says Messina, a black foreman at what was Figtree farm.

He says his employers had to sell, 'because their lives were in danger, definitely. This place is not safe any more.'

Messina says the land resettlement on his employers' property was orchestrated by black elite figures from town, not people close to the land.

'If you look at them they are driving smart cars. They want to look big in their four-by-fours. They say they will help us - but nothing. No job. We are suffering.'

For all South Africa's aims to be following the rule of law, there are comparisons here with Zimbabwe and other calamitous reforms under the banner of 'Africa for the Africans'.

'I saw people with heads cut off, horrible things,' says farmer Ockert van Niekerk as he sits his toddler daughter on his lap at home.

Cops tracking cases lack experience. Dockets vanish and criminals get out

'The aim is to scare white people. The attacks are not just crimes. They're political. You don't wait for a farmer for eight hours, kill him and steal a frozen chicken. In warfare you learn to soften the target, and the aim is to break us mentally and spiritually.'

But he then tells, in alarming detail, how he would respond to an attacker: 'I will cut in seconds all the main arteries: the neck, gut and groin.' He whips out two knives from either pocket. 'I feel quite safe with these.'

What the farmers dub 'hit squads' are well armed with AK-47s, deploy in gangs and if they are ever arrested they are allegedly found to be from outside the district - 'recruited', the farmers say, from cities hundreds of kilometres away.

At a farmers' day, or Boerdag, in a marquee tent surrounded by maize harvesting machinery, I meet a string of farmers with attack stories. One elderly man too scared to be identified tells me how a gang broke in at five in the morning, tied him and his wife up, then got an angle grinder from the workshop and sawed into the flesh of his legs with the blade, demanding, 'I want money! You must talk!'

One of the gang picked up the couple's mobile phone and inadvertently called their daughter, who then had to endure hearing the robbery unfold in screams and shouts.

The more brutal and incredible the stories, the more doubt creeps in: are they over-egging this for political impact? Are they perhaps deeply racist at heart? But then I remind myself: I have seen the pictures and read the local newspaper reports. I've been to the funerals.

It is said that the signs always lead down a road to the farmstead: bunches of long grass knotted like corn dolls, the strands of wire fences twisted into cat's cradle configurations, and stones, tin cans and plastic bags stacked in circle and arrow patterns.

These 'attack signs', which can supposedly warn if trouble is coming to your farm, are a macabre coded language. Farmers widely believe in their existence; they have been decoded by Special Forces veterans.

At first I wondered if the 'attack signs' story was a result of mass hysteria. But the hairs on the back of my neck stood rigid when I began to see what appeared to be sets of signs outside farms near where attacks had already occurred.

Each sign is said to mean something: a forked stick signifies a woman in the house, the corn dolls map out the farm buildings and signs dubbed 'triggers' are set to either 'off' or 'on' - meaning 'attack'.

White farmers read these runes and arm themselves because they have nothing else. New police units promised to substitute the old Commando system have yet to be formed. And people isolated on remote properties are worried by the fact that licenses for their firearms are not being renewed.

As a South African Police Service (SAPS) officer, Derek Jonker investigated 52 separate farm attacks and he says, 'There has been a decline in the abilities of the police. There is a power struggle in the police and investigators are not qualified.

'Crime prevention has collapsed totally,' he adds. 'And cops tracking cases lack experience and resources to gather evidence and arrest oenders. Dockets vanish and criminals get let out of jail.'

In the provincial town of Ermelo, I meet a policeman who's tired and angry. He says SAPS can't be bothered to fight crime any more. Only four out of 16 police vehicles at the station are still in working order. I ask what happens with the vehicles that are in working order. He shrugs and points across the street to Ermelo's main supermarket. And there they are: four police prowlers parked in a row. The police are inside doing their shopping while at a street corner crime scene that we've just come from, the blood still glistens wetly in the sunshine.

And at that murder scene I met another police officer who dismisses the idea that the ANC was involved in a conspiracy against white farmers.

It is much worse than that for South Africa as a whole, 'It's worse among the black people - all those rapes and killings,' he says. 'I feel sorry for these people. Everybody suffers, not just white people.

'You can buy an AK for a bag of maize meal. This causes hatred between blacks and whites - and this is boiling up to what? Every time it's very emotional because it's black against white, but you must think with your head and not your heart.'

As we talk I'm looking at the blood on the ground. It's the policeman's brother-in-law who just got shot.

'The whole criminal system is a balls-up for white and black people,' he says. 'We just don't need this.'

South Africa's proposed new law and order plans include better policing for those urban areas expecting visitors during the World Cup next year. It will be the most heavily policed World Cup in history, with 200,000 specially recruited officers and equipment ranging from surveillance cameras to water cannon.

But it will remain unnerving for those who travel that these brutal killings are happening within just a couple of hours' drive.

Le coût de la guerre

Dans le comté du Dorset, les archéologues ont découvert une fosse contenant les restes de personnes dont la mort brutale éclaire les circonstances de l'invasion romaine voici près de 2000 ans.

La guerre impose son lot d'horreurs. Une récente découverte archéologique en Grande Bretagne nous rappelle que l'invasion romaine de l'île ne s'est pas faite sans résistance et que l'envahisseur a fait payer très cher aux populations locales leur refus de la domination de Rome.

Le chantier d'une route prévue dans les constructions pour les Jeux olympiques de 2012 a permis la découverte d'une fosse contenant des corps décapités qui seraient les défenseurs d'un point de résistance des populations celtiques locales face à l'envahisseur. On peut supposer qu'il ne s'agit pas de Romains car on n'a pas trouvé d'objets qui leur sont habituellement associés.

Le fait que les corps aient été décapités suggère deux hypothèses : soit il s'agit de prisonniers celtes exécutés par les Romains après une bataille, soit il s'agit de décapitation rituelles de corps d'ennemis vaincus lors d'une guerre entre populations locales. Toutefois, il est douteux que les corps aient été enterrés. Ils auraient plutôt été utilisés dans une sorte de temple à la gloire du vainqueur.

Pour une fois, c'est un journaliste anonyme du Daily Mail qui rend compte de l'information dans un article bien illustré. Ce fait est assez rare pour être souligné.

Dozens of decapitated bodies found in mass Roman war grave unearthed on the route of Olympic Highway


A 2,000-year-old war grave crammed with up to 50 headless bodies has been uncovered by workers digging a new road for the Olympics.

The Iron Age victims found in the ancient burial site are thought to have been slaughtered by the invading Romans in about AD43.

All of them had been decapitated and some had their limbs hacked off. It has been discovered in the heart of Thomas Hardy country, on Ridgeway Hill near Weymouth, Dorset.

The site is being dug up to make way for a so-called Olympic Highway, an £87million relief road in time for the 2012 games.

Maiden Castle in Dorset: The mass grave was found near the site of this hill fort - where Celtic tribesmen are said to have staged their last stand against Roman general Vespasian

The burial site is close to Maiden Castle - Europe's largest Iron Age hill fort where the local Celtic tribe are said to have staged their last stand against General Vespasian and his Roman legion after the invasion.

Vespasian led a force south-westwards for Emperor Claudius. His aim was to secure coastal ports and harbours, as well as tin and silver mines in Cornwall and Somerset.

Along the way, he captured 20 hill forts - including Maiden Castle, according to archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler.

The archaeological record shows he got as far as Exeter and probably reached Bodmin.

Mr Wheeler created a vivid story about the fall of Maiden Castle to Roman forces, based on a so-called 'war cemetery' he discovered close to the fort.

He believed a legion wreaked destruction on the site, butchering men, women, and children, before setting fire to the castle.

While there was little archaeological evidence to support this version of events or even that the hill fort was attacked by the Romans, the discovery of the mass grave could change the historical assessment.

Archaeologists are waiting to carry out radio-carbon testing on the newly discovered butchered remains but believe the skeletons could be young local men killed by Roman soldiers.

Dave Score, project manager for Oxford Archaeology which is managing the dig, said it was a 'remarkable and exciting' discovery.

He said: 'We have found a large pit about six metres in diameter. We have counted 45 skulls so far, these are in one section of the pit, and several torsos and leg bones in separate sections of the pit.

'We believe they date from the end of the Iron Age going into the Roman period.

'At the moment we don't fully understand how or why the remains have come to be deposited in the pit.

Amazed archaeologists have discovered up to 50 headless corpses nearby

'But it is clear some kind of catastrophic event such as a major conflict or mass execution has taken place and this is a war grave of some kind.

'The heads have been removed and other body parts have been chopped up. We don't yet know if this was before or after death or was some kind of ritual.

'The pit is very close to Maiden Castle, which was a major Iron Age fort. If the victims were Roman we would have expected to find Roman artefacts in the pit, like hobnails from shoes.

'Our gut feeling is that this is the result of a conflict between Iron Age local people and Roman soldiers.'

Mr Score said he and his team were looking forward to carrying out more excavations and tests to find out more about the mass grave.

He said: 'Clearly this is a remarkable and very exciting find. It is exciting in terms of the type of deposit.

The earthen ramparts surrounding Maiden Castle

General Vespasian is believed to have attacked Maiden Castle as he marched through the south-western counties of Britain

'It is rare to find a burial site like this one. A pit like that with so many bodies and treated in that way and all piled up in one is very unusual.

'There are lots of different types of burial where skeletons may be aligned along a compass axis or in a crouched position, but to find something like this is just incredible.

'We are still working on carefully recording and recovering all of the skeletons, which will be taken back to our offices in Oxford for detailed analysis, and trying to piece together the extraordinary story behind these remains.'

Andy Ackerman, Dorset County Council's head of highways, said: 'I'd ask members of the public to continue to stay away from the archaeological works.

'The burial pit is within the construction site, which can be a dangerous environment for anyone not trained in site safety.'

The site has been fenced off and is under 24-hour security due to the unique nature of the find, he said.

Archaeological finds from the Weymouth Relief Road project will be put on show at a Dorset museum after they have been analysed and catalogued.

Weymouth and Portland will host all the sailing events at the 2012 Olympics.

Maiden Castle is a hill fort on the site of a Neolithic causewayed enclosure and bank barrow.

After being used for growing crops in about 1,800BC, in the Bronze Age, the hill top was abandoned.

Maiden Castle was built in around 600BC. This early phase was a simple and unremarkable site, covering 16 acres and was similar to many other hill forts.

However, in around 450BC, it underwent major expansion. The enclosed area was nearly tripled in size to 47 acres, making it the largest hill fort in Britain. At the same time, with the addition of further ramparts and ditches, its defences were made more complex.

Towards the end of the 1st millennium BC, the hill fort shrank and settlement became focused at the eastern end of Maiden Castle.

The fort was occupied until at least the Roman period. However after the Roman conquest of Britain in the 1st century AD, the site appears to have been abandoned.

Before this, the Romans may have had a military presence on the site. In the late 4th century AD, a temple and ancillary buildings were built. In the 6th century AD the hill top was abandoned and was used for agriculture in the medieval period.

Although there is a layer of charcoal, it is associated with the iron works, and the main evidence for slighting of defences comes from the collapse of an entranceway to the fort.

A total of 14 bodies in the cemetery exhibited signs of a violent death, but there is no evidence that they died at Maiden Castle.

The eastern part of the hill fort remained in use for at least the first few decades of the Roman occupation, although the duration and nature of habitation is uncertain.

Many 1st-century Roman artefacts have been discovered near the east entrance and in the centre of the hill fort.

At the same time that the castle was abandoned, Durnovaria (Dorchester) rose to prominence as the civitas, or regional capital, of the Durotriges, a Celtic tribe.

Hill fort studies were popularised in the 19th century by Augustus Pitt Rivers. Maiden Castle has inspired composer John Ireland and author Thomas Hardy to write about the place.

In the 1930s, Mr Wheeler undertook the first archaeological excavations at Maiden Castle, raising its profile among the public.

Further excavations were carried out under Niall Sharples, further expanding understanding of the site and repairing damage caused in part by large numbers of visitors to Maiden Castle.

Today, the site is protected as a Scheduled Ancient Monument and is maintained by English Heritage.

Un rappel nécessaire d'Eric Margolis

Le journaliste américain Eric Margolis est de ceux qui aiment mettre les pieds dans le plat et rappeler quelques rudes vérités aux élites anglo-saxonnes qui nous gouvernent.

A l'occasion de la visite d'Obama aux plages du débarquement de 1944, il s'est amusé à corriger quelques uns des mythes les plus répandus dans la culture populaire de nos amis américains et de nos voisins britanniques.

Premier mythe : l'Armée française de 1940 ne s'est pas effondrée sans combattre. Nous avons perdu près de 90 000 tués en 45 jours, un chiffre épouvantable qui se compare aux pires heures de la Grande Guerre. Les Anglais, quant à eux, ont à déplorer 3500 morts et les Allemands 45000. La comparaison entre ces chiffres éclaire bien le déroulement des opérations.

Les Français ont été battus non par manque de courage mais en conséquence d'une révolution technologique.

Deuxième mythe : la ligne Maginot n'a servi à rien. Faux, les Allemands n'ont pas tenté de la percer. Ils l'ont contournée.

Troisième mythe : Les Anglo-Saxons ont battu l'Armée allemande. Faux, ce sont les Russes qui l'ont fait en détruisant 75 à 80 % du potentiel de la Wehrmacht.

GETTING TO THE TRUTH ABOUT WORLD WAR II


President Barack Obama’s visit to Normandy to commemorate the 65th anniversary of D-Day makes us think about the entire course of World War II, and the lingering propaganda or myths that still becloud it.

As a former instructor of military history and lover of history, let me address four of these myths that are particularly annoying and misleading:

First, France’s army did not simply surrender or run away in 1940, as ignorant American Know-Nothing conservatives claim.

The German Blitz that smote France on May-June, 1940, scattering its armies like leaves before a storm, was a historical revolution in warfare. Blitzkrieg combined rapidly-moving armor and mobile infantry, precision dive bombing, flexible logistical support, and new high technologies in C3 – command, control and communications. In 1940, Germany led the world in technology: 75% of all technical books were then written in German.

France’s armies and generals, trained to re-fight World War I, were overwhelmed by lightening warfare. France was then still a largely agricultural society. Blitzkrieg – now adopted by all major modern armed forces - was designed to strike an enemy’s brain rather than body, paralyzing his ability to manage large forces or to fight. The Germans called it their `silver bullet.’

Indeed it was. France still relied on couriers to deliver vital information. Germany was the world’s leader in mobile radio communications. Amazingly, the French commander in chief, Gen. Gamelin, did not even have a telephone in his HQ outside Paris.

Britain’s well-trained expeditionary force in France was beaten just as quickly and thoroughly as the French, and saved itself only by abandoning its French allies and fleeing across the Channel.

No army in the world at that time could have withstood Germany’s blitzkrieg, planned by the brilliant Erich von Manstein, and led by the audacious Heinz Guderian, and Erwin Rommel –three of modern history’s greatest generals.

They were also incredibly lucky. Just one bomb on a German bridge over the Meuse, or one impassable traffic jam in the Ardennes forest could have meant the difference between victory and defeat. The French had temporarily moved some of their weakest reserve units just into the sector the Germans struck. It was, as Wellington said after Waterloo, a damned close run thing.

Germany’s new, fluid tactics shattered France’s armies. They were unable to reform their lines in spite of often fierce resistance. The fast-moving German panzers were constantly behind them. Retreat under fire is the most difficult and perilous of all military operations. After six weeks, and a stab in the back by Mussolini’s Italy, France’s armies had disintegrated.

France lost 217,000 dead and 400,000 wounded. Compare that to America’s loss of 416,000 dead during four years of war in the Pacific and Europe. At least France did not suffer the 2 million dead it lost in World War I. Germany losses: 46,000 killed in action, 121,000 wounded, and 1,000 aircraft. By comparison, the US, British and Canadians lost some 10,000 dead and wounded at D-Day.

Second, the forts of France’s Maginot Line were not tactically outflanked, as myth has it. The Germans struck NW of the Line’s end, through the Belgian/French Ardennes Forest, a route anticipated by the French Army which held war games there in 1939. The immobile French field army failed, not the Maginot Line. It may have been too costly, tied down too many men, and came to symbolize France’s defensive attitude, but the Great Wall of France fulfilled its designated mission.

The Line was intended to only defend the coal and steel industries of Alsace and Lorraine, which it did.
The Germans concluded an attack on the Line would be too costly, and opted for a different route – through Belgium.

But the high water table of Flanders and France’s aversion to building forts behind its Belgian ally left the Franco-Belgian border with only scanty fixed defenses.

Ironically, after the German breakthrough at Sedan on the Meuse, a French corps held in reserve to
cover this vital sector moved east to the Stenay Gap to protect the Maginot Line’s left flank,
opening the way for Guderian’s panzers to fan out to the NW behind French lines.

The second largest amphibious operation in Western Europe during WWII was the totally forgotten German crossing under fire of the Rhine in June,1940.

The crews of the unconquered Maginot forts held out until the armistice. Those who mock France for building forts that were supposedly `outflanked’ should know the `impregnable’ modern US fortifications at Manila, and Britain’s Fortress Singapore, were both taken from the rear by the Imperial Japanese Army. Germany’s much vaunted `Westwall’ and coastal defenses fared no better.

Third – Germany’s Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe were crushed well before D-Day. In commemorating the war, we must remember to salute the courage and valor of Russia’s dauntless soldiers and pilots who, like German soldiers, fought magnificently albeit for criminal regimes. World War II in Europe was not won just at D-Day, as popular myth has it. Germany’s army and air force were broken on the Eastern Front’s titanic battles.

The numbers speak for themselves. The Soviets destroyed 75-80% of all German divisions – 4 million soldiers - and most of the Luftwaffe. Russia lost at least 14 million soldiers and a similar number of civilians. The Red Army destroyed 507 Axis divisions. On the Western Front after D-Day, the Allies destroyed 176 badly under-strength German divisions.

When the Allies landed in Normandy, they met battered German forces with no air cover, crippled by lack of fuel and supplies, unable to move in daytime. Even so, the Germans fought like tigers. Had the invading US, British and Canadians encountered the 1940’s Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe, the outcome may well have been different.

Fourth – World War II was not a good and evil struggle between `western democracies’ and `totalitarian powers,’ as we are still wrongly taught.

It was a world conflict over land and resources pitting the British Empire which controlled 25% of the entire globe, the French Empire, Dutch Empire, and Belgian Empire, and, later, the US imperium(Philippines, Pacific possessions, Cuba, Central America), against the Italian and Japanese empires. The Soviet Union was an empire unto itself.

In 1939, the only major powers without colonies - that were not imperial powers - were Germany(who lost her few colonies in World War I) and China. Once the war ended, Britain and Holland, who complained mightily about the evils of Nazi occupation, scrambled to reoccupy their former colonies, some of which had declared independence.

One can hardly call this a crusade for freedom. Liberation for the white people of German-occupied Europe, certainly. But not for the peoples of Africa and Asia. However, in the end, the war did set in motion forces that would eventually spell the end of colonialism. The collapse of the British Empire, which Winston Churchill had vowed to defend at all costs, opened the way to worldwide decolonization.

We should not forget all this.


copyright Eric S. Margolis 2009

Race et santé

Sur cette photographie, prise en 2008, Carole Wiegand est aux côtés de son fils Nick Glasgow. Peu de temps après, ce jeune homme apprendra qu'il est atteint d'une forme aiguë de leucémie et que seul un don de moelle peut le sauver. Malheureusement, il n'existe pas de donneur référencé correspondant à son cocktail génétique métissé. (AP Photo/Carole Wiegand).

Une des facettes les plus inattendues de l'appartenance de chacun à un groupe racial est celle des conséquences sur la santé.

Dans une très intéressante dépêche de l'Associated Press datée du 27 mai dernier, la journaliste Juliana Barbassa dévoile le drame que vivent les malades métis.

On connaît bien les difficultés auxquelles font face les malades noirs en attente d'un organe. Ils pâtissent du fait que les donneurs noirs sont moins nombreux proportionnellement que ne le sont les Blancs. On s'est aperçu que cette réticence des Noirs à offrir leurs organes après la mort naît de la croyance infondée qu'ils pourraient bénéficier à des Blancs.

Ce manque de donneurs conduit à un tragique allongement des délais d'attente et ce retard entraîne parfois la mort du malade.

Mais une difficulté nouvelle se fait jour aux Etats-Unis. Dans ce pays, le nombre de métis est en grande augmentation. J'utilise ce terme dans son sens strict afin de ne pas confondre ces personnes, résultant de l'union de parents de races différentes, avec les mulâtres qui eux sont le fruit d'une union entre Blancs et Noirs.

Si les mulâtres, comme le président Obama, sont nombreux, en revanche les métis sont non seulement moins nombreux mais ils présentent à chaque fois des caractéristiques particulières qui réduisent considérablement leur compatibilité avec des donneurs.

Nick Glasgow, left, who has Leukemia, is comforted by his mother Carole Wiegand at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Hayward, Calif., Friday, May 22, 2009. If Glasgow were white, he would have a nearly 90 percent chance of finding a matching bone marrow donor to treat the leukemia that has robbed him of his dark hair and whittled 20 pounds off his bodybuilder's frame. But because the 28-year-old is one-quarter Japanese, his doctor warned him the outlook was grim: Glasgow's background would make it almost impossible to find a match, which usually comes from a patient's own ethnic group. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)

Mixed-race patients struggle to find marrow donors

HAYWARD, Calif. (AP) — If Nick Glasgow were white, he would have a nearly 90 percent chance of finding a matching bone marrow donor who could cure his leukemia.

But because the 28-year-old bodybuilder is one-quarter Japanese, his doctor warned him the outlook was grim. Glasgow's background would make it almost impossible to find a match, which usually comes from a patient's own ethnic group.
The doctor "didn't say it was slim-to-none. He didn't say it would be hard. He said 'zero chance,'" Glasgow's mother, Carole Wiegand, recalled with tears in her eyes. "When Nick heard that, it sent him plummeting."

At a time when the number of multiracial Americans is rising, only a tiny fraction of donors on the national bone-marrow registry are of mixed race. The National Marrow Donor Program is trying to change that by seeking more diverse donors for patients suffering from leukemia, lymphoma and other blood diseases.
"The truth is, when people of different backgrounds marry and produce offspring, it creates more types that are harder to match," said Michelle Setterholm, the program's director of scientific services. "The probability just gets lower when you have people of mixed ancestral DNA."

The number of people who identify themselves as multiracial in the United States has grown from 3.9 million in 2000, the first year the census included the category, to 5.2 million in 2008. Mixed-race people account for 1.6 percent of the U.S. population.

The donor program has been pushing for years to recruit more racial minorities and mixed-race donors. So far, multiracial volunteers make up just 3 percent of the 7 million people on the registry.

That is higher than the percentage of mixed-race people in the U.S. But there are so many possible racial and ethnic combinations that finding a match can still be extremely difficult.

The reason that mixed-heritage patients are so hard to match can be found in the immune system.

Populations in different parts of the world developed certain proteins, or markers, that are part of the body's natural defenses. These markers help the immune system determine which cells are foreign and should be rejected.

A match between two people who share many markers will reduce the risk of the donor and recipient cells attacking each other. Because certain markers tend to cluster in particular ethnic groups, matches are most often found among people of shared backgrounds. Multiracial patients often have uncommon profiles and a much harder time finding a donor.

About 6,000 patients in the U.S. are awaiting a bone marrow match.
Finding compatible organs for transplant is simpler. Organ matches rely essentially on blood type, which is not related to race.

Glasgow's grandfather, an Army soldier from South Carolina, fell in love while stationed in Japan after World War II and married across racial lines at a time when it was illegal to do so in many states.

From his Japanese grandmother, Glasgow got the almond shape of his eyes and cell markers that set him apart from most other whites. From his white grandparents, he got markers that set him apart from other Japanese.

Geary Moya's background — part Navajo, part Mexican — has kept his life on hold since 2005, when he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Chemotherapy has put his cancer in remission, but a bone marrow transplant is his only hope for a cure.

"I can't work. I can't plan. I just don't know what tomorrow will hold for me," said Moya, a 51-year-old former manager of an appliance company.

He often visits bone marrow drives, where he tries to encourage prospective donors to sign up.

"If it's not for me, it'll help someone," he said last week as he stopped by a booth registering potential bone marrow donors at California State University in Hayward. "There's a whole list of people out there waiting for someone to come along."

Moya watched and answered questions as a trickle of students filled out forms with their health history and ethnic makeup before swabbing the inside of their cheeks to collect the genetic material that will be used to match them to waiting patients.
If a match is found, they will undergo a painful procedure in which doctors withdraw liquid marrow from the back of their pelvic bones.

Among those filling out donor forms was Abe Rindal, a retired engineer who heard through friends about Glasgow.

Rindal was born to a Norwegian-American father and Japanese mother who met in Japan after World War II. They started a family before interracial marriage bans were struck down by the Supreme Court in 1967. Rindal remembers meeting only two other people with similar ethnicity.

"It was socially unacceptable back then," he said.

The chance to help someone of similar ethnicity appealed to Rindal. He not only filled out his form and swabbed his cheeks, he also sent test kits to his four siblings and their children in the hope they might be a match for Glasgow.

At the hospital, Wiegand prays for her son. Her niece started a Facebook group that has collected upward of 1,000 members interested in helping. The Asian American Donor Program has been contacting Japanese-American organizations, and large corporations such as Cisco have reached out to their employees via e-mail.
If chemotherapy sends Glasgow's cancer into remission, he might have months to find a match. If not, he might have far less time.

"I just keep thinking, `Please, everyone, get into that database,'" his mother said. "I just know there's a match out there somewhere for him.

Les tragédies du débarquement

Des héros au travail.

Dans un article long et bien argumenté publié ce matin dns le Guardian, le journaliste Antony Beevor rappelle les multiples tragédies vécues par les femmes au cours de la bataille de France, ces longs mois de combats durant lesquels les troupes britanniques et américaines ont repoussé les Allemands de France.

L'auteur Britannique note qu'en Bretagne le tiers des victimes civiles ont été des femmes. Souvent pour des raisons très éloignées de motifs politiques. Je suis frappé par le cas d'une jeune femme, agressée, violée, frappée à coups de pierres et achevée noyée dans l'Oust par un de ses anciens amants éconduits. Avec d'autres « résistants » armés de bric et de broc, ce monstre est venu la chercher chez elle une fois les Allemands partis, l'accusant de collaboration (ce qui était faux!) pour mener à bien sa vengeance. Ce crime, comme bien d'autres commis en Bretagne, a bénéficié d'une inexplicable mansuétude.

Ce qui me scandalise est que ce coupable de ce crime de violence contre les femmes, que le tribunal international de la Haye considère désormais être un crime contre l'humanité, donc imprescriptible, finit ses jours tranquillement à Renac. A deux pas d'ici.

An ugly carnival

As we mark the 65th anniversary of the D-day landings, Antony Beevor describes a dark side to the liberation parties: the brutal head-shaving and beating of women accused of collaboration


The 65th anniversary of the D-day landings this week is an occasion to revisit joyful pictures of the liberation of France in 1944. But among the cheering images there are also shocking ones. These show the fate of women accused of "collaboration horizontale". It is impossible to forget Robert Capa's fallen-Madonna image of a shaven-headed young woman, cradling her baby, implicitly the result of a relationship with a German soldier.
The punishment of shaving a woman's head had biblical origins. In Europe, the practice dated back to the dark ages, with the Visigoths. During the middle ages, this mark of shame, denuding a woman of what was supposed to be her most seductive feature, was commonly a punishment for adultery. Shaving women's heads as a mark of retribution and humiliation was reintroduced in the 20th century. After French troops occupied the Rhineland in 1923, German women who had relations with them later suffered the same fate. And during the second world war, the Nazi state issued orders that German women accused of sleeping with non-Aryans or foreign prisoners employed on farms should also be publicly punished in this way.
Also during the Spanish civil war, Falangists had shaved the heads of women from republican families, treating them as if they were prostitutes. Those on the extreme right had convinced themselves that the left believed in free love. (The most famous victim in fiction is Maria, the lover of Robert Jordan in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls.)
It may seem strange that head-shaving, essentially a rightwing phenomenon, should have become so widespread during the leftist liberation euphoria in France in 1944. But many of the tondeurs, the head-shavers, were not members of the resistance. Quite a few had been petty collaborators themselves, and sought to divert attention from their own lack of resistance credentials. Yet resistance groups could also be merciless towards women. In Brittany it is said that a third of those civilians killed in reprisals were women. And threats of head-shaving had been made in the resistance underground press since 1941.
There was a strong element of vicarious eroticism among the tondeurs and their crowd, even though the punishment they were about to inflict symbolised the desexualisation of their victim. This "ugly carnival" became the pattern soon after D-day. Once a city, town or village had been liberated by the allies or the resistance, the shearers would get to work. In mid-June, on the market day following the capture of the town of Carentan, a dozen women were shorn publicly. In Cherbourg on 14 July, a truckload of young women, most of them teenagers, were driven through the streets. In Villedieu, one of the victims was a woman who had simply been a cleaner in the local German military headquarters.
Many French people as well as allied troops were sickened by the treatment meted out to these women accused of collaboration horizontale with German soldiers. A large number of the victims were prostitutes who had simply plied their trade with Germans as well as Frenchmen, although in some areas it was accepted that their conduct was professional rather than political. Others were silly teenagers who had associated with German soldiers out of bravado or boredom. In a number of cases, female schoolteachers who, living alone, had German soldiers billeted on them, were falsely denounced for having been a "mattress for the boches". Women accused of having had an abortion were also assumed to have consorted with Germans.
Many victims were young mothers, whose husbands were in German prisoner-of-war camps. During the war, they often had no means of support, and their only hope of obtaining food for themselves and their children was to accept a liaison with a German soldier. As the German writer Ernst Jünger observed from the luxury of the Tour d'Argent restaurant in Paris, "food is power".
Jealousy masqueraded as moral outrage, because people envied the food and entertainment these women had received as a result of their conduct. When Arletty, the great actor and star of the film Les Enfants du Paradis, died in 1992, she received admiring obituaries that did not mention the rumour that she had her head shaved at the liberation. These obituaries even passed over her controversial love affair with a Luftwaffe officer. But letters to some newspapers revealed a lingering bitterness nearly 50 years later. It was not the fact that Arletty had slept with the enemy which angered them, but the way she had eaten well in the Hôtel Ritz while the rest of France was hungry.
After the humiliation of a public head-shaving, the tondues - the shorn women - were often paraded through the streets on the back of a lorry, occasionally to the sound of a drum as if it were a tumbril and France was reliving the revolution of 1789. Some were daubed with tar, some stripped half naked, some marked with swastikas in paint or lipstick. In Bayeux, Churchill's private secretary Jock Colville recorded his reactions to one such scene. "I watched an open lorry drive past, to the accompaniment of boos and catcalls from the French populace, with a dozen miserable women in the back, every hair on their heads shaved off. They were in tears, hanging their heads in shame. While disgusted by this cruelty, I reflected that we British had known no invasion or occupation for some 900 years. So we were not the best judges."
The American historian Forrest Pogue wrote of the victims that "their look, in the hands of their tormentors, was that of a hunted animal". Colonel Harry D McHugh, the commander of an American infantry regiment near Argentan, reported: "The French were rounding up collaborators, cutting their hair off and burning it in huge piles, which one could smell miles away. Also, women collaborators were forced to run the gauntlet and were really beaten."
Elsewhere some men who had volunteered to work in German factories had their heads shaved, but that was an exception. Women almost always were the first targets, because they offered the easiest and most vulnerable scapegoats, particularly for those men who had joined the resistance at the last moment. Altogether, at least 20,000 women are known to have had their heads shaved. But the true figure may well be higher, considering that some estimates put the number of French children fathered by members of the Wehrmacht as high as 80,000.
In Paris there were cases of prostitutes kicked to death for having accepted German soldiers as clients. And at the other end of the social scale, several women from the highest reaches of the aristocracy were sheared for consorting with German officers. But resistance leaders in Paris made a determined effort to stop all head-shaving. Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy had posters run off warning of reprisals against would-be tondeurs, and René Porte, another leader who was renowned for his strength, knocked together the heads of a group of youths tormenting a young woman.
While many allied troops were sympathetic to France's suffering under the occupation, a considerable number had their worst prejudices confirmed by what they saw. American troops who had never been abroad before tended to see France itself as an enemy country, despite the attempts of the military authorities to inform them of the true situation. Some officers gave orders to arrest or shoot any French civilians encountered in the immediate invasion areas. Certainly French men and women found with German weapons were shot on the spot before they had a chance to explain. The possibility that they might have been collecting these weapons for the resistance never occurred to the soldiers concerned.
An extraordinary battlefield myth soon spread like wildfire. This maintained that young French women, the lovers of German soldiers, were fighting as snipers against the allies. These rumours were soon picked by British and American war correspondents eager for sensational stories. But a number of incidents also found their way into official reports without any doubts expressed about their authenticity. For example a lieutenant with the American 1st Infantry Division reported that they had encountered "four women in German uniform as snipers in trees and five in the town. I only saw one closely enough to identify her as a woman. She wore the German uniform and looked like a French woman."
Churchill heard these stories of women snipers during his visit to Normandy on 12 June and wrote about them to Anthony Eden on his return. British officers, however, later became increasingly sceptical of these "latrine rumours".
Moral confusion, if not outright hypocrisy, existed on the allied side too. At his airfield near Bayeux, Colville found it ironic when General Montgomery ordered all brothels to be closed. "Military police were posted to ensure that the order was obeyed. Undeterred and unabashed, several of the deprived ladies presented themselves in a field adjoining our orchard. Lines of airmen, including, I regret to say, the worthy Roman Catholic French-Canadians, queued for their services, clutching such articles as tins of sardines for payment."
The French, meanwhile, were shocked by the attitude of some American soldiers, who seemed to think that when it came to young French women "everything can be bought". After an evening's drinking, they would knock on farmhouse doors asking if there was a "mademoiselle" for them. Supposedly useful gambits were also provided in daily French lessons published by the US Armed Forces publication Stars and Stripes, including the phrase for "My wife doesn't understand me."
Americans and British saw liberated Paris not just as a symbol of Europe's freedom from Nazi oppression, but as a playground for their amusement. "As we neared the city we were seized by a wild sort of excitement," wrote Pogue. "We began to giggle, to sing, yell and otherwise show exuberance." But when Pogue reached Paris, he was shaken to find that American military authorities had taken over the Petit Palais and erected a large sign announcing the distribution of free condoms to US troops. In Pigalle, rapidly dubbed "Pig Alley" by GIs, French prostitutes were coping with more than 10,000 men a day. The French were also deeply shocked to see US soldiers lying drunk on the pavements of the Place Vendôme. The contrast with off-duty German troops, who had been forbidden even to smoke in the street, could hardly have been greater.
The basically misogynistic reaction of head-shaving during the liberation of France was repeated in Belgium, Italy and Norway and, to a lesser extent, in the Netherlands. In France, another wave of head-shaving took place in the late spring of 1945 when forced labourers, prisoners of war and concentration camp victims returned from Germany. Revenge on women represented a form of expiation for the frustrations and sense of impotence among males humiliated by their country's occupation. One could almost say that it was the equivalent of rape by the victor.

D-dayThe Battle for Normandy

Antony Beevor

Viking Penguin

La fin d'un juge

Le juge d'instruction Tartempion en voyage d'études.

Prenons quelques instants pour imaginer la situation suivante.

Le juge d'instruction Jean-Paul Tartempion, grand spécialiste des affaires en vue du parquet de Paris, a demandé un congé de 18 mois pour effectuer un séjour d'études à New York durant lequel il a prononcé plusieurs conférences sur le thème « Dialogues trans-Atlantiques » qui lui ont rapporté la coquette somme de près d'un million d'euros, le tout généreusement financé rubis sur ongle par la Société Générale. A son retour à Paris, le juge Tartempion prononce un non-lieu dans une affaire impliquant la Société Générale et qui aurait pu entraîner des pertes considérables pour cette banque.

Tout esprit un tant soit peu éveillé concluerait que la banque a payé un million d'euros des conférences bidon au magistrat pour s'acheter un non-lieu.

Bien sûr, ces événements n'ont pas eu lieu à Paris, le juge Tartempion n'existe pas et la Société Générale, au grand jamais, n'a pas payé de juges pour influencer le cours de la justice. Du moins je l'espère.

En revanche, cette affaire a bien eu lieu en Espagne. Remplacez le nom de Tartempion par Baltasar Garzón et la Société Générale par la banque Santander et vous aurez un scandale espagnol… qui n'a pas eu lieu (du moins pas encore).

Juge emblématique de la gauche espagnole, le juge Garzon a pu commettre toutes sortes d'abus de pouvoir, d'erreurs et de fautes sans que cela lui coûte un centime. Grâce à un système bien rodé de conférences payées une petite fortune, il a amassé une fortune personnelle considérable. Sans que cela ne suscite la moindre indignation en dehors de la presse libérale espagnole.

Mais le vent tourne et peut-être le juge préféré de Zapatero s'achemine peut-être vers une fin sans gloire.

Le quotidien ABC rapporte que la Cour suprême espagnole demande au Conseil supérieur de la magistrature d'enquêter sur cette affaire de corruption supposée qui a pourtant été classée sans suite dans le passé.

Cette indulgence des copains et des coquins a pourtant été à nouveau mise en évidence voici peu quand un magistrat a imposé une amande de cent euros (100 euros) au juge Garzon pour avoir laissé sortir de prison deux dangereux trafiquants de drogue faute d'avoir renouvelé les mandats de dépôt à temps.

Il faut dire que notre bon juge était fort occupé quelque part dans le monde dans une de ses missions humanitaires dont il a le secret.

Cette mise en cause par la Cour suprême s'ajoute à celle toute récente qui l'accuse d'avoir instruit à tort des dossiers pour inculper à Franco pour des « crimes contre l'humanité » sans avoir le droit de le faire. Une faute très grave pour un magistrat instructeur qui peut lui valoir l'expulsion de la magistrature.

Le vent, comme la roue tourne, et pour Garzon la roche Tarpéienne semble toute proche de l'Audience nationale où il officie.

Il était temps.

Comme on peut le supposer, sauf erreur de ma part, cette information n'a intéressé personne en France. Ici la dépêche de l'AFP. Ici, le site latin.reporters. Que fait la belle Diane pour le Figaro, elle dort sur son édition du Pais ?