Grandiloquent Liar

Yesterday, Sunday March 11, 2007, Jacques Chirac delivered his farewell speech to the French people. It is published (in French) in its entirety at La Tribune. The ponderous cliché-ridden discourse is mercifully short. In it he says that he would have liked to do more to shake up conservative habits and egos, but that he is proud of what he accomplished.

The French patriots are breathing a sigh of relief that he didn't do more, although he nearly managed to destroy his nation and his people. Of all the critiques I've read today, and they are all damning, this one by Catholic writer Bernard Antony is the most devastating. Antony, a devout Catholic with close ties to the Church, is founder of Chrétienté Solidarité (Christian Solidarity) and publisher of the journal Reconquête (Reconquista):

With his grandiloquent solemnity in the utterance of Masonic remarks that might have been made by a sub-prefect during the Third Republic, Jacques Chirac, true to himself in his constant and perfected mediocrity, offered no surprises. He was still faithful to his great capacity for lying without the slightest shame, and with the most accomplished disdain for any intelligent being that may remain among those Frenchmen impermeable to the media's hammering.

If ever there was a man who abetted and collaborated all his life with the worst extremisms, with the worst racisms, it is he, Jacques Chirac, who in half a century of political life never made one single gesture for the victims of communism and its hundred million dead, and its thousands of individuals from all nations who suffered enslaved in its empire since 1917. For in truth, communism had already exterminated long before Nazism, following its example, began its exterminations. It continued to exterminate in our own time in the Cambodian genocide, and it continues in China, Indochina and Cuba, to oppress and persecute.

Abortionist-in-chief, Jacques Chirac, by promulgating the Veil Law had only one hatred: that of the Christian roots of France and the values of the authentic culture of life; he never uttered one word evoking the endless atrocities committed by the Marxist-Leninist regimes. And so he was the accomplice of the worst and the longest-lasting extremism that the earth has ever known. To such a degree that even the astounding anti-Semitism of Marx and Stalin were not denounced by this professional hunter of anti-Semites. Nor did this would-be cowherd denounce the Marxist hatred of peasants that sent to their deaths 10 million Russian and Ukrainian peasants.

Jacques Chirac, the grandiloquent, was never politically or morally great. But in the art of lying, he was not mediocre: he was superb.