I trust a bit better the french magazine "Le Nouvel Observateur"...I just finished reading the story about Jospin there. Anyway, the person who was Jospin's mentor in the trotskyist group "Organisation Communiste Internationaliste" ( a tiny Lambertist trotskyist sect in France...the three largest trotskyist groups in France are Ligue Communiste Revolutionaire, Lutte Ouvriere and Le Parti des Travailleurs) was Boris Fraenkel.
Fraenkel was expelled from the OCI in 1965 and, in the interview, speculates that maybe someone else took charge of Jospin. Fraenkel is now a member of Ligue Communiste Revolutionaire.
Now, Jospin has not denied being in this trotskyist organization, but it seems like a leap in faith to suggest that Jospin is being directed by OCI and when the moment is right, he is going to implement a trotskyist program.
I know the International Herald Tribune must love Chirac, but do they have to stoop to this level to attack Jospine?
Thomas
--- Ian Murray <seamus2001 at home.com> wrote:
> Copyright © 2001 The International Herald Tribune |
> www.iht.com
>
> Something Has Gone Rotten in France's Top Caste
> William Pfaff
> International Herald Tribune
> Tuesday, July 31, 2001
>
>
>
> PARIS The two fundamental institutions of modern
> government in
> France - the Gaullist Fifth Republic's constitution
> and the
> professional governing class, the product of an
> institution also
> created by Charles de Gaulle, the postgraduate
> National School of
> Administration - have been greatly undermined in
> recent years. This
> means that the quality of government, in the past
> very high, has
> declined, and its perceived legitimacy has been
> corrupted by political
> cowardice, and intellectual and fiscal dishonesty.
>
> The Gaullist constitution was subverted when
> President François
> Mitterrand in the 1980s and President Jacques Chirac
> in the 1990s
> decided to cling to the presidency despite their
> supporters' defeat in
> parliamentary elections. They named "cohabitation"
> prime ministers to
> carry out policies opposed to those which they
> themselves had been
> elected to carry out.
>
> The intent of the constitution, as de Gaulle himself
> said, was that a
> president who lost his parliamentary majority should
> either resign,
> forcing a new presidential election, or, if the
> margin of defeat was
> small, continue with a government composed of
> nonpartisan figures. The
> result of cohabitation is that two deeply
> compromised individuals are
> expected to run in next year's presidential
> election. They are the
> currently "cohabiting" president and prime minister,
> Mr. Chirac and
> Lionel Jospin. Mr. Jospin's commitment to an
> anti-democratic
> Trotskyist sect, from the mid-1960s forward, has
> only recently been
> revealed. For more than 30 years he denied
> membership in this
> secretive group, practicing deliberate infiltration
> of democratic
> parties in order to manipulate them. For much of
> that time he was also
> a member of the Socialist Party, eventually becoming
> its leader, a
> government minister, its presidential candidate and,
> today, the prime
> minister of a Socialist-led coalition government.
>
> Yet even now he declines to say when and how his
> Trotskyist commitment
> ended, or even whether it has ended. He says only
> that in 1971, when
> he joined the Socialist Party, he began "to act
> fully as a socialist
> militant." This does not answer the question. He
> says that Trotskyism
> was a youthful intellectual enthusiasm, and concerns
> only himself.
>
> To talk about this is not to conduct a witch-hunt.
> The problem is not
> Trotskyism but that of intellectual honesty and
> telling the truth to
> voters.
>
> Fellow members of his governing coalition have
> apparently found no
> reason to reproach Mr. Jospin. And few in the
> political opposition
> have offered more than trivially partisan comments,
> as if nothing
> important were at stake.
>
> Opposition and government members are nearly all
> graduates of the
> National School of Administration - ENA, in its
> French acronym. They
> form an administrative/political caste which
> dominates politics as
> well as government. Party partisanship clearly does
> not erase class
> interest, as Trotsky himself understood. Mr.
> Jospin's presumed
> opponent next year, Mr. Chirac, has been in
> publicized trouble for
> many months, concerning his period as mayor of
> Paris. Allegations of
> partisan and personal favoritism, sham jobs and
> illegal kickbacks to
> political parties by public works contractors have
> been under
> investigation. The accusations originally concerned
> money supposedly
> meant for political party expenses. Now they concern
> personal use of
> that money, and of the "special" cash funds supplied
> since 1947 to the
> presidential office and to ministries. These funds
> are supposed to
> finance intelligence operations but actually have
> been used for
> election expenses and as tax-free supplements to the
> salaries of
> officials.
>
> This money, voted by Parliament, is supposed to be
> accounted for by
> each minister, and the law (of April 27, 1946) says
> that any surplus
> must be returned to the Treasury at the end of each
> fiscal year. The
> law adds that "the prime minister is responsible to
> the Assembly for
> the use of these funds." These provisions seem to
> have been ignored
> for years. President Chirac has even defended
> himself against the
> charge that he spent kickback money on private
> travel and holidays by
> saying that the money really was leftover special
> funds from his time
> as prime minister, a decade earlier.
>
> An American lawyer in Paris, Aram Kevorkian,
> comments that the
> president's defense is effectively this: "I simply
> took the money from
> the public treasury when I was entrusted with the
> funds as prime
> minister." In some other countries, Mr. Kevorkian
> says, that would be
> considered embezzlement.
>
> That all this has gone on for so long is mainly due
> to the domination
> of public affairs and politics by the ENA graduates,
> and the sense of
> impunity that has developed among them. A French
> commentator, Max
> Gallo, asked as long ago as 1979: Who serves as
> guarantor of this
> elite "which considers itself indispensable?"
>
> What if it really is no longer the brilliant and
> incorruptible elite
> it was meant to be? "Who can pose such questions,
> when from one end of
> the political horizon to the other the only people
> to testify are
> members of the same club?"
>
> So far the public reaction to these abuses seems to
> be alienation
> rather than anger. A kind of corruption
> characteristic of the
> discredited Third and Fourth Republics has been
> reinstalled, in a
> country whose politicians like to say that the
> national vocation is to
> be "exemplary."
>
>
>
===== Thomas Morgan Seay 984 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 tel. (415) 643-7045 email: entheogens at yahoo.com
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