Sophie Masson writes a letter to The Australian (January 23, no link that I can find to the letter itself) on the subject of Germaine Greer’s reasons not to live in Australia:
Alas, poor Germaine. ‘Tis pity that everywhere she goes, she takes herself with her. The fault lies not in her stars for having been born Australian, but in herself.
Sophie Masson describes herself as a French-Australian writer. Her website is here and it includes this list of her books. I’ve had a read of some of Sophie’s journalism. In this piece from February last year, she discusses France’s international role. Dismissing what she considers to be several myths about it, she writes:
France has a sense of destiny, a “civilising mission”, just like the United States; it is as a rival, not as a client, that French anti-Americanism expresses itself.
Official France sees itself as representing one view of human development, and the US as another. It’s not sheer power we’re talking about, but an “empire of influence”.
In another article last October, Sophie thinks about different kinds, and levels, of fear:
Not a day passes when someone or other opines that the trouble with the world situation is that people are living in fear (a fear that by definition the opiner claims not to share).
…..
There’s a lot of guff talked about how the fear that supposedly stalks this country means that people have become more isolated, more intolerant and retreated into some white-bread, white-picket fantasy. This is simply not true of the general public, who continue to work, travel and enjoy themselves, just with the new knowledge that certain hidden dangers of an increasingly globalised world are now fully on show. We just factor in the presence of globe-trotting terrorists as well as other dangers and annoyances…
…..
I’ll tell you what fear really is. It’s Bergen Belsen and the gulag; it’s the look on the faces of the neighbours of a woman baker in Afghanistan, burnt to death in her own oven by the Taliban for breaking the prohibition on women working. It’s the all-pervasive police state of Iraq…
I particularly liked this observation:
The more you know, the more you understand, the less you excuse.