As if We were God’s Spies

Through the kind courtesy of Piranha, we are happy to provide the following excerpts from Clement Scholivé’s novel, Comme des Espions de Dieu (As if We were God’s Spies).

The short excerpts that follow have been adapted and translated from the French—avoiding spoilers. Make sure to read our interview with the author.

From the Prologue, 1

London, December 22, late in the afternoon. George Simmel, a professor at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, ENS, and at the SOAL Foundation in Fontainebleau, France, had trouble leaving St Pancras station. A police crime scene tape marked the spot where a bomb had exploded, early that morning, at the first-class coach level. Fortunately, the Eurostar had been delayed. No one thought of thanking the migrants who had lost their way into the Eurotunnel on the French side. They avoided the worst. The damage was trivial. He bypassed the bored police cordon, waved to his driver holding a “SOAL” sign and they sped off to his club, the Club, in St James’s.

The Club was unobtrusively discreet, even though or because it was located at the very heart of deep power. No flag on the façade, unlike others. A greying, Ghanaian bellboy on the porch and three narrow steps leading to a modest-looking glazed door, a trompe-l’oeil given the munificence of the interior—a vast hall with its three floors of interior galleries, served by a monumental staircase, supported by red marble columns and topped by a dome from 1900, under which immense ornamental palm trees, a gift by a Maharaja, had breathed the smoke of cigars for a hundred years, and survived the ordeal. George Simmel went down to the cloakroom, opened his closet bearing a little ivory plate engraved with his name, and collected his evening suit. He went upstairs to his chamber to rest a bit, shower and change. A talk was scheduled for that evening, with Baroness Hathaway, the former head of MI5.

George Simmel was not in his normal state. He was tired due to a series of events that had brought him to London, via Jersey. The averted St Pancras bombing was a further irritation. People here and in Paris would not fail to ask him, “If…,” and “If”—and then, “You are lucky!” As if he had any inside information. Who was the target. “You were at Helen’s talk? Very, very timely! Very strange!” People always rush to assumptions. Instead of thinking, first. And shutting up, second.

In fact, he was deeply distressed by the unexpected death of his oldest friend from high school, whom at Lycée Louis-le-Grand, and afterwards at Ecole Normale Supérieure, everyone called by his family name, Védrin, never Jean, always Védrin. As he struggled with his bow tie, he noticed in the mirror that he was dressed in black, as for a funeral. He sat down on the edge of the bed, and suddenly, just like that, God knows for what reason, reasonable reason that is, he sobbed. Like a child.

For the second time that day.

From Part II. Chapter I, 1

About six months before, in early July, at SOAL-Fontainebleau, George had subjected a prospective student to the ritual of the interview, a seemingly colorless and odorless conversation after a three-hour psychological and behavioral test. The young ENS graduate wore a fashionable Zara short sleeve shirt, but not too flashy, sensible chino rolled up on his ankles. He was manspreading, in rope sandals. Short reddish hair, “Venetian blonde” would have said Adélaïde, George’s mother. And she did.

Claus Bronn had made the tedious journey from Paris to Fontainebleau in sweltering weather, by suburban Transilien train, then by city bus and finally boarding a SOAL shuttle, all the way from the capital’s 5th arrondissement to the Domaine de Beaumont, next to Fontainebleau Forest and the river Seine. On a Sunday.

During the interview, George had tried to avoid looking at a scar the student had on his face. His nose, broken just below the bridge, showed a fierce dent between the eyes. Rugby? A graduate of elite Napoleonic ENS, and a rugby player. Rare combination. Yes, right there on the medical report: “Physical: Top shape. AAA.”

The interview concluded with Claus’ enrollment in the cross-disciplinary doctoral stream of tough-to-get-in Leadership Programme of SOAL-ENS. He agreed with the terms of study and signed the MoU.

The package included a summer internship, assisting George with a project on dematerialized soft power strategies.

“It’s up to you to check that sources are state-of-the-art, to fill in the statistical gaps and data, add tables and graphs; in short to reference fully the article which, for the moment, is just a narrative. I need the quantitative. For revenue journals. You are a mathematician; you know how to do it. But above all, and I know, I know you have declined a choice place at the Ecole Polytechnique. Yes, yes, I know; preferring, I read here, “the humanistic aspect of numbers.” Cute. You will be credited as second author. When I stretch it into a book, or a primer. You’ll get 5% up to five thousand copies sold. Above that, 9%. SOAL will pay you an advance, now. Three thousand euros. That’s our Growing Own Timber project. Are you okay with that?”

“Absolutely.”

“Very well. Sign the codicil. Bonus, Claus: if you like it, I’ll put you up in a place, a nice barn I’ve got in the Pyrenees, all expenses paid, to work in total peace. Deal?”

Hard to refuse.

George had then watched the young man stride confidently across the Lawn, acid green in the summer sun. He had observed how Claus had paused to take in the harmonious line-up of the Foundation buildings, in the deserted silence of that summery Sunday, when the hundred or so students had left for the weekend. George saw how the talented mathematician had sized up the place, reducing it to an equation, surely. Mother will like him.

From Part I. Chapter III, 2

George was sitting outside a café in Rue de Bretagne, in Paris’ Temple district, reading the Iliad in the sun. A young guy was parking his motorcycle, a big, red Ducati, and bumped slightly against his table. Taking off his helmet, the lad immediately apologized:

“I’m sorry, so sorry, Sir.”

“No problem. It shines like hell.”

The young biker repeated, “like hell,” and added:

“Can I buy you a drink, Sir, just to… you are…”

George raised his hand and pointed to a chair:

“SOAL, security guard?”

“Yes, Sir. At the aquarium.”

“Uh huh.”

“Weird, at SOAL, we’ve never spoken to each other.”

“We have. ‘Sir? Right thumb, press hard, for opening.’ Sir.”

Samuel burst out laughing. He became talkative, George recalled. The lad may have had a joint. He belonged to the XYZ+ young proletariat with no future and no past, who are surprised by nothing and are surprised by a nothing. Emotionally wired 24/7. Harmless and a mess. Errant dog, looking for collar.

Who’s paying for that bike? wondered George. Change of tack:

“Does it take you a long time, every night, anyway, to undo your piercings. If you do? Samuel.”

The first name calling took Samuel by surprise.

“Okay,” was his reply.

George ordered a Stella for him and a Perrier for himself. The line was cast. A year later the biker had vanished. And George was summoned at the Club by Sir Avery, president of SOAL, “for a good chat.”

From Part II, Chapter VI, 2

SOAL Chief Compliance Officer Hilb arrived fresh as a clavelito at Buenos Aires’ Ezeiza airport, took a limo to the microcenter of the city, and got dropped off at his favorite café, Confiteria Ideal, set between sellers of thrice-used books, milliners’ shops yellowed by the sun, and a large screen porn cinema. At the Ideal, Hilb sat up against a large brown marble pillar set with gilded sconces. He smoothed the red tablecloth with the back of his hand. The pastries were in the centre of the huge, tiled room, on a monumental, baroque sideboard, on parade. It was ten o’clock, no customers, the low point of the morning. He ordered a cortado and medialunas.

He had an appointment with Newton. Cradle name, Noah. Immigration name, Newton. Abbreviation Newt. Born, like Hilb, in the 9th arrondissement, Rue Cadet, Jewish quarter, Paris. Volunteered together in the Six-Day War. Then, specialists in the use of electric devices.

Newt was now “in the building industry.” He had the mystique of the construction industry. On a previous occasion, when they nearly fell out with each other:

“Do you remember what the rabbi used to tell us at school? ‘In Hebrew, my children, “child” and “builder” are homonyms. Homonyms, you know what that means?”… Guy Chouraqui, the poof, didn’t know where to hide. What a laugh! And the rabbi: ‘Evil spirits that you are, a homonym is a word that resembles another… And you know why they’re homonyms in Hebrew? Because a child, by going to school, by being educated, builds the real house, the building of peace… Ah, Shalom… Peace… What a beautiful noun, my children, it is the combination of sacred numbers…’ He could not switch off. Off his rockers. Needed no electricity to power him. That’s what building is all about.”

Diversion, anyway, all that chatter. Not today, not today.

“Holà, Pierre! Holà, Newt!”

Newt managed to squeeze himself into the armchair, pulled up his glasses with his thumb, a twitch that had always annoyed Hilb; it had to do with Hilb’s sister, and remained silent. Newt stared at Hilb with a look that was not very kind. Hilb decided not to talk about past differences—that deal about a SOAL school in Buenos Aires gone south. He went straight to the point.

“Come a little closer and listen. We’re going to have to move fast. Bissel of a shlep. But shekel tango, I promise.”

“Like last time?”

“Listen, no frigging building and all that crap. Listen to me, then you decide. I have not flown in from Paris just to drink coffee, and tell you I love you, hey? You just have to dress like a Brazilian tourist. You take your cut, at source. Toi-même.”

“Tu m’intéresses.”

From Part III. Chapter II, 1

Between Christmas and New Year, the Surveyor had allowed himself time for musing. The operation had “foreclosed,” as it was now trendy to say in the minister’s youngish, inner circle. But, with his head bent over his personal copy of the file, and supported as usual by three fingers of the left hand, thumb, index and middle finger, he meditated.

He mused about the irony of his fate, seated at his usual canteen, Rue des Saussaies, neither too close nor too far from the Interior Ministry, located there since the times of Napoleon’s police HQ. He sat, alone in the dining room, at his familiar banquette, the one with a broken spring. The duck confit had seen better days. A left over from Christmas. Like me, he mused, like me.

He opened a paper clip and unfolded it, then folded it back, then twisted it. He discarded it in the ashtray, symbols of a bygone era: paper clip and cigarette. I’m like a paper clip. Like a paper clip in this useless ashtray. But I have my file.

He looked at two cryptic notes he had jotted down on two purple post-its, stuck on the last sheet, and inscribed: “acc, so true.” He pondered the amusing irony of breaking an iron rule of the service, NPC, No Personal Copy, at a stone’s throw from the Tracfin office, a file foreclosed as the bright sparks say. He discreetly chewed an antacid tablet, so as not to offend Lucien, the patron.

Who would have guessed this high-ranking career police civil servant, nicknamed the Surveyor; Charles Fourcadet had reached the end of his tether. The complex affair of varsity money-laundering, now declared foreclosed, whatever that meant, had taken the best of five long years of careful, and inventive, scoping. Academia is tricky and deceitful, and smart, very smart. Worse than gun runners. He was about to wrap it up, and nab them all, and then remind the minister he was now ready to move on and up, since like a damn fool he had delayed a nice end-of -career promotion to close that juicy file, not to bloody foreclose it! Snuffed before the media would get a whiff of it. And that was surprising since the bright sparks leaked like a used condom.

He, who had led the operation from day one, was made to carry the can for all these years of wasted public money and so-called “scarce human resources,” as if that was ever an issue. He was in charge, until la Dutour, Madame Rector, barged in, George Simmel’s ex—can you believe it—took over, reshuffled the deck, and c’est fini, c’est la vie. Why her? Mind you, academic Mata Hari or not, she had form. If you see what I mean.

Nothing surprised him any longer. Time to take early retirement, in fact. They hinted at it. He took the hint. But how and why he would take it, that was his business. That is why he mused, and not why he had acid reflux.

He meditated on the irony of another fate. That of De Kemp, his penetration agent. That prick, slippery to handle, demanding like a tart, an addict to boot, “for my painful joints’” why yes, of course, your joints. Paid for under the table. For sure he impressed his colleagues at that second-rate university where we gave him a job, with his super frigging SUV. Father is well off. Antwerp. Diamond trade. We had a good laugh. Green grocer in Besançon. Got his comeuppance, though. The hard way. That kid, Victor, tough as nails. Should have followed his tracks. Collateral anyway. But…

The Surveyor picked up the twisted paper clip and was tempted to light a gauloise, just pour emmerder Lucien and his rotten duck confit from Hungary. He pushed aside the file.

For—and the Surveyor looked at the sad leg of confit—in all the driftwood that De Kemp was sending downstream, flotsam and jetsam of information of all sorts, Charles Fourcadet had flagged indicators that a second-level electronic wall of defense, as invisible as it was fierce, seemed to ringfence SOAL, while the front wall was agreeably permeable; not easy, for sure, but it consented to penetration. He had wisely omitted it from his verbal and filed notes and from the final report, of course, the moment he had sensed that the rug was being pulled underneath him by Mata Hari. Something else was cooking.

Now, taking the hint, he had decided to capitalize, and from civil servant to become civilly self-serving. Unlike all those military windbags who retire and lecture the free world on what should be done in the Ukraine or with the Taliban, while they did nothing when they could. He had decided not to take a dump in a think-tank, but to quietly re-invest his skills and expertise. And, in two short months, on March 1st, with full pension rights, and the blue rosette of Merit on his lapel, he was going to walk across to SOAL and join the opposition, whatever that may be.

He stood up, left fifty euros and, with a smile, added the pack of antacids.

“Ye Shall have No Other Society but This One!”: Neoliberal Theology

The theological character of the new ordo oeconomicus is clearly shown in its imposition of itself as an irrefutable and irredeemable horizon, as an objectively given totality, insuperable even if only at the symbolic level. It turns us all into followers of a cult without dogma, of a fetishistic incantation and of an omnipresent religion in everyday life, whose dominion extends “on Earth as it does in Heaven.”

We are confronted with commodities, stock market values or the inscrutable will of the market, as if they were emanations of the only surviving divinity: the fetishized economy. The result is an unprecedented vision of the world, which is smuggled in as aseptic, secular, anodyne and purely economic, but which in reality is a position of the highest ideological and religious content. It “unites” (religat, according to the original etymology of religio) all men on the planet to the omnipotence of the market as the sole guiding principle of the totality of fetishized social relations, like the Deus Mortalis referred to in the words of the Book of Job (41:24): non est potestas super terram quae comparetur ei.

That the economy represents the logical and chronological successor of the traditional monotheistic divinity is evidenced not only by the fact that its laws cannot be questioned, since they constitute the inexplicable with which to explain every reality of the market cosmos; it is also deduced from the very self-foundation that the economy began to operate, at least starting from the dialectical phase. Capitalist exchange presents itself, in effect, as a causa sui, according to the most typical prerogative of monotheistic divinity. Not only does it not need external foundations, of a political or philosophical character, but it must neutralize them, promoting the rejection of traditional faith, of contractualism as the political establishment of the social order, or of natural law as truth pre-existent to the self-instituted ordo oeconomicus.

From its abstract phase, the capitalist animal kingdom of the spirit aspires to eliminate the historical and social traces of its genesis, that is, its own condition of product of human action. It must be thought of as prior to any communal substance pre-existent to the network of mercantile exchanges (this is the social-historical deduction of the Lockean critique of the idea of substance), as without cause (this explains, on the social and political level, the Humean destructuring of the idea of cause) and, again, as ahistorically founded on free-trade human nature (the Smithian “invisible hand”). Like the monotheistic divinity, the market economy is not created and is, at the same time, at the origin of the creatio ex nihilo of the socio-political cosmos that considers it dominant as summum ens and as ens entium.

Postmodern men, disenchanted and already indifferent to the great narratives that have paved the way for Modernity, have ceased to believe in everything except the blind and mysterious force of the market, the only surviving Absolute. The market itself acts in its turn as the author of disenchantment with respect to any other value not superimposable or, in any case, not reabsorbable in the pantheon of the market, composed of exchange, consumption and the tenacious faith in the inevitability of economic fundamentalism conceived as the fatality of destiny. The continuous struggles of the secularist front against the monotheisms of tradition reveal here, once again, its misery: it is capital itself that sets aside any traditional form of religion other than that of the market.

Monotheism and polytheism coexist dialectically in the mystical figure of the divinized market, according to the aforementioned form of monocratic absolutism, which harbors within itself the kaleidoscopic plurality of lifestyles and unified customs functional to the sacred fury of unlimited valorization. Even in the common lexicon, as well as in the increasingly stereotyped lexicon of politics, whose sole purpose is to guarantee the non-existence of alternatives, the ordo oeconomicus presents the market in a form that is either singularized or pluralized. The market is pluralized when it offers possibilities of development that should not be missed (the so-called “market opportunities”) or, simply, when they are limited to carrying their existence significantly suprasensible as autonomous and divine entities.

In this, markets reveal themselves to be similar to Epicurus’ gods. Projected in the cosmic space of the interworld, hidden from human gaze and action, they exist self-referentially, indifferent to our needs and sufferings. Compared to them, we, inhabitants of the time of the fractured social bond, are just as many atoms that accidentally aggregate to disintegrate again in the vacuum of the circulation of commodities. And yet the market is once again reordered in the singular, when it assumes the status of a punitive divinity that, like the God of the Old Testament, imposes its inscrutable and non-negotiable will, giving rise to the figure of the imperatives of the market, before which politics and, more generally, human life, are called upon to submit passively.

In an integral rehabilitation of what traditional religions had condemned without appeal as vices (greed, lust, etc.), economic theology expresses itself in an unprecedented religious form that is purely cultic (of worship). It is devoid of dogmatics and theoretical justification, in harmony with its intimately nihilistic nature, because it is based on the unconnected extension of the commodity form to all spheres. That capitalism is a faith is clear from the unshakable confidence that continues to be placed in the market, despite the catastrophes and calamities it generates daily on a planetary scale. It is presented as if it were a God whose goodness cannot be doubted, following the typical recourse of all theodicy and its guarantee that, in the end, evil will not triumph.

Having attained its degree of absoluteness, capital today assumes in fully realized form the status of the new God to which it secretly aspired from its auroral gaze: we thus return to the religious spirit of capitalism of Protestant origin studied by Weber. To corroborate the status of unconditional faith that permeates our connection with the Nomos of the economy and also, in our daily life, the fact that, more and more often, it is not we who choose, but we happily and frivolously trust in brands—that is, in the almost divine guarantee of the griffe (the now disused slogan “in God we trust” gives way to the postmodern “in brand we trust”)—we count on the complicit and increasingly invasive dictatorship of advertising. The latter millimetrically disciplines our desires according to the dual and synergistic movement of its ever-renewed urgency and its diversion to the market: it is not permissible to desire anything that is virtually external to the society of the spectacle. The totalitarian character of a production apparatus that not only determines the socially required roles and attitudes, but also itself informs the needs and aspirations, the dreams and innermost desires of individuals, emerges once again.

The phenomenon of the gadget, that is, the aberration transformed into a commodity, can also be understood from a not-too-distant perspective. Gadgets such as advertising key chains—Debord suggested—not only reveal the umpteenth mystical abandonment to the transcendence of the commodity form: their meticulous collection fulfills a function similar to the accumulation of indulgences, constituting the proof for the adept of the cult of the commodity form of his own condition as a faithful of the religion of planetary alienation and of the creed of truth in money.

As Benjamin anticipated, in his prescient considerations of 1921 on Kapitalismus als Religion, the commodity faith, which satisfies the concerns and anxieties to which in the past the traditional religions responded and which are now increasingly abandoned, is articulated in the form of a religion of permanent worship. It knows no holidays inaccessible to economic transactions or consumerist rituals. It is a religion of daily life that shapes, according to its logic and its liturgy, each of our actions and each of our thoughts: from the moment we sign a check to the moment we make a bank transfer or even the moments when we wander through the temples of merchandise (supermarkets, shopping malls, outlets, etc.).

The religion of capital—which could perhaps be called “capitalism”—is a Deus absconditus (Isaiah 45:15), as can be inferred as soon as we consider that the market corresponds to the first religion that tends to conceal its own God in the very act with which it spasmodically celebrates its cult. It segregates in its own image and likeness an ethic of sacrifice and guilt, periodically immolating peoples on the altar of the market and its unfathomable lex divina. Guilt declines, in the religion of capital, as debit: and this, according to that semantic convergence which is symptomatically made explicit in the German word Schuld—which encompasses both meanings—and shows its operative unity in the capitalist landscape (where debt is also guilt).

The political lexicon is always revealing, for in it is sedimented the spirit of the times. The rhetoric of sacrifice is condensed today in theologomena, so commonplace that it goes unnoticed (“it is necessary to make sacrifices”, “the market demands it of us”, “the debt must be paid off,” “it is the will of Europe,” etc.). It is typical of religious thought: it is always governed by the idea of a salvation which, in the last analysis, does not depend entirely on us and which can, at most, be brought about by sacrificial rites whose most hidden meaning escapes human reason. The only possible economy of salvation today seems to be that which preaches the salvation of the economy, in the two senses of the sacrifice of all reality for the sake of maintaining the ordo oeconomicus and the reabsorption of all soteriological perspective in the immanent dynamics of the market.

The transcendental historical change introduced by the advent of the religion of capital is also made evident by the fact that salvation from the anguish and pain of existence is no longer pursued through the path of traditional religions, as fuga mundi. The only possible salvation, in times of the economic apocalypse and the “universal flood” of global liquidity, becomes unbridled consumption and, therefore, the loss of oneself in the meaninglessness of the world. It provokes that enslavement of the subject to the absolute power of the object which, as we shall see, constitutes the culmination of the reified hellish scenario, determining the oblivion of praxis. The cunning of production consists in generating the illusion that possible salvation resides in the commodity-object and, at the same time, in ensuring that this is characterized by a structural emptiness of substance: the commodity-object dissolves quickly, in the very act with which it is consumed.

Thus, in the order of the religion of capital, the illusion of salvation is punctually frustrated in the emptiness of the object and, at the same time, always re-emerges as itself, in a macabre dance of commodities that are extinguished in consumption only to re-emerge again and again. It is in this perverse circuit that lies the secret of the consumerist liturgy, as a constant search for salvation in an object that continually disappears in consumption and always reappears in circulation. The commodity-object, instead of saving, continues to generate ex novo the disastrous circularity it promised to break. For this reason, the enjoyment proposed by the discourse of the capitalist is unsatisfactory. Its unlimited pursuit gives life to the hell of the compulsive search for the new, which is always equal to itself, typical of the Kierkegaardian aesthetic phase to which Oedipal capitalism condemns humanity. Herein lies, incidentally, the “metonymic character of desire” (Massimo Recalcati), that is, its frenetic drive, in a fluctuation without peace, that leads humanity from one object to another, in the promise of a worldly salvation that, according to the theology of the market, always refers to the next commodity. The condition of lack is not safeguarded as constitutive of existence, but is continually generated as a ruse aimed at the unlimited reproduction of an ephemeral jouissance that is always the same.

The cunning of production exploits to its own advantage this tragic condition of Western man: pretending to want to cure it, it always renews it from scratch, exploiting it with a view to the circuit of self-referential valorization. The dictatorship of advertising is its finishing touch. The latter, through the artifice of fashion, determines the programmed obsolescence of the object, relentlessly declaring the expiration of the merchandise it praised until yesterday. In the words of Debord’s Société du spectacle: “both Stalin and outmoded products are denounced by those who imposed them” (§ 70); and, in this way, the new advertising lie disproves the preceding lie so that it can, in turn, be challenged by the subsequent one.

Diego Fusaro is professor of the History of Philosophy at the IASSP in Milan (Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies) where he is also scientific director. He is a scholar of the Philosophy of History, specializing in the thought of Fichte, Hegel, and Marx. His interest is oriented towards German idealism, its precursors (Spinoza) and its followers (Marx), with a particular emphasis on Italian thought (Gramsci or Gentile, among others). he is the author of many books, including Fichte and the Vocation of the Intellectual, The Place of Possibility: Toward a New Philosophy of Praxis, and Marx, again!: The Spectre Returns. [This article appears courtesy of Posmodernia].

Featured: Collins St., 5 pm, by John Brack; painted in 1955.

Land and Sea: Globalization as a Fluid Realm

Uncontrolled and uncontrollable, the sea is the realm of immoderation and universal transience, of pirate nomadism and uncontainable wandering: “in the sea it is not possible to sow or even to dig straight lines. The ships that sail the sea leave no trace behind them.” The trails that are drawn in the sea disappear almost instantaneously, without being transferred to the future. They are, precisely for this reason, the symbol of the universal transience of the global liquid society.

Unlike terrestrial spaces, regulated and subject to geographical differences, to natural roots and borders, to rooted and territorialized communities, the open space of the sea is literally uninhabitable. It is crossed without the possibility of being able to inhabit it stably. It is, by its essence, the space of free and perpetual omnidirectional circulation, devoid of barriers and borders, of norms and limitations.

To cross the thalassic surfaces implies the abandonment of terrestrial stability and the acceptance of the possible dangers linked to the absence of solid ground and the eventual encounter with pirates who, in the same way as those of finance and the banking system, carry out raids in the absence of laws to control and limit them.

Without land there is neither political power nor frontier. In a word, there is no νόμος; that is why the thalassic expanse appears as the natural place of deregulation and, consequently, of that falsely libertarian anarchy which in reality secretly coincides with the uncontrolled domination of the strongest, with their freedom to preserve without restrictions their own self-interest.

Marine expansion, like the financial market of planetary flexibility, knows only waves, ebbs and flows, sudden storms and unexpected turbulence. “The trembling of the sea” (Purgatory, I, v. 117) offers no protection and, instead, exposes to the permanent risk of storms, shipwrecks and pirate boardings.

Indeed, it has been the financialization of capitalism that has played a decisive role in its post-bourgeois metamorphosis, which has led it to transit from the solid to the liquid element: finance, in fact, is volatile and unpredictable, the enemy of stability and rootedness.

The sea thus becomes an absolute metaphor for flexible and post-telluric production, aeriform for its immateriality and thalassic for its liquid movement and freed from the political power of the νόμος.

This is true not only for the liquid condition characteristic of cosmo-marketing, but also for the convergent process of deterritorialization—to take up a notion dear to Deleuze and Guattari—that distinguishes the epoch of planetary uprooting, set in motion by the expansion of the globalized market: the sea is perennially unstable in its incessant becoming and, at the same time, prevents any stabilizing action from being implemented. It forces those who venture into it to the perpetual dynamism of navigation and displacement, of nomadism and instability. It is the place of wandering and vagrancy, not of citizenship and communal territoriality.

Hegel already, anticipating Schmitt, had contrasted terrestrial rootedness, centered on the idea of frontier, to maritime limitlessness, where barriers are lacking and the dimension of schlechte Unendlichkeit, the “bad infinitude” of permanent mobility, prevails:

“The sea is something indeterminate, unlimited, infinite, and man, feeling himself in the midst of this infinity, is challenged to cross the boundary. The sea invites man to conquest and rapine, but also to profit and gain. The dry land, the river plain, fixes man to the ground, from which multiple obstacles arise. On the contrary, the sea pushes him beyond these limited circles.”

In Hegel’s perspective, the oceanic extension, open and uncontainable, corresponds to the infinite evil of excessive growth, to the rage to transcend all limits: it is the emblem of Modernity which, forgetting the Greek value of the just limit and of the sacred measure, always ventures recklessly “beyond these limited circles.”

It is in this sense that, in Elements of the Philosophy of Right, as an anticipation of the dichotomy that will be at the center of Schmitt’s reflection, Hegel maintains that “a condition for the principle of family life (Familienlebens) is the earth, a foundation and a stable ground” (§ 247); in contrast, “for industry” (für die Industrie) the “natural element” (natürliches Element) is the sea that opens towards infinity.

The telluric stability of the “ethical roots,” with its solid and solidary dimension, which sinks deep into the earth, draws a space of permanent enmity against the vacillating flow of the thalassic extension of the “system of needs,” where everything is relentlessly subjected to the uprooting of trade and bargaining, of competition and exchange of one and all.

Ethical roots aspire to regulate the anarchic space of the system of needs, subjecting it to the νόμος of communal control. Such a space, for its part, aims at the opposite goal: that is, at its own integral liberation from the power of the νόμος connected with the ethical roots. Moreover, it explicitly tends to produce the uprooting and, therefore, the devitalization of those roots, so that the self in its interest, and with it every human relation, are redefined according to the thalassic logic of unsociable sociability and piratical deregulation.

From this point of view, turbo-chrematistics globalization could rightly be understood for all intents and purposes as the triumph of the thalassic principle over the telluric one and, therefore, as the successful destruction of all surviving ethical rootedness: from that of family life to that of ethics linked to the State form, passing through the intermediate bodies of the population (from schools to trade unions and public health).

We know that the Greeks feared the sea as a mobile space of limitlessness and as a very concrete place of infinite openness, before which Achilles, their most powerful hero, wept: “bursting into tears, he sat far from his own, apart, on the shore of the whitish sea, gazing at the infinite expanse” (apeiron) (Iliad, I, 349-350).

Let us note that in the Homeric poems it is commonplace to associate the sea with the term apeiron, which literally means “without border,” “without limit” and consequently, by extension, “infinite,” “unlimited,” “indeterminate.”

The uniform space of the thalassic immensity, with its structural absence of borders, appears as the opposite not only of the mainland, where roots and ethical communities distributed over the territory and different in culture and traditions prevail; additionally the increasingly unequal “financial integration of the world” is producing the destruction of the properly geographical element, i.e., of the plurality of differentiated and unequal locations, according to what has been defined as the end of geography.

Oceanic expansion is also presented as the antithesis of that sea, limited and perimetered by the land, that is the Mediterranean, where limitlessness is literally “contained,” delimited, because it is enclosed within precise confines that allow, at least to a certain extent, the control and management of the territory.

Unlike the infinity of the ocean, the Mare Nostrum comes to be defined as a figure of that politicized economy that constitutes the essence of the ethical life thematized by Hegel. The Mediterranean then stands as the living image of a sea regulated and subjected to the power of the νόμος, because it is surrounded by land and, to a certain extent, controlled by the latter and subordinated to its demands.

Absent in Hegel, the clear conceptual differentiation between the bounded sea and the borderless ocean-like sea is found in Kant’s work. In The Metaphysics of Morals (1797) he distinguishes between mare clausum and mare liberum.

The former is the sea close to the land, subject to the control of the latter and defensible “as far as the guns that guard the shore can reach.” It is, so to speak, a regulated and disciplined sea, subject to the jurisdiction of the continent and controllable by the political force that governs it.

Such is the essence, as we have recalled, of the Mediterranean, the closed and limited Mare Nostrum, open to plurality and difference, a fertile, pluralistic and multicultural space—as Braudel has exemplarily shown—of the origin and gestation of civilizations (Greeks and Romans, Christians and Muslims).

Thus, in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, the mare clausum of the Mediterranean is celebrated as the axis of Weltgeschichte, as the space for the flowering of the greatest civilizations that have traversed the history of the human race:

“All the great states of ancient history rest around this navel of the Earth. It is here that Greece, the brightest point of history, is located. In Syria is Jerusalem, the center of Judaism and Christianity. To the southeast of it are Mecca and Medina, cradles of Islam. To the west lie Delphi and Athens, and further west Rome and Carthage; and so to the south Alexandria, which is even more central than Constantinople, where the spiritual fusion of East and West is completed. The Mediterranean is, then, the heart of the Old World, being its motor, its condition of life.”

The mare liberum, on the other hand, is the sea free of controls, indefensible and physiologically uninhabitable: as Kant points out, “no domicile is possible in the open sea” or, we would say, no citizenship. The denied territoriality is accompanied by the thalassic wandering, which turns the navigator into mobilis in mobili.

And also according to this hermeneutic key, which links illimited and mare liberum together, the story of Dante’s Odysseus can be understood: “I launched myself toward the open high seas,” Odysseus declares in the presence of the Florentine poet, confessing his own guilt, which is, in all evidence, a guilt of ὕβϱις, derived from the surpassing of the just limit.

It is not by chance that Dante’s Inferno imagines the death of Odysseus when he sets out “toward the high open sea,” venturing on a voyage impossible because it leads toward the limitless. The Dantesque is one of the possible readings, if we consider that, for example, Elias Canetti of The Tongue Set Free (1977) reads the character of Odysseus in the opposite key, that is, as a figure of diminution and measure, as could be deduced from the gesture with which the hero of Ithaca makes himself “nobody” (οὐδείς) in order to defeat the Cyclops.

Because of its uncontrolled and uncontrollable, unregulated and unregulable nature, the open sea of the oceanic type gives rise to a sort of bellum omnium contra omnes of the aquatic type: by virtue of the absence of political regulation, the open sea remains a space attributable to the logic of status naturae.

It is, therefore, the sign of post-telluric anomie, where only the anarchic logic of piracy can prevail, that is, the status naturae that the globalist animal kingdom of the Spirit has generated by dissolving the telluric framework of ius publicum europaeum.

On the maritime surface, just as on the horizon of the commercial anarchy of the de-sovereignized market, the logic of the strongest prevails once again: that is, the possibility for the latter to “compete” freely and without restrictions with the weaker, according to the rule of free trade in free seas. A quintessential expression of the anomic energy of thalassic extension, the maritime conflict is ab origine unlimited and exempted from legal obligations.

As Schmitt has specified, “the sea does not constitute a state territory,” it is subtracted from the legal order and from the jurisdictions guaranteed by the political: its extension is intrinsically depoliticized and open, and “is, therefore, free from any type of spatial authority of the State.” The thalassic extension appears, then, as the space taken away from state power and its fundamental functions, from law to citizenship.

“The maritime realm knows no borders, no obligations, no rights, no control. It is presented as the unregulated space par excellence, as the locus naturalis of pirates, corsairs and all those who recognize no law other than that of the strongest: precisely because ‘no law applies at sea,’ it is inaccessible to law and human order, forming the space for a free confrontation of forces.”

The boundless vastness of the open sea “constitutes a free zone of free predation. Here the privateer, the pirate, can exercise his evil trade with a good conscience” and, above all, without legal impediments. Perhaps it is also from this perspective that the text composed by Hugo Grotius in 1609, programmatically entitled, Mare liberum and directed against English monopolistic pretensions, can be explained.

Indeed, as we know, the capitalist economy, which begins to develop also in the Mediterranean capital of Genoa, arises mainly in the oceanic spaces of the “English ports” evoked by Bloch, where the thalassic dimension (mare clausum) is overcome and we venture into the oceanic (mare liberum) in search of an unlimited expansion of profits. In the words of Carl Schmitt in his Land and Sea:

“England became the queen of the sea, and around her maritime dominion over the entire globe she built a British empire spread over every continent. The English world thought in terms of footholds and lines of communication… The age of free trade was also the age of the free display of England’s industrial and economic superiority. Free seas and free world markets were united in an idea of freedom of which only England could be the bearer and the guardian.”

Like the navigator, at an unprecedented distance from the mainland and at the mercy of storms, the precarious man navigates “by eye” between drifts and shipwrecks, be they labor or existential, in what, with Guicciardini, we could rightly characterize as “a sea agitated by the winds.”
Uprooted and subjected to the gales that constantly batter the sea far from coastal protections, the cybernaut of thalassic globalization is projected into a dimension of constant insecurity and piratical competitiveness, which will strike at the very possibility of his existence. The latter does not adopt solid and stable forms, always fluctuating between the waves of the market, on which it has been transformed into a dependent variable.

In the framework of the “vulnerable society,” it is the markets, like the sea for the cybernaut, that decide the survival of the inhabitant of the thalassic late-modernity, deprived of any communal roots and of any frontier that could protect him and provide him with a certain stability in his daily life.

Diego Fusaro is professor of the History of Philosophy at the IASSP in Milan (Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies) where he is also scientific director. He is a scholar of the Philosophy of History, specializing in the thought of Fichte, Hegel, and Marx. His interest is oriented towards German idealism, its precursors (Spinoza) and its followers (Marx), with a particular emphasis on Italian thought (Gramsci or Gentile, among others). he is the author of many books, including Fichte and the Vocation of the Intellectual, The Place of Possibility: Toward a New Philosophy of Praxis, and Marx, again!: The Spectre Returns. [This article appears courtesy of Posmodernia].

Featured: Sail through Rough Seas, by Henry Moore, no date.

Homo cosmopoliticus: Adam Smith and Globalist Subjectivity

“The proprietor of stock is necessarily a citizen of the world” (Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book V, Chapter II, Article II).

The perverted universality of globalism can be considered fulfilled in the verification of the logic that was already outlined by Smith in The Wealth of Nations:

The proprietor of stock is necessarily a citizen of the world, and is not necessarily attached to any particular country. He would be apt to abandon the country in which he was exposed to a vexatious inquisition, in order to be assessed to a burdensome tax, and would remove his stock to some other country where he could either carry on his business, or enjoy his fortune more at his ease (Book V, Chapter II, Article II).

Following Smith’s thesis, it goes without saying that the liberal Right of Money is cosmopolitan and vocationally non-border. Capital is, by its essence, stateless and deterritorialized (“not necessarily attached to any particular country”).

Moreover, if we venture beyond Smith, it is founded on the reduction of the whole world to its “homeland” of reference: it is cosmopolitan precisely because, in order to realize itself in an “ab-solute” form, it must neutralize national barriers and saturate the globe, reducing it to a smooth plane for the omnidirectional displacement of the flows of commodities and commodified persons, of speculative capital and consumer desires.

The possessor of capital is, therefore, “necessarily a citizen of the world,” free to move and circulate in order “carry on his business, or enjoy his fortune more at his ease.” And this, as is evident, according to that logic of profit which, if during a historical period coincided with the space of imperialist nationalism, today finds its own ubi consistam in denationalization and in the opening of all material and immaterial frontiers.

From this point of view, homo cosmopoliticus seems to be the most genuine product of that cosmomarket anthropology and of that rootlessness inscribed in its original code, against which De Maistre’s theorem remains largely valid, according to which we never find the “man” qua talis, but always the Frenchman, the Italian or the Russian (and since Montesquieu—De Maistre ironically added—we learned that the Persian also exists).

Once again, the Left of Custom, trapped in the “Ptolemaic phase,” deludes itself into thinking that it fights against power, when in reality it sustains it, fully defending its interests and intervening against any project of emancipation of the oppressed with respect to the auri sacra fames of turbo-capital.

It fights the very idea of national rootedness, confusing it with its pernicious and dangerous drift that was capitalist nationalism, without realizing that today it has been completely surpassed by the new non-border globocracy, which is the first to use the anti-nationalist rhetoric to demonize, no longer the nationalist imperialism that for a time it supported, but the very idea of Nation and, with it, of the Gramscian national-popular as the basis of cultural, identitarian, political and social resistance of the oppressed against the intrinsically undemocratic market cosmopolitanism.

In this scenario emerges, with clear outlines, the structural incompatibility of capitalist cosmopolitanism with proletarian internationalism or, more generically, of the classes today dominated. Internationalism implies a nexus of socialist solidarity inter nationes and, therefore, the opposite of the cosmopolitan annihilation of nations carried out by global-capitalism following Smith’s theorem and, if you will, according to Trotsky’s cosmopolitical perspective of communism, as deconstructed by Gramsci in the Prison Notebooks.

The internationalism of the national-popular Servant does not coincide, then, either with the conquering nationalism of the historical Right (which was the expressive function of imperialist capitalism in its dialectical phase), or with the capitalist cosmopolitanism of the de-sovereignized and post-national market (which is the project defended in our day, structurally, by the liberal Right of Money and superstructurally by the libertarian Left of Custom).

From what has been exposed, it is again inferred that, in order to break the yoke of liberal Glebalism, we must first of all deconstruct the hegemony of the single thought that sanctifies the really-given power relation. In particular, it is necessary to dismantle the ideological architecture of the champagne Left of Custom, which superstructurally legitimizes the structure of the dominance of the financial Right of Money.

The ideological fraud of the nationalist Right—if it still intends to use, for heuristic purposes, the obsolete and, in fact, “useless” Right-Left dichotomy—lies in presenting a certain authoritarian and non-democratic sovereignty, as if it were the real opposition to capitalist cosmopolitanism, which is precisely its other face (rectius, the culmination).

The imposture of the champagne and rainbow Lefts consists, on the other hand, in smuggling in as socialist internationalism what, strictly speaking, is liberal cosmopolitanism; that is to say, the sphere of conflict favorable to the competitivist Lord.

With an attitude that always oscillates between incomprehension of the power relation and its active legitimization, the champagne Left surreptitiously believes—and here is the core of its error—that “the contrast of cosmopolitanism implies a repudiation of internationalism;” on the contrary, it is socialist internationalism that carries implicitly a firm rejection of both imperialist nationalism and liberal cosmopolitanism. There can be no socialist internationalism in the absence of national States which recognize each other as free and brotherly.

By the way, it was the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 that certified the acknowledged “conversion of the Italian communists to neoliberalism.” On that occasion, the definitive and integrally cosmopolitan forma mentis of the market-friendly Left was forged, now convinced that any opposition to non-border globalism was no longer the possible defense of the dominated classes against the offensive of the unified market without borders, but the path of identitarian and regressive closure, which would necessarily have to be combined with the right-wing quadrant of politics.

Bobbio was undoubtedly right when, in his successful book, Destra e sinistra (Right and Left), he pointed to the “great problem of inequality between men and peoples” as the unresolved knot in the post-1989 world. However, this impeccable diagnosis coexisted, in Bobbio’s works, with the unreal ideal-typical identification of the Left with the defense of that equality, with respect to which the really-existing new Left, converted to liberal cosmopolitanism, had already said goodbye in an evident manner for some time.

If historically the Left—as Bobbio also admitted—was based on the connection between freedom and equality and used the action of the State as an instrument of action upon reality, with a view to implementing that end, how could the post-Marxist new Left still call itself “Left,” which to the questions of equality and labor rights had now placed individualist liberalization and the rainbow rights of the individual consumer before the questions of equality and labor rights; that to the struggle for equality and freedom of colonized peoples had preferred unconditional support for the abstractly humanitarian and concretely imperialist interventionism of the dollar thalassocracy; and that, even before the eticizing power of the State as a means to achieve equality, had chosen to adhere to the de-sovereignizing globalization which is the means that guarantees the ever growing hegemony of the ruling class?

Diego Fusaro is professor of the History of Philosophy at the IASSP in Milan (Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies) where he is also scientific director. He is a scholar of the Philosophy of History, specializing in the thought of Fichte, Hegel, and Marx. His interest is oriented towards German idealism, its precursors (Spinoza) and its followers (Marx), with a particular emphasis on Italian thought (Gramsci or Gentile, among others). he is the author of many books, including Fichte and the Vocation of the Intellectual, The Place of Possibility: Toward a New Philosophy of Praxis, and Marx, again!: The Spectre Returns. [This article appears courtesy of Posmodernia].

Featured: Folio 13 from The Nuremberg Chronicle, or the Schedelsche Weltchronik, or Liber Chronicarum (Book of Chronicles); published in 1493.

Neoliberal Globalization: A New Religious Faith

Using Gramsci’s syntax, ideology exists when “a given class succeeds in presenting and having the conditions of its existence and of its class development accepted as a universal principle, as a conception of the world, as a religion.”

The culmination outlined by Gramsci is entirely relevant if reference is made to the ideology of globalization as a nature that has always been given, irreversible and physiological (globalismus sive natura). In the framework of the post-1989 New World Order and what has been defined as “the great chessboard,” it is presented to all intents and purposes as a “universal principle,” because it is indistinctly accepted in all latitudes of the planet (it is what we could call the globalization of the concept of globalization) and, at the same time, it is also embraced by the pole of the dominated, who should oppose it with the utmost firmness. It is presented as an unquestionable and universally valid truth, which only asks to be ratified and accepted according to the modality of an adaequatio that is both cognitive and political.

Globalization shows itself then, as a “conception of the world;” that is, as an articulated and all-embracing system, because it has been structured in the form of a unitary and systematic perspective, centered on denationalizing cosmopolitanism and on the elimination of all material and immaterial limitations to the free circulation of commodities and marketized persons, to the flows of liquid financial capital and to the infinite extension of the competitive interests of the dominant classes.

Finally, it takes the form of a “religion,” because it is increasingly experienced as an unquestionable faith and largely situated beyond the principles of rational Socratic discussion: whoever does not unthinkingly and with fideistic credentials accept the new globalized order will be immediately ostracized, silenced and stigmatized by the language police and the gendarmes of thought as a heretic or as an infidel, dangerously threatening the stability of the mundialist catechesis and its main articles of faith (free movement, integral openness of all material and immaterial reality, borderless competitiveness, etc. ). Globalization thus coincides with the new idolatrous monotheism of the global market, typical of an era that has ceased to believe in God, but not in capital.

In general terms, globalization is nothing other than the theory that describes, reflects and, in turn, prescribes and glorifies the post-Westphalian class-based New World Order, which emerged and stabilized after 1989 and—to take up Lasch’s formula—was ideologically elevated to the rank of true and only heaven. Such is the world entirely subsumed under capital and under the American-centric imperialism of liberalized private capital markets, with collateral export of free market democracy and free desire, and of the anthropology of homo cosmopoliticus.

The symbolic power of the concept of globalization is so invasive that it literally makes it impossible for anyone who dares to question the concept to gain access to public discourse. It is, in this sense, more akin to a religion of obligatory creed than to a theory subject to free discussion and hermeneutics embedded in dialogical reason.

Through categories that have become cornerstones of the capitalist neo-language, any attempt to curb the invasiveness of the market and to challenge the absolute domination of the globalized and American-centric economy is demonized as “totalitarianism,” “fascism,” “Stalinism,” or even “rojipardismo” (red-fascism), the diabolical synthesis of all three. Liberal fundamentalism and globalist free-market totalitarianism also evidence their inability to admit, even ex hypothesi, the theoretical possibility of alternative modes of existence and production.

Any idea of a possible control of the economy and of an eventual regulation of the market and of the open society (with built-in financial despotism) would lead unfailingly, according to the title of a well-known study by Hayek, towards “The Road to Serfdom.” Hayek states it without euphemism: “socialism means slavery.”

Obviously, the theorem of von Hayek and his acolytes does not take into account the fact that totalitarianism is not only the result of political planning, but can also be the consequence of a private competitive action of political rules. In the present Europe, by the way, the danger is not to be identified with nationalism and the return of traditional totalitarianisms, but rather with Hayekian market liberalism and the invisible violence of the subtle club of depoliticized economics.

It is therefore imperative to decolonize the imaginary of current hegemonic conceptions of globalization and try to redefine its contents in an alternative way. To this end, it is necessary to re-understand Marxian social relations as mobile and conflictive, where the gaze flooded with ideology only registers things that are inert and aseptic, rigid and immutable.

In other words, it is necessary to deconstruct the hegemonic image of globalization, showing its non-neutral but class-based character.

When analyzed from the perspective of the globalist ruling classes, globalization may indeed appear enthusiastic and very worthy of praise and empowerment.

For example, Amartya Sen celebrates it most insistently for its greater efficiency in the international division of labor, for the fall in production costs, for the exponential increase in productivity and—to a decidedly more questionable extent—for the reduction of poverty and the general improvement in living and working conditions.

Suffice it to recall, at a first glance at the new millennium, that Europe has 20 million unemployed, 50 million poor and 5 million homeless; and all this while, in the last twenty years in the same Europe, total income has risen by between 50 and 70 percent.

This confirms, in a way that is difficult to refute, the class character of globalization and the progress it generates. From the perspective of the dominated (and thus seen “from below”), it is identified with the very concrete hell of the new technocapitalist power relation, which was consolidated on a planetary scale after 1989 with the intensification of exploitation and commodification, of classism and imperialism.

To this hermeneutic duplicity, which presides over the duplicity of classes in the very fractured post-1989 context, returns the endless debate that has interested and continues to interest the two foci of this frontal contraposition: on the one hand, the apologists of globalization; and on the other, those engaged in the elaboration of the cahier de doléances du mondialisme.

The former (who as a whole can be called “globalists,” despite the kaleidoscopic plurality of their positions), extol the virtues of making the world a market. On the contrary, the latter (who only partially coincide with those whom the public debate has baptized with the name of “sovereigntists”), emphasize the contradictions and the eminently regressive character with respect to the previous framework centered on national sovereignties.

In short, and without delving into the intricacies of a debate that is practically unmanageable because of the quantity of content and diversity of approaches, the panegyrists of globalism insist on how globalization extends the industrial revolution, progress and the conquests of the West to the entire world; or, in other words, how it “universalizes” the achievements of a humanity somehow understood as “superior” and, therefore, entitled to organize the “single file” of linear development of all the peoples of the planet.

Even the most soberly skeptical authors on the axiological value of globalization, such as Stiglitz, seem to suffer from a magnetic and ultimately unjustified attraction to the work of turning the world into a market. In the view of Stiglitz and his reformist optimism, this process, which at the same time also “planetarizes” capitalist inequality and misery, deserves not to be abandoned because of the developments and changes to which it might give rise.

Diego Fusaro is professor of History of Philosophy at the IASSP in Milan (Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies) where he is also scientific director. He is a scholar of the Philosophy of History, specializing in the thought of Fichte, Hegel, and Marx. His interest is oriented towards German idealism, its precursors (Spinoza) and its followers (Marx), with a particular emphasis on Italian thought (Gramsci or Gentile, among others). he is the author of many books, including Fichte and the Vocation of the Intellectual, The Place of Possibility: Toward a New Philosophy of Praxis, and Marx, again!: The Spectre Returns. This article appears courtesy of Posmodernia.

Featured: Playing Chess. Cafe “Dominic,” St. Petersburg, by Hugo Karlovich Bakmanson; painted in 1909.

Turkey, Africa and the World: A Fragmented View

The decomposition of patterns dating back to the Cold War and their ongoing recomposition according to new, but still uncertain parameters, is particularly evident in Africa, where ancient presences are progressively attenuating their influence and new ones are pushing to assert themselves on the continent, despite their own internal problems, while others try return there. An example of it is the fogging of France, the penetration of Turkey, the return of Moscow and the not so clear stance of China.

The reality, however, is more articulated and complex and alliances and hostilities are intertwined in the constant diplomatic game of influences, to which are added imperial and/or neo-imperial dreams, economic interests, internal political needs.

Turkey’s efforts to expand its influence in Africa often align with those of Russia, with both Ankara and Moscow holding back from condemning recent military coups in Sahel and seeking to capitalize on post-colonial resentments growing in the region, especially against France, but widely hostile to the Western economic and political states and architectures (e. g. G7, NATO and EU).

While the analysts look on the Turkish ambitions only towards the Turanic area (Caucasus and former USSR Central Asian republic) and Middle East, Africa is also an important element of the Ankara welt politik and the highly mediatized presence and influence of Turkey in Libya is a mere, even important, part of a broader strategy of influence and penetration in the continent.

A series of military takeovers in West Africa, the latest occurring in Gabon at the end of August, may reveal the extent to which Turkish and Russian efforts converge in trying to leverage political shifts to the detriment of former colonial powers, chiefly among them France, and expand their own influence in the region.

Keen to seize opportunities under the new African governments, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the Russian head of state Vladimir Putin, have refrained from condemning the putschists riding the wave of popular resentment toward the ongoing influence of former colonial powers, their endless exploitation of local natural resources and the failure of Western-led anti-terror operations in the region.

Speaking at a Russia-Africa summit in St. Petersburg shortly after the July coup in Niger, Putin remarked that some manifestations of colonialism remain in Africa and underlie the instability in many regions on the continent.

Erdogan has employed similar rhetoric for years, in particular targeting France, expanding the rift that opposed the two countries in the demarcation of hydrocarbon fields in Eastern Mediterranean waters and the consequent rapprochement of Paris with Greece and Cyprus, and leading to a dangerous confrontation in June 2020 when, when a French frigate under NATO command tried to inspect a Tanzanian-flagged cargo ship suspected of smuggling arms to Libya in violation of the UN embargo, was harassed by three Turkish navy vessels escorting this one. A Turkish ship flashed its radar lights and its crew put on bulletproof vests and stood behind their light weapons.

However, as many other aspects of the Russian-Turkish relationship, also there is a strong background of ambiguity, giving the divergent strategic and long-term objectives. But this ambiguity is present as well with the relationship with NATO, of which Ankara is full member, and EU, and these ambiguities reflect, paradoxically, the firmness of Turkey in finding her own way, space and ambitions, regardless the expectations of partners/competitors, but the dreams of Ankara’s leadership could be undermined by intrinsic fragilities, weakness and fracture affecting the country.

In August 2020, just after the coup, the (then) FM Mevlut Cavusoglu visited Mali, putting his opportunism on striking display and openly irritating (further) France and US. However, after the coup in Niger (July 2023), Ankara has been more prudent expressing concern for the toppled President Bazoum and the suspension of democratic framework (the prudence of statement in Niger could be read as concern also for the presence of a quite large group of Turkish aid workers there). Ankara had issued an almost identical statements after the other recent coups, in Burkina Faso in September 2022 and in Gabon in August 2023.

Hyping the attention received from Russia and Turkey is politically advantageous for the juntas, as it allows them to claim that they are not without alternatives while breaking with France. French President Emmanuel Macron openly pointed out Moscow and Ankara of seeking to exciting and exploiting the anti-French sentiment in Africa. “There is a strategy at work, sometimes led by African leaders, but especially by foreign powers such as Russia or Turkey who play on post-colonial resentment,” he already said in a 2020 interview to the Paris-based weekly ‘Jeune Afrique’. “We must not be naive on this subject: many of those who speak, who make videos, who are present in the French-speaking media are funded by Russia or Turkey.”

With the military governments in Mali and Burkina Faso, Russia got the opportunity to expand the presence of the Wagner Group, the Moscow-funded private military company, (even now the fate of these contractors appears uncertain in the whole contingent, giving that for example, all of them were withdrew from Libya). For Turkey, the primary objective is to strengthen military ties through training programs and arms sales, including the named and very coveted combat drones. Turkish military sales to Africa rose to $288 million in 2021 from $83 million the previous year. Turkey now lists 14 clients on the continent: Algeria, Burkina Faso, Chad, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Somalia and Uganda.

Erdogan expressed his readiness to boost military cooperation with Mali in September 2021 during a phone call with Assimi Goita, head of the junta government (since then, Mali has received several Bayraktar TB2 drones). But Turkey expanded dramatically the diplomatic fingerprint in the continent, opening embassies (today are 43, and there are plans to open new diplomatic facility in Bissau, while the member states of the African Union are 54 and Turkey is the fourth most represented country in the continent after the US, China and France), consulates, development aid offices (22) and expanding trade (more than 100 US$ Billions last year). Turkey had opened its embassy in Bamako in 2010, with Erdogan making his first presidential visit in 2018. There are of course up and downs; while in Mali, the Turkish presence is only in sending drones, in Somalia, where Ankara has a military base in Mogadishu, Turksom, where since autumn 2017 Turkish 300 CO and NCOs, train Somali soldiers (till now 10.000 completed their training programme).

Modern Turkey’s current engagement with Africa officially started in 2005 after Turkey declared 2005 “the year of Africa” and adopted a new policy of “opening up to Africa.” Since then, it was seeing Turkey’s diplomatic venture in the continent because, according to the Turkish foreign ministry, relations with Africa constitute one of the key foreign policy objectives and opening new diplomatic missions enhances Turkey’s relations with the continent.

Also, Turkey was granted observer status by the AU in 2005 and later became a strategic partner in 2008 with its first Turkey-Africa summit in Istanbul in the same year. Focal points in the Istanbul summit were a “common future,” “cooperation” and “solidarity” between the participating parties. Moreover, both Turkey and African partners have agreed to implement a concrete programme of action based on equality, mutual respect and reciprocal benefits. The second summit between Turkey and African states was held in Equatorial Guinea’s capital, Malabo, in 2014 in accordance with the Istanbul Declaration’s follow-up mechanism, which demarcated that summits are to be held every three years and ministerial review conferences every three years. In Malabo, the Joint Implementation Plan for the period of 2015-2019 was accepted by the participants.

Nevertheless, Turkey’s Africa policy is not limited to periodical summits. Official visits to African countries play an important role in developing Turkey’s cooperation with Africa too. In this regard, Turkish President Erdoğan has visited 30 different African countries, including war-torn Somalia, a couple of times in the last 15 years. This is usually considered a record for a non-African leader. After a two-year interruption due to the coronavirus pandemic, he started his Africa tour once again from Angola, Togo and Nigeria in October 2021 and make another tour in 2022, visiting DRC (where it was signed a pact of military cooperation and assistance) and Senegal.

Turkey’s history in the continent goes back to the 16th Century when the Ottomans first arrived in North Africa. Later, Ottoman territory expanded across the shores of the Red and Mediterranean seas and towards the Sahel region. The Ottomans remained a ruling power in Africa for four centuries and established five separate administrations in Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Eritrea. However, in 1912, Ottoman forces retreated from Libya, the last stronghold in the continent, expelled by the Italian colonialist push. Although it is quite rich, the Ottomans’ historical legacy in the continent still remains unexplored by academics. In addition, during the Republican era, Turkey focus shifted to the West.

While Turkey carries some Ottoman baggage in North and East Africa, Russia has no colonial past in the region, which gives it an edge in terms of perception and now Putin emphasize it as tool for his assault to global power. In addition, bilateral ties fostered during the Cold War make things easier for Moscow than Turkey, which remain a member of NATO and could awake some suspicions. Whereas Turkey (along with Russia) was seen as a rival of France in Mali, the main rivalry in both Burkina Faso and Niger appears to pit France against Russia.

Niger, giving her geographical position as hub linking western and eastern Africa, carries more importance for Turkey’s opening to Africa than Mali. Turkey has signed 29 agreements with Niger since opening an embassy in Niamey in 2012. Erdogan paid a visit in 2013, and the following year, President Mahamadou Issoufou traveled to Ankara. In 2021, Turkish Vice President Fuat Oktay attended the inauguration ceremony of Bazoum, who then traveled to Turkey for a diplomatic forum in 2022, where he met with Erdogan. Many other Nigerien senior officials and ministers have visited Turkey as well since 2021. Bilateral trade stood at $134 million last year, up from $46 million in 2012, and an agreement on military training cooperation was among the deals that (the then) FM Cavusoglu signed when he visited Niger in July 2020. After a phone call with Bazoum in November 2021, Erdogan said that Turkey would help boost Niger’s defense capabilities by supplying it with TB2 drones, armored vehicles and Hurkus light trainer and combat aircraft, in the frame of rearmament policy inaugurated by that country to face the Islamist terrorist pressure. At least six TB2s have been delivered to Niger since then, but claims of plans for a Turkish military base in Niger have not been confirmed.

The junta in Niger withdrew the country’s ambassadors from France, Nigeria, Togo and the United States, but revoked military deals with only France. It is unlikely to halt defense cooperation with Turkey. Reluctant to explicitly condemn the coup and be hostile against an intervention by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), Ankara look to protect her interests and enlarging it furtherly in the sub region of Sahel, expel France and limit the influences of US, Russia and China.

As above said, Niger is in a critical geographical point and in a peculiar momentum and the persistent instability of Nyamey, despite the ongoing normalization with US (which recently de facto accepted the quasi legitimacy of the military junta) may represent a risk for the subregional and continental ambitions and plans of Ankara.

The low intensity conflict in Niger (as well for Chad) could be sealed with the one which affect the instability of South-West Libya and Western Fezzan. After years of heavy, but ineffectual, civil war, the country is still split in two (officially, while in reality there are at least 5 entities/areas under different power and/or influence). Ankara want to defend the position acquired with the Tripoli-based institutions (also based on the fact that Turkish military appeared to be the key element of the struggle against of the general Afthar-led forces offensive, which, by the way, were supported by hundreds of Russian military contractors and thousands of mercenaries from Niger, Chad, Sudan). Turkey might be in tactical convergence with Russia, but she damaged by the Russian factor elsewhere in Africa as it is in Libya. Turkey wants to keep the agreements on defense, maritime delineation and energy exploration with the Tripoli-based government, with the political aim to marginalize Italy and (again) France from Libya.

The changing political landscape in Africa may offer Turkey opportunities to expand its areas of influence, but any prospect of gaining new footholds on the continent, such as its permanent base in Somalia or its de facto base in Libya, appears unlikely at present.

But as mentioned above, under a general view, Erdogan in its look to dismantle the legacy of Ataturk, may be in unconsciously, he walks in the path of political doctrine of the last period of Ottoman Empire.

With the decline of the Ottoman Empire, playing on the contradictions of powers to protect its interests, it was the central doctrine of the international policy of the Sublime Porte and particularly of Sultan Abdulhamid II.

The bet quickly became untenable and led the Empire to numerous setbacks. The construction of the Republic in 1923 must initially be understood as an attempt to break with this strategic framework.

Turkey of Erdogan has been able to reconnect with a certain influence and advance its pawns, it is, systematically, by benefiting from the contradictions of world powers, seeking first to exploit all the interstices from which it could benefit.

The opening of two military bases abroad, one in Doha (formally opened in 2015, even training programme existed since 2022), the other in Somalia, was firstly the result of local conflicts and the disengagement of Western states having a preponderance history in these regions. The dynamism of its defense industry, materialized by the production of drones or the delivery of a drone carrier for the national navy, directly contributes to Turkey’s interventionism in numerous conflicts.

But here again, it benefits from international contradictions and confrontations, like the support of Azerbaijan, against Armenia, getting advantage of Russia’s strategic refocusing in Ukraine (and consequent quagmire).

Likewise, recent years have seen Turkish companies enter new markets. Still using the African parameters, in 2022 there were 225 of them operating on the African continent, particularly in the construction, textile and infrastructure sectors, compared to only three in 2005. Turkey has notably benefited from the challenge to the monopoly of the former colonial powers initiated by other actors and in particular China.

Above all, in the last period, diplomatic balancing has become a trademark and a means of affirmation for the Turkish president, oscillating between Moscow and Washington, asserting his place in NATO, slowing the adhesion of Sweden (blackmailing Washington in order to get spare parts for the F-16’s fleet, practically grounded) the Atlantic Alliance, and applying for membership within the Bejing tool of SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization), or playing a pivotal role between Russia and Ukraine.

Ankara’s diplomacy aims to obtain, piecemeal, as many concessions as possible from appropriate allies. It thus allows Russia to circumvent international sanctions, to benefit from massive imports of energy products.

However, Turkey’s current policy thus risks transforming strategic opportunism into critical vulnerability, but there are, as above mentioned, elements of fragility. Turkish foreign trade is already experiencing a record deficit due to the exponential growth of Russian hydrocarbon imports. The country has lost its food sovereignty, and entire sections of its economy are directly backed by foreign financing, particularly from the Gulf states. The development of its defense industrial base, despite some important achievements, like an indisputable experience on the drone sectors, still suffers from critical dependencies for fundamental parts, such as engine construction, which obstructs the path to real strategic autonomy.

To encourage foreign investment and strategic rapprochements, a large part of the country’s state property productive assets has been privatized and dependence on food and energy imports fuels inflationary loops (and the new finance minister signalled to further privatize important sectors, but his problem is to privilege domestic buyers and avoid foreign influences and the potential domestic buyers have limited finances).

Finally, building the country’s power to mirror the game of the great international powers weighs heavily on Turkish society. Faced with the loss of sovereignty, this strategy fuels a nationalism encouraged by political power. To reassure partners about the reliability and stability of the country, this path encourages a tenuous, and often brutal, supervision of the population which participates, moreover, in the growing questioning of secularism.

The imposition of religion in the political field and in all dimensions of society cannot mask the growing secularization of the Turkish population, and particularly its youth. The need for the AKP to increasingly resort to religious themes in its mode of governance constitutes, ultimately, both an admission of weakness and a signal sent to the outside world. It helps to channel its youth and impose its political agenda, but at the same time reinforce the secularism in social and geographical areas. It also supports Turkey’s strategic realignment, both economic and diplomatic, giving guarantees to the States of the Gulf, North Africa, Central Asia and the Balkans which now constitute strategic partners that Recep Tayyip Erdogan intends to use as support (especially the ones, like in the Gulf, which have a financial leverage) to help the recovery of the national economy and lower the prices (it should be recalled that the ‘Erdoganomic’, or lower prices, was a key element of the electoral successes of AKP).

How much longer will this strategic opportunism allow Recep Tayyip Erdogan to remain in power in the face of a shrinking social base? This is an essential question for the Republic of Turkey, on his centenary.

Enrico Magnani, PhD, is a retired UN official and expert in military history and international politico-military affairs.

On The Right to Live in Your Own Home and Live with Dignity

1 – During his recent speeches in Marseilles (September 2023), Pope Francis reminded us of the “right of migrants to remain in their homes and lead a dignified life.”

A “right” implies a relationship of exigibility, between the holder of that right and any person, physical or moral, obliged to recognize and respect it. In this context, the holder of the right is the migrant; the person obliged to guarantee it is primarily the state.

The Pope thus understands that the right to remain in one’s home is primary, antecedent to the right to leave one’s homeland. Migration from one country to another must be a free choice, rather than a constraint for many, provoked by violence of all kinds: hunger and thirst, war, misery, persecution, ideological madness. This notion deserves a closer look.

2 – In the expression “chez soi” (“in your own home”), the word “chez” comes from the Latin “casa” (“house”), which gave rise to “case” in French. It designates the fundamental dwelling, the “thatched farmhouse” of the song, which remains at the bottom of one’s heart wherever one goes, and whose intimacy and personal character is emphasized by the pronoun “soi” (“your own”).

The “chez-soi” is thus not just a legal domicile, nor a more or less ephemeral residence. It is the human, protective place, inscribed in a physical and spiritual space, where warm, living roots have taken root. The place of initial “little things” where, as in César Isella’s poem, everyone always returns, in one way or another, because it is the place “where they loved life.”

The “right to stay at your own home” is therefore the right to keep these roots, and to continue to live from them, where they were born. A rootedness that cannot, however, retain this vital virtue unless it is itself continually nourished and invigorated. No one settles near a dried-up tree or a dried-up spring without being forced, sooner or later, to migrate.

For a “home” to remain such, its roots must be nourished by a tradition, both cultural and religious, that is preserved and enriched, a tradition that is nothing other than the permanence of the identity of a “home” renewed over time.

3 – The purpose of the “right to remain in one’s own home” is therefore not limited to the physical maintenance of a place. The purpose assigned to it confirms this. The right to remain in one’s own home is “to lead a life of dignity.” The right to remain in one’s own home thus implies the right to a dignified life.

Dignified life” does not simply mean “feeding, growing and dying by oneself” (Aristotle, Treatise on the Soul, II 1, 412-414) in a chosen place, after having enjoyed it in a variety of ways. Nor does it simply mean living in conditions of material or economic sufficiency, as expressions such as “dignified housing” or “dignified working conditions” might suggest.

Dignity, in fact, is an essential and inalienable property of the person, insofar as he or she is rational and free. It is the radiance of “that which is most perfect in all nature; namely, that which subsists in a reasonable nature” (Thomas Aquinus, Summa theologica, Ia, q. 29, a. 3.). It follows that “dignified life” is that which enables everyone, according to their natural vocation, to live and grow to the height of humanity, the material conditions mentioned above being ordered to this vocation. Respect for natural law, which reflects divine wisdom, the promotion of the family as the original “home,” education in truth, love and transcendence, and the cultivation and practice of justice are the primary conditions for a dignified life.

4 – Thus founded on the principle of human dignity, which French law recognizes must be protected against any infringement (art. 16 of the French Civil Code), the “right to remain in one’s own home and lead a dignified life” reveals its true dimension: it is a fundamental right with, as such, universal value.

In this respect, it is not the privilege of the migrant. Its purpose is not simply to measure the freedom to come and go, to stay at home or go into exile. This right is the ultimate expression of every human being’s natural inclination to live in society, not only to find security there, but also—and above all—to find and keep that deep-rooted “home” that is destined to be the nurturing place, familial and social, for his or her total human, material and spiritual fulfillment.

The “right to stay at home and lead a dignified life” also belongs to citizens of host countries. Being universal, it is fundamentally equal for those who welcome migrants into their homes and for those who, having seen this right violated, are forced into exile.

Two conclusions, at least, can be drawn from this, which are rarely present in discourses on migration.

5 – The first is that the fundamental nature of the right being invoked conditions not only the political freedoms of those who hold it. It also sheds light on the state of health of societies that are, or are not, in a position to guarantee and promote it.

Societies that not only exhaust the economic capacities of their members, but also feed systemic lies and manipulation, moral and mental degradation, educational ruin, sanitized homicide or other forms of violence—physical, legal or ideological—contrary to the dignity of the human person, are certainly not the right setting for the creation or permanence of a “home” enabling its members to grow humanely.

So it is, of course, with the societies that migrants are forced to flee, precisely because of this. But the same is true of the societies they join, when these societies offer them nothing but their materialism, their self-hatred, their break with natural law and the degradation of their culture and mores. So, it is hardly surprising that these migrants cannot find a national “home” in which to integrate. Failing that, they prefer to try and rebuild the community they were forced to leave.

Nor are migrants the only victims of this decivilization. The first are the citizens of these societies, where the common good, in particular, is no longer the raison d’être of the law. Many of them are struggling against their own uprooting and that of their children. As a result, they are at risk of becoming exiles from within, forced to nurture a “home” against the grain, from family to workplace to school, that preserves their Christian identity, historical tradition, language and culture.

6 – The second conclusion is that if this “right to remain in one’s own home and lead a dignified life” is fundamental and universal, and thus equal for all, then it is particularly binding on the migrant himself. They are obliged to respect it in those who welcome them—or are unable to welcome them. For them, too, the right to “stay at home and live with dignity” and in peace is prior to the right to migrate. It is therefore prior to the rights of those who intend to migrate home. Indeed, it is even among those who do not migrate, by hypothesis, that the exercise of the right to remain at home to live with dignity and in peace is perfect.

It is therefore not without subversion of the natural order that we try, under the guise of charity, to make the citizens of host countries believe that their right to stay at home should take a back seat to the right to migrate of those who cross their borders. In the dialectic imposed by Pope Francis between the “culture of humanity and fraternity,” supposedly virtuous, and the “culture of indifference,” supposedly criminal (Pope Francis, Address, Palais du Pharo, Marseille, September 23, 2023), there is a legal and human space which is that of respect for the fundamental rights of all.

When the phenomenon of migration undermines or threatens the security, habitat, culture, way of life or religion of a host country, to the point where its citizens no longer feel at home and can no longer live there with dignity and security, and are sometimes forced to flee, it necessarily undermines what is, for them, a fundamental right. To this extent, the phenomenon is a grave social injustice, commensurate with the rights it violates, which cannot be ignored.

7 – That is why, between the right of some to migrate and the right of others to “stay at home” to live in peace and dignity, a measure is needed to determine the balance between them. This measure is that of the common good—or, if you like, the general interest. Each State, which is its natural guardian, just as it is the guardian of the fundamental rights of its citizens, has the right, and even the duty, to establish this measure, so that the rights of the former do not prevail over the rights of the latter.

This is the condition and limit of any migration policy. It requires the government to determine when it can welcome immigrants, and under what economic and social conditions, and when it cannot. It requires the government to know how to refuse immigration when it appears that it can no longer be integrated and infringes on citizens’ fundamental rights.

To see this as a “criminal indifference” contrary to charity is to be fooled by political fideism, whereas the demands of charity never erase those of nature. Yet for a long time now, we have been hearing the much-needed lesson of Saint Thomas, which no longer seems to be understood, but which must be repeated over and over again: “Divine right, which proceeds from grace, does not take away human right, which proceeds from natural reason” (Thomas Aquinus, Summa theologica, IIa IIae, q. 10 a. 10).

Patrick de Pontonx is a lawyer based in Paris, France.

Featured: Salon, anonymous, 1857.

Hunkagate, or How “Inglourious Basterds” Eat Crow

Note to self: The Nazis are no longer the bad guys, the Russians are.

So, why is it so surprising that Justin Trudeau honored a former Waffen SS veteran (Yaroslav Hunka), in parliament, on September 22, 2023? There is no point in insulting our own intelligence by even considering that it was solely the fault of one man (Anthony Rota), and no one else even knew what Rota was up to. The fact is, Canada has long protected and nurtured Ukrainian Nazis and many other extremists. It is a venerable Canadian tradition.

As well, it is also a long tradition that Ukrainians very closely police their history, to make sure that their Nazism is played down, and Russia’s is always vilified. So, Mr. Trudeau’s honoring of Hunka is the way things are done in Canada. Hunka was honored back in 2007, by the Canadian Congress of Ukrainians, which is closely associated with Mr. Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland, his Deputy Prime Minister and Canada’s Minister of Finance:

So, the whole drama of never knowing who Hunka is, that he was foisted upon the well-meaning, unsuspecting parliamentarians by Rota is simply false. The man was moving about a lot in government circles.

This honoring of a Ukrainian and Canadian “hero” appears to be carefully scripted to please the neo-Nazis in Ukraine who are the real powers broker in that sad country. Hunka was Trudeau’s bowing to that power.

As well, it is an old custom among Ukrainian nationalists to mitigate the Nazis and deflect to Russia as evil. This is something that the West has been doing ever since the war in Ukraine began, where it has become an attempt to rewrite history: not all Nazis were bad, while all Russians are evil, always have been and are the natural enemy of mankind, ever since Adam and Co wended their way east of Eden.

This sort of re-imagining of history has been done before (and successfully) with ancient Egypt, which has been transformed into a sub-Saharan (Bantu) civilization, which it most certainly never was. In the same way, the Nazis are being re-imagined as fighters against the Russians, the new bad guys.

Mr. Trudeau’s honoring of Hunka was mirrored later in Mr. Anthony Blinken’s recent Tweet, in which he mentioned the slaughter at Babiy Yar—in order to vilify Russia. Here is what he said:

The Nazis are being erased from atrocities so that Russians can be photo-shopped in, because the past is fluid, like gender. Therefore, like Mr. Trudeau, Mr. Blinken must de-emphasize the truth of history in order to traduce the Russians—even though it was Ukrainian Nazis (men like Hunka) who played an integral role in the slaughter at Babiy Yar.

Maria Zakharova, representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, gave the perfect response to all this re-imagining:

Anthony Blinken allowed himself to lie about one of the most horrific tragedies of the Second World War: the execution of the civilian population of Soviet Kyiv on September 29-30, 1941 in the Babi Yar tract. Then the Nazis, having occupied the territory of the city, began “cleansing” operations. Within a few days, tens of thousands of Jews, Gypsies, and Soviet prisoners of war were killed. On the 29th and 30th alone, the German fascists brutally literally destroyed 34 thousand people – this is exactly what Blinken remembered, cynically lying (more about this below) about the memory of this tragedy in the USSR, and also “forgetting” that executions continued until the liberation of Kiev by the Red Army in November 1943.

Also, on September 20, 2023, Ursula von der Leyen gave a speech to the Atlantic Council, in which she indulged in the same re-imagining of history:

Distinguished guests, there is a Japanese proverb that tells a lot about the country and about its prime minister. It says onkochishin and it means “explore the past to learn new things.” You, dear Prime Minister, showed me the meaning of this proverb during the G7 summit in Japan last year. You brought us to your hometown of Hiroshima, the place where you have your roots and which has deeply shaped your life and leadership. Many of your relatives lost their life when the atomic bomb razed Hiroshima to the ground. You have grown up with the stories of the survivors. And you wanted us to listen to the same stories, to face the past, and learn something about the future.

It was a sobering start to the G7, and one that I will not forget, especially at a time when Russia threatens to use nuclear weapons once again. It is heinous. It is dangerous. And in the shadow of Hiroshima, it is unforgivable.

Onkochishin, indeed. “Russia threatens to use nuclear weapons once again.” This time the USA has been erased and Russia photo-shopped in. In Ms. von der Leyen’s mind, the Russians dropped two bombs on Japan, and we cannot let them do that again, can we. And the USA comes out smelling like a proverbial rose, like the Ukrainians. This is not historical revisionism at all, but a complete erasing the recent past, all played out for a public that is brainwashed by Hollywood as per fare like Inglourious Basterds.

Returning to our “hero,” notice how carefully he was scriped: seated, front-and-center in the gallery where all could easily see him. Notice the Canadian army officers, smiling and clapping (impossible that even they knew no Canadian history).

The careful packaging of Hunka is also evident in the introduction that the now ex-Speaker of the House, Anthony Rota, gave before the yappy seals, aka, members of Parliament. Here’s the script that he was handed, and which, to his great credit, he read very awkwardly. These were not words that he was not comfortable with, but was forced to perform them:

We have here in the Chamber today a Ukrainian-Canadian World… veteran, from the Second World War, who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians, and continues to support the troops today, at the venerable age of 98 (spontaneous standing ovation and cheering). His name is Yaroslav Hunka. And I was going to say that he’s in the gallery, but I think you beat me to that (self-congratulatory laughter). But I am very proud to say that he is from North Bay and from my riding of Nipissing-Timiskaming (more applause). He’s a Ukrainian hero, a Canadian hero, and we thank him for all his service. Thank you. (More applause).

The official state propagandists, the CBC, blithely reported that while Zelensky’s “speech received at least a dozen standing ovations. There was also one for this man (a shot of Hunka sitting in the gallery), a 98-year-old Ukrainian-Canadian who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians during the Second World War” (CBC News). Notice the same careful scripting: dim the Nazis and in order to asperse the Russians.

And this packaging nearly worked. Who wouldn’t feel grateful to a 98-year-old war veteran? And the general public wouldn’t even know when World War Two happened.

Enter Warren Thornton, in Britian. It was he who first noticed as to what had happened in the Canadian Parliament. He just pointed out the obvious: in World War Two, the only ones fighting the Russians were the Nazis and their ilk, because the Russians (or Soviets at that time) were “our” allies. Ergo, Hunka could not be anything other than a Nazi.

Unwittingly backing up Mr. Thornton was AP, which non-chalantly noted that Hunka had been a member of the “First Ukrainian Division.” Sounds harmless enough and armyish, as befits a veteran. AP just threw this bit of information out there, confident that their readers would nary blink an eyelid.

Those who know a little about such things will immediately spot the problem: “First Ukrainian Division” was a later name for the 1st Galician Division , or the 14th Grenadiers of the Waffen SS. The Division had a lackluster career as a fighting Nazi unit, and it was involved in various atrocities, largely against Poles, Jews and other Ukrainians.

Back in the day, there was also much controvery when these Ukronazis were brought into Canada in the late 1940s and 1950s; for various reasons, the government supported and protected them (the Cold War, in which Nazis were now friends and the Russians the enemy). With great loyalty, Canada has always protected Ukrainian Nazis. For example, in 1986, a Commission, looking into the “alleged” crimes of the 1st Galician, concluded: “If the only allegation against a resident of Canada is that he was a member of the Galicia Division that is not an individual which we consider should be made the subject of an investigation by your Commission. If the allegation is that while he was a member of the Division, he committed atrocities at such-and-such a place, if there is evidence of the committing of atrocities alleged in the information which was conveyed to us, then that person becomes of interest to your Commission.”

The logic of this conclusion is still prevalent, where simply being a member of the Waffen SS does not automatically make you a criminal. Crime has to be proven first, since we all know that the majority of the SS were just regular guys doing doing charity work. And the Banderite stalwarts at the BBC agree: “The Galicia Division has been accused of committing war crimes, but its members have never been found guilty in a court of law.” So, there. What’s the problem of honoring a Waffen SS veteran? They were doing great work in Europe against the Russians, and they still are!

Back in Britian, Mr. Thornton was rewarded for all his hard work by being promptly arrested for spreading “malinformation.” This is information that is true but which the government feels can cause “harm.” So, British authorities were busy protecting Hunka, since we can’t have anyone maligning the Nazis, can we? Thankfully, Mr. Thornton was released because he hung tough.

Having been caught in the ensuing ruckus that Mr. Thornton started, the Canadian MPs, including Mr. Trudeau, gave vent to all manner of condemnation—of an event that they themselves planned and implemented, and in which they themselves enthusiastically participated.

Video evidence clearly shows that they were all applauding—including Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the Conservative Party (and all his MPs) and Jagmeet Singh, the leader of the lefty New Democratic Party (and all his MPs), and of course Trudeau and all his crowd.

In fact, all 338 MPs (no matter what their affiliation) were on their feet applauding Hunka of the SS, who, it must be said, rather masterfully controlled his instinct to give a “proper” salute from the balcony, and went instead with a raised, clenched fist.

Yarosalv Hunka in the Canadian parliament (September 22, 2023).

And this same Mr. Poilievre, now so outraged, had this to say to Christine Anderson of the German AfD, who was visiting Canada back in February 2023: “Frankly, it would be better if Anderson never visited Canada in the first place. She and her racist, hateful views are not welcome here.”

But Mr. Poilievre gave Hunka two standing ovations, because Hunka’s “racist, hateful views” are perfectly welcome, and belong in Canada’s House of Commons, since they are against a common enemy (Russia). Like Mr. Trudeau and Mr. Singh (the less said about him, the better), Mr. Poilievre understands perfectly which side his globalist bread is buttered on.

The concerted outrage came two days late and a dollar short, because it was so convenient and thus contrived.

Why did all these now-outraged MPs not loudly boo and hiss the presence of Hunka on September 22nd? Why did none of them angrily storm out of the chamber? Why did none of them refuse to stand up? Why did none of them refuse to clap? Why did none of them denounce Hunka precisely when Rota introduced him? Why only after Mr. Thornton’s revelations? Only when their gamble failed, for they were rightly counting on the public’s ignorance. Notice it was only Mr. Thornton who noticed. No one else.

The Government House Leader, Karina Gould, explained what truly, truly (honestly) happened:

Mr. Speaker, like all members of this chamber, I am incredibly disappointed in the fact that this individual was invited, as you yourself, Mr. Speaker, have confirmed by you, was recognized in the gallery. I found out just like every other member in this house at that time that this individual was present. This is deeply embarrassing for us as parliamentarians, as Canadians, and it is something that I think all of us take extremely seriously, and I would ask my honorable colleagues not to politicize this moment. Thank you, Mr. Speaker… Mr. Speaker as a descendant of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, I am personally very hurt by the fact that this chamber recognized this individual, and I am sure that everyone feels the same way in this chamber. The Parliamentary Protective Service had the appropriate screening in place to ensure the security of last Friday’s event and that is what I was referring to. Mr. Speaker. But what I can continue to say is that we all must take this seriously because it is hurting many communities.

Translation:

Look. We’re all guilty as Hell. We all clapped like trained seals. But since we’re all birds of a feather, let’s put this behind us, and let’s just stop talking about it, and soon the Great Unwashed will forget that any of this ever happened. Why pee and pooh in the trough where we all feed. The more you talk about this, the more Putin wins. Is that what you really want? Let’s move on and do what we’re really here to do, which is to bring about the New World Order. Besides, can you imagine what it’s going to be like for me at my synagogue now? Have a heart. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Her claim of not knowing who Hunka is, is very odd, since there is a selfie of her warmly clutching Hunka’s hand and smiling with much joy (a selfie that she has since deleted… and which is now being scrubbed from the Internet, so we’re saving it). Ms. Gould’s Jewishness was not an issue at the time of the selfie.

Can anyone still argue with a straight face that there are no Nazis in Ukraine because Zelensky is a Jew?

And if Ms. Gould is now so upset, why not simply resign? In fact, the entire 338 members of Parliament should resign—starting with Trudeau, and they all should never be allowed to set foot inside the Parliament buildings again. They have thoroughly sullied them.

Karina Gould, a relative of Mr. Hunka, Anthony Rota, Mr. Hunka (seated).

Later, Ms. Gould introduced a motion to strike Hunka from the parliamentary records—to wash the slate clean; nothing happened. Zelensky came, we gve him tons of cash, and he left. Yawn. Cancel culture is a Canadian “value.” And how quiet is Zelelnsky about all this…

Another egregious example of this outrage is one Ya’ara Saks, a Liberal MP from a Toronto riding, and who is also Jewish. Back when the Truckers’ Protest was labeled a “Nazi-rally” by Trudeau, Ms. Saks (a Trudeau stalwart), angrily stood up in parliament and declared that when truckers honked their horns, it actually meant “Hail Hitler.”

So, what does Ms. Saks applauding (thrice) for Hunka actually mean for Ms. Saks? There are other MPs who are Jews (including Melissa Lantzman, a Conservative)—all of them applauded. Only after being exposed are they now outraged. Ah, yes, Jews can’t be Nazis.

Some context: Back in April 7, 2022, Zelensky was invited to speak, via video, to the Greek parliament. Part of his speech included exhortations by two members of the neo-Nazi Azov battalion. All the Greek parliamentarians at once condemned what Zelensky had done, since he had foisted Nazis upon them without forewarning. They did not applaud and did not take two days to be outraged.

Why did the Canadian parlimentarians not behave this way? In fact, why did Zelensky say nothing; instead he was fist-pumping and beaming, since he knows who keeps him in power; or rather who holds him hostage.

One might wonder, why was this done? The official version—it was entirely Rota’s doing, and Hunka is from his riding. And, dutifully, Rota assumed the posture of the scapegoat, apologized and resigned (doubtless he will be amply rewarded down the road). Of course, had Trudeau and his MPs known what Rota was up to, they would have kiboshed the whole thing at once, because Mr. Trudeau’s moral compass is second to none when it comes to spotting Nazis, especially among people he dislikes.

But this “defense,” this evocation of ignorance by all 338 MPs, just does not wash. Rota very clearly announced what he was about to do—and only then did all 338 of them leap to their feet in Russophobic zealotry, and before Rota could even finish the introduction proper, which even he found a tad surprising: “You beat me to that.” What, a Ukrainian “freedom fighter” battling the evil Russians from long ago, living right here in Canada? Huzzah!

This appeal to ignorance is given the lie by a photo, taken by a granddaughter of Hunka’s, in which she explains that he is waiting to meet both Zelensky and Trudeau. Who are we to believe? Trudeau or the rather innocent remark of granddaughter? What a tough choice!

The image in full, in case the photo also disappears:

But then, the Nazis and the Trudeaus are old acquaintances. His father (Pierre Eliot), during the Second World War, rode around on a motorbike wearing a Nazi helmet to stick it to the Anglos, since their war against Hitler was not his war. And the current Deputy Prime Minister (the eminence grise behind Justin), Chrystia Freeland, her grandfather ran a pro-Nazi newspaper in Ukraine during those years in which Hunka was a “hero.” And her uncle (Myroslav Shkandrij) has just published a book defending the actions of the 1st Galician Division and whitewashing all their atrocities as “unstantiated,” unproven in any court of law (see BBC above), and therefore claims of Ukrainian brutality are nothing but… you guessed it, “Russian propaganda.”

In Trudeau’s Canada, the government has also been busy removing and, yes, destroying statues that might be reminders of the many achievements of Old Stock Canadians—but try defacing a monument to Roman Shukhevych, the man deeply involved in the Holocaust in Ukraine, and you will be arrested and charged. There are various Ukronazi monuments in Canada, a country in which 4 percent of the population is of Ukrainian origin: after the Second World War, 45,000 Ukrainians were brought into the country, and many thousands of these were from disbanded Nazi units.

Trudeau’s affinity for Nazsim gets darker yet. Why does he believe that to say there are Nazis in Ukraine is Russian propaganda? In his visit to Ukraine, in June 2023, he met with Andrij Melnyk, who is the lead proponent of this school of thought, where history must be reimagined in order to malign the Russians and who has famously said: “That is the narrative [Nazi-Ukraine] that the Russians are pushing to this day, and that has support in Germany, in Poland, and also in Israel.” History is just a narrative. History has no facts. From his actions in Parliament and elsewhere, it would seem that is is also what Mr. Trudeau believes.

Mr. Trudeau further echoed Melnyk when he came out in his own defense in Hunkagate: “It’s going to be really important that all of us push back against Russian propaganda, Russian disinformation, and continue our steadfast and unequivocal support for Ukraine.” We will soon discover that it was the Russians who brought Hunka to the House of Commons; it was the Russians who forced Mr. Trudeau to clap and nod his head approvingly; it was the Russians that forced all 338 MPs to jump to their feet and applaud wildly. The depth of Russian connivance knows no bounds, but they’re also weak and stupid.

This statement by Trudeau is also a directive to the Canadian legacy media, which he richly funds. He is tellng them to now drop the whole matter, bury the story and move on. If you keep repeating this story, you are working for Putin. Many have gotten the message: “Canada just made Vladimir Putin’s day, a chance for him to try to claim he’s fighting Nazis in Ukraine, an idea dismissed as nonsense by most of the world but a favourite topic of the Russian leader” (Rick Bell, Calgary Sun). Notice the lie, which is not even subtle… “dismissed as nonsense by most of the world.” Amazing how one reporter, in one Canadian newspaper, can speak with authority for “most of the world.” Ignorance—the most vital ingredient for success in propaganda.

So, the message to the legacy media is that if you keep repeating this story, you will prove Putin right—Ukraine does indeed have a serious and deep-seated Nazi problem. Stay on narrative… In Mr. Trudeau’s world, the only Nazis are the Trucker Protestors, and anyone else who disagrees with him. Therefore, “honk-honk” really does mean, “Hail Hitler,” and it’s OK for a Jew to clutch a Nazi’s hand for a heart-warming selfie. This is why Hunka is a Canadian hero—for the real enemy of Canada is not the Nazis, they never were; it’s the Russians. The jig might be up for Hunka as Poland wants him extradited for crimes his Division committed there. But Hunka need not worry. Canada will never extradict him.

And by the time elections come around (2025), all this will be long forgotten, and Canadians will once again blithely vote for the Uniparty agenda: climate change and gender equality. Hunka can live out his days in peace. But who will speak for the victims of his SS Division?

In the meantime, in the words of Melnyk:

C.B. Forde lives in a small community, in Ontario, Canada.

Is Canada now a Nazi State?

Canada today is a monstrous Woke machine, finely calibrated to yield the globalist new world order of green economics and eugenics (aka, gender equality, transgenderism, euthanasia). This machine was constructed by the wildly popular Canadian prime minister, Pierre Eliot Trudeau, the father of Justin.

Political systems do not really disappear; they may fall into disuse for a while, until someone finds a use for them, and they reappear in a fresh iteration. Globalism is a fresh iteration of Nazism, for the two have the same core; they vary only in detail, because they must fit into the time-period in which they exist. Thus, the mistake often made by commentators is a lazy one, whereby Hitler and his Germany become the blueprint for comparison, while the core is never noticed, which defines both. What did Hitlerism seek to achieve? A purified humanity (eugenics), inhabiting a purified earth (environmentalism), a process facilitated by the state.

And what is the core of globalism? Less and better humans (eugenics), on an earth purified from the pollution of human activity (environmentalism).

Both Hitlerism and globalism function on the perfection-imperfection relationship—the former must continually seek out and destroy the latter. This is labeled “progress;” a better definition is the “great replacement,” in which anything marked as “imperfect” is to be replaced by the “perfect.” The agency doing the marking and the replacing is the state.

Eugenics for globalism is the marking of imperfect humanity (European, aka, “white”), which must be severely husbanded so that it can only exist on the margins. The perfect humanity is non-white, which must be given to dominate the earth. The only difference between Nazism and globalism is in the marking: “Jew” is now “white.” The end result is the same—the annihilation of humanity.

Canada is the chief architect and conniver in this globalist program—and thus Canada is now a Nazi state by another name (“democracy” and “our values”), for it seeks to achieve what eugenics and environmentalism will bring about—a green Hell—inhabited by non-white peoples bunched up from all over the world. The original Canadians of British and French origin (Old Stock Canadians), who built the Canada whose reputation whose glow yet lingers in people’s minds, have largely disappeared, having been drowned in legalalized, mass migration (the government imports 1,000,000 people every year, from the third world into Canada; a vast number, given Canada’s small population). And the finest enthusiast that this program has is Justin Trudeau.

To be clear, in the current Canadian political scene, all parties are complicit in the broader program of globalism—all will actively work to serve it well. It matters little whether the label is “liberal,” “conservative,” “green,” “socialist,” and even “communist”—none can escape the machine; rather, none want to. And Canada is eager to take this machine worldwide, for it has just launched a UN declaration to fight “disinformation.” Only people applauding Waffen SS veterans can really know what the truth is. Everyone else is the enemy.

In Canada, politically, there is only one glimmer of hope—the People’s Party of Canada, and its leader Maxime Bernier. But their biggest challenge is how to overcome the monstrous machine.

W.O. Munce writes from Canada.

Religions and Wisdoms are the First Guarantee of Freedom and Peace

A former student at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, Henri Hude was Professor of Philosophy at the French Saint-Cyr Military Academy. (Saint-Cyr). His latest book, A Philosophy of War, is a call for religions to take a philosophical and spiritual leap forward in building peace for the world of tomorrow.

[This interview was conducted by Omnes Magazine, through whose kind generosity we are able to bring you this English version].

Omnes Magazine (OM): Faced with the risk of total war, can we sum up your approach in your latest book, A Philosophy of War, by saying that religions are the solution, not the problem, to achieving universal peace?

Henri Hude (HH): Total war requires the use of all available means. Today, it would lead to the destruction of the human race, thanks to technical progress. The terrifying possibility of such destruction gives rise to the project of eliminating war as a condition for the survival of humankind. But war is a duel between several powers. So, to eliminate war radically, there is the need to institute a single World Power, a universal Leviathan, endowed with unlimited power.

Henri Hude.

But plurality can always be reborn: through secession, revolution, mafias, terrorism and so on. To make the world safe, there is the call to destroy all powers other than that of the Leviathan. Not only must we put an end to the plurality of political and social powers, but we must also destroy all other powers: spiritual, intellectual and moral. We are far beyond a simple project of universal imperialism. It is about supermen dominating subhumans. This Orwellian-Nazi project is so monstrous that it has a paradoxical consequence. The universal Leviathan becomes common enemy number 1 of all nations, religions and wisdoms. Previously, these were often at war or in tension. Now, thanks to the Leviathan, they are allies, friends, perhaps. The Leviathan is incapable of guaranteeing peace, but his monstrosity, now forever a permanent possibility, guarantees the lasting alliance of former enemies. Religions and wisdoms are the primary guarantee of freedom and peace. This is another world.

OM: The Holy See’s diplomacy seeks to establish a solid dialogue with Islam in order to build “bridges.” In recent history, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran worked to this end by visiting Saudi Arabia, a first for a Holy See diplomat of such rank. In 2019, the emblematic meeting between Pope Francis and Ahmed Al-Tayeb, Imam of the Al-Azhar mosque, the most important Sunni institution in the Middle East, also marked a further step in this rapprochement (not to mention the successive trip to Bahrain). Do you think this diplomatic policy is a step in the right direction?

HH: I think so, because it is part of this logic of peace through an anti-Leviathan alliance. For who is the Leviathan? Certainly, to become the Leviathan is forever the temptation of every power in this world. The Leviathan is therefore first and foremost a fundamental concept of political science. But it also has a terrible application in the political and cultural choices made by Western elites, especially Anglo-Saxon ones. The Woke is a machine for manufacturing sub-humans. Democracy is transformed into plutocracy, freedom of the press into propaganda, the economy into a casino, the liberal state into a police state, and so on. Such imperialism is both odious and dysfunctional. It has no chance of success, except in the old, more controlled Western countries—and even then… The Pope is right to prepare for the future.

As far as Muslims in particular are concerned, the Leviathan’s strategy is to push the most violent and sectarian everywhere, who are its useful idiots, or its stipendiary agents, in order to divide and rule. Muslim religious leaders, who are as intelligent as the Pope, know this very well. Political leaders know it, too. See how they are taking advantage of NATO’s failures in Ukraine to take their freedom from the Leviathan. It is not at all a question of creating a single syncretic religion, because cheap relativism is the first principle of the sub-human culture that the Leviathan wants to inject into everyone in order to dominate everything dictatorially. It is all about finding a modus vivendi. It is about friendship and friendly conversation between people who are sincerely seeking God, not pseudo “interfaith dialogue” between modernist, relativist clerics or intellectual laymen, guilt-ridden to the hilt by the Leviathan.

OM: In the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, do the links between the Patriarch of Moscow and the authorities, or similar links in Ukraine and internal religions, make it almost impossible for religions to join forces to build peace?

HH: If you want to criticize others, you have to start by putting your own house in order. We might ask ourselves, for example, if we French Catholics do not have an ambiguous relationship with political power. In the face of Woke dogmatism, the canonization of the culture of death, invasive authoritarianism, servility to the Leviathan, the march to world war, we remain as if KO standing. Manipulated and/or careerist, we sometimes wade into guilt, asking forgiveness for existing in the public sphere.

If the Woke culture were to be universally imposed, it would be the loss of all souls and the end of all decent civilization. Resistance to the imposition of Woke culture can be a just cause of war. That is what the whole world thinks, except the West, and that is why Western soft power is evaporating so fast. This is without prejudice to the justice due to Ukraine and charity among Catholics.

OM: Is violence inherent to Islam?

HH: I would like to ask you, is cowardice inherent to Christianity? Christ said he had not come to bring peace on earth, but division. He also said that he spewed out the lukewarm. In many a Sunday sermon, there would be nothing to change if we replaced the word “God” with “Teddy Bear.”

In his book, Ecumenical Jihad, Peter Kreeft (pp. 41-42) writes: “…it took a Muslim student in my class at Boston College to berate the Catholics for taking down their crucifixes. ‘We don’t have images of that man, as you do,’ he said, ‘but if we did, we would never take them down, even if someone tried to force us to. We revere that man, and we would die for his honor. But you are so ashamed of him that you take him down from your walls. You are more afraid of what his enemies might think if you kept your crucifixes up than of what he might think if you took them down. So I think we are better Christians than you are.’”

We call blushing for Christ respect for freedom. We believe we have opened up to the world, when in fact we have abdicated all evangelical freedom. We believe we are superior to our elders, when all we are doing is participating in this lamentable evolution, which Solzhenitsyn called the “decline of courage.” To be a Christian, you must first not be a sub-human. And in order not to be sub-human, you have to be capable of resisting the Leviathan. If need be, by spilling his blood. Bismarck put thirty bishops in prison, and in the end had to abandon the Kulturkampf.

OM: Ten years ago, Pope Francis said: “True Islam and a proper interpretation of the Koran are opposed to all violence.” This phrase continues to provoke debate and divide Islamologists and theologians. What did Francis mean?

HH: I do not know what the Pope meant. The expressions “true Islam” and “proper interpretation” pose formidable problems, so the phrase can take on very different meanings. In the absence of precision, there is no way of knowing. The philosopher Rémi Brague, who knows the subject admirably, has just written a book entitled, Sur l’Islam, in which he displays a truly confounding erudition. He believes he must interpret the sentence as if the Pope were speaking as a historian of ideas. He proves that, if this were the case, this assertion would be wrong. But I do not think the Pope is speaking as a historian of ideas. (In any case, these are subjects to which the Petrine charism of infallibility does not apply).

OM: Should we understand the Pope’s statement as primarily political, confronting Muslim authorities with their contradictions and responsibilities, and inviting them to join him in building a world of peace?

HH: The Pope is no more Machiavellian than he is ignorant. In truth, we need to distinguish between force and violence. Violence is the illegitimate use of force. All the great religions and wisdoms are opposed to all violence, but none is opposed to all use of force. Every society has the right to self-defense. If the use of armed force were morally forbidden to any society in all circumstances, it would be morally obligatory to endure any aggression, by anyone, for any purpose. In other words, it would be morally obligatory to obey even those perverts who would destroy every moral principle. Societies therefore have a right, and sometimes a duty, to self-defense, armed if necessary. Some abusers understand no language but force. So, you draw a red line on the ground in front of them. “This line means that I would rather risk my life and suffer than undergo what you want to impose on me. If, therefore, you transgress this line, you will have to risk your life and suffer.” If you are incapable of this behavior, you are good for slavery.

Featured: The Return of the Crusader, by Karl Friedrich Lessing; painted in 1835.