In a seven-minute televised address yesterday President Chirac responded to the people’s resounding rejection of the EU Constitution.  There are three (not unpredictable) threads to his response.

1. The direction of Europe will not be fundamentally affected by the May 29 vote.  Chirac said quite specifically, “It was not a rejection of the European ideal. It was a demand to be heard, a demand for action, a demand for results.”  The people – as all elites averr when it suits them – were not answering the question put before them.  They were voting on the French economy.

2. As a rejection of French unemployment the vote was also a rejection of the Anglo-Saxon economic model (code for market discipline) with which the Constitution was, apparently, heavily imbued.  You might consider this perverse and an egregious conflation.  But Chirac is an opportunist, like all politicians, and the referendum vote provides an opportunity to rein in British influence in Europe.

3. The French governmental predeliction for paternalism and elitism sails on unaffected.  Chirac explained his Prime Ministerial appointment of Dominique de Villepin as a response to “worries” and “expectations” about, basically, unemployment.  Quite what “action” and “results” a career diplomat, gris eminence and would-be man of letters who has never once stood for election will be able to effect (and through “The French model”) remains to be seen.

Plus ça change …

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The ‘freedom’ we have gained is therefore but mere licence for us to behave as to the manner born, destined to build a society consumed by corruption, sexual depravity, autocracy and criminal violence

No, not Thabo Mbeki reflecting on the difficulties of post-apartheid South Africa.  The quote is from a Telegraph article today, and shows Mbeki wackily characterising the supposed opinion of UK Chancellor Gordon Brown in a weekly Presidential epistle to the on-line newsletter, ANC Today.

“President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa rebuked Gordon Brown yesterday,” the Telegraph article begins, “accusing the “presumed successor to Tony Blair” of promoting nostalgia for British imperialism and joining in a “discourse” that “demonises” blacks.”

Mbeki, of course, is a specialist in denial.  So we should not be surprised that he denies those social and economic outcomes the rest of the world wearily anticipates from his people.  He once even found it in him to answer the anti-rape campaign of vicitim-activist Charlene Smith, writing in ANC Today only in the most general terms about ‘contact crime’ (rather than rape) and ascribing the causes to poverty and community degradation.  Mountainous peaks in Serum Testosterone rythmicity, did you say? Never heard of it.

Meanwhile, the latest target of Mbeki’s wrath - our once-prudent Chancellor and PM-in-waiting - is working hard to solve Africa’s crises from without.  That also, in its way, is an act of sublime denial.  Mbeki, apparently, does not recognise a kindred spirit when he sees one.

I noticed that John Ray’s “Dissecting Leftism” today has a link to a Thomas Woods article criticising the PC version (or is it the Monty Python version?) of the history of the Crusades. Readers interested in this issue should check out the work of historian Thomas Madden who is a crusades specialist.

Madden dispels some popular myths about the Crusades here but perhaps more importantly points out how mythology about the crusades impacts modern foreign policy debate here.

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We French hate the perfidious English.  We French have always hated the perfidious English.  We French hate the perfidious English for being … perfidious.  And English.  And for positively refusing to be invaded by Germans when we French managed it so effortlessly.  Twice.  And for letting us deceive ourselves that all those English SOE agents running around organising Le Resistance were … French.  Unacceptable.  And then, mon Dieu, there was Waterloo … Trafalgar … Agincourt … the ‘andbag of Madame Thatcher …

Entente cordial?  Never.  A ridiculous, impossible idea.

Ah, but we French used to love “Europe” before the English insinuated themselves into it.  It was the very essence of French dirigisme.  And OK, Germany was the economic engine.  But France held the political power.  That was the deal.  The English, of course, were not included.  That was also the deal.  Anyway, they had their “special relationship” with the Americans.  But that didn’t worry us.  We French hated the Americans.

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The Boer years were rolled back yet further yesterday when some official commission decided that the RSA capital Pretoria should henceforth be known as Tshwane.

A city built as a monument to the white Afrikaner heroes - and a symbol of resistance to the British during the Boer War - will soon carry the name of an African chief who once ruled the area.

Critics said the change was designed to obliterate the symbols and folk memories of the country’s three million Afrikaners.

But Ben Mncube, 28, said whites should learn to live with the new name. “It was the whites who introduced all these names when they came here,” he added. “There should be African names for African cities.”

Leaving aside the question whether there is such a thing, strictly speaking, as an African city, I don’t think one can argue there with Ben.  Sorry Pretorians of old, hunkered down behind your electrified fences, a loaded gun in every drawer.  African heritage and culture should inform the naming of the seats of power in African nation states.  Leaving aside, of course, the question whether there is such a thing as an African nation state ...

Justice ... nay, not merely justice but democracy and freedom demand that this worthy principle must translate everywhere.  That, after all, is only being equal, isn’t it?  Can’t argue with that.

And so to Britain, where the new colonisers have, with typically uncaring and selfish disdain, imposed their own culture upon us in the form of, quite probably, hundreds of alien place and street names.  Are we not to share in the rights of all ancient majorities, so expressly contained within that one glorious, never to be forgotten word, “Tchwa ... Tchaw ...  Tsch ... well knee, anyway?  Or Nay.  Or Nur.

Probably not.

Virginia Haussegger is becoming well-known in Australia as a feminist critic of feminism.

She already had a public profile as a TV journalist when she wrote an explosive newspaper article in 2002, “The sins of our feminist mothers”.

In this article she describes how her generation of women was brought up to believe “We could be and do whatever we pleased”. This is the basic principle of liberalism: that we should be “free” to create who we are and what we do through our own individual choices.

At first things seemed to go well. She writes of a generation of women who “crashed through barriers and carved out good, successful and even some brilliant careers.”

But the story ends unhappily. The feminist mothers forgot “to warn us that we would need to stop, take time out and learn to nurture our partnerships and relationships.”

Virginia Haussegger describes very well the incompetent attitude to relationships of women brought up in a culture of liberal individualism:

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There is a certain, not very fatal fascination in watching the left try to grasp who we are and why we think as we do.  They tend not to get very far with it.  They veer off into ham-morality at the slightest challenge to the old auto-think.  John Ray is not wrong when he says that in public lefties need a regular fix of high-octane Feelgood Factor X.

Oddly enough, these creatures were once human, much like us really.  Alright, they were wearing terries then.  But a vestigial something might survive somewhere.  I do remind myself of that as I strive to listen to the liberal mind.  For one thing, I’m getting pretty close now to being able to grant them a complex inner life ... the capacity to love others, to have real opinions culled from real life, etc.  It’s a struggle every day of the week but one does one’s best, you know.  And then, biffo ... along comes a knockout example of otiose left-speak like this from today’s Guardian.  Game over.  Back to the political semaphore.

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This morning Tim Gillin, ace Aussie blogger, advised me that he has had to close his Personal Independence Day blog due to the heavy demands of his work.  This is very sad - but not necessarily for MR readers.  Tim will continue commenting here and, I hope, occasionally benefitting us with a post (that’s an arm-twist, Tim).

As a thoughtful and entertaining writer and pretty much, in British terms anyway, a man of the libertarian wing of the Conservative Party, Tim is altogether too useful to allow just to float off among the unblog people.  We profit from political breadth and variety because that is the catalyst for good debate and new understanding.

Good luck anyhow, Tim.  Just don’t forget where we are.