BOYCOTTS AND OTHER TIRESOME CLICHÉS

In reaction to my posting about the British University and College Union reviving their odious campaign to boycott Israel, regarding which I cheekily complained that there were too few British things to boycott in response, reader and friend of blog Graham suggested that instead I boycott the English language.

He made the suggestion in Dutch.

Touché. 'Cheek-mate', so to speak.
[He is an Englishman. Dutch is my other native tongue. ]

However, boycott the English language? Heaven forefend! If I wrote mostly in Dutch, I would have far too many Netherlanders visiting this blog, and not nearly enough rational readers.

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Speaking of a boycott.............


BIGOTED FRENCHMAN BOYCOTTS ISRAEL
Passé cineaste cancels appearance in Tel Aviv.


Director Jean-Luc Godard recently withdrew from an Israeli film festival because of political motivations, succumbing to pressure from pro-Palestinians to boycott Israel.
That decision probably came naturally to him; his oeuvre betrays his biases.


PEEVISH IDEOLOGUE
Jean-Luc Godard is a crypto-Stalinist from an era (1960's) when post-war Europeans were discovering just how delicious it was to daemonize the United States, their own governments, their war heroes, their colonialist involvements, their societies' values, their own spectacular role in the mismanagement of the world, their religions, and their parents.
Such rejectionist "self-liberation" from the burden of the past enabled them to deny all involvement, guilt, and responsibility. It also allowed them to set aside WWII and pretend to be new, different, clean - societies transformed and sanctified.

It still is considered au courant, hip, and educated to subscribe to this crippled and glib world-view. Coupled with a selective superficial appreciation of both "culture" and Marxist ideals, it has been a hallmark of ultra-progressive Europeans ever since.


HACKNEYED HAS-BEEN
Jean-Luc Godard is nothing if not consistent - in the last forty years he's done little more than remain staunchly loyal to a rigid iconoclastic hashkofo.
One would not expect a leading light of New Wave cinema to break his own mold and reject his own clichés.

I wish him much success cooperating with the film boards of the Arab world - I expect that his next film will be a masterpiece along the lines of 'Triumph des Willens'.
Anything else would, of course, be censored, and being ideologically supportive of developing-world despotisms, he would wholeheartedly approve of that - societies struggling upward must not be hampered by free speech.


Even if one would expect such censorship to go against the very fibre of Jean-Luc Godard's being, we should instead assume that the very fibre of his being is sodden with self-loathing and a drang for discipline rather than any real appreciation of liberal values. That is a common response to the extraordinary freedoms of postwar European society, and many ultra-progressive Europeans are thus afflicted (their liberalism hides an insecurity and negativity that goes all the way to the bone).

[It probably also explains 'progressive' support for a boycott of Israel; as such it represents not only denial of that nation's right to exist, but deliberate deafness to its ideals and ideas, and a rejection of everything that is Israeli - people, society, culture, products - as if they were pollution and their very proximity defiling. All done in the approved manner, self-righteously as a social movement or group manifestation rather than by tyrannic fiat.
This is a censorship as fierce but far more degenerate than any other - with the pretense that personal freedoms are not affected, though individual choices are circumscribed and dissent is fiercely censured.]


At the ripe old age of seventy eight it must be too painful for Jean-Luc Godard to admit that he is scarce more than an intellectual manqué, appreciated because of political correctness, by the politically correct.

The lack of imagination on both sides of that equation speaks volumes.


If any of that loathsome Marxist's jejune films get shown in the bay Area, I will be organizing a protest.