Glucksmann on Vietnamisation or Somalisation?
Originally published in the German paper Der Standard, here are the opening paragraphs of French nouveau philosophe Andre Glucksmann’s essay Englished for us by the good people at signandsight. You can read the whole piece here. Interesting to note that Glucksmann, before turning “nouveau philosophe” i.e. defining himself against the general leftist, new or old marxist mode of being of the French sixties, wrote from close to a maoist position on questions of revolution and war; I remember with some admiration his early Le Discours de la Guerre, never, as far as I know, translated into English.
Andre Glucksmann looks at the spread of the abomination of abominations: the war against civilians:
One short week at the beginning of June 2006 serves to remind the dreamers of eternal peace of the implacable permanence of chaos. Tiny East Timor with one million inhabitants, controlled by an estimable Nobel Prize winner and inundated by the good wishes of the UN, now slides into chaos and blood: mutinous officers are igniting the powder keg of latent social and political disorder. In Afghanistan, the Talibans who were dispersed four years ago are resurfacing in a violent way. In Somalia, pick-ups and 4x4s bristling with machine guns assure the triumph of the most fanatical faction, the Islamic tribunals who immediately decide to ban broadcasts of the football World Cup, that satanic event. And Iraq weeps each day for its civilians who have been shot, killed by bombs or had their throats slit by bloodthirsty Saddam Hussein nostalgics.
The conceptual error of Western armed forces has long been to rush into present conflicts “one war back,” with their heads full of the previous war. This mental sloth has now reached the pacifist ranks, who dizzy themselves with pseudo lessons from the past, rebuking Washington for getting bogged down in a “new Vietnam.” Nothing could be more naive. Zarqawi (more here) was no Ho Chi Minh. Iraq is emerging from thirty years of atrocious totalitarian dictatorship, NOT from three decades of anti-colonial uprising first against France, then against Japan, once more against France and then against the United States, which had stepped willy-nilly to relieve France. No geopolitical data justifies slapping onto the current confusion in Iraq the schemas of the last major hot war of the Cold War era.
“Interglacial Narrows (Poems 1915-2021)” Contra Mundum Press
“Always the Many, Never the One: Conversations In-between, with Florent Toniello” Contra Mundum Press
“Conversations in the Pyrenees”
“A Voice Full of Cities: The Collected Essays of Robert Kelly.” Edited by Pierre Joris & Peter Cockelbergh
“An American Suite” (Poems) —Inpatient Press
“Arabia (not so) Deserta” : Essays on Maghrebi & Mashreqi Writing & Culture
“Barzakh” (Poems 2000-2012)
“Fox-trails, -tales & -trots”
“The Agony of I.B.” — A play. Editions PHI & TNL 2016
“The Book of U / Le livre des cormorans”
“Memory Rose Into Threshold Speech: The Collected Earlier Poetry of Paul Celan”
“Paul Celan, Microliths They Are, Little Stones”
“Paul Celan: Breathturn into Timestead-The Collected Later Poetry.” Translated & with commentary by Pierre Joris. Farrar, Straus & Giroux
It is of course the usual pompous Glucksmann bullshit edict mainly arguing in a provincial francocentric manner with those of his countrymen obsessed with making comparisons with Vietnam – rather than engaging with the corrosive criticism of, say, Eliot Weinberger or even genuine conservatives or you name them…What is clear is that no geopolitical data can justify an ill-considered and corrupt war that has alienated a continent and brought total mayhem to hundreds of thousands of lives with no obvious secondary gain, while the cultural riches of the country (and the world!)have been viciously trampled on by the ignorant armies of the hypocritical imperialist aggressor.