Effaced from Facebook

I've just submitted a request to be effaced permanently from Facebook, and I'm apparently scheduled for deletion within a fortnight. I've always detested the Facebook system... for gut reasons that I would be incapable of analyzing. I only joined Facebook for superficial reasons, because friends invited me to do so.

Today, of course, people who wish to contact me can do so by looking up my name through Google and then visiting my Antipodes blog.

Concerning my dislike of Facebook, the straw that broke the camel's back was the situation surrounding the recent Islamist bombing of the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris.

[Click to access French-language explanations from Charlie Hebdo]

In the wake of the terrorist attack against this splendid French journalistic institution, Charlie Hebdo has evoked "the feeble moral solidity" of Facebook. The Facebook pages of Charlie Hebdo were indeed submerged in Islamic shit, including death threats. It seems that Facebook authorities reacted by reprimanding Charlie Hebdo in a red-tape fashion. And all that remains is a mess.

Super-sacred rock

I warn Antipodes readers that you won't necessarily understand much, if anything, of what I'm about to say. First, it's in French. And second, even I don't grasp the theme of things. But, here goes...

Recently, a distinguished French newspaper, Le Figaro, displayed a quiz on its website [display] comprising twenty questions designed to test your awareness of French political happenings, generally at an anecdotal level, over the last twelve months. The 14th question was perfectly topical: a simple matter of identifying the personality who said: "I'm reminded of words from the Bible: Forgive them, for they don't know what they're doing." Many people in France know the answer to this question. The Socialist presidential candidate Ségolène Royal dared recently to talk like Jesus when she was criticizing certain elders of her party, designated in colloquial French political talk as "elephants". [Our metaphors start to get terribly mixed if we try to imagine Jesus talking of jungle beasts.]

What intrigues me is: Why did the French graphic artist of Le Figaro decide to illustrate their question by an image of Australia's Uluru?

Has Ayer's Rock ever been a specifically Christian symbol? I don't think so. Would it be a symbol of folk who deserve to be forgiven because they don't know what they're doing? Surely not. Finally, I end up believing that the employee of Le Figaro chose this image of Uluru for the simple reason that this sacred rock strikes us all as being terribly Biblical, like the words of Jesus... whatever that means. Funny, no?

French Communist irony

One of France's oldest newspapers is the Communist daily L'Humanité, founded in 1904 by the great Socialist Jean Jaurès, who was celebrated because of his defense of Alfred Dreyfus. His pacifist views provoked his assassination by a nationalist student from Alsace-Lorraine, Raoul Villain, three days before the outbreak of World War I. At the end of this war, in which France emerged as a winner, pacifism was considered retrospectively as a misdeed. Villain was therefore liberated. The widow of Jaurès was even obliged to pay the court costs! In modern France, Jean Jaurès became a national hero, and streets and avenues bear his name from one end of France to the other.

L'Humanité, read by countless folk who don't belong to the French Communist party, has printed one of the few articles I've discovered in France concerning the start of the APEC conference in Sydney. I've translated the following tongue-in-cheek extract:

On this occasion, John Howard made an odd appeal on the Internet video platform YouTube. He asked protest groups to support the fundamental efforts made by the USA and Australia since their nonsigning, in common, of the Kyoto protocol. Protestors will surely respect Howard's electronic gesture and refrain from transforming the prime minister's environmental celebrations into a demonstration against a global economic order.

The banner of L'Humanité is beautifully cynical, in the time-honored spirit of the Parti communiste français. The US bomber is dropping teddy bears. No need for explanations. The journal's slogan is a splendid play on its name: In an ideal world, Humanity would not exist. For those who might not understand: If everything were fine in the world [meaning, among other things, that bombers would not be dropping explosive devices disguised as teddy bears], then there would be no need for a newspaper, defending the powerless innocents, such as L'Humanité. I'm in no way a Communist, but I agree.

Click the banner to see the English-language version of this great French daily newspaper.