On April 21, 1961, a group of retired generals and serving officers mounted a failed coup against president de Gaulle.
As recently as the spring of 1988, a handful of generals published a letter in the conservative daily
Le Figaro protesting that France would be “in danger” if it re-elected the socialist president François Mitterrand.
The 1988 letter was, purportedly, about cuts in defence spending. The recent “generals’ letter” was quite different in tone and language: the kind of stuff that one can read in a constellation of far right and racist web-sites and pseudo news-sites in France known as the
“Fachosph
re”.
Antiwar.com Original
Joe Biden uttered the word Africa exactly once in his first address to a joint session of congress, marking the vaunted presidential cliché of his first 100 Days in office. It was a tangential reference, but its context, implications – and what Biden
didn’t say – were somewhat instructive:
After 20 years of American valor and sacrifice, it’s time to bring our troops home…But make no mistake – the terrorist threat has evolved beyond Afghanistan since 2001 and we will remain vigilant against threats to the United States, wherever they come from. Al Qaeda and ISIS are in Yemen, Syria, Somalia, and