Awake, awake, utter a song: arise,
Barak, and lead thy captivity
captive, thou son of Abinoam.
Judges, 5, 12
By Nicolas Bonnal
Nobody knows accurately what France is doing in Mali after having so bravely assaulted Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. Some think we obey an American agenda since Barack Obama decided to keep his hands clean in many of this world's messy places. According to William Engdahl, France is now a mere American mercenary. Others think we are again being manipulated by Qatar: our ex French-president seems nowadays more a luxurious Qatari subject than a French citizen. But Qatar is arguably not satisfied with our performance in Mali! The shrewdest of commentators have indeed commentated that the terrorists we fight in Mali are the terrorists we helped in Libya or we equip and train in Syria. So, as would put Molière, what are we doing in this galley?
Let us evacuate the real and serious motivations that would be money, raw material and the famous clash of civilisations that unifies businessmen, emirs and political clowns-commissars of all this brave new world.
In Syria, some would dream of a new pipeline avoiding now classical enemies like Russia, our logical gas provider, and Iran (that Obama has not yet bombed, and why?). In Libya, others dreamt of privatized oil-companies. In Mali, according to researcher Christopher Bollyn, the much desired gold mines are the property of the unavoidable Rothschild and the serviceable French government has to defend it arduously against ruthless plunderers. But in Mali there is uranium too and this time famous commentator Thierry Meyssan states that French government and its universal soldiers basically defend the interests of Areva, the French nuclear crumbling giant. For Mr Meyssan French government would be enchanted too in destroying the republic of Algeria and maybe undermine Chinese interests in Africa: is our government that powerful?). Others think that our 'social-imperialist government', to put it in Leninist terms, needed to wag the dog, like in a good Hollywood movie, to create a diversion war in order to distract public opinion from growing domestic problems and collateral damages of anti-gay wedding protests.
But I think that all these good commentators are wrong. France doesn't need to be the dogfighter of Obama, France doesn't make war for Qatar; France doesn't even want oil, gas or uranium. France is not smart enough to fight for that. France like Bush Junior and inspector Clouseau just wants to fight terror. In Afghanistan, in Syria, in Libya, in Mali, we fight terror! This is what her prestigious foreign minister utters and I pretend that we should humbly listen to him and understand his deep motives.
What is terror? It is just a word producing terror, and this terrific word can cause since the end of the cold war any kind of war, be it the most absurd and cruellest one. People lived once in the fear of the devil, the post-Christian mobs live with the media-originated fear of computer-generated terrorists. And we are fighting terrorists anywhere at any cost. That's all. The Latin race, told once the great writer Celine, has been stupefied by the words. She believes that the world is a word. At these Orwellian times it is the most justified of proverbs. The word becomes a world. Think of the use of a term like pollution, democracy or racism...
Of course the comically repetitive French war is a fight of the good against the evil.
Yet it is time to rewind the time machine. For this terminology is typically imperialist and we are back to imperialistic times! The end of history, to put it in Marxist terms, means the comical repetition of many of our forgotten nightmares. And the new French agenda works like the latter when our former politicians, all leftists of course, who were involved in nineteenth century conquests or recently in Algeria's tortures, argued that they were fighting for democracy, enlightenment, tolerance and love of humanity. Higher races have a duty of civilization over lower races, said once infamously Jules Ferry, who gave his prestigious name to many of our sad and grey boulevards. This is why we keep killing so many Arabs or Africans: for their own good. But read what wrote on that subject of naïve imperialism John Hobson, the brilliant English commentator of British imperialism in Victorian times.
There exists in a considerable though not a large proportion of the British nation a genuine desire to spread Christianity among the heathen, to diminish the cruelty and other sufferings which they believe exist in countries less fortunate than their own, and to do good work about the world in the cause of humanity.
That was the main motive of imperialism for Hobson: not the economics but the ethics!
All the imperial discourses depend on euphemism, double-speak and language distortions. If you bomb Baghdad or Hiroshima, you are a humanist; if you don't want the atomizing of Tehran, you're a peril for humanity; if you destroy Libya with fascist gangs, you are acting for democracy and the avant-garde of the emirates of global freedom... and if your drones exterminate families in Pakistan, they are cleaning the world, even purifying it. This is the way we keep the peace in this neo-biblical world, worthy of the book of judges.
The progress of imperialism implies of course a progress in people-mixing and migrations.
As Chesterton - or even Machiavelli - had understood before, an imperialistic country doesn't respect anymore its own people. The imperial sovereign mixes them, displaces them, scorns them and persecutes them if they don't agree with his lunatic multiracial agenda. Read Don Quixote: Chesterton made these remarks more than a century ago! He knew too that the macho, vernian, adventurer and missionary writings served actually interventionism anywhere. Nowadays we have the non-governmental organizations.
Of course this attitude, both barbaric and erratic, of western declining but everlasting powers leads to nowhere. Nobody truly understands the meanings of the Iraqi war or the massacres of Libya (I believe in the first case in an esoteric agenda). But this is not the first time. Think of imperial competition, of the Boers' war, think of the first WW1, think of long and bloody and scandalous decolonization. The west was barbaric until the end because the west is idealistic and then a confused Tartuffe. He believes in his own embellished words. Nazi Germany was convinced to defend the values of the West against soviet Asia (read French fascist Rebatet). The West is a just a word, but a good one.
The West gets so what Hobson calls the genius of inconsistency. This is why we can label the new imperialism an Orwellian one, whose distorted patriotism, distorted humanitarianism and distorted vocabulary lead us to a politically nothing. It is a merely a tale told by and idiot, full of sound and fury, etc. etc.
Who's next to be bombed and depopulated on the list of this despicable and inconsistent imperialism?
Nicolas Bonnal