LE MONDE
Friday 21 May 1999
From Guernica to Belgrade
(excerpts)
By Jean Clair
(Jean Clair is director of the Picasso Museum, an art historian, and writer).
PARIS, the first Wednesday in the month. The noon sirens sounded. No one reacted. The
conversational noise level did not diminish at all. The French are unconscious, as if
under anesthesia. When I heard the wailing, as usual I wanted to hide under the table. The
reflex of a kid, born in 1940, who was awakened suddenly, taken in his father's arms, and
rushed into the subway. When the alert ended, the dull fear remained that we would not
find our house still standing. The heads of state who declared war on Belgrade share a
trait in common: they were born between 1945 and 1955 and have not known war. Jose Maria
Aznar, Blair, Schroeder: they all have the look of the yuppie generation. Clinton directs
a country that has never been bombed. We are swimming in unreality. The awakening will be
rude.
Guernica, in April 1937, had been a shock. For the first time, a population was targeted
by airplanes flying so high that they could hardly be seen. Until then, wars had been
waged by soldiers against soldiers. Killing without a doubt, but killing that obeyed the
elementary rule of protecting the weak in the name of justice. But this military nobleness
has been replaced by the disgrace of a world where only soldiers are protected, where only
civilians are hostages and victims. The Pentagon doctrine of concentric circles is
well-known: innermost is the circle of civilians, who will be struck first and destroyed.
Next are the administrative and political circles… last and outermost, is the circle
of soldiers, who must be spared.
At the end of March, an American pilot who--flying from one of those now very numerous
bases in northern Italy, had turned a training flight into acrobatics, cut through a
ski-lift cable, and caused the deaths of twenty people-- passed through the justice system
of his country. He was acquitted. He discovered that the lives of twenty European
civilians were worth little compared with the life of one American soldier.
Several days later, NATO declared war on Serbia. The massacre of a civilian population,
under the nose of the UN and the parliaments of the NATO countries, had become legal.
Why this sudden nausea at hearing the sweet and sprightly voice of Jamie Shea, the *Cadum
Baby of "new tech" communications? The words he uses, from "strike" to
"collateral damage," and his mesmerizing tone recall the euphemistic language
used by the Third Reich to conceal abominable realities under the apparent neutrality of
technical terminology.
In his letter to Le Monde (on 13 May), Regis Debray said what I have often read in the
Italian, German, American, and Canadian press, but rarely in the press of my own country.
If France today is the last warmongering country in Europe, it is because French opinion,
generally speaking, has been manipulated by a strangely partisan press. Has it ever been
possible, for example, to read in the French press anything about the true nature of the
KLA, about its rival clans and mafias? It is impossible to comprehend the catastrophe that
has struck Europe without awareness that the America of 1999 is no longer the America of
1945. The continuing devout French admiration toward America will undoubtedly be one of
the great mysteries of the end of this century. The technicians piloting the stealth
airplanes and the marksmen guiding the Tomahawks are no longer the brave GIs who landed in
Arromanches. No, the frequently arrogant and pompous America of today is no longer the
nervous and generous America that we knew on the campuses in the late 1960s. It is a
nation where illiteracy has increased more over the last twenty years than anywhere else.
A land of unequaled fortunes, where (as in Los Angeles recently) bloody riots erupt from
whose violence the wealthy shut themselves off in fortresses guarded by private police.
One out of every 150 Americans is in prison or under detention, a proportion without an
equivalent in any other democracy…. It is a nation where the death penalty is applied
to women, minors, and the mentally defective. Prison for some and war for others: American
democracy also has its ways of regulating the problems of its ethnic minorities. This is
the nation that Europe is relying on to defend "human rights."
But there is more. It is understood that no American must risk his life to save human
rights that should be restored. In his cockpit, at 5,000 meters, he bombs blindly. The
Nazi forces were also blind. They refused to "descend" to see, to
"condescend" to the level of their victims. They did not have to look into the
eyes of those they killed, either in Ukraine or in the camps. To see your adversary, face
to face, would make it necessary to recognize that he is made of the same flesh and blood
as yourself.
To save American lives has become an obsession of this new master race. The greatest
fantasy of this new nation, convinced that it personifies wealth, power, and beauty on
this earth, is immortality. An American should not die and, consequently, cannot die.
Thus… the cult of the ever-young body that must not age, the phobia about addictions
(such as to cigarettes or alcohol) that can cause illness and death.
The infantile fantasy of immortality and omnipotence is also a façade for a country ill
at ease in its own body under the tawdry finery of intolerant hygiene.
Human rights? Was it ever about defending human rights? If it were ever necessary to start
a war wherever human rights are threatened, the whole planet would be enflamed, from Korea
to Turkey, from Africa to China. What army was ever mobilized to defend human rights? The
soldiers in *Year Two did not die in Valmy to defend human rights that had just been
proclaimed, but to defend their threatened national borders. France was the incarnation of
human rights: therefore, what was involved was the defense of France. As a country with
secure territory, France can impose its own principles upon itself. Whoever has lost his
feeling for defending boundaries and for the values he is defending has lost his reason.
That day when Europe renounced its national boundaries in the name of super-sovereignty
and substituted "humanitarian" politics, it plunged toward ruin and
irrationality.
A war in the heart of Europe, conducted by a foreign power and declared in the name of a
supranational Europe: the end of the century has brought us a bloody absurdity that only
the irony of Swift or the humor of Voltaire could denounce as is necessary. But who will
confirm that on the passage from one millenium to another, some nations suddenly went
out-of-date-as will some computers after 1999? Let's ask that question to Pasqual
Maragall, the mayor of Barcelona, who is not only proud of the cultural identity of his
city and the fact that today "they speak Catalan in Perpignan, Montpellier, Narbonne,
Valencia, the Baleares, Sardinia…," but who also imposed Catalan as the language
of Catalonia. Let's ask that question of the Basques, among whom are hidden arsenals that
could serve tomorrow. Let's ask the Flemish, the Corsicans, the Irish. The choice is wide.
By what privilege does the KLA, which America is arming under the table and which a
NATO-ized Europe is courting on its screens, have more charm in our eyes than the secret
armies and terrorist bands that are working for the disintegration old nations everywhere
in Europe? When the small fight among themselves, the large devour them. The beginning of
the 20th century saw the destruction of empires; the beginning of the 21st century will
see the fall of nations… To proclaim a supranational Europe, to dream about it and
its power when in reality one is no longer capable of maintaining a rampart of nations
that organize and guarantee internal equality and unity and external freedom against
ever-present menaces, is to escape into the future. Caught between Turkey and Albania, the
Greeks know exactly the price for sacrificing the principle of the European nation to
great "humanitarian" principles that conceal troubled political visions. If the
war in the Balkans seems so terrible to us, it is because it is a laboratory of what
tomorrow will be in the Balkanization of Europe as a whole.
--------------NOTES on items marked with *
*Cadum Baby -- apparently a well-known
advertising figure/logo for Cadum Soap. Note that the baby has an overbroad smile and
rather adult features, and does in fact bear a striking resemblance to Jamie Shea..... http://www.ips.be/_wbm/padv/en/bodycare.htm
*Year II, Valmy -- Valmy (1982 pop. 290),
Marne dept., NE France, in the Argonne region. The cannonade of Valmy, a Franco-Prussian
artillery skirmish, was fought near there on Sept. 20, 1792. This was the first important
engagement in the French Revolutionary Wars. Although heavy rain brought an inconclusive
halt, the encounter revealed the superiority of French artillery. -- http://lycos.infoplease.com/ce5/CE053688.html
The French regarded themselves as defending the Revolution and its "Liberte, egalite,
fraternite" ideals -- the rights of man and the citizen -- from reactionary European
monarchies in this war; thus the reference to that first battle.
Whenever you see "Year X" or the like, odds are that the reference is to the
French Revolution and its short-lived revolutionary calendar, with month names like
"Brumaire" and years renumbered from 1791 (= Year I). These events are as deeply
embedded in the French cultural psyche as references to Lexington and Concord or Bull Run
or Iwo Jima are to an educated American. |
Document compiled by Dr S D Stein