Paris, Dimitris Skarpalezos
I was shocked to see that an ex-Maoist friend of mine voting the far-right RN in the last elections. His justification was as follows: “When I hear Glucksmann and his sanctimonious tirades in favour of continuing the war against Russia at any price and at any risk with the blood of Ukrainians (and maybe not only) and when I see the more reserved positions of the RN, I conclude that at least with them we won’t be heading for world war. It was all very well pointing out to him the gradual shift in the RN’s positions towards a ‘demonisation’ of Russia (which, even if it is more moderate than that of the Macronists or the warmongers of the ‘left’, shows nonetheless that RN is not to be trusted!) but the insistence of the ‘politically correct’ in favour of war ‘until Russia is defeated’ and Putin is condemned by an international court convinced him to vote RN.
His is an isolated case in ‘intellectual’ circles, but this opposition to the war is perhaps stronger among the working classes, who are more suspicious of “what we’re told” and who are not really touched by the injunctions of “solidarity” with the Ukrainians.
The Jaurès Left had a solid pacifist tradition and distinguished itself from the colonialist or warmongering patriotic Left, which was complicit in the great massacre of young Europeans in 1948. But since the fall of the USSR, the manipulations of the “good guys” and the “bad guys” have blunted all the pacifist reflexes that were part and parcel of the notion of “left” (from Robespierre’s rejection of foreign wars to Jaurès and to the protest movements against the Vietnam War).
By targeting the ‘bad guy’ Milosevic, the (more or less provoked) dissolution of one of the federations that best respected the rights of all its ethnic components, the bombing of Serbia’s infrastructure and the deaths of several thousand civilians, the violent ethnic cleansing of Krajina and the transformation of Kosovo into one of the largest American bases in Europe were all swallowed up.
The demonisation of Saddam was one of the most murderous imperialist attacks of the late twentieth century. By targeting the “evil Gaddafi” (even though he was presented as a “friend” of Sarkozy, who murdered him) and adopting the “Neither-Nor” position “Neither Gaddafi – nor NATO”, the politically correct left bears a heavy responsibility for the complete destruction of a country and the ensuing destabilisation of a continent. After Gaddafi’s death, the “Neither NATO” principle was completely forgotten!
Today, in order not to appear as “Putinophile”, most of the Left is enthusiastically complicit in one of the most “immoral” and cynical wars of our century, which could have been avoided or stopped several times over, and which the “moralising” complicity of this Left is prolonging for no understandable reason and with increasing risks of it getting out of hand!
The rift that separates the European left from those of the rest of the world, and the “politically correct” abandonment of its pacifist reflexes, is a catastrophe from which the extreme right is profiting, simply by giving the impression that they are less war-mongering than their opponents on the left.
This is most probably not true, because the media that favour the RN are not so far removed from the warmongering disinformation that prolongs the “moral” image of “solidarity with Ukraine” (until the last Ukrainian dies?).
What’s more, so as not to jeopardise the marriage with the more Atlanticist components of the traditional right, the RN is falling further and further in line on the question of the war in Ukraine!
Left-wing warmongering may well have been one of the major factors in the extremely dangerous strengthening of the racist, ex-colonialist and anti-Semitic extreme right in France (its support for Israel is not contradictory with a certain anti-Semitism on part of this extreme right, as shown by the “Christian” Zionism of the “born again Christians” who promise Jews that they will be burnt with fire from heaven if they do not convert to Christianity at the second appearance of Christ, which can only take place in Israel).
For the European Left, the alternative is more than ever: “return to Jaurès, or demise”…
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