French weekly magazines review 24 May 2015

Terror in Pyongyang, the 'accomplices of radical Islam', inside the head of a Google executive and what we can all learn from the spirit of French resistance, all in this week's French magazines.

DR

On the inside pages of left wing Marianne is a fascinating four-page splash on the reign of terror in Pyongyang.

"The baby-faced barbarian", reads the headline.

The paper goes on to describe the Stalin-style purges carried out by the leader of the hermit regime, Kim Jong-un. The most recent was against the four-star general Hyon Yong-chol.

His crimes? Nodding off during a speech by the cherished leader.

His punishment? Death at the barrels of no fewer than two dozen 50-calibre anti-aricraft guns.

Marianne points out that this isn't the first such purge carried out by the big baby of the Democratic People's Republic. In 2013, the leader's uncle Jang Song-tak was executed, according to the country's official news agency, for "a crime as hideous as attempting to overthrow the state by all sorts of intrigue and nefarious methods with the frenetic ambition of taking the supreme power of our party and state."

His auntie, according to the same media outlet, is now in a psychiatric hospital receiving high doses of morphine. That proves, accoding to the regime, Kim's "unconditional love for her".

Marianne says the terror which reigns in Pyongyang shows that far from having a tight grip on power, Kim needs to resort to neutralising anyone who poses a threat to his authority.

The regime is not as solid as it would have us believe.

The cover story on Marianne returns to something which features regularly in the French weeklies - the spectre of radical Islamism. This week's anglis is those who are helping it 'flourish'.

Four months after the massacres at the satirical paper Charlie Hebdo, Marianne warns that a brief moment of national unity is over.

But why were the demonstrations, which united millions of people across France, so brief? And what has the disappearance of this solidarity left in its wake, asks the paper?

Well, firstly politicians in France were unable to respond to the complex questions which the attacks posed.

Yes, there was initially a 'courageous debate' in the weeks following the attacks - the integration of Muslims in Europe, the rivalries between the various schools of Islam and the isolation of poor communities in France's suburbs.

The prime minister, Manuel Valls, led what the paper calls a muscular debate on radical Islamism, saying France had ignored too many problems for too long. He said the government had allowed conditions for radical islamist thought to flourish.

This questioning is all but over, says Marianne. Why? Because that brief spell of national unity has given way to a plethora of debates, many of which the paper claims actually advance the cause of radical Islamist thought.

Who is helping the Islamists then? The "Islamo-Left", which Marianne says has justified the killing of the journalists at Charlie Hebdo and the radicalisation of young Muslims by saying France is merely reaping what it and other Western powers have sewn since colonisation.

"Cowardly" politicians looking for votes, they're helping the Islamists too. The paper cites how the centrist UDI party managed to oust the longstanding Communist mayor in the poor Paris suburb of Bobigny by accepting demands made by Islamist groups in the district.

Marianne goes on to say that fear, blindness and ignorance are all contibuting, albeit unintentionally, to creating the conditions for radicalism to prevail.

Le Nouvel Observateur takes its cover story from the news that four members of the French resistance are to be admitted to the Pantheon - the sacred temple where France buries its great and good.

The remains of Germaine Tillion, Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz, Pierre Brosollette and Jean Zay will be transferred to the crypt of the Pantheon on 27 May.

The magazine uses the occasion to speak to a surviving member of the resistance, the sociologist Edgar Morin.

Morin says the spirit of the French resistance could help people today against what it says are the two great threats to our society - fanaticism, be it religious, ethnic or nationalistic, and the power for financial speculation.

He warns that we should beware of over-simplifying our world view into GDP, growth and opinion polls.

Right-leaning Le Point has as its cover story what it claims to be an exclusive with the search-engine executive Sergey Brin - "Inside the brains of Google" reads the headline.

Not very newsy, perhaps, but the interview does offer us a glimpse into how the US giant works - and how big (and you might say scary) its ambitions are.

The biggest of these ambitions fall into the top secret world of Google X - whose building does not appear on Google earth and whose very existence was only made public in 2013.

Here Google geeks work on artificial intelligence, flying cars and wearable healthcare technology.

This all might sound like far-flung fancy, but for a company that made a cool 15 billion dollars (13.6 billion euros) profit last year alone, Google has more money to spend on this kind of research than most countries.