memoires-en-mouvement

[memoires-en-mouvement]

Oh, que je l’aime ce garçon Oh, que je l’aime ce garçon

Will I survive that look in your eyes I feel you close yet so far

You’re made of me, and we share this heart But I know that you’re not mine

Si seulement tu savais Tout ce que je ressentais

There will be a day when the sun is rising I won’t be by your side

I hope you know then, how much I loved you That I still would from the sky

Ooooh Ooooh

Sweeter than honeydew Stuck in between your teeth Now there’s so much to lose And I’ve got to let it be

Oh, que je l’adore ce garçon Oh, que je l’aime ce garçon Oh, que je l’adore ce garçon Oh, que je l’aime ce garçon

Time To love you is also to know when to let you go What is our fate? Forever still wouldn’t be enough Felt the spirit- calling, it’s a life force I didn’t know it I didn’t know I was waiting for you Living for you Now that I’ve stared in the eyes of god I found something that I know, my love, My love, it will transcend it all

What is my faith? Safe in the knowing that you’re not alone I trust in your fate I believe that you’re here for divine reason, oh When in the face of hardship Remember that you are surrounded

Will I survive that look in your eyes I feel you close yet so far

You’re made of me, and we share this heart But I know that you’re not mine

Sweeter than honeydew Stuck in between your teeth Now there’s so much to lose And I’ve got to let it be

Oh, que je l’aime ce garçon

[memoires-en-mouvement]

A historic speech on our European future by Senator Claude Malhuret in France’s upper house on March 4:

‘Europe is at a critical turning point in its history. The American shield is crumbling, Ukraine risks being abandoned, Russia strengthened.

Washington has become the court of Nero, a fiery emperor, submissive courtiers and a ketamine-fuelled jester in charge of purging the civil service.

This is a tragedy for the free world, but it is first and foremost a tragedy for the United States. Trump’s message is that there is no point in being his ally since he will not defend you, he will impose more customs duties on you than on his enemies and will threaten to seize your territories while supporting the dictatorships that invade you.

The king of the deal is showing what the art of the deal is all about. He thinks he will intimidate China by lying down before Putin, but Xi Jinping, faced with such a shipwreck, is probably accelerating preparations for the invasion of Taiwan.

Never in history has a president of the United States capitulated to the enemy. Never has anyone supported an aggressor against an ally. Never has anyone trampled on the American Constitution, issued so many illegal decrees, dismissed judges who could have prevented him from doing so, dismissed the military general staff in one fell swoop, weakened all checks and balances, and taken control of social media.

This is not an illiberal drift, it is the beginning of the confiscation of democracy. Let us remember that it took only one month, three weeks and two days to bring down the Weimar Republic and its constitution.

I have faith in the strength of American democracy, and the country is already protesting. But in one month, Trump has done more harm to America than in four years of his last presidency. We were at war with a dictator, now we are fighting a dictator backed by a traitor.

Eight days ago, at the very moment that Trump was rubbing Macron’s back in the White House, the United States voted at the UN with Russia and North Korea against the Europeans demanding the withdrawal of Russian troops.

Two days later, in the Oval Office, the military service shirker was giving war hero Zelensky lessons in morality and strategy before dismissing him like a groom, ordering him to submit or resign.

Tonight, he took another step into infamy by stopping the delivery of weapons that had been promised. What to do in the face of this betrayal? The answer is simple: face it.

And first of all, let’s not be mistaken. The defeat of Ukraine would be the defeat of Europe. The Baltic States, Georgia and Moldova are already on the list. Putin’s goal is to return to Yalta, where half the continent was ceded to Stalin.

The countries of the south are waiting for the outcome of the conflict to decide whether they should continue to respect Europe or whether they are now free to trample on it.

What Putin wants is the end of the order put in place by the United States and its allies 80 years ago, with its first principle being the prohibition of acquiring territory by force.

This idea is at the very source of the UN, where today Americans vote in favor of the aggressor and against the attacked, because the Trumpian vision coincides with that of Putin: a return to spheres of influence, the great powers dictating the fate of small countries.

Mine is Greenland, Panama and Canada, yours is Ukraine, the Baltics and Eastern Europe, his is Taiwan and the China Sea. This is called, in the evenings of the oligarchs of the Gulf of Mar-a-Lago, “diplomatic realism”.

So we are alone. But the talk that Putin cannot be resisted is false. Contrary to the Kremlin’s propaganda, Russia is in bad shape. In three years, the so-called second largest army in the world has managed to grab only crumbs from a country three times less populated.

Interest rates at 25%, the collapse of foreign exchange and gold reserves and the demographic collapse show that it is on the brink of the abyss. The American helping hand to Putin is the biggest strategic mistake ever made in a war.

The shock is violent, but it has a virtue. Europeans are coming out of denial. They understood in one day in Munich that the survival of Ukraine and the future of Europe are in their hands and that they have three imperatives.

Accelerate military aid to Ukraine to compensate for the American abandonment, so that it holds out, and of course to impose its presence and that of Europe in any negotiation.

This will be expensive. It will be necessary to end the taboo of the use of frozen Russian assets. It will be necessary to circumvent Moscow’s accomplices within Europe itself by a coalition of only the willing countries, with, of course, the United Kingdom.

Second, demand that any agreement be accompanied by the return of kidnapped children, prisoners and absolute security guarantees. After Budapest, Georgia and Minsk, we know what agreements with Putin are worth. These guarantees require sufficient military force to prevent a new invasion.

Finally, and this is the most urgent, because it is what will take the most time, we must build the neglected European defence, to the benefit of the American umbrella since 1945 and scuttled since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

It is a Herculean task, but it is on its success or failure that the leaders of today’s democratic Europe will be judged in the history books.

Friedrich Merz has just declared that Europe needs its own military alliance. This is to recognise that France has been right for decades in arguing for strategic autonomy.

It remains to be built. It will be necessary to invest massively, to strengthen the European Defence Fund outside the Maastricht debt criteria, to harmonise weapons and munitions systems, to accelerate the entry into the Union of Ukraine, which is today the leading European army, to rethink the place and conditions of nuclear deterrence based on French and British capabilities, to relaunch the anti-missile shield and satellite programs.

The plan announced yesterday by Ursula von der Leyen is a very good starting point. And much more will be needed.

Europe will only become a military power again by becoming an industrial power again. In a word, the Draghi report will have to be implemented. For good.

But the real rearmament of Europe is its moral rearmament.

We must convince public opinion in the face of war weariness and fear, and especially in the face of Putin’s cronies, the extreme right and the extreme left.

They argued again yesterday in the National Assembly, Mr Prime Minister, before you, against European unity, against European defence.

They say they want peace. What neither they nor Trump say is that their peace is capitulation, the peace of defeat, the replacement of de Gaulle Zelensky by a Ukrainian Pétain at Putin’s beck and call.

The peace of the collaborators who have refused any aid to the Ukrainians for three years.

Is this the end of the Atlantic Alliance? The risk is great. But in the last few days, the public humiliation of Zelensky and all the crazy decisions taken in the last month have finally made the Americans react.

Polls are falling. Republican lawmakers are being greeted by hostile crowds in their constituencies. Even Fox News is becoming critical.

The Trumpists are no longer in their majesty. They control the executive, the parliament, the Supreme Court and social networks.

But in American history, the freedom fighters have always prevailed. They are beginning to raise their heads.

The fate of Ukraine is being played out in the trenches, but it also depends on those in the United States who want to defend democracy, and here on our ability to unite Europeans, to find the means for their common defence, and to make Europe the power that it once was in history and that it hesitates to become again.

Our parents defeated fascism and communism at great cost.

The task of our generation is to defeat the totalitarianisms of the 21st century.

Long live free Ukraine, long live democratic Europe.

[memoires-en-mouvement]

It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig. Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me. When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic. No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell. And of course, no theology, no metaphysics. Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light.

So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage, not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered. ― Aldous Huxley, Island

[memoires-en-mouvement]

“For the past three years, state media fed the Russian public a steady diet of stories about their culture being canceled and disrespected in the West. To go from being effectively frozen out of the 2024 Paris Olympics to the country’s first Oscar acting nomination since 1978 must have given the propaganda machine quite a whiplash. Better yet, unlike Andrey Zvyagintsev’s “Leviathan,” which earned an Academy nod in 2015 but was seen as libelous back home, “Anora” contains no overt criticism of Russian society (beyond the universal theme of the rich not caring about the little people). That is the outcome Mr. Putin’s soft-power operators have been trying for decades to buy — until it landed in their laps for nothing.

It is no wonder, then, that the film’s success is seen from Moscow as the country’s return to the global stage. Who needs pole vaulting when you’re winning the culture? Or, as Mr. Borisov said to Interview magazine about “Anora” capturing the Palme d’Or, the top award, at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, “A lot of people in Russia were very happy, and congratulated me in the shops, some at gas stations, on the streets.” He added, “Because it is like a win at the Olympic Games.” In Russia, all victories are national.

My guess is that Mr. Baker, too, knows this. After all, “Anora” is set in 2019. (One clue is a Juul vape pen, which was banned in 2022.) Unlike his 2021 film, “Red Rocket,” which was strategically set around the 2016 U.S. presidential election, “Anora” doesn’t ground the story in a specific moment but untethers it from one. Its plot works only in a world where the war in Ukraine is not an issue and oligarchs’ private jets zip from Moscow to New York to Las Vegas without worrying too much about sanctions or other restrictions.

Of course, with a Putin-Trump peace deal, that might once again be our world very soon. Sanctions will probably end, and Hollywood blockbusters will return to Russian theaters. And those who sacrificed their homes and careers to avoid associations with a genocidal regime will be made, in retrospect, to look like idealistic fools.

“Red Rocket” was a barbed fable about an amoral striver returning to his hometown and corrupting everyone in sight; I would imagine that it would horrify Mr. Baker to see the effects of his work even accidentally sync up with Mr. Trump’s brand of mercenary realpolitik. If one or more of the six nominations for “Anora” turn into a win come Oscar night, I hope that at least some of its time in the spotlight will be spent addressing a simple truth: There is, at this dire moment, no such thing as a neutral actor and an apolitical film — even if they are both also excellent.”

[memoires-en-mouvement]

З добрих новин – хіба що весна, моє серце. Сніг раптовий, нічний, розтане опівдні. Добра земля і далі носить усе це із гіркотою і материнським терпінням.

Всю цю нестерпну муку, залізну латку на шовковому горлі, всі сльози мужніх. З добрих новин – ми досі здатні ставати ближчі, ще ближчі, як усередині мушлі.

Те, що лишається. І сонце вже ходить вище. Скоро усе розквітне, засокорушить. Винеси з попелища і посади на вишню білу маленьку пташку, тривожну душу.

― Катерина Калитко