Overcome Evil by Doing Good

Drawing on the Book of Proverbs, St. Paul offers a simple admonition to his readers:

“…if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.” (Romans 12:20)

He then adds:

Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

It is a very simple statement. However, when anyone begins to suggest what that might look like, critics quickly begin to offer egregious examples that would ask us to bear the unbearable, with the inevitable conclusion: “Kill your enemies.” What is suggested, in effect, is that Christians should respond in the same way as any tyrant would, only a little less so. “Kill your enemies, but not so much.” (I use the term “kill” in this example only as the most extreme form of violence). A question: What is it about the Kingdom of God that gave Christ and the Apostles such a confidence in its non-violence?

Consider these verses:

Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If My kingdom were of this world, My servants would fight, so that I should not be delivered to the Jews; but now My kingdom is not from here.” (Jn. 18:36)

And

“But now let the one who has a moneybag take it, and likewise a knapsack. And let the one who has no sword sell his cloak and buy one. For I tell you that this Scripture must be fulfilled in me: ‘And he was numbered with the transgressors.’ For what is written about me has its fulfillment.” And they said, “Look, Lord, here are two swords.” And he said to them, “It is enough.” (Lk. 22:38)

And

“And behold, one of those who were with Jesus stretched out his hand and drew his sword and struck the servant of the high priest and cut off his ear. Then Jesus said to him, “Put your sword back into its place. For all who take the sword will perish by the sword.” (Matt. 26:52)

There is something of a mystery in Christ’s instruction to buy a sword. Many consider it simply a metaphorical way of saying that troubles are coming. Indeed, one of those two swords is drawn and does terrible damage to a man when Christ is arrested, earning a rebuke. I have always wondered if Peter (the one who wielded the sword) thought to himself, “But I thought He said bring a sword!” As it is, Christ restored and healed the ear of the injured man.

The key, I think, is found in Christ’s statement to Pilate that His Kingdom is not “of” this world. That does not mean that the Kingdom is located somewhere else. Rather, it means that His Kingdom’s source is not found within the things of this world. It is a sovereign act of God. As such, its reality is independent of our actions and will. There is nothing in the Kingdom of God that requires our swords (or even our words). It is heaven-breaking-into-our-world. It is unassailable.

This is the faith of the martyrs. The long history of the Church’s faithful who have gone to their deaths include many stories of terrible persecutions and tortures. They also include an abiding witness to an abiding sense that everything being done to them somehow misses the point. When Christ stood before Pilate, He was threatened with the might and power of Rome. “Don’t you know I have the power to release you or to kill you?” Human beings have no power over God. The Kingdom of God willingly enters into the suffering of this world, willingly bears shame, willingly embraces the weakness of the Cross. The martyrs acted as they did because their lives were not of this world. Christians should not live in this world thinking about a world somewhere else (heaven). Rather, Christians themselves are heaven in this world. It is that reality to which we bear witness (martyr means “witness”).

Modern nation states came into existence slowly, as one of the consequences of the Reformation. Some, like England, had a head start, inasmuch as it was partially defined by its shoreline. But most, like France and Germany, evolved more slowly. We imagine today’s modern states as though they were defined by blood and language. However, that is a fantasy, little older then the 19th century. Nationalism, sadly, was one of a number of romantic movements that served to replace the common life of the Church with romantic notions of lesser, tribal belongings.

The patriotic mythologies that came into existence together with modernity’s nationalisms are siren songs that seek to create loyalties that are essentially religious in nature. World War I, in the early 20th century, was deeply revealing of the 19th century’s false ideologies. There, in the fields of France, European Christians killed one another by the millions in the name of entities that, in some cases, had existed for less than 50 years (Germany was born, more or less, in 1871). The end of that war did nothing, apparently, to awaken Christians to the madness that had been born in their midst.

I have noted, through the years, that the patriotism that inhabits the thoughts of many is a deeply protected notion, treated as a virtue in many circles. This often gives it an unexamined character, a set of feelings that do not come under scrutiny. Of course, there are other nation-based feelings and narratives, some of which are highly reactive to patriotism though they are driven as much by the passions and their own mythology. These are the sorts of passions that seem to have risen to a fever-pitch in the last decade or so, though they have been operative for a very long time.

These passions are worth careful examination, particularly as they have long been married to America’s many denominational Christianities. I think it is noteworthy that one of the most prominent 19th century American inventions was Mormonism. There, we have the case of a religious inventor (Joseph Smith) literally writing America into the Scriptures and creating an alternative, specifically American, account of Christ and salvation. It was not an accident. He was, in fact, drawing on the spirit of the Age, only more blatantly and heretically. But there are many Christians whose Christianity is no less suffused with the same sentiments.

Asking questions of these things quickly sends some heads spinning. They wonder, “Are we not supposed to love our country?” As an abstraction, no. We love people; we love the land. We owe honor to honorable things and persons. The Church prays for persons: the President, civil authorities, the armed forces. We are commanded to pray and to obey the laws as we are able in good conscience. Nothing more. St. Paul goes so far as to say that our “citizenship [politeia] is in heaven.” The assumption of many is that so long as the citizenship of earth does not conflict with the citizenship of heaven, all is fine. I would suggest that the two are always in conflict for the simple reason that one is “from above” while the other is “from below,” in the sense captured in Christ’s “my kingdom is not of this world.” There is a conflict. We should not expect that the kingdoms of this world will serve as the instrument of the Kingdom of God. Such confusions have yielded sinful actions throughout the course of the Church’s history.

St. Paul notes in Romans 13 that the state “does not bear the sword in vain.” It has an appointed role in the restraint of evil. Such a role, however, is not the instrument of righteousness. It can, at best, create a measure of tranquility (cf. the Anaphora of St. Basil). The work of the Kingdom of God cannot be coerced, nor can it be the work of coercion. It is freely embraced, even as it alone is the source of true freedom.

My purpose in offering these observations is, if possible, to “dial down” passions surrounding our thoughts of the nation and politics in order to love properly and deeply what should be loved. That this is difficult, and at times confusing, is to be expected. We live in a culture in which the passions are marketed to us in an endless stream, carefully designed for the greatest effect. If these thoughts of mine help quiet the passions to some degree, then I will have done well. If, on the other hand, they have stirred reaction, then, forgive me and let it go.

If the Kingdom of God were a ship (an image sometimes used of the Church), then we should not be surprised when the seas become boisterous and the winds become contrary. Nor should we panic if we find that Christ is asleep in the back of the boat. His sleeping, indeed, should be a clue as to what the true nature of our situation might be. There are some who imagine that the work of the Kingdom can only be fulfilled once we’ve learned to control the winds and the seas. We fail to understand that they already obey the One who sleeps.

And so we come to overcoming evil by doing good. It is a common teaching in the Fathers that evil has no substance – it only exists as a parasite. All created things are good by nature. It is the misuse of the good that we label “evil.” To do good thus has the character of eternity. It is not lost or diminished with time. Christ said, “And whoever gives one of these little ones even a cup of cold water because he is a disciple, truly, I say to you, he will by no means lose his reward.” (Matthew 10:42)

When the final account is given, the nations will not be named. Their wars and empires will pass into what is forgotten. However, the many cups of cold water and other such acts of goodness will abide. I could imagine such actions on the part of a nation, and there are probably plenty. They likely go unnoticed, or even derided as wasteful.

I think that our politics and patriotism want to measure the seas, where God is measuring cups.


Father Stephen Freeman is a priest of the Orthodox Church in America, serving as Rector of St. Anne Orthodox Church in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He is also author of Everywhere Present and the Glory to God podcast series.


Featured: Arrest of Christ, by Heinrich Hofmann; painted by 1858.


The Church is just a Building?

For some strange reason, in numerous conversations I have had with Protestants, the same statement has been made over and over by the other party while discussing the nature of the Church: “The Church is not a building!” The observation is most often accompanied with a special sort of emphasis — the cultivated certitude, the dead-eye look, the relish of one enlightening a fellow human being trapped in the depths of ignorance, topped off with a dramatic pause at the end allowing the auditor to savor the profundity of it all. It is same rhetorical flare that often accompanies that other great revelation:“You know, it’s not the heat; it’s the humidity.”

The curious thing is that this arresting disclosure that the Church is not a building is often said at the beginning of a discussion of what constitutes the true Church, and it has never been in response to me saying, “You know, the Church is a building.”

I am convinced that these various interlocutors all heard this negative definition of the Church from preachers versed in the same “ecclesiology”—which is probably the wrong word because what they learned is less like theology and more like bad rhetoric about the Church. My reaction to this claim has invariably been to agree with it and to point out that this higher, more spiritual, and less material reality that we are both calling “the Church of Christ” is actually the one to which I belong. After all, my objective in these conversations is — of course — to communicate to the other party that the one true Church of Jesus Christ is indeed the Catholic Church.

But I think I have been wrong in my approach all along. Consider:

“And I say to thee: That thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18).

“Now therefore you are no more strangers and foreigners; but you are fellow citizens with the saints, and the domestics of God. Built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone” (Eph. 2:19-20).

“I will build…”; “built upon”: this is not pure symbolism. It would be much more true to say that the churches (oratories, chapels, etc.) that we worship in are the symbols. Regardless of the practical functions that they fulfill as places both of worship and of shelter from the elements, these earthly edifices stand as symbols of the more sublime reality that Jesus came to build, the one that extends beyond our time and space into Purgatory and Heaven itself.

My preferred hand missal, the Saint Andrew’s Daily Missal, has this gem of a paragraph in its brief commentary for the Feast of the Dedication of the Basilicas of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul (Nov. 18; spelling and styles as in original):

The Dedication of St Mary Major at Rome was celebrated on August 5, that of St Michael on September 29, St John Lateran on November 9; the local feast of the dedication of all the consecrated churches has been fixed in many dioceses about this time; finally, today we celebrate the dedication of the Roman basilicas of St Peter and St Paul. These dedication feasts are fittingly placed in this season: after having celebrated the Kingship of Christ, we have remembered two provinces of His Kingdom: the Church triumphant (All Saints) and the Church suffering (All Souls): our material churches, carved with chisels and mallets (Vespers hymn), are an image of the Church militant. [Emphasis mine.]

The “Vespers hymn” mentioned by the Saint Andrew’s editors is the Cœlestis urbs Jerusalem. It is one particularly beautiful part of the liturgy for the dedication of a church, which, in its Mass, Divine Office, and pontifical ceremonies of consecration, is itself a sublime ceremonial edifice.

Let us not forget that Jesus was derided by some of His unbelieving critics not only as “the carpenter’s son” (Matt. 13:55), but also as “the carpenter, the son of Mary…” (Mark 6:3). When the creative Logos became Man, He through whom all that is made was made had as His earthly father a carpenter from whom He received that trade. It is most fitting that the humble Patriarch of Nazareth, the great Saint Joseph, toiled at this particular craft, for he was an image of the Eternal Father, the Creator of all things, “of whom all paternity in heaven and earth is named” (Eph. 3:15).

Jesus came as a builder. His saving mission included building a Church. The Church is a building.

But what a building! It is built on the foundation of Jesus Christ, that “stone which the builders rejected,” who “is made the head of the corner” (Mark 12:10), and “upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets” (Eph. 2:20). Atop that foundation other stones are laid. Speaking to Christians, Saint Peter, who knew something about rocks, refers to this same Old-Testament passage that Jesus and the Evangelists invoke (Psalm 117: 22) and builds upon it. We Christians, he says, come to Christ, “as to a living stone, rejected indeed by men, but chosen and made honourable by God”; then follows the apostolic admonition: “Be you also as living stones built up, a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ” (I Pet. 2:4-5).

In I Cor. 3:9-17, Saint Paul employs similar imagery, concluding his exhortation with these words:

Know you not, that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? But if any man violate the temple of God, him shall God destroy. For the temple of God is holy, which you are.

There is a tropological reading of all this “building” language (see The Four Senses of Scripture if you would like an explanation of the word tropological). If we are the living stones upon which the Church, the Temple of God, is built, then we must be chiseled, hammered, shaped, scraped, and put into our place, whether visibly resplendent in the structure or ingloriously crammed into some crevice to be seen by God alone.

In other words, in this life, we must be both perfected by prayer, penance, and patient suffering, and fit into our place by accepting our proper vocation or state in life and virtuously fulfilling its duties. God willing we do so, we will overcome our enemies (the world, the flesh, and the devil) and become pillars in the New Jerusalem, that glorious heavenly temple the Apostle saw from Patmos (Apoc. 21:1-5a):

And I saw a new heaven and a new earth. For the first heaven and the first earth was gone, and the sea is now no more. And I John saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice from the throne, saying: Behold the tabernacle of God with men, and he will dwell with them. And they shall be his people; and God himself with them shall be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes: and death shall be no more, nor mourning, nor crying, nor sorrow shall be any more, for the former things are passed away. And he that sat on the throne, said: Behold, I make all things new.

The title of this Ad Rem is ironic, if only slightly so—because of the word “just.” The Church is a building, as I believe the Scriptures make amply clear. After all, it is built by Jesus Christ. But it is a building that is also a bride, and a bride that is also a city, and a city that is also a kingdom, and a kingdom that is also a Mystical Body.

Let us make sure to remember all this when someone says to us, “The Church is not a building!”


Brother André Marie is Prior of St. Benedict Center, an apostolate of the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Richmond New Hampshire. He does a weekly Internet Radio show, Reconquest, which airs on the Veritas Radio Network’s Crusade Channel. This article appears courtesy of Catholicism.org.


Featured: West Front of Rouen Cathedral at Sunset, by Henri Vignet; painted in 1903.


Operation Al-Aqsa Flood: The Defeat of the Vanquisher

We are pleased to bring you this excerpt from Colonel Jacques Baud’s latest book, which deals with the genocide in Gaza currently being carried out by Israel. The book is entitled, Operation Al-Aqsa Flood: The Defeat of the Vanquisher. We will update this page as soon as this book becomes available. in the meantime, here is the excerpt.

Doctrinal Apparatus Ill-Suited to an Asymmetrical Conflict

The BETHLEHEM Doctrine

This doctrine was developed by Daniel Bethlehem, legal advisor to Ben-jamin Netanyahu and then to British Prime Minister Tony Blair. It postulates that states are entitled to preventive self-defense against an “imminent” attack. The difficulty here is to determine the “imminent” nature of an attack, which implies that the terrorist action is close in time and that there is a body of evidence to confirm it.

In February 2013, NBC News released a Department of Justice “White Pa-per” defining “imminent:”

the imminent threat of a violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have proof that a specific attack against American persons or interests will take place in the immediate future.

While the principle appears legitimate, it’s the interpretation of the word “imminent” that poses a problem. In intelligence circles, the “imminence” of an attack is defined in terms of its proximity in time and the likelihood of it taking place. But, according to Daniel Bethlehem, this is no longer the case here:

It must be right that states should be able to act in self-defense in cir-cumstances where there is evidence of imminent attacks by terrorist groups, even if there is no specific evidence of where such an attack will take place or of the precise nature of the attack.

In this way, a terrorist attack can be considered “imminent,” even if the de-tails and timing are unknown. This makes it possible, for example, to launch an air strike simply on the basis of suspicions of an imminent attack.

In November 2008, while a ceasefire was in force, an Israeli commando raid killed six people in Gaza. The explanation given by the Israeli army illustrates the BETHLEHEM doctrine:

This was a targeted operation to prevent an immediate threat […] There was no intention to break the ceasefire, rather the aim of the op-eration was to eliminate an immediate and dangerous threat posed by the Hamas terrorist organization.

This doctrine is similar to the one enunciated in 2001 by Dick Cheney, then Vice President of the United States, also known as the “Cheney doctrine” or the “1% doctrine:”

If there’s a 1% probability that Pakistani scientists are helping terrorists to develop or build weapons of mass destruction, we have to treat that as a certainty, in terms of response.

It’s the strategic/operational version of the Wild West “hip shot.” It’s symp-tomatic of the way we understand the law and the way we wage war: without values and without honor.

The problem with the BETHLEHEM doctrine is that it has been systematically used by Israel to justify ceasefire violations. This is true of extra-judicial kill-ings, which are not considered ceasefire violations. A study of Palestinian rocket attacks shows that they are always carried out in response to an Israeli attack, which does not generally appear in our media. From this stems our perception that Palestinian organizations—Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Ha-mas in particular—wantonly attack Israel with their rockets, and therefore engage in terrorist practices.

In its February 2018 report, the Human Rights Council (HRC) reports that during the Gaza border protests (Return Marches), the Israeli army shot dead 183 civilians, including 154 who were unarmed and 35 children. In February 2019, he reports that the Israeli army “intentionally” shot children, medical personnel (wearing badges and shot in the back!), journalists and disabled people. The Palestinian children shot by Israeli snipers with fragmentation bullets while simply standing in front of the border in Gaza in 2018, or the handcuffed and blindfolded Palestinian youth shot in the back in April 2019, are war crimes.

Israel’s supporters claim self-defence, but this is fallacious, as the videos published by the United Nations show. Firstly, because the victims were in a 150 m security strip inside Gaza, separated from Israel by a fence and a wide berm, from which Israeli snipers fire. Secondly, because those killed were “armed” only with stones, and thirdly, because some of those hit (notably children) were shot in the back.

So much for the world’s most moral army, which the United Nations has asked to stop shooting children.

The DAHIYA Doctrine

The Israeli army deliberately ignores the principles of international humani-tarian law and applies the “Dahiya doctrine,” drawn up by General Gadi Ei-senkot, now Chief of the General Staff. It advocates the use of “disproportion-ate force” to create maximum damage and destruction, and considers that there are “no civilian villages, these are military bases… This is not a re-commendation. It’s a plan.”

It’s a doctrine that presents itself as a deterrent, but contrary to Wikipedia’s assertion, it’s a tactic that can only work in a symmetrical context, i.e. when the action has a linear effect on weakening the adversary. In an asym-metrical context, where the determination of combatants depends on the brutality of their adversary, such destruction only serves to stimulate the will to resist and the determination to use a terrorist approach. This is the essence of jihad.

In fact, the very existence of this doctrine shows that the Israelis have failed to understand their adversaries and their operating logic. This explains why Israel is the only country in the world not to have mastered terrorism in three-quarters of a century.

In October 2023, the same logic will be applied. The British newspaper The Telegraph quoted Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, spokesman for the Israeli army, as saying that for the strikes “the emphasis is on damage, not precision,” the aim being to reduce Gaza to a “tent city” by the end of the campaign.

***

The HANNIBAL Directive

Our media never mention the “HANNIBAL directive,” which came into force in 1986 in the Israeli army, designed to prevent Israeli prisoners from being used as bargaining chips by the Palestinians. It stipulated that those holding the prisoner were to be destroyed by any means necessary (including at the cost of the prisoner’s own life and that of civilians in the area). Applied during Operation PROTECTIVE EDGE, it was behind the total destruction of a Rafah neighborhood on August 1st, 2014, an event known in Palestine as Black Friday.

This directive seems to be still in use, naturally without much publicity. It ex-plains why the Israelis are not impressed by the hostages taken by Hamas:

The European diplomats were also struck by the lack of interest shown by the Israeli government in prioritizing the lives of the hostages held in Gaza.

Very soon after the start of the Hamas operation, Israel announced the deaths of 1,400 Israeli civilians. This number became a leitmotif for refusing any dialogue with Hamas and other Palestinian groups. But this number was revised downwards after 200 charred bodies were recognized as those of Ha-mas fighters. Then, on December 2, 2023, it was lowered again to 1,000 in a tweet from the Israeli government.

An Israeli air force colonel would later confirm that on October 7, a “free fire” was ordered from the air force, described as a “mass HANNIBAL.”

The HANNIBAL directive is applied not only in cases of hostage-taking, but also when soldiers are at risk of capture. For example, on January 24, 2024, near Khan Younès, a tank was damaged by rocket fire, and the Israeli military was unable to approach it to retrieve the three wounded crewmen. The gen-eral staff therefore preferred to bomb the tank and its occupants rather than risk them falling into the hands of Hamas.

In any case, we can see that the Israeli army applies the precautionary prin-ciple neither to the Palestinians nor to its own men. One could say with a cer-tain cynicism that, at least here, Palestinians and Israelis are treated equally.

In mid-December 2023, the discovery of three bodies in a tunnel in Gaza sparked controversy. They were three men held by Hamas, whom the Israeli army spokesman had declared killed by the Palestinian organization. They have no apparent injuries and appear to have been killed by poisoning. Were they killed by the deliberate use of a combat toxicant or accidentally by toxic fumes from explosions (such as carbon monoxide)? We don’t know, but the mother of one of them, Ron Sherman, believes he was deliberately sacrificed by the army. In any case, this illustrates the Israeli army’s failure to respect the precautionary principle.

Extrajudicial Executions

Extra-judicial executions are an important element in Israel’s policy of de-terrence against Palestinian movements. They consist of eliminating militants outside the judicial process, using killers or “one-off” strikes such as air attacks. Legally questionable, they are often strategically ineffective. Three countries use them regularly: the United States, Israel and France. Presented as a preventive measure, they are generally carried out in a punitive manner, like Sicilian vendettas, without any real assessment of their strategic conse-quences. In practice, they fuel a growing process of violence and are a source of legitimacy for terrorism. In fact, they often reflect a lack of real coun-ter-terrorist strategy.

The archetype of this mode of action is Operation ANGER OF GOD (Mivtza Za’am Ha’el), also known as Operation BAYONET, carried out by the Mossad to punish the perpetrators of the attack on the Israeli Olympic team in Munich in 1972 (Operation BERIM & IKRIT). Within a year, almost the entire Palestinian commando was eliminated: Wae Zwaiter (Rome, October 16, 1972), Mahmoud Hamchari (Paris, January 9, 1973), Abd El-Hir (Nicosia, January 24, 1973), Basil Al-Kubaissi (Paris, April 6, 1973), Ziad Muchassi (Athens, April 12, 1973), Mohammed Boudia (Paris, June 28, 1973), Kamal Nasser, Mahmoud Najjer and Kamal Adouan (Beirut, April 9, 1973). Its leader, Ali Hassan Sala-meh, was killed in Beirut on January 22, 1979, followed by his sec-ond-in-command, Khalil al-Wazir (alias Abou Djihad), on April 16, 1988 in Tunis. In the end, only one member of the group, Jamal al-Gasheï, seems to have escaped the wrath of GOD, while an innocent man was mistakenly killed in Lillehammer (Norway).

These actions are punitive operations. What our countries and Israel con-sider part of the game is called terrorism when others do it. By accepting it from Israel, we create a permissive environment that could well legitimize the elimination of some of our political leaders. Which could happen.

Since 1988, Israel has been using specially trained units to operate clandes-tinely in the occupied territories. Known as “mista’aravim” or YAMAS, these are ad hoc formations that operate clandestinely (in Arab clothing—hence their name) in the occupied territories for reconnaissance missions, comman-do actions or extra-judicial executions. Mista’aravim actions are mainly car-ried out in the West Bank by Sayeret Duvdevan (Unit 217).

The best-known of these was Mossad’s attempt to poison Khaled Mashal, political leader of Hamas in Jordan, in 1997. It ended in failure: the two Israeli agents carrying Canadian passports were arrested; then Israel had to provide an antidote and release Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in exchange for the release of his agents. The result was Israel’s loss of credibility with the international com-munity and the mistrust of Jordan—with which Israel has a peace treaty.

Mista’aravim are the equivalent of the Groupe Antiterroriste de Libération (GAL) units used in Spain in the 1980s, which are considered a form of state terrorism. However, the advantage of this type of action is that it can elimi-nate an individual without razing an entire neighborhood or destroying entire families. But it requires agents who are all the more competent and coura-geous because the Palestinians have strengthened their counter-espionage and internal security capabilities. This is why this type of operation has be-come almost impossible to carry out in Gaza, but is still common practice in the West Bank. In Gaza, Israel prefers to carry out its actions “at a distance,” using more sophisticated means such as drones or guided missiles, which have a devastating effect on the civilian population.

With some 2,300 known assassinations, Israel rivals the United States as the country that regularly assassinates opponents and terrorists. When carried out on foreign soil, an “elimination” is a complex operation, relying on a net-work of local informers (“sayanim”), most often recruited from the Jewish diaspora. But this has a perverse effect: it turns the previously well-integrated Jewish community into an object of distrust, perceived as a “5th column” in many countries of the Near and Middle East.

But extra-judicial executions not only carry a significant political risk if un-successful, they tend to legitimize illegal violence and terrorism, as evidenced by the Arabian Peninsula Jihad Base’s (APJB) Inspire magazine:

[The assassination of leaders of the civil and military unbelievers] is one of the most important arts of terrorism and one of the most advanta-geous and deterrent types of operation. These methods are also used by the enemies of Allah. The CIA has authorization from the US gov-ernment to assassinate presidents, if it is in the national interest of the United States, and they have used it more than once. In the CIA, there’s a special department for that! So I don’t know why we’re prevented from doing it?
This is a case of Islamist asymmetry: the “cure” is worse than the “disease.” The assassination of leaders has no dissuasive effect. It makes the dead a martyr and an example to follow. It hardly ever leads to the end of terrorist action, but keeps the flame of resistance alive and takes on more varied forms.

With highly decentralized structures, the elimination of cadres does not necessarily weaken the terrorist group, but it does force its hierarchy to renew itself more rapidly and apply new methods and policies of action. This is what happened with Hamas.

But on August 21, 2003, Israeli forces eliminated Ismaïl Abou Shanab. At the time, he was considered a Hamas moderate, and his assassination triggered widespread condemnation and an unprecedented mobilization of the Pales-tinian population. Attacks resumed in step with the eliminations carried out by Israel.

In September 2023, on the LCI channel, where journalist Darius Rochebin praises the assassinations carried out by the Ukrainian secret services, Gen-eral Christophe Gomart explains that France also carries them out. He is a perfect illustration of the Western way of thinking. Like the Israelis, he thinks it’s useful to shoot a leader “because in fact it’s the leaders who decide, and it takes longer to train a leader than it does to train an ordinary soldier,” so:

We destabilize, we disorganize, and the idea in war is to disorganize the adversary in order to weaken him and make it possible to win, and therefore to overthrow him… that’s what we did in the Sahel against the terrorist leaders: we sought to disorganize the terrorist or jihadist Not only does this illustrate a tactical approach to the fight against terror-ism, but it is not valid for highly decentralized insurgent structures, made up of small, quasi-autonomous groups. This partly explains the operational and strategic failure of French action in the Sahel.

This somewhat childish vision of war may work in a conventional conflict, but not in an unconventional context, and certainly not in a jihadist one. It flies in the face of what a British SAS officer told me during my counter-terrorism training in Britain during the war in Northern Ireland in the mid-1980s. The British had extremely detailed files and information on the various command-ers of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), down to knowing their every move. When I asked why they didn’t eliminate them, the officer replied:

Because we know them. We know their psychology, their families, their networks, their way of fighting, and we can better anticipate their ac-tions, even pre-empt them. If we kill them, others will come along, per-haps more effective, more aggressive, and we’ll know nothing about them.

Of course, such an answer is only possible when you have studied your op-ponent thoroughly and know him in great detail. The fact is that today, we know very little about our opponents. Even public figures like Vladimir Putin are so poorly known that he is diagnosed with illnesses he doesn’t have. It’s the same in Palestine.

Experience shows that extra-judicial executions have no operational effect. On the contrary, they encourage the spirit of vengeance and tend to mobilize the spirit of resistance. This phenomenon is all the stronger when civilians are killed in the process. They inspire contempt rather than admiration, as they represent a success not achieved in face-to-face combat. Moreover, as in the case of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, the Israeli military are not fighting a “brave” battle. This is why these executions become a substitute for real suc-cess against terrorism. They therefore appear more as proof of weakness and incapacity than as a demonstration of effectiveness.

According to some (unconfirmed) reports, SHABAK has set up a clandestine unit, code-named INDIGO, whose mission is to hunt down the perpetrators of the crimes of October 7, 2023. But with evidence mounting that the vast majority of these crimes were the result of errors of conduct, the question of the extent to which this group will punish the real perpetrators of the massacres remains open.

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Operation Al-Aqsa Flood

Strategic Objectives

Over and above the historical objectives of Palestinian resistance, which are aimed at creating a Palestinian state or returning to the land taken from them, the objectives of Operation AL-AQSA DELUGE essentially concern the situation in Gaza.

The operation’s central strategic objective is to end the blockade of the Gaza Strip and restore normal living conditions for the population. This includes the end of permanent surveillance by Israeli forces, restrictions on trade in goods, and measures that prevent economic and social development. This objective follows on from the “Marches of Return,” which were led by civil society, but were met with sniper fire.

Achieving this goal involved enabling objectives, the most important of which was to bring the Palestinian question back onto the international stage. In November 2012, the United Nations General Assembly granted Palestine the status of “non-member observer state of the United Nations.” Since then, however, no progress has been made in dealing with the Palestinian question, and the situation has even deteriorated with the arrival of Israel’s ul-tra-nationalists in power.

The second intermediate objective was to interrupt the normalization pro-cess between Israel and certain Arab countries. Not because of normalization itself, but because it sidelined the Palestinian question. The Palestinians had always wanted these issues to be linked, so that there would be leverage to force Israel to implement UN decisions.

The third intermediate objective was to rally the Muslim community around the issue of the future of the Esplanade of the Mosques (or Temple Mount), which is closely linked to the Palestinian question. As Ihsan Ataya, a mem-ber of the political bureau of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PID) and head of the PID’s Arab and International Relations Department states:

The aim of Operation AL-AQSA RELIEF was stated from the outset: to prevent the Al-Aqsa Mosque (in Jerusalem) from being attacked, Muslim religious rites from being insulted or defamed, our women from being assaulted, efforts to Judaize the Al-Aqsa Mosque and normalize its occupation by Israel from being implemented, or the mosque from being divided in time and space.

It has to be said that, while the blockade of Gaza has not been lifted, these three intermediate strategic objectives have been at least partially achieved. To what extent they will lead to a lasting and just solution to the Palestinian question is an open question, but Hamas has clearly underlined the responsi-bility of the international community to enforce the decisions it has taken.

Operational Objectives

First Objective: The Gaza Division

The first objective was to destroy the elements of the Gaza Division and the surveillance installations encircling the Gaza Strip. On October 12, Abu Obeida, spokesman for the Al-Qassam Phalanges, explains:

Operation AL-AQSA DELUGE was aimed at destroying the Gaza Division, which was attacked at 15 points, followed by 10 more. We attacked the Zikim site and several other settlements outside the Gaza Division headquarters.

This objective may seem outdated to us, since it was clear from the outset that the Palestinian operation could not maintain its momentum for very long, and that the fighting would necessarily continue in the Gaza Strip itself. Con-sequently, the destruction of infrastructure could only be temporary, but highly symbolic.

To understand this, you have to put yourself in the Palestinians’ software. Victory is not achieved by destroying the adversary, but by maintaining the determination to resist. In other words, whatever the Israelis do, however much destruction and death they cause, the Palestinians have already emerged victorious from this operation. Faced with a numerically and materi-ally stronger adversary, victory in the Western sense of the term is not possi-ble. On the other hand, overcoming fear and feelings of powerlessness is al-ready a victory. This is the very essence of the notion of jihad.

Consequently, all the humiliations the Israelis can inflict on their prisoners or the civilian population can only make the Palestinians feel better, and lower the military’s thirst for vengeance. In fact, this is what is happening around the world: the Israelis are obliged to use their censorship to hide the crimes com-mitted by their soldiers, and the idea of “the most moral army in the world” is now totally discredited.

Second Objective: Take Prisoners

The second objective was to seize prisoners in order to exchange them for those held by Israel. Very quickly, testimonies in the Israeli press showed that the aim of the Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PID) fighters was not to carry out a “pogrom,” but to seize soldiers in order to exchange them for Pal-estinians held by Israel. The aim was to gain leverage to resume the negotia-tions interrupted by the Israeli government in November 2021. Since then, it has been known that Hamas would carry out such an operation. The depu-ty chief of staff of the Al-Qassam Phalanges, Marwan Issa, had declared that “the prisoners’ file will be the surprise of the enemy’s next surprises.”

Clearly, the aim was not to kill civilians, but rather to obtain a bargaining chip for the release of some 5,300 prisoners held by Israel. Eyewitness ac-counts in the Israeli press suggest that the original idea was to take only mili-tary prisoners (who are “more valuable” than civilians for an exchange). These same accounts show that the Palestinians were surprised to find so few mili-tary personnel on site, which can be explained by the fact that part of the gar-risons had been redeployed to the West Bank a few weeks earlier. Yasmin Porat’s testimony, mentioned above, shows that Hamas fighters stayed with civilians in their homes, waiting for the security forces to intervene. The testi-monies indicate that the Palestinian fighters left with civilian prisoners only after the Israeli military had intervened, firing indiscriminately into the houses with their tanks. It therefore appears that the capture of civilians was more the result of a combination of circumstances than a decision taken in advance.

The death of civilians was therefore not an objective, and the fact that the freed hostages declared that they had been treated with respect, and even in a friendly manner, tends to confirm that this was not a “pogrom” against the Israeli population.

The prisoner exchanges of November 2023 illustrate Hamas’s strategy, at the heart of which were military prisoners, not civilians. That’s why the Pales-tinians released the women and children first, and kept the military (especially the top brass) for later. We’ll come back to this later.

Tactical Objectives

The Hamas attack targeted 25 military objectives located in the “Gaza en-velope.” The three main tactical objectives of the operation were:

  • the Zikim naval base in the north of the Gaza Strip, which was attacked by Hamas marine commandos, who resisted Israeli counter-attacks for several days;
  • the Erez checkpoint, in the north of the Gaza Strip, which manages part of the fence’s surveillance facilities; the Gaza Division command post at the Re’im site, where the heaviest fighting will take place on October 7; and the Urim intelligence center some 17 km from the Gaza Strip, in order to damage Israeli surveillance installations.
  • A document discovered near Kibbutz Mefalsim, 2 km from the Gaza Strip, containing data on the number of soldiers and security forces, shows that the operation was meticulously prepared and directed against military installations.

Are We in a Liberal Regime?

The moral depression and intellectual disorientation that have taken possession of our country over the past twenty years have one main cause: we no longer know which political regime we are living under. More precisely, the regime we live in is no longer the one we are supposed to live in. We are supposed to be living in a liberal democracy, but the institutions of this regime are running on empty and are incapable of fulfilling their function. Which regime are we actually living in?

The liberal-democratic regime is based on the association of two principles which must be closely linked if the regime is to function properly, but which are in themselves distinct and can be separated, as we see precisely today in Europe and especially in France.

First principle: the State is the impartial guardian of the rights of citizens and members of society, protecting the equal freedom of each and every individual. Second principle: government is representative—representative of the interests and wishes of a historically constituted people, representative of its way of life and its desire to govern itself. These two principles are linked by a third, that of the sovereignty of the people.

Thus, in the modern regime, a historic people governs itself sovereignly, on condition that the equality and freedom of citizens are respected in the formation and application of the law. The State is impartial, but necessarily partial parties alternate in government. This alternation allows the opinions and interests that divide the civic body to feel sufficiently represented by the governing institutions. This system, which allows for the fiercest opposition, is at the root of the greatest stability, because it enables a moral and emotional exchange between rulers and ruled, between the confidence of the ruled, if not in the governing party, at least in the system that organizes the alternation, and the sense of responsibility of the rulers, who know to whom they are accountable.

Today, this moral and emotional exchange is virtually frozen, as alternation has been deprived of its representative and purgative virtue. From the 1970s and 1980s onwards, both the Right and the Left abandoned their respective “peoples” of reference—the Right the nation, the Left the “workers”—and the representative system came up empty. The so-called “governing” Right and Left came together in a common reference to “Europe,” but what seemed to promise a less partisan politics led instead to mistrust, and even a kind of secession, of the two “peoples” thus neglected. The ruling class now draws its legitimacy not from a representativeness that eludes it, but from its adherence to “values” that it intends to inculcate in recalcitrant populations. In this way, we have allowed representative government to atrophy, shifting the bulk of political legitimacy to the State as producer of the impartial norm. To be perfectly impartial, to be beyond suspicion, the norm would eventually have to detach itself entirely from the body politic in which the State was rooted, and to whose legitimacy its own legitimacy was closely associated.

The Depoliticization of the State

We can see where this movement is taking us. If the institution of the State is willing and able to effectively guarantee the equal rights of its members, as well as the free and undistorted pursuit of their particular interests, do we really need a representative government with that ever-precarious moral and emotional exchange between rulers and ruled that I mentioned? Why should the State, guarantor of our rights and interests, be closely, indissolubly attached to the historical body politic known as France? The shift in legitimacy we are witnessing is because of the fact that a State attached to a particular political body will always appear less impartial than a State detached from any political affiliation. Only the complete depoliticization of the State can guarantee its perfect impartiality. According to the new legitimacy, the right of the “climate migrant,” for example, prevails without contest over the right of the body politic, which has only its “common good” to invoke—a notion that is actually unintelligible today for the judge, administrative or judicial, who only wants to judge in the name of humanity in general, of humanity without borders. Thus—and this is the immense revolution we are now witnessing, or rather, acting in and victimizing, in this new regime—it is the body politic of which we are citizens that is at the root of all injustice, because of the self-preference it cannot help feeling and exercising. This is a point well worth considering.

For the opinion that governs us, every political body, every republic, is an arbitrary circumscription in the seamless fabric of humanity. What right do we have to separate ourselves from humanity in this way? What right do we have to declare as the “common good” that which is, at most, the good of a few, of a “we?” What is more, within our own arbitrary borders, “we” exercise no less arbitrary power over all sorts of groups—”minorities”—on whom we impose this supposed “common good.” The work of justice, then, is to bring the oppressed minorities to light, to make their cry heard—an indefinite task, an interminable task, for we cannot guess today what new oppressed minority will come to light tomorrow. Note that those who call for a new right usually put forward no other justification than generic “equality,” without bothering to establish that this criterion is applicable or relevant in the context under consideration.

Why are new rights exempt from the obligation to justify them? Why this refusal to argue? Quite simply because deliberation, the exchange of arguments, necessarily presupposes a constituted society, a civic conversation, a shared form of life, a common world—in short, everything that the minority claim denounces and rejects as its oppressor, its suffocator, its executioner. Indeed, debate presupposes not agreement on political, religious or any other truth, but at least that minimum of shared meaning and trust that makes discussion possible, and which the minority claim rejects as the most insidious form of majority oppression.

Europe’s False Promises

What is most deleterious about this double movement I am trying to define is that, outwardly as well as inwardly, it obeys a principle of limitlessness. We will never be done abolishing borders, just as we will never be done emancipating minorities. We will never finish deconstructing what the political animal has built, undoing what it has so painstakingly ordered.

We might never have embarked on such a fruitless adventure had we not believed that the erasure of national borders promised a “new frontier,” the “external frontier” of Europe, or that the erasure of the national “common” promised the new “common” of the European Union. The proof that this promise was illusory is that the European Union is incapable of putting an end to its “enlargement.” Yet each step in this direction has meant a political weakening of Europe, both by increasing its internal heterogeneity and by diminishing its capacity to relate judiciously to the outside world. This compulsion to enlarge ignores the fact that the more we expand, the more we come into contact with new contexts and unprecedented difficulties, demanding ever greater capacity to deliberate, decide and act—something Europe has lacked since the very beginning.

Thus, far from substituting its strength for the weakness of the nations that make it up, the European Union merely confirms and renders irreversible the abandonment of the representative republic, which was the regime in which our countries, France in particular, found in the modern era that alliance of force and justice that is the very purpose of political existence.


Pierre Manent is a political philosopher at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Centre de recherches politiques Raymond Aron, and Boston College. His many books are widely translated into English, including, Metamorphoses of the City: On the Western DynamicA World beyond Politics?: A Defense of the Nation State, and Modern Liberty and its Discontents. This article appears courtesy of La Nef.


Featured: Vuelo de brujas {The Flight of Witches), by Francisco Goya; painted in 1798.


About Alexei Navalny

Reports of Alexei Navalny’s death in a Russian prison on February 16, 2024 quickly spread around the world, accompanied by unanimous condemnation of the Russian government, accused of suppressing an opponent. But in reality, no one knows what happened or the cause of his death. As with all current crises, our governments judge not by the facts, but by a narrative.

Was Navalny Vladimir Putin’s Main Challenger?

First of all, we need to understand who Alexei Navalny was. Our media present him as the “head,” or “leader” of the opposition in Russia. Yet, as the French newspaper Libération acknowledged, he was simply the most visible opposition figure in the West. He was part of the so-called “off-system” alternative opposition, made up of small groups often located at the extreme left and right of the political spectrum, too small to be able to form parties.

Navalny began his business career in the 2000s. In a common practice during the Yeltsin period, he would buy state-owned enterprises, liquidate the unprofitable parts and privatize the profits of the more profitable elements. This illegal practice is at the root of Vladimir Putin’s fight against certain oligarchs, who ended up taking refuge in Great Britain or Israel. Navalny was given a five-year suspended prison sentence in a first case (Kirovles).

But the most high-profile case was that involving the Yves Rocher cosmetics group. This is a relatively complex case, beyond the scope of this article, which is best described in the Yves Rocher press release and on the Russian version of Wikipedia. In a nutshell, it is a case of personal enrichment through abuse of an official position by Oleg Navalny, Alexei’s brother. In 2008, Oleg was a manager at the Russian Post Office’s automated sorting center in Podolsk. To streamline the delivery of Yves Rocher products to the sorting center, he encouraged the French company to use the services of a private logistics company, Glavpodpiska (GPA). But as GPA was owned by the Navalny family, there was a clear conflict of interest, leading to an investigation for unlawful enrichment and abuse of an official position. In addition to this corruption-like affair, there were accusations of overbilling. In this case, Oleg Navalny was the main defendant, while Alexeï Navalny was “only” an accomplice. This is why Oleg was sentenced to three and a half years in prison, and Alexeï to three and a half years suspended. It is this suspended sentence which, on appeal after appeal, was postponed—prohibiting him from leaving Russian territory—before being applied in 2021.

On February 4, 2019, French-speaking Swiss radio claimed that “Russian authorities, who were already investigating the Navalny brothers, allegedly pressured Yves Rocher in 2012 to file a complaint against them.” This was a lie. In fact, Navalny was not convicted for the damage caused to Yves Rocher, but for the abuse of an official position. Just the day before, Yves Rocher declared in a press release:

Yves Rocher Vostok never filed a complaint against the Navalny brothers, nor did it make any legal claim against them at any time.

Oleg and Alexei Navalny took this ruling to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), arguing that it was politically motivated. However, contrary to the claims of the Western media, and the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs, the ECHR did not invalidate this judgment, as it did not judge the substance of the case, but its form. On October 17, 2017, the ECHR delivered its verdict, partially upholding the two brothers on certain points of law and concluding that the Russian justice system should pay them compensation. On the other hand, it rejected the allegation that their conviction was politically motivated (paragraph 89).

In 2018, Alexei was not allowed to run in the presidential election. Our media claim that the reasons are political, but this is not true. The reason is that—as in other Western countries—you cannot run for president if you have been convicted. Furthermore, as we have seen, his conviction was not political in nature.

Politically, Alexei Navalny’s background was more that of an activist than a politician. In the early 2000s, he was an advisor to Nikita Belykh, Governor of Kirov. At that time, he was a complete unknown whose activism had no national or international visibility to justify harassment by the Russian government. In 2005, he co-founded the Democratic Alternative (DA) movement. This is an alternative opposition movement funded by the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED). In June 2007, he co-founded the unsuccessful nationalist group Narod (“People”), which merged in June 2008 with two other Russian nationalist far-right movements: the Movement Against Illegal Immigration (MAII) and Great Russia, to form a new coalition: the Russian National Movement.

In 2010, on the recommendation of Garry Kasparov, Navalny was invited to the United States to take part in the Yale World Fellows Program. This is a fifteen-week, non-degree-granting training program offered by Yale University to foreigners, identified as potential relays of American policy in their respective countries.

Back in Russia, Navalny campaigned for the rights of small shareholders in large corporations and denounced abuses in corporate practices. His Anti-Corruption Fund (FBK) attracted sympathy, but also a great deal of distrust and antipathy. His accusations were often spurious, as in 2016 against Artyom Chaika, son of Russia’s Prosecutor General; in 2017, against Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov, or in 2018, against businessman Mikhaïl Prokhorov.

As for his ideas, the picture is hardly any brighter. In 2007, he was expelled from the center-right Yabloko party for his regular participation in the ultra-nationalist “Russian March” and his racist “nationalist activities.” At the time, in a now-famous video for the liberalization of handguns, he mimed shooting Chechen migrants in Russia. In October 2013, he supported and stirred up, the Biryulyovo riots, castigating the “hordes of legal and illegal immigrants.” In 2017, the American media outlet Salon claimed that “if he were American, liberals would hate Navalny far more than they hate Trump or Steve Bannon.” In 2017, the American media outlet Jacobin, even referred to him as “Russia’s Trump.” In fact, as Princeton University’s American Foreign Policy Magazine noted in December 2018, he emerged through far-right groups, and his ideas were more akin to what is described as “populist” in the West. The Grayzone did a remarkable interview with two activists on the “anti-Putin” left, which shows how much our mainstream media have distorted our image of Navalny.

On Radio-Télévision Suisse (RTS)’s “Géopolitis” program on Navalny, broadcast on February 21, 2021, a presenter asserted that “nothing remains of Navalny’s ultra-nationalist beginnings and anti-migrant declarations.” This is not true: in April 2017 in The Guardian, then in October 2020 in the German magazine Der Spiegel, Navalny confirmed that he had not changed his opinion.

In order to attract the votes of the extremes on the right and left—which are not sufficiently numerous separately to field candidates in elections—Navalny applied the concept of smart voting, inspired by American strategic or tactical voting. Whereas in France, the “useful vote” consists in giving one’s vote to the candidate who is closest to one’s opinions, Navalny’s “smart voting” principle was to give one’s vote to anyone except a member of United Russia (Vladimir Putin’s party). “Smart voting” is not based on preference, but on detestation. Very symbolic!

The advantage of this process is that it enables the votes of extremists to be pooled. This explains Navalny’s “success” in the Moscow municipal elections of 2013, when “he” won 27 percent of the vote. But it was a deceptive success: it did not express a preference for Navalny, but a rejection of the then incumbent mayor of Moscow, Sobyanin.

This election showed that Navalny’s supporters are a very disparate and unholy mixture of left-wing and right-wing extremists, where internal rivalries are very strong. But it also showed that his supporters were not rallying around a project for Russia, but around a determination against “power.” This is yet another example of the Western approach, which does not seek to promote an improvement for Russia, but, on the contrary, its weakening. It is also symptomatic that none of our media report on Navalny’s political project. For a good and simple reason—it does not exist.

In 2019, on the occasion of the Moscow Duma elections, 20,000-50,000 demonstrators calling for “free elections” attracted the attention of the Western media. Headlines such as “27 candidates have been excluded” (Le Figaro) or “Authorities exclude opposition candidates” (Le Monde) suggestws that the validation of candidacies was discretionary. The BBC claimed that the candidates were “ignored” and “treated as if they were insignificant.” Not true. In fact, as in France for the presidential election, candidates must have a certain number of signatures in order to take part. In France, candidates must have the signatures of 500 elected representatives.

In Russia, a non-party candidate needs the signatures of 5,000 ordinary citizens, which does not seem too much in a city of 12 million inhabitants. Naturally, these signatures are checked by an electoral commission to prevent fraud, and despite a 10 percent tolerance, some candidates fail to reach the required number. This is what happened to these small groups, whose tendencies ranged from the extreme right to the extreme left, who have no popular base, and some of whom did not even try to collect the signatures.

This is the same phenomenon that affected Alexei Navalny’s Progress Party in 2015—it simply did not have enough supporters to have branches in at least 85 entities of the Russian Federation. It was therefore struck off the electoral rolls, not by arbitrary decision, but because it did not meet the criteria defined by law.

In reality, Navalny’s popularity was very low. A poll carried out between August 20 and August 26, 2020 (just after his “poisoning”) by the Levada Center (funded by the USA and considered in Russia as a “foreign agent,” so not really ” regime-friendly”) showed the difference in popularity between Vladimir Putin and Alexei Navalny (Table 1).

Table 1: Voting intentions in November 2020 (among voters who intended to vote). August 2020 figures come from a poll conducted in the week of August 20-26, 2020, after the Navalny “poisoning attempt.” [Source: Levada Center]

Alongside these institutional problems, the reason why the non-systemic opposition—i.e., that which is not structured into parties with sufficient popular representation to be elected—is sidelined is that it is funded from abroad. In part by oligarchs guilty of illegal enrichment who have fled the country to Britain or Israel, and by foreign powers, notably the United States and Great Britain. By financing political parties in Russia, our countries are, quite logically, turning them into “foreign agents.”

The US uses the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) to fund “non-systemic” opposition in Russia. According to the New York Times, the NED was created in the early 1980s to alleviate the workload of the CIA. In 2021, it supported no fewer than 109 political and influence activities in Russia, for a total of $14 million. As for the UK, it participates in this effort by funding anti-Russia media in the countries surrounding Russia. According to investigative journalist Matt Kennard, the UK spent around €96 million between 2017 and 2021 on “counter-information” in 20 countries.

In response to a situation that has only worsened since the early 2000s, Russia passed a law in 2012 similar to the one in force in the USA since 1938, allowing the banning of foreign-funded political organizations.
In November 2017, following the United States’ decision to classify the Russian media outlet RT as a “foreign agent,” Russia tightened its policy and passed a law allowing foreign journalists and media outlets to be classified as “foreign agents.” In 2018, this law was extended to individuals and NGOs funded by foreign countries.

To what extent the Russian opposition is free to express itself is certainly debatable, but the fact that we are funding it makes it ipso facto illegitimate and illegal. No country accepts foreign funding of its opposition. What is more, if the opposition were as strong and vibrant as they say it is in Russia, it would not need our financial support.

In fact, Western countries fund the Russian opposition not to improve the situation for Russians, but to put pressure on the government.

The Poisoning

On Thursday August 20, 2020, on his flight from Tomsk to Moscow, Alexei Navalny was suddenly in severe pain. The flight was diverted to Omsk so that he could be rushed to hospital.

Although no analysis was ever carried out and no one knows the exact nature of Navalny’s illness, his spokeswoman claimed that he was deliberately poisoned. The rumors circulating on social networks about alcohol consumption combined with medication were immediately described as “defamatory” and dismissed as “slanderous” by our media, which readily prefered, without any supporting evidence, a more romanticized narrative—Novitchok poisoning on Putin’s orders.

Assuming that the poisoning was deliberate (and therefore criminal), how it occurred remains a mystery, and explanations have varied. In the first version, his entourage claims that he was poisoned while drinking tea at Tomsk airport. The problem was that the tea had been brought to him by Ilya Pakhomov, one of his colleagues. Later, another video shows a waitress placing cups on the table.

Navalny’s entourage then presented a second version: poisoning with water bottles at the hotel, which Navalny’s team (remaining in Tomsk) recovered on August 20. The British media outlet The Sun published the video of the operation, which took place before the arrival of the police, thus altering the presumed crime scene. Navalny’s entourage claimed to have taken the bottles to Germany for analysis. But scans of the Navalny team’s luggage at the boarding gate, published by the private Russian media REN TV [30 percent of is owned by the RTL Group], confirmed that there were no bottles (which would have been confiscated anyway), while surveillance cameras show one of Navalny’s relatives buying water from a vending machine after the luggage check. In September 2020, one of Navalny’s associates himself confessed that the bottle of water was not the cause of the poisoning. In any case, according to the BBC, Navalny had ingested nothing but his tea at the airport that morning.

Navalny’s entourage then came up with a third story: the poisoning of Navalny’s underpants, “revealed” on December 21, 2020, with the video of a telephone conversation with what is presented to us as an “FSB [Federal Security Service] agent,” named Konstantin Kudryavtsev. It was widely circulated on Western media. Conspiracy theorists claimed that, after this conversation, “there can be no doubt.” But there is absolutely no proof that a) this is the person in question, b) that he really is an FSB agent, and c) that he was actually involved in the poisoning attempt.

The video was shot with the help of Bellingcat, a British government-funded outfit. The problem is that its methodology for identifying Kudryavtsev is technically questionable. In fact, instead of starting with the crime and working backwards to its perpetrator (as a Sherlock Holmes would do), Bellingcat looks for the individuals who best fit the hypothetical course of the crime. It builds a profile of culprits based on an assumed scenario, and then looks for the individuals who are most likely to match it. This is the principle of artificial intelligence. In this way, we arrive at the result through a succession of approximations—we have the probability of the probability of the probability of the probability that what we find is true. To put it simply: facts are selected on the basis of conclusions—whereas facts should lead to conclusions. This is a method that police forces try to avoid, as it leads to miscarriages of justice.

Such a methodology could be used if all the details of the crime were known in advance. The problem is that, in this particular case, numerous facts show that Bellingcat knew neither the functioning nor the structure of the Russian security services, nor even how the crime was committed and under what circumstances. The probability that Bellingcat arrived at the right result is therefore extremely low. What is more, the American channel CNN—which investigated the case on site—admitted that it has “not been able” to confirm Navalny’s accusations.

Furthermore, assuming that Navalny’s contact was indeed a member of a team of “poisoners,” would he speak freely with a stranger, on an unencrypted phone, and give details of an operation that would presumably be highly classified? Assuming that this “agent” had been involved in Navalny’s surveillance for four years, would he not have recognized his voice on the phone? With so many contradictions and errors about the way the services work, we have every right to believe that Navalny’s contact person was not the one we have been led to believe.

Russian opposition media outlet Meduza asked four lawyers whether Navalny’s video constituted proof that the FSB tried to poison him. All agreed that, even if it were legally possible to present the video at a trial, its content was highly open to manipulation and insufficient to prove anything.

As to Bellingcat—regularly referred to by far-right conspiracists, Conspiracy Watch and many Western media outlets—an internal UK Integrity Initiative document from June 2018 on countering Russian disinformation judged it as follows:

Other concerns were that the CPDA and ISD had analytical shortcomings, and that Bellingcat was somewhat discredited, both by spreading disinformation itself, and by being willing to produce reports for anyone willing to pay.

This telephone conversation was therefore not credible in its form. But neither was its substance. Assuming that it was Novitchok poisoning, and even that the poison was of Russian origin, there was nothing at that stage—not even Navalny’s conversation—to link the Russian authorities to this attempt. Moreover, as we shall see, the various reports on this poisoning, published by the Charité hospital, the OPCW, Germany, Sweden or France, were based on biomedical samples (blood and urine samples), and none confirmed the mode of poisoning, nor refered to bottles or underwear. This was confirmed by the German government in its answers to parliamentarians.

I was trained in the Swiss Nuclear Biological and Chemical (NBC) Defense School, based in Spiez, which is a center of excellence for the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). So, the alleged assassination attempts on Sergei Skripal in Britain (2018) and then Alexei Navalny (2020) caught my interest. In both cases, Russia allegedly used a poison “a single gram of which could kill a thousand people in seconds.” However, not only none of the “victims” died, but their symptoms were totally different from each other’s, and moreover, these symptoms did not correspond to those of nerve agents.

In fact, the symptoms of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulya (and the testimony of a British National Health Service (NHS) emergency doctor in Salisbury) suggest that they were probably victims of food poisoning by a toxin related to saxitoxins, as were other customers of the same restaurant a few months later. As for Navalny, the military laboratories never published the results of their analyses.

Assuming that Novitchok had been put on Navalny’s underwear, he would have died when he picked it up and would not even have had time to put it on! In reality, the facts are poorly known. Our governments and the mainstream media exploit this ignorance to create a narrative that justifies their policies towards Russia. In this respect, our governments are behaving in a way that meets the definition of conspiracy theorists. The stories reported to us without nuance in the media are artificial constructs, which must “play” with the facts to appear credible.

Let’s remember a few facts. First of all, Novitchok was not listed in the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) until 2018, simply because the USSR (then Russia) never adopted it: it was merely a research product.

Secondly, it was at Russia’s request that several variants of Novitchok were added to the CWC list in 2018. Why? Because the laboratory that had developed it had been dismantled by the US, and the Americans had supplied samples to several NATO countries. The Americans themselves synthesized it for research purposes back in 1998. This is why the British laboratory at Porton Down refused to confirm to Theresa May that the toxin analyzed in the Skripal affair was of Russian origin.

In short, scientific evidence tends to contradict the claims of politicians and other propagandists. So we cannot say for sure, even if the report from German doctors at Berlin’s La Charité hospital indicates that Navalny’s poisoning seemed to have been caused by a wrong combination of drugs.

The Results of the Analyses

There is little available data to assess the reliability of the Western accusations made in 2018 and 2020. The analyses carried out by German, French and Swedish military laboratories in September 2020 remain classified and have neither been published nor communicated to Russia, despite its requests. On the other hand, we do have the medical reports of the doctors who treated Navalny in Omsk and Berlin, the declassified version of the OPCW report and—to a certain extent—the German government’s answers of November 19, 2020 and February 15, 2021, to questions from Bundestag lawmakers.

Analyses by military laboratories tended to assert the presence of Novitchok, but their content is unverifiable. Observations by civilian doctors tended to contradict their conclusions, while government responses seemed much less categorical than the media, and invoked military secrecy when facts appeared to contradict their statements.

On August 24, the Charité hospital issued a press release stating that clinical analyses “indicate intoxication with a substance from the cholinesterase inhibitor group.” However, the Omsk doctors did not detect any. So, conspiracy? Not necessarily. As the opposition media outlet Meduza explained, the German doctors were looking for evidence of poisoning, whereas the Russian doctors were looking for the cause of Navalny’s illness. As they were not looking for the same thing, they obtained different results, but they were not inconsistent.

In Sweden, lawyer Mats Nilsson requested publication of the results of Navalny’s blood analysis by the Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI). FOI only published a text in which the name of the substance had been redacted, stating that “the presence of XXXX has been confirmed in the patient’s blood.” A blackout which suggests that something other than Novitchok, which Westerners had expected, was found. What is more, elements of his medical file published by doctors at Berlin’s Charité Hospital in the medical journal The Lancet, tended to show that he was probably the victim of a toxic combination of drugs.

The name of the substance was hidden and obviously covered by military secrecy. So we do not know anything about it, but we can imagine that if it had been Novitchok (which Western countries expected), there would have been no reason to hide it. On January 14, 2021, the Swedish government refused to declassify this result so as not to “harm relations between Sweden and a foreign power,” without specifying whether this was Germany or the United States. So we do not know. But we do know that Sweden is a country whose honor is a fiction subordinated to political interest—in the Julian Assange affair, the Swedish government had already literally “fabricated” rape accusations, according to Nils Melzer, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture.

As it turns out, the “traces of toxin” which the German government found in Navalny’s blood (but which the doctors at Berlin’s La Charité hospital did not find) were not on the CAC list. Apparently, this toxin was so dangerous that the German government even refused to put it on the CAC list! So, the Germans found an unnamed toxic substance so dangerous that they have decided not to ban it.

Only our journalists can understand such deranged logic.

The German doctors’ report, published on December 22, 2020, in the medical journal The Lancet, clearly stated that they were unable to identify the presence of Novitchok when Navalny arrived, but only of “cholinesterase inhibitors.” They stated that the identification of Novitchok required further analysis by the IPTB.

But the analyses carried out by the Charité hospital on Navalny’s arrival spoke for themselves. They are the subject of an appendix to The Lancet article. An appendix that no mainstream media has published, reported or analyzed, because the German doctors’ findings call into question the military version of events.

The presence of cholinesterase inhibitors could therefore simply be explained by the drugs ingested by Navalny himself, likely in combination with alcohol. This would explain why his symptoms were totally different from those of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in 2018, who were claimed to have been victims of the same poison.

Furthermore, the German doctors’ report reveals that when the French, Swedish and OPCW took their samples–a fortnight after Navalny’s arrival in Germany—his cholinesterase levels were close to normal. At this stage, these laboratories were only able to detect “cholinesterase inhibitors,” but not the substances found at the Charité a few days earlier, such as lithium or drugs, which would have favored their appearance. In the absence of published results, we do not know exactly what the military found, but it is likely that, having no other explanation for the presence of these inhibitors, they were led to conclude that it was Novitchok.

By keeping their results secret, these laboratories had probably not anticipated that the German doctors would publish the results of their analyses. Thanks to the latter, the hypothesis that Navalny was the victim of accidental poisoning appears more likely than deliberate poisoning.

Navalny must obviously have known this, just as he must have known that these results were going to be published; and it was probably to disqualify their conclusions that, the day before The Lancet article was published, Navalny posted online his telephone conversation with an “FSB agent.”

Navalny’s Death

The official version given by the Russian authorities is that Alexei Navalny died from a form of cerebral embolism. Whether this is true or not, we do not know, and only an autopsy can tell us. In the absence of medical data, it is impossible to determine the cause of his death, let alone whether it was of criminal origin. However, it is now clear that Alexei Navalny’s death is of no interest to the Russian government.

In Ukraine, Russia controls the military situation and is making gains along the entire front line. Ukrainian institutions are in crisis, and the threat of a cut in Western aid is contributing to mounting political tensions. Ukraine and the West expected a rapid collapse of Russia thanks to sanctions, and convinced themselves that Ukraine could only win. Two years after the start of the Russian operation, the opposite is true: the Russian economy is growing, while those of the West are tending towards recession. We were told that the Russian army had no more tanks, no more artillery, no more missiles, no more fighters, that it was isolated from the world, that it had to find its micro-processes in washing machines; and today we are told that it is ready to invade Europe.

Faced with the failure of its strategy in Ukraine, the West is moving deeper into the war of narratives. As Josep Borrell, head of the European Union’s foreign policy department, puts it: “It is clear that the wind is blowing against the West, it is blowing against us. And we have to win the battle of narratives.”

But here too, Russia appears to be the winner. Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin went round the world, showing a Kremlin leader more stable, coherent, rational, and intelligent than his White House counterpart.

Furthermore, the approaching presidential elections in Russia made the timing of Navalny’s elimination unlikely. In fact, Alexei Navalny was transferred from his prison on the outskirts of Moscow to Penitentiary Colony No. 3 (IK-3). According to the opposition media Novaya Gazeta, when Navalny was transferred to IK-3, the Russian government gave instructions that he should be protected and not die before the elections. Did the Russian authorities have any information about possible threats against Navalny? We do not know.

What we also know from the German and Ukrainian media is that Russia was negotiating with the US government to exchange Navalny for Vadim Krasikov, a former Russian spy.

The problem here, as in all matters concerning Russia or Belarus, is that our leaders are reacting on the basis of their hatred of noth these countries, not on the basis of the facts. Already during the alleged “hijacking” of flight FR4978 to Minsk in May 2021, European leaders had tweeted that President Lukashenko was responsible, even before the plane had landed in Minsk, and Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya had tweeted that activist Roman Protasevich had been arrested, demanding his immediate release and calling for sanctions against Belarus, even before he had stepped off the plane.

With the Nord Stream affair in September 2022, on the French television channel LCI, French general Michel Yakovleff claimed that Russia had sabotaged its own gas pipelines, before anyone knew what had actually happened.

The same thing happened with Navalny’s death: within minutes after his death was announced, all European leaders immediately accused Vladimir Putin of having had him assassinated. This shows that our leaders have no robust decision-making processes. They decide according to the mood of the moment, not according to decision-making processes documented by the work of the intelligence services. Here, too, our intelligence services show their weakness and their inability to integrate into decision-making processes. In Switzerland, the state of intelligence analysis is catastrophic, and this is reflected in the decisions of a political class which, like its European counterparts, is incapable of thinking things through. We have reached a point where, as a Belgian minister said in the 1990s: “things are too complex to be answered with the brain, so we answer with our guts.”

By the way, what do Ukrainian intelligence services think? On February 25, Kirillo Budanov, head of Ukrainian military intelligence (GUR), told journalists, “I may disappoint you, but he really had a blood clot come off.”


Jacques Baud is a widely respected geopolitical expert whose publications include many articles and books. His lastest works are The Russian Art of War He has researched Alexei Navalny in The Navalny Case.


Multipolarity Forum and Russophile Congress 2024

The Multipolarity Forum and Russophile Movement Forum, which took place from February 26-27, 2024, is a unique event that brought together influential experts, activists, politicians and members of the public to discuss key issues in international relations, politics and diplomacy. These forums have fostered dialog and exchange of views on current topics related to global politics.

The Multipolarity Forum discussed the problems of a multipolar world, new challenges and opportunities for global development. The forum participants talked about the role of different states and regions in the world, strategies of cooperation and conflicts, as well as modern trends in international relations.

The forum of the Russophile movement, in turn, is aimed at discussing and popularizing Russian culture, history, language and values. Forum participants discussed issues related to the preservation and promotion of Russian heritage, Russia’s cultural influence, and the Russian language in the world.

Both forums featured highly qualified speakers, discussions, plenary sessions, workshops and roundtables. Participants had the opportunity to exchange experiences, knowledge and ideas, strengthen ties and forge new partnerships. These forums will have a significant impact on global politics, culture and diplomacy, fostering greater international cooperation and understanding.

The Multipolarity Forum and the Russophile Movement Forum are important platforms for discussing contemporary challenges and finding joint solutions on a global scale. Participation in these forums allowed participants to gain a deeper understanding of contemporary processes in international relations and to share their ideas and proposals for achieving peace, justice and development.

According to Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova, there is an increasing substitution of concepts in the world. Freedom, as Western leaders see it, means forced adherence to their understanding of world order and hegemony. Despite what used to be said only about the interests of certain clubs, today all countries, including the Global South and Global East, have equal rights. This has been achieved thanks to Russia’s efforts. Today, the real-world majority gathers not at Western conferences, but here in Russia.

According to Alexander Dugin, today humanity is experiencing significant changes in the civilization process. He advocates the idea of a multipolar world, which is based on the criticism of Western universalism and its racist and imperialist aspects. Previously, Britain claimed to be the center of consciousness of humanity, which led to the establishment of a world with the only acceptable political system, economic approach and culture. Dugin argues that there is a need to move towards diversity and get rid of the monopoly of one country or culture.

Multipolarity is a philosophy which argues that the world is not limited to the West alone, but is a multitude of civilizations. Russia, China, India, the Islamic world, African countries, and Latin America are all distinct civilizations with their own traditions and values. Despite their differences, they do not clash with each other but strive for peaceful coexistence.

Western civilization has the potential for harmonious coexistence with other civilizations, the Russian philosopher argues. Multipolarity is not opposed to the West as a whole, but rather to its claims to exceptionalism, world leadership and universality. The West’s toxic ideology has undermined the national elites of many countries, using them to support one hegemon. Today, however, this state of affairs is on the wane.

Russia is engaged in a deadly battle with the collective West in Ukraine, seeking to resist a unipolar world. Sanctions and pressure from the West are trying to strangle us, but our victory will be important for all of humanity, Dugin argues. China is leading on the economic front, fighting the West. The Islamic world is resisting pressure on religious and family values. Africa is moving from being a raw material colony to a global giant. Latin America continues on the path of anti-colonial struggle, representing all its countries in the forum.

As an example of the new world order, we can cite the unification of representatives of six civilizations out of seven within the BRICS framework. This indicates the formation of an institutional system of multipolarity. At the same time, the West is not unified. The peoples of Europe and the Anglo-Saxon world are subjected to their globalist governments that seek to destroy their cultural and national identity. This remark by Alexander Dugin drew a round of applause. The peoples of the West are not opponents of a multipolar world, but rather victims of the despotism of their elites.

Chang Weiwei, a leading international relations expert in the Communist Party of China, emphasized that the concept of a unipolar world is already outdated. “Unipolarity is outdated. This order will change with the strengthening of the international influence of China, Russia and the expansion of the BRICS by adding countries from the global South and East to the alliance,” he said.

The speeches of Cardinal Vigano and Archpriest Tkachev delivered a verdict on the hegemony of Western elites, condemning their diabolical roots and the private club of Satan-worshippers. They openly criticized the hatred of traditional biblical man, dotting the i’s and calling things by their names.

After the plenary session of the forum there was a division into three thematic sections devoted to different centers of world civilization. During the discussion in the section, “Prospects of the Western World after Hegemony: Is the Salvation of European Civilization Possible?” the participants deeply analyzed the ways of development of Western countries.

Representatives of Italy, Cyprus and Greece spoke in favor of returning the Mediterranean civilization to its roots and getting rid of the influence of the United States. The section “China’s Role in a Multipolar World” discussed the Eastern center of gravity of state-civilization. China, as a country that has achieved prosperity through its unique model of cooperation without hegemony, offers its economic support for the prosperity of many countries. The “One Belt, One Road” global project aims to unite the interests of different states and world development centers to achieve common goals.

A guest from Kyrgyzstan, Valdai Club expert, Kurbat Rakhimov, examined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as an important institutional structure for regional development. He emphasized the need to develop the world without one superpower prevailing over another. Rakhimov expressed the opinion that multipolarity does not always guarantee the absence of conflicts between countries and blocs, and called for striving to ensure that the actions of one pole do not provoke conflicts with others.

The multipolarity forum held in Moscow emphasized that diversity of cultures and beliefs facilitates the exchange of ideas and creates harmony in the development of the global economy. The section “Global South: Changing the Global Architecture” attracted a lot of attention from participants who expressed a desire to unite after a long time of division and to stop the exploitation of natural resources by transnational corporations.

For the representatives of Iran, Yemen and other Middle Eastern countries, it is important to create a new economic model, different from the liberal Western dictatorship of global corporations. They see the battle in the Red Sea and Palestine as having not only military but also cultural and economic significance. African countries have highlighted the fight against terrorism and the pandemic as top priorities. The example of Mali, the Central African Republic and Niger showed that with Russia’s support it is possible to quickly and successfully defeat the terrorists they have been fighting for many years.

The guest from Zambia expressed her desire to quickly overcome the COVID-19 pandemic, taking inspiration from the history of African victories over measles and polio. This requires effective vaccines available through Russian efforts and increased public awareness of the importance of vaccination. She noted that the continent’s current main challenge is the development of the health care system and protection of public health.

The Forum on February 26,.2024 turned out to be productive and allowed participants to exchange views and experiences, as well as to outline further steps to build a more sustainable and just world order.

Sergey Lavrov, speaking at the Congress of Russophiles, emphasized that the development of international relations is an important priority for Russia.

Russia strives to be friendly and open to all countries of the world. We pursue an independent, pragmatic and peace-loving foreign policy, supporting the democratization of international relations in accordance with the principles of the UN Charter. Our efforts are aimed at developing this task through our chairmanship of BRICS, CIS, active work in EAEU, SCO, G20 and other multilateral formats. We are also strengthening ties with regional integration associations.

“Multipolarity is important because it offers the world alternatives. We hope that Senegal will join BRICS. It would be better if the alliance accepts countries that have applied to join as soon as possible,” said Oumi Sen, secretary general of the Kalinka Cultural Center in Senegal.

Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fighter Jeff Monson also attended the forum and spoke in favor of deepening economic cooperation among the BRICS countries: “If the BRICS countries came to an agreement to introduce a common currency, it would be a very effective step. It could be used for joint trade,” Monson noted.

According to the idea of the organizers of the event, the platform is designed to unite scientists from different countries who advocate the concept of a multipolar world based on mutual respect.

To date, the International Movement of Russophiles actively advocates for the dissemination of Russian culture and humanitarian values.


Anastasia Gavrilova writes from Russia. This articles appears through the kind courtesy of Geopolitika.


Multipolar Humanity

Speech at the Multipolarity Forum. Moscow. Lomonosov Cluster, February 26, 2024.

The multipolar world is first and foremost a philosophy. It is based on criticism of Western universalism.

The West has racially imperialistically identified itself with humanity. Britain once declared all the seas and oceans its property. Western civilization has declared all of humanity—above all its consciousness—to be its property. This is how the unipolar world came to be.

It has only one value—Western values. There is only one political system—liberal democracy. Only one economic model—neoliberal capitalism. Only one culture—postmodern. Only one idea of gender and family—LGBT. Only one version of development—technical perfection up to posthumanism and the complete displacement of humanity by AI and cyborgs.

The unipolar world, according to its supporters, is “the triumph of world history,” the total victory of the Western New Age, liberalism, which has become the sole and unquestionable ideology of all mankind.

Multipolarity is an alternative philosophy. It is based on a fundamental objection: the West is not yet the whole of humanity, but only a part of it, its region, its province. It is not a civilization in the singular, but one of civilizations. And there are at least seven such civilizations today—hence the most important concept of multipolar theory—heptarchy.

Some civilizations are already united into huge continental States, World-States, Civilization-States or wénmíng guójiā (文明國家). Others have yet to do so. The collective West, NATO countries and US vassals are only one of the poles.

Three others are:

The other three are

  • Russia-Eurasia,
  • Greater China ( Zhōngguó 中國) or Tiānxià (天下),
  • Greater India.

They are all Civilization-States, that is, something more than ordinary countries.

And then there are three other large spaces, integrated to varying degrees

  • the Islamic world, tightly knit together by religion, but politically still fragmented,
  • black Trans-Saharan Africa,
  • the Latin American ecumene.

All seven civilizations have completely different religious profiles, different systems of traditional values, different vectors of development, and different cultural identities.

And Western civilization, contrary to its claims, is only one of them. Arrogant, insolent, aggressive, deceitful, predatory and dangerous. However, its claims to universalism are unsubstantiated, and its dominance is based on double standards.

It is not the West that opposes multipolarity, but the West’s claims to oneness and universality. We know these claims firsthand. They permeate all systems of our culture, science and education. The West has penetrated with its toxic ideology inside our societies, seduced, corrupted the elites, put our society under its information control, tried to lead our youth as far away from faith and tradition as possible.

But the era of the West’s sole hegemony is over. It ended with the position of Russia and personally our President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, when we refused to sacrifice our sovereignty and entered into a deadly battle with the West in Ukraine. We are at war in Ukraine not with the Ukrainians, but with the unipolar world. And our imminent victory will be not only ours, but the victory of all humanity, which will see with its own eyes that the power of the West is not absolute, that it and its policy of neo-colonialism and desubordination can be said a decisive “no” to and the world can insist on its own.

Russia is one of the poles of a multipolar world. This is not a return to the bipolar old model. It is the beginning of a completely new world architecture.

The rapid growth of the Chinese economy and the strengthening of China’s sovereignty, especially under the great leader Xi Jiangping, has turned China into another completely independent pole. And seeing this, the West, represented by the US globalist top brass, immediately declared a trade war on China.

The Islamic world has challenged the West primarily in the religious and cultural sphere. Western values that openly call for the destruction of tradition, family, gender, culture, religion are incompatible with the foundations of Islam. Each of the nearly 2 billion Muslims understands this today. And today the Islamic world has its own war with the globalist West—in Palestine, in the Middle East, where the shameful genocide of the Palestinian people—the slaughter of Palestinian babies, women and the elderly—is in full swing with the total approval of the West.

India is another pole. Today—especially under Narendra Modi—it is an entire civilization that is returning to its Vedic roots, to its ancient tradition, to its fundamentals. It is no longer a cultural and economic colony of the West, but a rising global giant.

Africa and Latin America are consistently and methodically, though not without problems, following the same path.

The Pan-Africanist movement is preparing the way for a unified and comprehensive African integration free from neo-colonial control. It is a new theory and a new practice, incorporating the best aspects of the previous stages of the liberation struggle, but based on a different philosophy, where religion, spirit and traditional values play the most important role.

Latin America also continues its path of anti-colonial struggle. Here, too, peoples are seeking new ways to consolidate and unite, partly overcoming outmoded models that divided everyone into right and left. In many Latin American countries, supporters of traditional values, religion, and the family are uniting with those who advocate for social justice under the banner of a common struggle against the neocolonialism of the collective West and its perverted anti-human culture.

The multipolar world today is neither a utopia nor only a theoretical project. Six civilizations out of seven (from the planetary heptarchy) have united in a new bloc in BRICS. There are representatives of each of them there. We are dealing with the institutionalization of multipolarity. Greater Humanity is uniting, comprehending itself, beginning to harmonize its traditions and its orientations, its systems of traditional values and its interests.

Only the collective West, trying to preserve its hegemony at any cost, categorically refuses to be included in this inevitable multipolar process. It opposes it. It intrigues, provokes conflicts. Intervenes. It tries to strangle all pockets of independence with sanctions and direct pressure. And if it fails, it engages in direct military confrontation—as in Ukraine, in Gaza and if not today, then tomorrow in the Pacific Ocean.

However, the West is not monolithic. There are two Wests. The globalist West of liberal elites and the traditional West—the West of peoples and societies. The traditional West itself suffers from the omnipotence of the perverted globalists and tries, where it can, to revolt. The peoples of the West are not enemies of the multipolar world. They are first and foremost victims. And as our President’s interview with conservative politician and journalist Tucker Carlson shows, Russia and the anti-globalists of the United States have far more in common than they appear.

Therefore, the real Victory of multipolarity will not be the defeat of the collective West, but its salvation, its return to its own—Western—traditional (not perverted)—values, its culture (not a culture of abolition), its classical Greco-Roman, Christian roots. I believe that the nations of the present West, freed from the globalist yoke, will sometime in the future also join the Greater Humanity, becoming a respectable pole of a multipolar world. To stop being a hegemon is not only in the interests of all non-Western civilizations, but also in the interests of the West itself.

I welcome all participants of our Forum. We have gathered here to create the future, to make sense of the present, and to save our glorious past by ensuring the continuity of culture.

So different, so special, so unique, so distinctive, sovereign—humanity is us!


Alexander Dugin is a widely-known and influential Russian philosopher. His most famous work is The Fourth Political Theory (a book banned by major book retailers), in which he proposes a new polity, one that transcends liberal democracy, Marxism and fascism. He has also introduced and developed the idea of Eurasianism, rooted in traditionalism. This article appears through the kind courtesy of Geopolitika.


The Crisis of 2007: The Great Financial Capitalist Swindle

Despite the seismic crisis of 2007, a question persists that is likely to remain unanswered. Colin Crouch condensed it in the title of his 2011 book, The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism: why did neoliberalism re-emerge stronger from the 2007 crisis, from which in fact it might have been expected to emerge, at the very least, weakened?

One plausible answer could be the following: the turbo-financial elites managed to make the crisis, for which they were mainly (if not exclusively) responsible, appear to have been caused by the inefficiencies of the public sector and by the Debt of the States. On this basis, by skillfully manipulating the consensus of public opinion, through the ever-zealous work performed by the intellectual clergy, the aforementioned elites managed to make the State itself—and, therefore, the Public—pay for the crisis: that is, they “generously” made wage-earners and pensioners pay for it, as if they had really been responsible for the failure of the financial system.

In this way, the capitalist system, with its asymmetrical social relationship based on bonds of Lordship and Servitude, has not limited itself to generating the poor as it has always done, but, evidently with the crisis, it forced them to subsidize the rich themselves through an authentic and genuine Economy of Swindle. Through it, it triggered concrete transfers of property and power to those who, from above, kept their resources intact and are in a position to manage credit. There is no image that clarifies the situation better than the one used by Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook to title their study, The Winner-Take-All Society.

Incidentally, the fabula docet is that to assert—as the hedonistic singers of the free market paroxysmally do—that in the long run the economic system produces its own equilibrium constitutes a false position, since—as Hegel already pointed out—even the plague ceases at a given moment, but in the meantime hundreds of thousands are its victims. In addition to this argument in support of the need for political regulation of the wild beast of the market, Hegel mobilized another one: liberals make a profession of faith in individualism, but they are precisely the first to sacrifice the welfare of the individual on the altar of market power and economic equilibrium. They forget that it is not the market, as an abstract entity, but only the individual, as a particularity, who represents an end and who is the holder of rights.

In the context of the 2007 crisis, “Save the banks” was the new and indecent slogan repeated by the elites and, above all, by their politicians and intellectuals of reference. As if it were a new Aztec religion fed by human sacrifices, in the name of liberalism the resolution of all problems could wait, but the solemn call to help the banks in difficulties became the new categorical imperative to be obeyed immediately. And this was also thanks to the new imaginary spread urbi et orbi; an imaginary for which, basically, it was easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism (fiat profitus, pereat mundus).

According to a well-established practice that is fully inscribed in the modus operandi of ideology, the masters of discourse and of the media circus chose to invert reality; and attributed the responsibility for the crisis of private finances to the State, thus laying the necessary foundations to make it possible to attack it head-on and plunder it without restraint.

The storytelling, concocted by the anesthetists of consensus and by the administrators of the superstructures after 2007, can be summarized as follows: it was the increase of the Public Debt that caused the crisis, so it is fair and necessary to claim against the State. On the other hand, the cataclysms of speculative finance and fictitious capital should not be the subject of debate, almost as if they had never happened. Moreover, the “Public Debt theorem” proves to be functional to the neoliberal processes of de-sovereignization of the national State and the contextual simultaneous transfer of sovereignty from the State (and politics) to the banking system (and the economy). In the words of Mario Draghi, maximum exponent of the global class and protagonist—as president of the ECB—of the maneuvers referred to above, “a country loses sovereignty when the level of the Debt is such that any decision passes through the scrutiny of the markets, that is, of actors who do not vote but determine the processes.”

This situation, surrealistic to say the least, was on the other hand the palpable proof, as Dardot and Laval have suggested in Guerra alla democrazia, that in the framework of neoliberalism every obstacle becomes an opportunity, every collective tragedy a triumph for the ruling elite. The financial crisis was ridden to direct the offensive against the State and against wages, against the public and, in short, against the subaltern classes that live off their own labor.

This is also the quid proprium of the neoliberal order: to ensure that the Lords of Big Business enjoy the benefits of globalization without charge, often taking advantage of a tax system that tends to zero, where the losers of globalization—the “glebalized”—are the only ones who pay the bill on behalf of all, through the iniquitous transfer of the entire tax burden onto the shoulders of poor families and the impoverished middle classes. Neoliberalism, the supreme phase of the hegemony of the ruling classes and of the new spirit of capitalism, thus presents itself also in the form of a fanatical faith and a fundamentalist religion of the capitalist economy; a faith by virtue of which—in the triumph of a credo quia absurdum deprived of transcendence—the market is always right on principle, even when it is flagrantly wrong.

The fanatical faith of economic fundamentalism, coessential to the neoliberal order, is based on an ideological naturalization of mercantile exchange, elevated to the condition of an aprioric endowment of the human mind (a natural-eternal forma mentis) and, at the same time, to a natural relational practice among individuals, conceived in turn as free-trading atoms. If, in The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith already posed free exchange as a quid proprium of human nature (“no one has ever seen a dog make with another dog a deliberate and fair exchange of one bone for another bone”), Milton Friedman goes further. And he ventures to extend the activity of free exchange to the very foundation of human relations: “economic activity is by no means the only area of human life in which a complex and sophisticated structure arises as an unintended consequence of the cooperation of a large number of individuals, each pursuing his own interests.”

In this sense, the formula—among those preferred by neo-liberal discourse—”working to sustain the Public Debt” means, no more and no less, than working to pay usurious interests to the financial markets, depriving the real economy of those scarce residues of wealth that the financial markets have not yet managed to “dematerialize” and make their own. The States, deprived of their sovereign currency, are forced to pay very high interests for the loans obtained in the financial markets and this determines the uninterrupted growth of the Public Debt. This, and certainly not the excessive cost of the welfare State, is the real cause of the Public Debt, whose calculated increase is intended to annihilate, in perfect neo-liberal style, the residues of welfarism and public spending, favoring the complete privatization of the world of life.

Strictly speaking, what has been said above is hardly refutable proof of Ezra Pound’s assertion that “a nation that does not want to get into debt makes usurers rage,” as well as of the vital need for nationalization of the banks in order to reduce the public debt and free itself from the auri sacra fames of the financial markets. The case of Japan remains exemplary. It has a sovereign currency and, despite having a fairly high Public Debt, is not subject to the rapacious attacks of financial speculation. In fact, on the one hand, Japan is guaranteed by its own Central Bank, which acts as “lender of last resort” and, on the other hand, 95% of the Japanese Public Debt is in the hands of the Japanese and not of speculators.

From this also follows the governmental character of the crisis: to govern by means of a crisis—one of the cornerstones of the neoliberal raison—means to manage it as a weapon for the benefit of the ruling classes who live off capital and against the dominated classes who live off labor. In effect, there is no crisis that is not exploited by capital and its servile governments to accelerate and intensify the transformation of the economy for the benefit of the dominant classes, sweeping away all still existing limits and, therefore, specifically and gradually weakening the sphere of the Public and the State.

If neoliberalism not only does not implode but strengthens, even after the continuous catastrophes it generates, it is also, because it continually manages to change the world (in the capitalist sense, of course), adapting it to the demands of the market, and exercising (also in this case in a capitalist way, that is, for the benefit of the ruling class) the hegemony theorized by Gramsci: from the Cato Institute to the Heritage Foundation, from the Adam Smith Institute to the Institute of Economic Affairs, from the Mont Pelerin Society to the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission, capitalism triumphs also thanks to its cultural hegemony, that is, through the domination combined with the consensus it manages to impose on all those who, truly, should have every interest in rebelling against it.


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 IntellectualThe Place of Possibility: Toward a New Philosophy of Praxis, and Marx, again!: The Spectre ReturnsThis article appears courtesy of Posmodernia.


Featured: le Naufrage (Shipwreck), by Joseph Vernet; painted in 1772.


Revel: A Liberal between Paris and Washington

Known and recognized for his talent as a polemicist and his unquestionable erudition, Jean-François Revel added to these qualities the strength of his personal convictions against the current of his time and his country. Of his time—he defended an uncompromising liberalism against all forms of totalitarian temptation when almost no one was grumbling against the Marxist doxa. Of his country—he was an atypical exponent of a pessimistic and skeptical current in the nation that has probably deposited more militant faith in the transforming capacities of politics. However, as we shall see later, these two considerations need, if not total amendments, at least partial ones.

A Liberal of the Land who Loved Ideas

Born in Marseille in 1924, a student of the elite École Normale Supérieure and a philosophy graduate, he taught in Algeria, Mexico and Italy before abandoning teaching and devoting himself to an independent intellectual and journalistic career. He was a cosmopolitan spirit, an attitude that radiated in his writings and was reflected in his philias and phobias, but very French in an essential sense: that of the utmost fidelity to that national spirit summed up in the formula that the British historian Sudhir Hazareesingh coined for his How the French Think: “that country that loved ideas.” For, although every great nation considers itself to be an exceptional homeland, France’s particularity is that it associates that status with the genius that allows it the greatest theoretical feats and the greatest intellectual prowess. As a historian of ideas, philosopher, journalist, literary and political editorialist, director of collections in various publishing houses, Jean-François Revel’s biography fits like a glove with the epochal sense of what Michel Winock baptized as “the century of intellectuals.”

In his case, however, the slogan so often repeated in the Parisian 1960s can be reversed: unlike a whole generation seduced by that “cabal of devotees” (title of the book in which he criticized the intellectual caste infected by totalitarian ideologies), Revel preferred to be right with Aron rather than wrong with Sartre. He challenged with the weapons of the committed intellectual the kind of anti-capitalist and anti-liberal gnosticism that manifests itself in the disdain for facts and the real man. Against the prophetic attitude of his guild, which proclaims itself, as Voegelin noted, “connoisseur of the means to save the human race,” Revel dared to proclaim the nakedness of ideologies surrendered to radiant futures that pass for unwavering and sanctimonious adherence to the iron fist wielded by the salvific powers of the earth. As his boss wrote in the newspaper l’Express, Olivier Todd, he was a declared enemy of jargon, systems, gurus, social projects and utopias.

But this is, as we have already warned, only a half-truth, which leaves Revel, so to speak, on the good side of history in view of the well-known outcome of the Cold War. Because Revel’s liberalism came from the humanist left and he did not end up separating himself from a certain idea of socialism that he cultivated since his youth as a resistance fighter during the German occupation of France. He wrote his first works against the right (Lettre ouverte à la droite), against General de Gaulle and against the monarchical architecture of the Fifth Republic. He came to the conclusion that the greatest enemy of the socialism he desired was communism. He knew Mitterrand very well, and even became a candidate on his electoral lists during the long desert crossing of the socialist leader, whose political youth was, as is well known, quite different from his own (perhaps for that reason Revel was one of the first to portray that cold and impenetrable sphinx who arrived at the Elysée Palace in 1981). To put it in Oakeshott’s terms, Revel’s liberalism proceeded from the politics of faith but ended up being anchored, perhaps to his regret, in the politics of skepticism. Though never quite.

In How Democracies Perish, Revel warned that liberal democracy risks being a brief parenthesis in history, if the mental framework of Western leaders and public opinion remains a prisoner of bad conscience and political blindness. Almost naturally, and perhaps hastily, he shifted his interpretation of the red totalitarian threat to a new actor that was to replace it after the establishment of the New World Order: Islamist terrorism. This coalition of enemies explains to a large extent his bet on the American model, even though Revelian liberalism was, however, decidedly anti-Fukuyamaesque. In fact, he could rather be reproached for an excess of pessimism in his prognoses. The astuteness of reason seemed to lean toward the perverse side of history. Precisely at the moment when humanity perceived the need for a universal democracy, Revel understood that the Western democratic system “is corrupted, denaturalized, falsified at its core.” Little trace of messianism or democratic soteriology in his worldview.

An unrepentant liberal, Revel proposed in his works various remedies against democratic defeatism. This historical therapy could also be interpreted as an inner struggle against the psychological needs that the various forms of totalitarianism satisfy: overcoming nationalism, re-establishing the separation and balance of powers, matching the progress of knowledge with the efficacy of political action and decision. His theory of useless knowledge is, in this sense, symptomatic of his civilizational pessimism. The increase of knowledge in multiple fields of knowledge does not, according to Revel, have repercussions in a public space impervious to the rationalism of facts that thrives in civil society. By their attachment to the legends and prejudices of ideologies, the political-intellectual clercs continue to lead the masses along the path of chimeras.

This general attitude makes their increasingly enthusiastic defense of the United States a problematic and symptomatic element of their thinking. “If you erase anti-Americanism, you erase eighty percent of French political thought, both left and right,” he went so far as to say in an interview. This position undoubtedly reveals his public dissent. However, even he did not manage to remain aloof from the deformed image of the United States that prevails in the Hexagon.

Neither Marx nor Jesus?

For Revel America practically invented the idea of the future. While all previous societies, including modern ones, had their models in the past (the anticomania, for example, of the French revolutionaries, marvelously restored by Claude Mossé), the United States populates its imaginary with a society to come, a city on the hill to be inhabited by new men without stain. And Revel aspired precisely to a type of planetary democracy born of a second world revolution. According to the daring interpretation of Ni Marx ni Jésus [Neither Marx or Jesus], this second coming of the revolutionary spirit could only sprout by virtue of the particular historical dynamism of the United States of America, a “laboratory society” called to infect its way of life to all the countries of the world, for “revolution breaks down into two words: crisis and innovation.” It is here where one of the great errors of his understanding of historical facts can be pointed out.

Undoubtedly, he was right in understanding, perhaps before anyone else, that the revolution would not come from Moscow but from America. But, neither Marx nor Jesus? The American revolution is nothing but a particular and heterodox way of other Christians for another socialism. There is the Woke spawn to prove it, religious acrobatics, unhinged heresy of iconoclastic followers of both Marx and Jesus, twinned in the common devotion of victimocratic religion. It is no coincidence that the new European left expresses an undisguised admiration for this liberal and progressive America that fits in perfectly with its aspirations. When Revel was vituperative of the residues of totalitarian mentality in the European left despite the undeniable failures of real socialism, he was not wrong: his socialism could feel better represented in Washington. In a way, Augusto del Noce’s formula can be repeated: Marxism failed in the East because it triumphed in the West.

Edgar Morin, who by his own admission had lived his militancy in the French Communist Party during the forties and fifties of the last century as a form of religious mysticism, returned ecstatic from his stay with the “socialists” of California in the sixties. Thus he found an ideal that rejuvenated him and which he could not have defined in better terms: “Neo-Rousseauism, yearning for Christian purity, childlike warmth, libertarian tradition, utopian communism, Kathmandian rejection of the West.” Jean-Marie Domenach put it less nuanced in Esprit magazine in the 1970s, shortly after the publication of Neither Marx nor Jesus: “The United States is today the greatest communist country in the world.” Annie Kriegel recalled that communists “in their own way love America, as they feel attuned to its aspirations, its needs, the expectations that preside over the persistent use of the New World metaphor.” And he added: “Whether the entrance into the Promised Land is through migration or conversion, in both cases it has been necessary to tear oneself away from the ancient land of the Fall and Sin; it has been necessary, in person, to choose, to choose a new way of being in the world. The emigrant and the communist share the same brutal experience which is that of rupture.”

Trotsky, for his part, in a particularly revealing text, confirms this essential anthropological reality that nests in a revolutionary spirit common to modern Promethean projects: the Founding Fathers of Bolsheviks and Puritans share the same ancestors. After the Revolution, noted the creator of the Red Army, human life has become a Bivouac, that is to say, one of those camps set up provisionally to spend the night outdoors while waiting for the definitive dwelling. He wrote: “What is the use of solid houses,” the old believers of yesteryear asked, “if we are waiting for the coming of the Messiah? The Revolution does not build solid houses either; to compensate, it moves the people, crowds them in the same premises and builds barracks. Provisional barracks: such is the general aspect of its institutions. Not because it awaits the coming of the Messiah, not because it opposes his ultimate goal to the material process of organizing life, but because it strives, by constant research and experimentation, to find the best methods for building its final home. All its actions are sketches, drafts on a given theme.”

French Liberal… and American

Revel could have joined the mainstream of French liberalism, which is not that of giants like Tocqueville, but that other one portrayed by Lucien Jaume from his studies on Jacobin democracy and the 19th century. Far from enthroning the individual like the Scottish Enlightenment, French liberalism erases him. The French-style liberal individual, consecrated by the Reformation and confirmed by the Declaration of the Rights of Man, must contend with the sovereign state of the Bodinian matrix, which, far from being weakened, was strengthened by the Revolution. In figures such as François Guizot and Victor Cousin, this effort to erase the individual by submitting him to the geometric spirit of administrative centralization was manifested. French liberalism was an eminently statist liberalism, also colored with a missionary and collectivist spirit, of genuine republican civil religion. The liberalism of figures such as Madame de Staël or Benjamin Constant, supporters of the protection of individual conscience and the rights of the individual against the State, did not join the main stream of the majority liberalism in France. The Jacobin anticomania leaned to the side of the liberty of the ancients, which demands that the interest of the City should absorb the energy of all. In The Republic of the French Republicans, the interpretation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen was always selective. The Frenchman would only be recognized as a citizen in the capacity of soldier, taxpayer, voter or pupil of the republican school. The long shadow of Rousseau did not fade with Robespierre. French liberal humanity, beyond the universalist rhetoric, circulated along the path of a citizenship domesticated by the State. Paradoxes of French liberalism, Jaume calls them.

If we expand on this point, it is simply to point out that Revel could have perfectly followed the course of this French-style liberalism without betraying the foundations of his thought. If he did not do so, perhaps it was because Paris was no longer the Mecca of the Revolution and Moscow could not be. Washington remained as the Third Rome of socio-liberal cosmopolitanism. There was no lack of philosophical sources on which to base an American-style progressive liberalism. In fact, in the United States the liberal is, broadly speaking, a praying social democrat. This is the line of Herbert Croly, who called for the creation of a New Republic of “Jeffersonian ends with Hamiltonian means.” These are aspects that Patrick Deneen reminds us of in Why Liberalism Failed? For this new American liberalism “Democracy could no longer mean individual self-reliance based upon the freedom of individuals to act in accordance with their own wishes. Instead, it must be infused with a social and even religious set of commitments that would lead people to recognize their participation in the ‘brotherhood of mankind.'” Baptist pastor Walter Rauschenbusch deepened this sensibility by proposing a Kingdom of God on earth, a new form of democracy that would not accept human nature as it is, but move it in the direction of its improvement.” Dewey proposed a “public socialism” and Croly a “flagrant socialism,” but for both of them this socialism was at the service of the construction of a new individual freed from the bonds of the past. It is a current that reaches as far as Saul Alinsky in the 20th century, Obama’s inspiration, Robin Hood of the Chicago suburbs, friend of the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain (another convert, alas, to Americanism) and the subject of Hillary Clinton’s doctoral thesis.

Aron recalled in his memoirs that at the end of the 1970s Revel still considered himself a socialist, although in the paradoxical sense that “only liberalism can fulfill the hopes of socialism.” A liberal by the name of socialist, this particular vision manifested itself in a privileged way in The Totalitarian Temptation, whose first lines read: “Today’s world is evolving towards socialism. The main obstacle to socialism is not capitalism, but communism. The society of the future must be planetary, which can only be realized at the cost, if not of the disappearance of the nation-states, at least of their subordination to a world political order.” It is not forcing things too much to affirm that this bet on socialist-liberal, globalist and anti-national, de-ideologized and technocratic future-centrism makes Revel an intellectual precursor of Macronism, that is, a form of international-socialism of a Saint-Simonian cut operating behind the mask of European institutions impatient to dissolve the nation-states that founded them—institutions immersed in a federalist race that only disguises, with a kindly countenance, the true reality of the American hegemon to which they have bowed, at least since Jean Monnet. “He is not the man of the Americans,” de Gaulle said with derision about the French investment banker and “Father: of Europe, “he is a great American.”

Liberalism: A Socialism with a Human Face?

When a country subordinates its foreign policy to its domestic policy, that is to say, to the well-being of its citizens,” said Revel, “it can be considered more socialist than when it acts the other way around.” Here, at last, is the socialism with a human face so often invoked on the other side of the Wall. A socialism centered on the administration of things from which emanates the idol of material well-being. And autistic in terms of the internal concord and external security that defines the government of men. It was nothing new, in fact. It was not for nothing that Baron Hertling had already warned of this turn in contemporary politics in 1893: “It was not so long ago that word politics exclusively designated foreign policy. The respective strengths of the various states, their reciprocal relations, friendly or strained, their varying alliances, their projects and aspirations: such was the exclusive object of interest to diplomats and statesmen… Then the political interest changed direction, falling especially on questions of internal order, such as the constitution and administration of the state, brought up to date by the then so-called constitutionalism.” It is a tendency that Revel tirelessly cheered in his work, however much his pessimism made him lament, once again, the lamentable nationalist resistances of the nation-state. Socialist internationalism is perfectly expressed in this affirmation of the “liberal” Revel: “As long as the system of nation-states persists, democracy will retreat. And as long as democracy regresses, socialism cannot be established.” This socialism is nothing other than the liberal utopia of a disembodied democracy. And we can say that never has so much progress been made as in our time in this suicidal direction. Would Revel have deplored it?

The reality is that the political model of the European Union has long since veered towards a new form of liberal-socialist Welfare totalitarianism, a system, therefore, that defies Revel’s rigid antitheses: the convergence of liberal democracy and a new form of totalitarianism without violence. Did Revel forget the lessons and prophecies of the great Tocqueville about the disturbing horizon that looms over a democracy given over to paternalistic despotism? Would he have celebrated this evolution or would he have interpreted it as the fulfillment of his darkest prognoses about the inevitable infection of totalitarian ideological residues in the weak Western democracies? If so, if liberal melancholy had definitively prevailed over his socialist faith, the hypothetical Revelian analysis would resemble today the one offered to us from the post-communist East by authors such as Ryszard Legutko, who in The Demons of Democracy presents a merciless diagnosis of the European Union: the EU is today the EURSS. Contrary to what many think,” says Legutko, “the demoliberal world does not deviate too much, in important aspects, from the world dreamed by the communist man who, in spite of his enormous collective efforts, was unable to build within the communist institutions. To tell the truth, there are differences, but not so great as to be appreciated and accepted unconditionally by someone who has had first-hand experience with both systems and has passed from one to the other.” It is precisely this biographical experience that places this Polish philosopher, MEP of the conservative group, above the outdated vision of Revel, who never really suffered totalitarianism in the flesh, even though he always denounced it with vehemence and courage. Compared to this lucidity coming from the East, his judgments today seem petrified in a world that is no longer ours.

Yankee Apocalypse: The Return of Trotsky

If Revel ignored the fact that the totalitarian utopia was introduced under other guises in the mainstream of liberal democracies, his bet on the United States also overlooked a feature that John Gray masterfully exposed in Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia. This apocalyptic tendency of American politics was especially aggravated in the wake of the 9/11 attacks of 2001. ” In claiming a foundation in a universal ideology,” Gray asserts, “the United States belongs with states such as post-revolutionary France and the former Soviet Union, but unlike them it has been remarkably stable.”

Revel’s ideological evolution does not differ much from that of the old leftists of the Trotskyist matrix who in the United States founded the Neocon current, such as Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Daniel Moynihan or Midge Decter. Michael Novak confirms: “Practically all of this group had been men and women of the left, and more specifically, of the sectors that were further to the left than the Democratic Party, perhaps among the most left-wing 2 or 3% of the American electorate. Some were economic socialists; others were political social democrats.” Gray, for his part, is very explicit about the revolutionary Marxist invoice of the thinking of this group of authors: “It is too simple to view neo-conservatives as reformulating Trotskyite theories in rightwing terms, but the habits of thought of the far Left have had a formative influence. It is not the content of Leninist theory that has been reproduced but its style of thinking. Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution suggests existing institutions must be demolished in order to create a world without oppression. A type of catastrophic optimism, which animates much of Trotsky’s thinking, underpins the neoconservative policy of exporting democracy.” It is the policy that Revel supported in his last years, albeit in the minority of a French atmosphere very hostile to the United States and its geopolitical projects.

Like the neocons, the planetary project of disembodied democracy defended by Revel retained a utopian matrix that dispensed with the national body, presenting both (democracy and nation) almost as opposites. Revel even spoke out in favor of the humanitarian right of interference, together with Bernard Kouchner and Mario Bettati. The latter, a French jurist and professor of international law, retains his good or bad reputation thanks to his terrible apothegm, worthy of appearing in the pages of the Yankee Apocalypse: “sovereignty is the mutual guarantee of torturers.” Very bad company. It was not necessary to wait twenty years of US military occupation in Afghanistan to understand that a democracy without a body is a much more utopian project than that of a body without democracy. The return of the Taliban to power is a great lesson against the multicolored democratism of the armed missionaries and against the discourse of the beautiful souls who support it.

Sovereignty as the Origin of all Evils: The Leap towards Utopia

It is one of the great errors of Revel’s political vision, which manifests itself in his rejection of the idea of national sovereignty. To a large extent this error is explained by his typically modern conception of political concepts. He probably understood, not without reason, that the French understanding of sovereignty, which starts with Bodin’s absolute and perpetual power and culminates in Rousseau’s general will, was incompatible with the liberal society to which he aspired. But this is precisely the impasse of a certain liberalism. Instead of betting on an alternative model of popular sovereignty, such as Althusius’ medieval one, it bet on the anti-political denunciation of national sovereignty. With modern sovereignty Revel despised not only a historical concept that can (and should) be criticized but the very essence of the political, which cannot be rejected without denying reality itself. It is what is called in France jeter le baby avec l’eau du bain (throwing the baby out with the bath water). Liberalism’s distrust of political power is all the more paradoxical because liberals began by conceding everything to the Leviathan in the construction of the new man and the new society. To take back with one hand what they have given with the other: this is the uncomfortable position of the liberal soul, eternally in conflict between its anarchic pole and its macro-archic pole.

Raymond Aron, who was personally fond of Revel and who collaborated with him in their common journalistic vocation, masterfully portrayed in his memoirs the aporias of his thought: “What impressed me in him as a writer was the simultaneous presence of an authentic culture and the art of making the polemic comprehensible to all readers. His books, which simplified without vulgarizing the great debates, were inspired by an anti-communism that he himself described as ‘visceral’ and found a large audience on both sides of the Atlantic, which demonstrated his success in such a difficult genre. At the same time, I was cross—and I told him so when our relations became closer—at his insistence on calling himself a ‘socialist’, of the leap he was taking towards utopia by rising up against national sovereignties, in his opinion the evil par excellence, the origin of all evils.” Once again, there is in Revel a skepticism that does not get off the ground, a utopia that refuses to die.

Indeed, Revel had written in The Totalitarian Temptation that Maurras had triumphed and Marx had failed. A puzzling judgment: with the principle of national sovereignty and the cult of the nation associated with the State, the principles of absolute monarchy were clandestinely triumphing in the modern world. This partly explains the anti-Gaullist origin of his intellectual career and his support for Mitterrand. His first works, Le style du général [The General’s Style] and L’absolutisme inefficace [The Inadequacies of Absolutism], fired their argumentative ammunition against General de Gaulle and the monarchical architecture of the Fifth Republic. As an interpreter of the genealogy of ideas he was not without reason but, in this respect at least, he failed to see that in contesting the Gaullian enterprise against the incipient Europeanist federalism and the military hegemony of NATO he was siding with another totalitarian temptation, a temptation perhaps more subtle but ultimately also more effective than that embodied by the Soviets.

In the 1980s, with the reprinting of his book against de Gaulle, he did not renounce his judgments against the general and what he considered as historical errors of his interpretation, but he ended significantly with these words: “De Gaulle was great, not because he was infallible, but because he was capable of that speed of decision and action which is the only mark of true leaders, and which allows us to say that, had they not been there, better or worse, the world would in any case have been different. Of how many can the same be said?” Had he finally understood that the greatness of the great stylists of politics ends up being in the end indispensable to sustain, not only democracy but also the prosperity of free peoples? We do not know what Revel would have said or written about the course of events between his death in 2006 and today. But perhaps this sentence pointed in a more stimulating direction than the one he reflected in previous writings.

Carlo Gambescia has masterfully portrayed in Liberalismo triste the features of a realistic liberal tradition, sentinel of the facts and attached to the regularities of politics. It is a melancholic tradition that knows well, as Berlin pointed out, that “from the twisted wood from which man is made… nothing entirely straight can emerge.” This sad liberalism has its feet firmly on the ground and feels awkward trying to lift them off. “It is melancholy proud in Burke; benevolent in Tocqueville; Faustian in Weber; aloof, perhaps too much so, in Pareto; restless, notwithstanding scientific habit, in Mosca; reasoning in Ortega; feverish in Röpke, methodical in Jouvenel; serene in Aron; humble in Freund; autoironic in Berlin.”

There are no willows in Revelian melancholy to inhabit this Olympus of thought. His vision did not entirely expurgate the utopias which, on this or the other side of the Atlantic, imagined “new heaven and a new earth” for men. He did not become a true sad liberal. Fortunately, he was not a sad liberal either. Let’s keep that.


Domingo González Hernández holds a PhD in political philosophy from the Complutense University of Madrid. He is a professor at the University of Murcia. His recent book is René Girard, maestro cristiano de la sospecha (René Girard, Christian Teacher of Suspicion) He is also the Director of the podcast “La Caverna de Platón” for the newspaper La Razón. He has explored the political possibilities of Girardian mimetic theory in more than twenty studies and academic papers. His latest publication is “La monarquía sagrada y el origen de lo político: una hipótesis farmacológica” (“Sacred monarchy and the origin of politics: a pharmacological hypothesis”), Xiphias Gladius, 2020. This article appears through the kind courteesy of La gaceta de la Iberosfera.


Robert Badinter, or the Errors of a Wise Man

The unanimous tributes paid to Robert Badinter leave a large part of his work in the dark, and overlook certain flaws in his thinking, certain deleterious effects of his political decisions, the price of which we are cruelly paying today, and certain ideological inconsistencies. We take a critical look at the career of this great figure of the humanist left, and the consequences of his actions.

By a natural law of things, without any relief of sentence, without the race to the abyss suffering any special consideration, at the end of his old age turned into a prison, following an irrevocable sentence, tortured for a long time, life has just condemned Robert Badinter to death. After the august Jacques Delors, who had the right to a national tribute at Les Invalides under the great European flag, his imaginary true nation, it is now the turn of the venerable Robert Badinter to pass, without a trace of irony, to head off into the sunset. One by one, the French giants of the early 20th century are departing.

A committed man gifted with charisma and a singular art for the phrase, his intellectual positions and biases, however questionable, do not prevent him from being shown a certain respect, like that owed to one’s adversary, and take on an obstinate and courageous air. Badinter, a life-long struggle, as we like to repeat since his death. This intellectual of the law, professor and academic, Minister of Justice, sage among the sages of the Palais Royal, then Senator, was a leading figure—a figure of the progressive left; a humanist figure; a heroic figure in defense of the oppressed. A totem without taboos. A certain section of the Catholic press praised “this force of law” and “this bulwark against populism,” whose aim was to bring the law fully into the Republic, so that, through the Constitutional Council, respect for fundamental principles would triumph.

Once we have said all that, and given Robert Badinter his due, it is time to return to the many pitfalls of his work and thought. Some have said that he was one of the last men of the Enlightenment. He was, for the better, a disciple of Condorcet in finesse and elegance, in his ideas on liberty and tolerance, in his mathematical sense applied to ideals in the form of constitutional equations. And above all, for the worst, born into a class that had succeeded, through social mobility, in replacing the old ruling class and seizing power, while carrying the new ideas of his time, universalist, generous and tolerant, Monsieur de Badinter was one of the great bourgeoisie of the left, capable of great indignation, lavish in humanism, generous in virtue and abundant by decree, sure of his duty: to impose his ideas on the people as a whole, applying them to reality without worrying about their consequences. This liberal, progressive bourgeoisie, who reaped the benefits of the French Revolution, was always at the forefront, on the correct side, marching with the party of order. It is easy to rant about the plight of criminals from below when you are not looking up to those above; it is easy to make humanist judgments about migrants, welcoming people, the Other, when you have spent your life in four arrondissements of Paris. It is easy to be comfortable in your own office, condoning and condemning with relativism, but it is also easy to have class contempt. There are the enlightened know-it-alls, who have understood; and then there are the others, the lowly folk, inhabited by all manner of wrongs, vices and crimes. Robert Badinter, his eyebrow furrowed, had the arrogant facility to declare that if you were in favor of the death penalty, you were a fascist; that if you were in favor of the obvious regulation of immigration, you were a racist; so many cookie-cutter, self-righteous judgments that never suffer debate.

Robert Badinter was passionate about human rights. What a passion that was! It was this passion that drove him for years to defend the oppressed, the persecuted of every stripe. In the name of human rights! Joseph de Maistre’s gentle irony of knowing the rights of Italians, Frenchmen and Russians, but ignoring those of a bodiless, abstract man, pure concept. Karl Marx spoke of the rights of the bourgeois, which made it possible to lecture others while ignoring the misfortunes of those closer at home. And it is at this very moment that Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s words in Emile make sense: “Beware those cosmopolitans who search far and wide in their books for duties they disdain to fulfill around them. Such a philosopher loves the Tartars, so as to be exempt from loving his neighbors.”

To Bernard Pivot’s question: “What would you like to be reincarnated as?” the wise man replied: “As a fox, because even if he is trapped, he can cut off his own tail to be free.” Ah, freedom! Cherished freedom! The one that Eluard’s poem haunts school classes about! Here too, it is astonishing that Mr. Badinter, shouting his passion for freedom at the top of his voice, had nothing to say about the vaccination pass and the suspension of unvaccinated hospital staff. No outcry, no humanist, left-wing, indignant reflection for poor people who find themselves with nothing from one day to the next. Similarly, when Edouard Balladur’s government sought in 1991 to work, supposedly, against massive and unregulated immigration, it was the Constitutional Council, of which Badinter was president at the time, that rejected the Pasqua bill in the name of France’s humanist and universalist values. The former Ricard executive himself denounced the “dictatorship of judges,” who, depending on circumstances favorable or not to their ideas, use the law and its values to make politics rain or shine.

When the Yellow Vests demonstrated and brandished the President’s head on a pike, in 2020, it was this same defender of freedom who vituperated these good people, finding it odious, almost fascist, that such an effigy should be brandished. But democracy is not all smooth sailing! It cannot be summed up in a conversation on the set of a TV Parliamentary Channel, nor can it be reduced to parliamentary palaver. Violence is a fact of politics, because it is exercised as a perpetual balance of power, and it can be seen in history as resolutely tragic.

Robert Badinter was not a politician. Like Jacques Delors, of the same generation but operating at a different level, he was never an elected official. His career can be summed up by the fact that, in the 1980s, he was the strongman of the judiciary, accompanying the ideas and interests of a new category of decision-makers known as Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (VGE), Jean-Jacques Servan Schreiber, under the leadership of Pierre Mendès-France, an anti-Gaullist and Atlanticist whose involvement and influence on political ideas in the early years of the Fifth Republic is still unmeasured. Badinter, a handsome man with slicked-back hair, an elegant suit and modern, close-cut hair, was a figure of change that was to follow the end of Gaullism, which, it should be remembered, was a national rally for a sovereign France against Europeanist yes-manism and American Atlanticism. The much-vaunted liberation of society, applied on those down below, needed to find figures from above to make it palatable in politics. It found Robert Badinter.

His famous battle was for the abolition of the death penalty. He was the driving force behind this project; he was its face. It would be all too easy to believe that a single man can, by his own will, change things in this way, without there being any underlying trend. The abolition of the death penalty was already on the shelves of the cupboard of the Second Republic; it was already supported by Victor Hugo, it was enacted in other countries in the 19th century, in Portugal or in the Netherlands; it was already in the program of VGE in 1974.

The death penalty is a thorny issue to defend point-by-point and peremptorily. Such a problem does not presuppose a dogmatic solution. It is not that either party is wrong to be for or against it. Robert Badinter was not a man of faith or the law. He started from very precise and fixed ideas, the effects of which must be assessed. We refer you only to Father Raymond-Léopold Bruckberger, Yes to the Death Penalty, which summarizes the conceptual history of the death penalty and debunks the very modern idea that it is a denial of civilization, when in fact it has been practiced within civilization. It was the sacredness of life that justified the death penalty, at least from a traditional point of view: “Thou shalt not kill” was, like incest, a prohibition. Its transgression earned the murderer radical exclusion from the human community, following a public ceremony. This same death penalty in 1981 threatened so few people that it should have been the last measure taken by a left-wing government. It was the first under François Mitterrand.

Opposition to the death penalty remained numerous: religious opposition, which questioned whether a human community could substitute itself for God by taking life, turning the “Thou shalt not kill” principle against itself; conservative and Catholic opposition, which was also logically opposed to abortion. In the face of this “right-wing” opposition, progressive “left-wing” abolitionism advocated its humanist logic of the credit due to every human being, first and foremost a victim of his or her environment. This has led to a kind of lax degeneration of justice, allowing a judge to see a custom in the rape of a woman by a Pakistani migrant.

The first flaw in Robert Badinter’s thinking is that it is permeated by that bourgeois instinct for whom, outside profit, nothing is sacred, neither death nor life, and which makes it criminal to take the life of a despicable murderer, but normal to take it from a future innocent baby—to be both, without the slightest problem, against the death penalty and in favor of abortion. This Left, therefore, good in every way, is in fact a simulacrum of the Left to lyrically conceal the abandonment of concrete progressivism, the kind that was not intended to save the heads of a handful of scum, but to improve the lives of ordinary people. It was at this very moment that a vast abolitionist nebula, meditated in universities in the aftermath of 1968 by agents of French Theory, sought to create a tohu-bohu, a notion dear to Michel Foucauld, in society. Our twisted and tainted elites had to dismantle the totems of our society and break down its taboos. A few years ago, a few renowned intellectuals and committed figures had sought to abolish the age of sexual consent and decriminalize relations with minors under the age of fifteen.

Another pitfall is the assumption that man is infinitely good and infinitely lovable, that it is society that perverts him and that he is unintentionally evil. The death penalty had been applied in a Christian society, based on the Gospel itself. Jesus was on the cross, with two thieves at His side. One mocks Jesus, the other rebukes him: “What is happening to us is just, while he is innocent” and adds, “Jesus, remember me when you are in your kingdom.” This prompts the Lord to say, “Truly, I say to you, you will be the first to enter the kingdom of heaven.” In a few lines, everything is there: a man can be condemned for his crime; by the justice of men, he can be led to die, but he can be saved by divine justice. Traditional Christian society played both sides: God’s justice and man’s justice, earthly life and metaphysical life, body on one side and soul on the other. Our post-Christian society, secularized to the extent that it has digested Christian ideas and done away with them, is witnessing the emergence of a form of justice that gives itself the proper role of executioner and priest. This kind of justice condemns while absolving; it punishes while judging a man’s redemption. In his 1981 speech to Parliament, Abbé Badinter, dare we say it, explained that “however terrible, however odious their acts, there are no men on this earth whose guilt is total and which one must always totally despair about.” This secularized mercy, this unshakeable faith in redemption, forgiveness, conversion to virtue and goodness, sometimes contributes to an obscene fascination that made Fourniret, Bodin or Dutroux famous, and sometimes to an unhealthy victimization that makes the executioner as much a victim as his own victim. Forgiving an executioner is a personal process, and that of little Philippe Bertrand’s mother commands respect, but it is not up to justice to show mercy and have feelings. In short, Patrick Henry is a kind of Saint Blandine, a martyr of the arena? Is it not dishonest to equate an innocent with a scoundrel?

Badinter made a major intellectual error: he confused philosophy with justice. They are two different categories. A man is not guilty, yes, as a concept. When we put a man on trial, we do so in the context of his crime, in relation to the law, and not on the basis of a concept. This philosophy is accompanied by a rhetorical art of clichés, peremptory elucidations, evasions and slips, ideas asserted with authority, false truths and true political ideas, adulterated concepts mixed with pathos and lyricism—which has raised almost no criticism.

The death penalty is capital punishment, because it is at the top of the pyramid of punishments. It is the basis for all possible sanctions in response to crimes or misdeeds. The abolition of capital punishment has shaken the pyramid of penalties and sanctions to the point of disordering the whole, and leading to a tohu-bohu in society where, to caricature, as Jean Ferrat sang in “Tout Berzingue” [“Full-Throttle”]: “steal an apple and you’re done for, shoot a man, you get probation.” All these arguments—”the death penalty is not a deterrent,” “it doesn’t make people think,” “it adds blood on top of blood”—have their share of truth, if only the debate did not stop there. If we believe that justice is reparation by equivalence, then it is only natural that when an innocent person is murdered, justice should give itself a monopoly on legitimate vengeance, to prevent all hatred and personal vengeance, to make reparation for a crime and balance the loss of a life against a criminal whose imprisonment would ensure him, at times, certain moments of happiness—when he has taken a life. And besides, is there not a worse failure of justice and Mr. Badinter’s lofty ideals when a rehabilitated criminal relapses into crime, when a murderer takes another life, shatters a family that will never recover, when prison no longer terrifies the bad souls it houses? It is enough to make one despair of the naivety that fails to see that man is on the slippery slope to evil. Mr. Badinter’s justice system has caused suffering and harm to the people; society has been traumatized by cases, victimized by insecurity, demoralized by injustice, disgusted by the failure of justice. This naïve and generous ideal allowed furious, ideological magistrates to give free rein to their whims, and degenerate intellectuals to spend their pity on criminals. The death penalty had its aesthetics in Montherlant, de Maistre and Baudelaire; the scoundrel became an idol of the counter-culture; the underworld theater of those years had its Cid with Roberto Succo.

“The system is simple: we have a justice of freedom.” In his almost five years as minister, Robert Badinter profoundly transformed the justice system: he abolished the State Security Court, put an end to the “Security and Freedom” text, reformed the Napoleonic penal code; he worked to reintegrate criminals, abolished the high-security wings, while conforming to European law. At the end of his life, he came to believe that prison was torture. Man as a concept is not guilty, and if we like to think that freedom defines man, then we cannot lock him up, either. Man’s inseparability is replaced by his “inclosability.” Let’s abolish prisons! What a program!

“Of all the trials a lawyer can go through, we had forty-five minutes to save a man’s life, that’s the most frightening vertigo a human being can have.” Fair enough. But why, then, did he never write a line, never dwell on the fate—just or unjust, that is not the question—about Bastien-Thiry, Degueldre and Claude Piegt? Jean Dutourd, the bête noire of the German-Pratin world, had the beginnings of an answer: the death penalty should never be abolished for political enemies. The same Badinter, when asked if he would have voted for the death of the king, replied that “the king’s head had to fall for the people to be sovereign.” There you have it. If there is one more inconsistency to be found in his body of work, we have found it.


Nicolas Kinosky is at the Centres des Analyses des Rhétoriques Religieuses de l’Antiquité and teaches Latin. This articles appears through the very kind courtesy La Nef.