Un comentariu după tragedia de la Paris care subliniază ce spunem, dar mai ales ce nu spunem după un astfel de atac.
Macho language about “pitiless war” defines the contours of leadership these days. Little else is on offer. It is red meat to our emotions.
Where did these ISIS attackers come from? The temptation is to blame religion or race, to take the eye off more substantial areas of investigation. Amnesia is the order of the day. Each terror attack on the west resets the clock. No-one must pay attention to the western and Saudi-backed World Muslim League, whose job was to destroy the forces of secular nationalism and communism in the Arab world in the 1960s and 1970s. All those who were on the good side of history fell to the sword, destroyed as anti-Islamic in order to protect the Gulf Arab emirates and the Saudi kingdom as well as western interests in oil and power.
We must not mention the western and Saudi assault on Afghanistan in the 1970s, before the Soviet intervention, to cut down that nation’s communist republic. No one should talk about the creation of the “mujahideen”, whose core contained a brutal kernel that exploded into al-Qaeda. Why make so much of the wars on Iraq and then on Libya and Syria, which wrecked states and turned them – like Afghanistan – into playgrounds for the “jihadis”, children of the Cold War?
Disbelief will greet those who remind us of western violence, from the aerial bombardment of Libya in 1911 to the bombing of Libya in 2011 – untold numbers dead; “it was not war,” wrote a journalist in 1911, “it was butchery.” Few will go to their shelves and pull out Leila Sebbar’s La Seine était rouge, a searing novel about the French government’s murder of hundreds of pro-Algerian protesters in Paris in October 1961.
You will read these words and say, are you blaming the people who died for their own death? You will be outraged at me. You will not be outraged at the history of these countries, of the death they have occasioned, of the misery they have concocted and then denied. You will not ask, why did these thousands of Europeans go to Syria and fight these last few years, or why the French foreign minister – Laurent Fabius – seemed reticent to place the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria on the terror list?
You will not ask who influenced these young men, sanctified by their governments to go fight in a war elsewhere and then inspired by Saudi-funded clerics who told them not only to fight in Syria but to go home and create mayhem? You will think all this is made up, that I want to justify the massacres.
There is no justification here. There is only the recitation of a pitiless history that is buried under official clichés.