Jean Bricmont est professeur de physique théorique à l’Université de Louvain. Chercheur en physique statistique, il est également président de l’Association Française d’Information Scientifique et se partage entre son travail de recherche scientifique et son engagement dans la lutte contre l’impérialisme.
Pourfendeur du monde intellectuel, il est le co-auteur, avec Alan Sokal, de l’ouvrage « Les Impostures Intellectuelles » (Editions Odile Jacob, 1997) qui dénonce les dérives du post-modernisme, notamment l'abus systématique de mots et de théories empruntés aux sciences par les auteurs de ce courant.
Fervent militant pour la paix, Jean Bricmont s’est exprimé à plusieurs reprises sur la nécessité d’une opposition sans concession aux Etats-Unis, notamment dans une « Lettre ouverte aux pacifistes » (novembre 2024). Reconnu comme un spécialiste de la politique étrangère des Etats-Unis, Jean Bricmont contribue régulièrement à des débats et des plates-formes de réflexion sur les alternatives au néo-libéralisme et sur la résistance à la diplomatie américaine.
Auteur de nombreux ouvrages, il a notamment co-écrit avec Noam Chomsky, Anne Morelli et Naomi Klein « La fin de ‘la fin de l’histoire’ », aux Editions Aden, en réaction aux attentats du 11 septembre et en référence à l’ouvrage de Francis Fukuyama.
Jean Bricmont, De la guerre comme politique étrangère des Etats-Unis, Agone, 2024
Jean Bricmont est co-auteur de "Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science"
par Alan D. Sokal, Jean Bricmont - Lire les revues éditoriales
A lire aussi : Lettre ouverte aux pacifistes - Open letter to the pacifists, Jean Bricmont 23 september 2024
Il y a un certain nombre de choses qu’il est apparemment plus facile de commencer que d’arrêter : une histoire d’amour, grignoter des pistaches et mener une guerre. C’est ce dernier point que les Américains découvrent aujourd’hui en Irak. Cette situation va soulever de nouveaux débats au sein des mouvements opposés à la guerre. Il y a toujours eu deux tendances au sein de ces mouvements, l’une minoritaire et l’autre majoritaire : en 1991, la majorité soutenait l’embargo contre l’Irak comme alternative à la guerre. La minorité voyait dans cet embargo un simple préparatif à la guerre et s’y opposait. Lors des accords d’Oslo, la majorité a applaudi et la minorité y a vu un accord de type « Bantoustan » qui ne résoudrait rien[2]. Lors des guerres contre la Yougoslavie et contre l’Afghanistan, la majorité a pris une position de type ni-ni : ni l’OTAN ni Milosevic, ni Bush ni les Talibans. Lors de la dernière guerre, la majorité a soutenu les inspections de l’ONU, de nouveau comme alternative à la guerre, et la minorité y a vu une préparation psychologique à cette guerre (s’il faut des inspections, c’est que l’Irak viole sans doute le droit international et si ces inspections ne mènent à rien, une guerre est peut-être nécessaire). Dans la situation présente, la majorité demandera que l’ONU ou l’Europe s’impliquent plus dans la « reconstruction » de l’Irak et la minorité exigera le départ pur et simple des occupants[3].
L’idée que je voudrais défendre ici, c’est que la position majoritaire est en fait très faible intellectuellement et que sa force vient essentiellement du soutien dont elle dispose dans les grands appareils politiques (socialistes, verts et même communistes). À cause de cette force institutionnelle, les majoritaires peuvent éviter le débat avec les minoritaires en les taxant de simplisme, d’antiaméricanisme primaire (si pas d’antisémitisme) ou en les accusant d’être « pro-X » (où X=Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, les Talibans etc.). Pour illustrer ce qui est erroné dans la tendance dominante, commençons par le slogan « ni-ni » : maintenant que Milosevic est à La Haye, les Talibans et Saddam Hussein renversés, les partisans de ce slogan peuvent-ils expliquer comment ils comptent se débarrasser de l’autre partie du « ni », Bush ou l’OTAN. Bien entendu, c’est impossible et ils le savent très bien. Mais c’est bien là tout le problème : on ne peut pas mettre sur le même pied un pays où vivent 4 % de l’humanité et dont les dirigeants déclarent ouvertement que le siècle qui commence sera « américain »[4] et des pouvoirs brutaux (au demeurant très différents entre eux) mais dont l’action est fortement limitée dans le temps et dans l’espace.
Plus fondamentalement, le discours majoritaire se laisse trop influencer par l’idéologie dominante de notre époque. Celle-ci peut être résumée en quelques idées fondamentales : la chute de l’URSS démontre la supériorité de notre système, basé sur la démocratie, le respect des droits de l’homme et le marché libre. Le problème est d’étendre ce système là où il ne règne pas encore et pour cela, l’usage de la force est parfois nécessaire. Il y a partout de nouveaux Hitlers qui se proposent de massacrer de nouveaux Juifs-les Kosovars, les Kurdes, les femmes afghanes etc. Ceux qui refusent l’ingérence humanitaire sont analogues aux « Munichois » d’avant-guerre. Ils ferment les yeux face au véritable danger de notre temps, le « fascisme islamique » et refusent de porter secours aux « victimes ».
Le courant majoritaire accepte pour l’essentiel le début du raisonnement, mais pas nécessairement sa conclusion (concernant l’usage de la force). Le courant minoritaire repose sur une tout autre vision du monde et de l’histoire. « Notre » système n’est pas basé uniquement ou même principalement sur « la démocratie, le respect des droits de l’homme et le marché libre », mais sur une longue période de relations inégales avec ce vaste réservoir de matières premières et de travail gratuit ou très bon marché qu’on appelle aujourd’hui le Tiers Monde[5]. Personne ne peut dire ce que serait notre système (ni d’ailleurs comment aurait pu se développer le reste du monde) sans le trafic des esclaves, la conquête des Amériques et son pillage ainsi que celui de l’Afrique et des Indes, les guerres de l’opium, le flot ininterrompu de pétrole bon marché au 20ème siècle ou le transfert de ressources pudiquement appelé « service de la dette ».
Du point de vue défendu ici, le plus grand progrès du 20ème siècle est sans doute la défaite des puissances européennes dans les luttes anti-coloniales. Cela a permis de libérer des centaines de millions d’hommes et de femmes d’une des formes les plus extrêmes de racisme, d’exploitation et d’oppression. Mais cette libération n’a été que partielle, essentiellement parce que le système colonial a été remplacé par un système néo-colonial qui a laissé plus ou moins intactes les relations économiques inégales, tout en déléguant les tâches de répression à des gouvernements formellement autonomes. On peut penser et souhaiter que les principales luttes de ce siècle-ci auront pour objet le démantèlement du système néo-colonial, et l’on peut observer en Amérique Latine ainsi que dans ce qu’il y a de meilleur dans le mouvement altermondialiste, l’amorce d’un tel combat.
Il est par ailleurs facile d’établir un lien direct entre les guerres actuelles et le système colonial et néo-colonial. La création d’Israël n’a été possible que comme prolongement de l’occupation britannique de la Palestine après la fin de l’empire turc. La création d’un Koweït « indépendant » (du monde arabe, mais pas de nous) est aussi liée à l’implication de l’Empire britannique dans cette région. Le régime baasiste en Irak est issu de la révolte contre la monarchie qui servait de « façade arabe » à cet empire, pour utiliser l’expression de Lord Curzon. Le régime iranien, quant à lui, est issu d’une révolte contre celui du Shah, qui a été instauré par les États-Unis en 1953, lors du renversement de Mossadegh, lequel avait eu le mauvais goût de chercher à nationaliser le pétrole. Le soutien à Saddam Hussein dans les années 80 était motivé par la volonté de « contenir » la révolution iranienne. Al Quaida trouve ses origines dans la lutte instiguée par les Américains contre un régime relativement laïc mais proche des Soviétiques en Afghanistan[6]. Bref, où que l’on se tourne, on constate que les interventions d’hier, toutes bien sûr justifiées par les plus nobles intentions, ont semé les germes des conflits d’aujourd’hui.
Venons-en à la situation actuelle en Irak et à l’attitude que les mouvements anti-guerre devraient adopter. Tout d’abord, il faut se rendre compte que les États-Unis ne vont pas quitter l’Irak, sauf s’ils finissent par en être chassés militairement, ce qui prendra beaucoup de temps (et de morts). Politiquement, ils ne peuvent pas se permettre de perdre la face dans un conflit où ils ont tant investi. Ils ne peuvent s’en aller que s’ils laissent derrière eux un régime « ami ». Le problème est qu’ils ont peu d’alliés réels dans le monde arabe : quelques milieux d’affaires et des dirigeants féodaux, mais ni les forces laïques qui ont toujours eu une position anti-impérialiste ni, ce qui est nouveau, le gros des forces religieuses. L’avenir dira s’ils gagneront leur pari - Irakiser la guerre - c’est-à-dire faire combattre la résistance par les Irakiens eux-mêmes. Mais c’est loin d’être certain et il est peu probable que ce pari soit gagné par des moyens démocratiques et respectueux des droits de l’homme. On aura sans doute affaire pendant des années à un gigantesque Liban ou à une gigantesque Palestine. Il sera pour le moins intéressant d’observer l’attitude des intellectuels occidentaux qui ont agité le drapeau des droits de l’homme pendant tant d’années contre les pays socialistes et les régimes nationalistes du Tiers-Monde.
On peut facilement parier que ces intellectuels se focaliseront, non sur l’occupation et son caractère illégitime, mais sur les méthodes utilisées par la résistance et dont la stigmatisation sera un axe privilégié de leur discours ; on s’indignera face aux attentats-suicides et aux attaques contre les civils et on exigera que les critiques de la guerre « condamnent sans ambiguïté » ces méthodes, avant toute autre chose. Mais, comme le texte de Marx cité en exergue le rappelle, l’indignation sélective face aux « atrocités » n’est pas nouvelle. Les Moudjahidines en Afghanistan à l’époque soviétique n’utilisaient pas des méthodes particulièrement délicates, mais étaient néanmoins applaudis par la « respectable Angleterre » et surtout par les États-Unis. On peut retourner les choses comme on veut, le fait est qu’il y a beaucoup plus de morts, y compris de morts civils, parmi les Palestiniens, les Afghans et les Irakiens que parmi les Américains et les Israéliens. Quant à la question de savoir si les morts civils sont intentionnels dans un cas et pas dans l’autre, on ne peut s’empêcher d’observer que les guerres, les occupations et les embargos sont parfaitement intentionnels et leurs conséquences parfaitement prévisibles. Par ailleurs, il faut souligner que les millions de gens qui se sont opposés de par le monde à cette guerre l’ont fait par des moyens pacifiques et démocratiques : pétitions, manifestations etc. On leur a ri au nez : quelle bande de naïfs ! Même les gouvernements européens (France, Allemagne) qui ont en fait donné aux États-Unis un conseil d’ami (quelles qu’aient été leurs intentions réelles) ont été traités par le mépris. Ce sont les États-Unis et leurs admirateurs dans l’intelligentsia et la presse européenne qui ont fait le choix de lutte armée ; qu’ils ne viennent pas ensuite se plaindre de la résistance que cela provoque ou des formes qu’elle prend.
Lorsque les Américains sont entrés à Bagdad, la question qui s’est immédiatement posée était : à qui le tour ? La Syrie, l’Iran, Cuba ? Un des premiers mérites de la résistance irakienne, c’est d’avoir retardé ces plans et d’avoir immobilisé une bonne partie de l’armée américaine. Reste à savoir combien de temps elle pourra tenir. Contrairement à l’image donnée par la guerre du Viêt-nam, la majorité des résistances populaires, de la Commune de Paris à l’Amérique centrale des années 80, finissent par être écrasées. Mais si la résistance continue, alors elle peut contribuer à changer la face du monde. Elle peut redonner l’espoir à un monde arabo-musulman qui en a bien besoin après toutes les défaites et les humiliations subies face à Israël et aux États-Unis. Plus important encore, elle peut mettre en question l’invincibilité des États-Unis, particulièrement en Amérique Latine. L’ordre du monde ne repose pas sur la justice et les droits de l’homme, mais sur la conviction, cent fois répétée dans l’histoire, que les opprimés peuvent se révolter tant qu’ils le veulent, ils finiront par être vaincus. C’est ainsi qu’on en arrive à considérer comme naturel, sauf lorsque les victimes protestent, que la Bolivie fournissent de l’énergie à bas prix à la Californie (après avoir « fourni » de la même façon de l’argent et de l’étain à l’Occident) ; une comparaison entre les deux pays montre que, de toute évidence, c’est à la Bolivie de soutenir le niveau de vie de la Californie[7]. Déstabiliser, même temporairement, le bras armé de cet « ordre » peut avoir un effet symbolique extraordinaire. De plus, tous les mensonges qui ont servi à préparer cette guerre ont été servilement répétés par les médias dominants (au moins aux Etats-Unis et chez leurs alliés) et cela contribue à leur faire perdre en partie leur crédibilité.
D’aucuns verront dans les propos tenus ici un soutien au terrorisme et d’autres au contraire applaudiront en appelant à soutenir la résistance irakienne. Personnellement, je vois dans la rhétorique du soutien à X (à Saddam, à la résistance etc.), une grande part de mythologie. Nous (les opposants à la guerre) n’avons ni armes ni argent à fournir à qui que ce soit. Si des gens sont prêts à partir combattre ou aider directement la résistance irakienne, c’est leur choix et ils doivent évaluer lucidement la nature des forces qu’ils soutiendraient alors réellement (ne serait-ce que pour éviter de tragiques désillusions et retournements de veste, comme on a pu en connaître dans le passé). Mais pour la majorité, qui restera ici, une attitude plus modeste est de rigueur. Nous ne pouvons pas résoudre tous les problèmes du monde. Par ailleurs, le mouvement anti-guerre doit aussi admettre son échec : nous ne sommes arrivés absolument à rien face à la violence déchaînée des États-Unis. Par conséquent nous sommes mal placés pour donner des leçons d’humanisme aux Irakiens qui doivent, à cause de notre échec, se sacrifier en grand nombre pour libérer leur pays.
Depuis le conflit entre Staline et Trotski en Union Soviétique, les intellectuels de gauche en Occident ont passé beaucoup de temps à se disputer pour savoir qui ils « soutiennent » dans des conflits lointains ou passés sur lesquels ils n’ont aucune influence réelle. Un cynique pourrait suggérer que, outre que ces débats leur permettent d’étaler une vaste érudition historique, ceux-ci les mènent à se couper de la majorité de la population là où ils vivent et là où leurs actions pourraient avoir un réel impact. Quoi qu’il en soit, la question que nous devons nous poser n’est pas celle d’un soutien affectif ou imaginaire à ceci ou cela mais de l’action à entreprendre là où nous pouvons avoir un effet, c’est-à-dire dans nos sociétés et face aux gouvernements occidentaux. Dans l’immédiat, il faut tout faire pour n’apporter aucune aide, matérielle, symbolique ou autre, même sous prétexte de reconstruction, à l’occupation. Le gouvernement américain n’a d’ailleurs pas besoin de troupes étrangères pour des raisons militaires, mais pour pouvoir prétendre, face à son opinion publique, qu’il est à la tête d’une vaste coalition. Dissipons cette illusion au plus vite. Il faut aussi se préparer à un éventuel après-Bush. Ceux que l’on pourrait appeler les impérialistes intelligents, le « financier et philanthrope » George Soros par exemple, mais aussi une bonne partie des élites américaines vont tout faire pour se débarrasser d’un président qui a contribué bien trop efficacement à la mobilisation de la population mondiale contre les États-Unis. Des démocrates tels que Clinton ou Carter sont bien meilleurs que Bush pour agiter le drapeau du « multilatéralisme » (sans aller bien sûr jusqu’à demander l’avis des populations de l’Asie, de l’Afrique ou de l’Amérique Latine) et pour reconstruire, avec le soutien de la social-démocratie (et accessoirement, des Verts), le condominium impérial euro-américain.
Plus fondamentalement, et pour agir à plus long terme, surtout dans les pays non directement engagés dans cette guerre, nous devons travailler au niveau intellectuel et culturel pour changer radicalement la perspective dominante dans les « rapports Nord-Sud ». Le problème fondamental n’est pas qu’il y a des méchants dictateurs (même s’il y en a) ou des fanatiques religieux opposés à « l’Occident » (même s’il y en a aussi) mais des siècles de rapports injustes qui n’ont nullement disparu et qui sont à la base d’un ordre économique qui n’est pas moralement défendable et peut-être même pas stable à moyen terme. Ce point de vue peut paraître « radical » et « minoritaire », mais uniquement lorsqu’on se limite aux sociétés occidentales ; dans le vaste monde, il n’a rien de choquant et surtout pas dans le monde arabe, où la politique des Etats-Unis réalise des « scores staliniens », mais d’opinions qui leur sont défavorables[8]. Il y a des quantités de choses à faire pour s’attaquer à cet ordre : alléger le poids de la dette, combattre les accords économiques inégaux, limiter les gaspillages, ouvrir les frontières aux réfugiés. Si nous nous attaquons à cela, et à cela d’abord, nous contribuerons à réaliser le modeste vœu exprimé lors de l’agression occidentale contre la révolution russe par Bertrand Russell, qui, afin de « minimiser le sang versé et de préserver au maximum ce qui a de la valeur dans la civilisation actuelle », espérait « un peu de modération et de sentiment humain de la part de ceux qui bénéficient de privilèges injustes dans le monde tel qu’il est »[9].
Jean Bricmont.
[1] New York Daily Tribune, 16 septembre 1857 ; in : Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Textes sur le colonialisme, Ed. du Progrès, Moscou, 1977. Cité dans Albatroz, no 34, Octobre 2024. Sur les conditions réelles imposées par le système colonial dans ce qui est aujourd’hui le Tiers Monde, voir Mike Davis, Génocides tropicaux, La Découverte, Paris, 2024.
[2] Voir à ce sujet, Edward Said, The end of the peace process,Vintage Press, New York, 2024, Noam Chomsky, Middle East illusions, Rowan and Littlefield, Lanham (États-Unis), 2024 ainsi que Pirates et empereurs, Fayard, Paris, 2024, et Norman Finkelstein, Tuer l’espoir, Aden, Bruxelles, 2024.
[3] On objectera bien sûr que ce départ livrerait le pays au « chaos ». Curieusement, cet argument a été rarement entendu à propos de l’occupation soviétique de l’Afghanistan.
[4] Voir le « Project for a New AmericanCentury » : http://www.newamericancentury.org/ et Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival. America’s Quest for Global Dominance, Metropolitan Books, New York, 2024, particulièrement le chapitre 9, sur les plans américains de militarisation de l’espace.
[5] Ainsi que, sur le plan intérieur, une intervention importante des États qui tempère le caractère auto-destructeur du « marché libre ».
[6] Rappelons que, dans une interview au Nouvel Observateur, Brzezinski, qui était conseiller du président Carter à l’époque, déclarait : “ Selon la version officielle de l'histoire, l’aide de la CIA aux Moudjahidines a débuté courant 1980, c'est-à-dire après que l’armée soviétique eut envahi l'Afghanistan, le 24 décembre 1979. Mais la réalité, gardée secrète jusqu'à présent, est tout autre : c'est en effet le 3 juillet 1979 que le président Carter a signé la première directive sur l'assistance clandestine aux opposants du régime prosoviétique de Kaboul. Et ce jour-là, j'ai écrit une note au président dans laquelle je lui expliquais qu'à mon avis cette aide allait entraîner une intervention militaire des Soviétiques. ” (Le Nouvel Observateur, no 1732, Janvier 1998).
[7] Voir Eduardo Galeano, « Le pays qui veut exister », SolidaritéS, no 35, 30 octobre 2024. Original en espagnol dans Pagina 12 (Argentine), 19 octobre 2024. Disponible en anglais sur http://www.zmag.org .
[8] Par ailleurs, le sommet des chefs d’état ou de gouvernement du mouvement des pays non alignés, réuni en Malaisie, les 24-25 février 2024, pays qui regroupent la majorité de la population mondiale, a condamné sans équivoque la politique américaine en Irak et a rejetté catégoriquement ce qu’ils appellent le « soi-disant `droit’ d’intervention humanitaire ».
[9] Bertrand Russell, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, Allen and Unwin, Londres, 1920.
During recent years, there has been a rebirth of a global challenge to the existing socio-economic order, a challenge that hadalmost completely disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union. This movement is still weak, both materially and ideologically. I want to argue here that one of its weaknesses is that insufficient attention is paid to the military aspects of the uneven relations that are criticised at the economic level. This weakness is itself in part due to the ideological framework within which the discourse about human rights takes place.
I shall first review briefly an historical precedent to the present “war on terrorism”, namely the Cold War. I shall argue that the way it is presented, also within most of the left, reflects the ideological prejudices of the dominant powers. Then, I’ll discuss some frequent delusions in the left about power, war and human rights. Some of this part will be polemical; but it is a fact that the recent wars, specially the Kosovo one, were supported to a surprising extent by liberals and leftists and that the opposition to them by “revolutionaries” or “radicals” has been extraordinarily weak. In the concluding section, I shall try to make some constructive suggestions.
The Cold War As Reality and As Fiction At the beginning of the Cold War, George Kennan, who was then heading the State Department policy planning staff, outlined what were to be the effective guidelines of US policy in the coming years:
“We have about 50% of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3% of its population.... In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity.... We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.... We should cease to talk about vague and ... unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards and democratisation. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.” The way this “pattern of relationships” has been set up was essentially to “kill hope”, as William Blum puts it. Namely, destroy any hope of an independent development that would allow the Third World to “divert” its natural and human resources towards the need of the poor majority of its population. This can also be called the “rotten apple” theory. Any country, specially a poor one, that manages to escape from the global domination system poses the “threat of the good example”: it might be imitated by other, more important countries. That is why countries that are by themselves economically marginal, like Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua or even tiny Grenada have to be dealt with in one of two ways: either by imposing, through subversion and warfare, a government favourable to Western interests or by destroying them sufficiently so that any alternative development path that they might follow will be too harsh to be attractive.
It might be added that this has been the strategy of the powerful for a long time, including vis-à-vis the Paris Commune, the Russian revolution or the Spanish one. Neither the phenomenon of “Leninism” nor similar tendencies among Third World nationalists can possibly be understood if one fails to take into account the fact that their authoritarianism derives in large part from a desire to avoid the fate of the Paris Commune and of other more democratic attempts at social change or simply to try to preserve a minimal form of national independence in the face of formidable threats. That the Leninist path also led to failure does not imply that the problem it tried to solve does not exist.
It would take too long to review here the long series of coups, invasions, support for brutal dictatorships, and boycotts/sanctions made by the United States during the so-called Cold War. But it is worthwhile to give some examples of what one may call the mentality of the planners, i.e. of intellectuals, bureaucrats, lawyers working for the US government or its allies or strongly supporting them, especially when we hear that, at the beginning of its war against Afghanistan, the United States ordered Pakistan to close its borders with Afghanistan, through which most food aid was passing, or when we are told, in regard to the forthcoming war with Iraq, that defeat for the United States is not an option.
Consider first the following advice, given during the Vietnam war, in 1966, and which can be found in Pentagon Papers: “Strikes at population targets (per se) are likely not only to create a counter-productive wave of revulsion abroad and at home, but greatly to increase the risk of enlarging the war with China and the Soviet Union. Destruction of locks and dams, however – if handled right – might (perhaps after the next Pause) offer promise. It should be studied. Such destruction does not kill or drown people. By shallow-flooding the rice, it leads after time to widespread starvation (more than a million?) unless food is provided – which we could offer ‘at the conference table’.”
And the now universally famous Samuel Huntington wrote around that time that the Vietcong is “a powerful force which cannot be dislodged from its constituency so long as the constituency continues to exist”. And to solve that problem, he was urging the “direct application of mechanical and conventional power ... on such a massive scale as to produce a massive migration from countryside to city”. This idea was adopted as the “forced urbanisation” policy.
Turning to war in Afghanistan, we learn that: “Indeed, the war has been a near-perfect laboratory, according to Michael Vickers, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a defence think tank. Vickers, a former Army officer and CIA operative, said the success came because the al-Qaida network and the Taliban government sheltering it were overmatched opponents. ’When great powers fight smaller wars – precursor wars in between the old military world and the new military world – you can experiment more because there’s no doubt you’re going to win’, he said. ’You experiment, and there is real feedback. You don’t get that very much in the military.’ ’This was a new way of war, a new operational concept’, Vickers said. ‘And it was a pretty significant innovation, because we got fairly rapid regime change with it. This wasn’t on the shelf. This was the way we planned to overthrow governments.’”
In a recently released pamphlet of the British Foreign Policy Centre, Robert Cooper, an advisor of Tony Blair who represented the British government at the Bonn talks that produced the interim Hamid Karzai administration in Afghanistan, calls for a “defensive imperialism” and for Western countries to deal with “old-fashioned states outside the postmodern continent of Europe with the rougher methods of an earlier era – force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with those who still live in the nineteenth century....”
Finally, here is the advice about Palestine given by a prominent US lawyer: “Israel should announce an immediate unilateral cessation in retaliation against terrorist attacks. This moratorium would be in effect for a short period, say four or five days, to give the Palestinian leadership an opportunity to respond to the new policy. It would also make it clear to the world that Israel is taking an important step in ending what has become a cycle of violence.
“Following the end of the moratorium, Israel would institute the following new policy if Palestinian terrorism were to resume. It will announce precisely what it will do in response to the next act of terrorism. For example, it could announce the first act of terrorism following the moratorium will result in the destruction of a small village which has been used as a base for terrorist operations. The residents would be given 24 hours to leave, and then troops will come in and bulldoze all of the buildings.
“The response will be automatic. The order will have been given in advance of the terrorist attacks and there will be no discretion. The point is to make the automatic destruction of the village the fault of the Palestinian terrorists who had advance warnings of the specific consequences of their action. The soldiers would simply be acting as the means for carrying out a previously announced policy of retaliation against a designated target.
“Further acts of terrorism would trigger further destruction of specifically named locations. The ’waiting list’ targets would be made public and circulated throughout the Palestinian-controlled areas.”
What is truly frightening about those cynical and aggressive statements (and the many similar ones that could be quoted) is that they come from people advising or praising governments that enjoy an almost complete monopoly of weapons of mass destruction, are supported by the major world news media and control fairly obedient domestic populations. It is also important to refute the standard excuse for support of regimes of terror given by pro-intervention intellectuals, namely that all this was the result of “excesses” in the otherwise noble pursuit of “fighting communism”. Had this been the case, why not support reformist regimes as an effective bulwark against truly communist ones? Arbenz, Mossadegh, Lumumba, Allende or Goulart were in no sense communists. Nor were the Arab and African nationalists that the United States opposed either in their struggle against Zionism or against Apartheid. Also, why continue similar “excesses”, such as years of bombing Iraq, long after the collapse of the Soviet Union? Observe also that, contrary to what is commonly said, the United States did not entirely “lose” the Vietnam War. It did indeed fail to achieve its maximal objective of imposing its own client regime in South Vietnam. But, through massive bombings and defoliation, it did manage to destroy the material basis of any successful alternative development able to serve as a model.
However, the partial defeat in Vietnam and the horrors of that war led many people to question the legitimacy of US domination over the world. A counter-offensive was needed to recover the initiative at the level of rhetoric and image. The instrument for this was the human rights ideology proclaimed by President Carter (1976-1980). The basic tenet of this ideology can be stated quite simply: since human and democratic rights are better respected, in general, in the West than in other countries, it is our right, indeed our duty, to intervene, if necessary by military means, in order to enforce the respect for those rights abroad. The basic fallacy of this ideology should be obvious: the fact that a particular society is internally democratic in no way implies that it will have an altruistic attitude towards the rest of the world. To take an extreme case, consider Israel; there is no doubt that it is internally more democratic towards its own citizens, at least the Jewish ones, than most Arab states.
But that does not imply, to put it mildly, that it can be relied upon to defend the human rights of Arabs in Palestine, Lebanon or elsewhere. Likewise, the Greek cities were democratic for their citizens, and used slave labour. Similar remarks can be made about European colonialism, which, incidentally, was also often justified in the name of “human rights”. For the Vietnamese bombed by the United States or the Iraqis dying from the embargo, the fact that the United States is a “free country” with a “free press” does them little good so long as the press remains silent and the population reacts with simple patriotism or indifference. The US press did finally criticise the Vietnam war when the elite concluded that the war had became too costly to the United States. That contrasts with the media silence over the slow extermination of the Iraqis, which costs nothing in terms of US casualties or political protest at home.
The human rights ideology, as used by the United States and its Western supporters, rests on an extremely selective reading of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Only the sections on Civil and Political Rights are referred to, and even these are interpreted according to double standards. Take Article 14 that grants the right to seek asylum abroad from persecution. Its implementation is extraordinarily politicised by the United States: out of more that 24,000 Haitians intercepted by US forces from 1981 through 1990, 11 were granted asylum, in comparison with 75,000 out of 75,000 Cubans. Or consider Article 13, granting the right to leave any country, including one’s own. During the Cold War, the United States refused to grant passports to US citizens such as the famous singer Paul Robeson, who had the effrontery to be both black and communist.
This right to leave was however constantly invoked with great passion against the refusal by the Soviet Union to allow Jews to emigrate. But the end of Article 13, which adds “and to return to his country” is ignored. No wonder; the day after the Universal Declaration was ratified, the United Nations passed Resolution 194, which affirms the right of Palestinians to return to their homes (or to receive compensations).
The declaration also contains Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, including a right to health care, social security and adequate standard of living (Article 25). Whatever one thinks of those rights, they are part of the Declaration and have the same status for the signatories as any other part of the Universal Declaration. Nevertheless, President Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, could call them a “letter to Santa Claus” without provoking much reaction. (This is in itself an interesting example of “relativism” – just think of the reactions in the West if some Third World leader called the first part a “letter to Santa Claus”.)
In the West, the Civil Rights part of the Universal Declaration is held to have absolute priority over the Economic and Social parts. In case this seems an obvious priority, imagine being one of those two or three billion people (about half of mankind) who have to survive on more or less two dollars a day. How would you weigh Cuban efforts to maintain public health, education and availability of basic necessities for the poor in comparison to the limitations imposed on civil liberties? These efforts continued long after Cuba was no longer being “subsidised” by the Soviet Union – and while it was suffering from a very severe embargo as well as from numerous acts of sabotage caused by the single superpower, forcing the Cuban government to divert resources to defence, counter-spying, etc.
Considering the relationship of forces, if Cuba introduced liberal democracy as demanded by the United States, one could expect the Cuban émigré lobby in the United States, backed by Washington, to bribe politicians, finance media and subvert the new “democratic process” to ensure the takeover by a pro-US regime that would adopt neo-liberal “reforms” putting an end to the existing social benefits. This does not mean that socio-economic rights should be used to justify the abandonment of civil liberties. All such rights should be part of a just society. But given the world relationship of forces, the constant exclusive emphasis on political rights by the rich countries must be seen as self-serving and therefore not a valid promotion of universal values.
The following comments, taken from the Jesuit Salvadorian journal Processo, illustrate nicely the double standards of the US human rights discourse: “If Lech Walesa had been doing his organising work in El Salvador, he would have already entered into the ranks of the disappeared – at the hand of ‘heavily armed men dressed in civilian clothes’; or have been blown to pieces in a dynamite attack on his union headquarters. If Alexander Dubcek were a politician in our country, he would have been assassinated like Héctor Oquelí [the social democratic leader assassinated in Guatemala, by Salvadorian death squads, according to the Guatemalan government]. If Andrei Sakharov had worked here in favour of human rights, he would have met the same fate as Herbert Anaya [one of the many murdered leaders of the independent Salvadorian Human Rights Commission CDHES]. If Ota Sik or Václav Havel had been carrying out their intellectual work in El Salvador, they would have been found one sinister morning, lying on the patio of a university campus with their heads destroyed by the bullets of an elite army battalion.”
Another striking example of double standards was attested by no less than Daniel Patrick Moynihan, recipient of the highest award bestowed by the International League for the Rights of Man. In 1975, the newly independent ex-Portuguese colony of East Timor was invaded by Indonesia, a regional client of the United States, which supplied most of its weapons. The United Nations failed to come to the aid of the East Timorese, thanks to Moynihan, who was US ambassador to the United Nations at the time and who proudly recalled in his memoirs: “The Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success.”
Moynihan even cited figures showing that the Indonesian invasion killed “10 percent of the population, almost the proportion of casualties experienced by the Soviet Union during the Second World War”. Along with Huntington and several US theologians, Moynihan is one of the 60 signers of the “letter from America” sent to European newspapers exalting the US assault on Afghanistan as part of a “Just War”.
The human rights policy also signalled a change of operational tactics. During the Vietnam war period, there was much talk about “nation building”, meaning building strong anti-communist states in the Third World. The United States drew the lesson from Vietnam that it was easier to destroy an unfriendly state that to build a friendly one. The Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan, the contras and the Miskitos Indians in Nicaragua, Savimbi in Angola, the UCK in Kosovo, most of the separatist forces in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia (and probably now in China), have been supported by the United States in what one might call an enterprise of state deconstruction. This has the added advantage of provoking less opposition among liberals and leftists, given the latter’s prejudice in favour of whoever appears to be the underdog, whether guerrillas versus a regular army, traditional societies versus a modern state, or ethnic minorities versus democratic majorities.
In the end, the Cold War was quite similar to the present “war on terrorism”: a continuation of centuries of domination by the advanced industrial powers of the rest of the world, ensuring popular support at home thanks to a clever and scary rhetoric. Of course, there was a real conflict, as there is now. But, then as now, the relationship of forces was enormously unequal, the response totally disproportionate to the actual dangers, and the real goals, although concealed, not hard to figure out.
Good and Bad Arguments
Perhaps the most striking success of our ideological system is the extent to which its assumptions are shared by critics on the left, even honest ones. To take one example, consider the widely shared expectation that a “peace dividend” would follow the demise of the Warsaw Pact. This was about as realistic as expecting Genghis Khan to stop half way through his conquests. In reality, the victors (NATO and the United States) immediately started to expand and seek fresh justifications for their aggressive military posture. This mirage, as well as similar confusions concerning later operations against Iraq, Yugoslavia or Afghanistan, show that we urgently need to clarify our thinking about the basis of our objections to Western aggression, and to its apologists. This is necessary even, or especially, when aggressive interventions are successful, and when the declared targets are individuals such as Saddam Hussein, Milosevic or bin Laden who, leftists are persuaded, are not “our kind of guys”.
The Reincarnations of Hitler
The main argument used by the pro-war party to intimidate its opponents is extraordinarily simple: we are always confronted by the latest form of fascism. Saddam is Hitler, Milosevic is Hitler, bin Laden is Hitler, as were Nasser or Arafat before them. We (the West) should therefore intervene to liberate poor and oppressed people – Kosovar Albanians or Afghan women, considered more or less the present-day equivalent of the Jews in Nazi-dominated Europe. Left alone, our governments and public opinion are too selfish, uninformed and indifferent to human suffering. Therefore, the role of intellectuals is to arouse public opinion and to put pressure on the governments so that they dare commit themselves more actively to the defence of our values.
Note in passing that, for many of those intellectuals, whom one might call the humanitarian warriors, doing business is morally dubious (it may lead to all kinds of compromises with dictatorships), while waging war, or at the very least imposing trade sanctions, is the really noble thing to do. For classical liberals, it was the other way around: wars were seen to strengthen states, their armies, police and bureaucracies, while commerce promoted human exchanges and better mutual understanding.
Note also that the fact that the United States usually refuses to negotiate with its enemies (e.g., imposition of unacceptable conditions on the Serbs in Rambouillet, refusal even to consider legal extradition proceedings for bin Laden) is not an effective argument against such intellectuals. Their view is that we should seize every opportunity to wage wars that can topple dictatorships and brutal regimes, in order to spread democracy and respect for human rights. Nor is there any point in complaining about the “collateral damage” of Western aggressions. The humanitarian warriors can always cite the “greater good” obtained by imposing liberal regimes. For them, the great good fortune of our time is that overwhelming military force is in the hand of powers, like the United States, committed to the defence of liberal values. The only problem is the reluctance of the general public, sometimes influenced by the left, to let their governments commit themselves even more actively to that just struggle.
That is why, as Christopher Hitchens put it, Osama bin Laden “saved us”. By provoking the United States, he forced its leaders into a fight that, otherwise, they might not have had the guts to lead. We can be sure that whatever countries will be targeted by the United States in the future, the humanitarian warriors will applaud, even if no evidence whatsoever links them to “terrorism”. Such countries are likely to qualify as brutal dictatorships, and as such the main targets of the Western “defenders of human rights”.
Munich For Ever
The inevitable companion of the “new Hitlers” discourse is stigmatisation of critics as the new Chamberlains and Daladiers playing into their hands. This is done without recalling what “Munich” was all about.
There was a part of Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland, with a predominantly German population that wanted to be part of Germany; its annexation by Germany was accepted at Munich by Britain and France. That sent a message to the main rising power of the time that international law didn’t matter and that it could do as it pleased. And it is now understood, rightly, that this was sending the wrong signal to Hitler. But what about the right of self-determination of the Sudeten? What would our pro-intervention left have said at that time? The case of Kosovo quickly comes to mind. There, a majority of the population wanted to be detached from Yugoslavia and become part of what one might call Natoland. And the major power of our time used that opportunity to brush aside international law. Future historians may well identify the aggression against Yugoslavia as a major turning point in a new form of imperial reconquest of the world. And who were the real Chamberlains at that time may have to be re-evaluated. As noted above, the fact that the United States is not at all similar to Nazi Germany internally implies less than what is usually supposed for the fate of the people on the wrong side of the guns.
Before indicating how I think one should respond to the apologists for “just” wars, I will discuss a certain number of arguments frequently used by people who oppose Western aggressions but that should be avoided as counterproductive.
Bad Arguments for the Left
One bad argument used against the war in Afghanistan, as against the war in Yugoslavia, is that “it won’t work”. Indeed, the question is, work for what? Towards what end? Those that are proclaimed? Or those that are probably the real ones?
Consider first the latter. We heard warnings that war would only strengthen Milosevic, or bin Laden, and that the Taliban would resist for a long time (the so-called “Afghan trap”) and that the war would be too costly (for “us” of course). It may be too soon to draw conclusions about Afghanistan, but in Yugoslavia, the war worked beautifully. It resulted in a Serbian government in Belgrade that is even eager to provide NATO with retrospective justifications for the bombing. What is more, this government was elected by the Serbs themselves. This was of course the result of a series of bribes, blackmail, and deceptions. But who ever did better? Certainly not the Russians, nor the Germans in World War II, nor even the British Empire.
Of course, one could try to argue that “it does not work” in comparison with the proclaimed goals (defending human rights, peace and stability etc). But even that is delicate; any intervention has many effects and almost always brings some “collateral benefits” (like the liberation of the Sudetes at the time of Munich). And, off course, the latter will be spotlighted by the media to encourage further interventions. But, I shall explain below, there are general arguments against interventions that avoid any detailed discussion of those local and temporary benefits.
Moreover, portraying the Afghans, the Serbs or the Iraqis as stronger than they are, allows the humanitarian warriors to shout “victory” when victory comes: “see, I told you, it would not be so hard!” While if we put the issue in realistic terms, and ask whether the greatest military might of all times can succeed through months of the most intense bombing in history in subduing a small, poor and devastated country, whose level of development is more or less the one of Europe between the 8th and the 12th centuries, then the outcome does not look like such a miracle. It also explains why a large number of Afghans are ready to collaborate with the United States: even the Nazis found plenty of collaborators in all the countries they occupied. So, what is to be expected when an immensely rich country like the United States, particularly ready to bribe others, wishes to install a puppet government in Afghanistan? Making the victory look like a divine surprise also encourages the imperial power to go further: let’s now tackle Somalia, Iraq, whatever. So, this line of argument should be avoided at all costs.
Another bad argument is to say that the Northern Alliance is no better than the Taliban, or even that they are no better in their treatment of Afghan women. This may be the case, but it is again irrelevant. What are we to say if they do behave better? Given the record of the Taliban, that would not be very hard and, given time, they very well might. Then, the media will feed us with reports on how great the situation in Afghanistan is; what will the left say then?
To understand why all this is irrelevant, just imagine that the World Trade Center events had occurred in Bombay and that the Indian government thereupon decided – without providing publicly available proofs and rejecting all negotiations – that the responsibility lay with the Afghans, invaded Afghanistan and toppled the Taliban. How would the West react? Not hard to guess.
Now, if the condition of Afghan women was the overriding issue, why not have supported the Soviet regime (to which many leftists, including myself, were opposed), the best on that score that the Afghans ever had? At that time, the overriding issue in the West was certainly not the condition of women, but strategic concerns such as the access of the Russians to warm seas (a dream going back to the Tsars, as the Western media used to say). But now, the fact that the United States has obtained new strongholds both in the Balkans (Albania-Kosovo) and in Central Asia is totally irrelevant. Only the fate of women counts.
The Real Issues: International Law and Imperialism
Observing (and denouncing) these double standards gets us closer to the real arguments against the war. They are of two types. The first one is quite universal and is simply that nobody has yet found a better rule to avoid war than respect for international law. None of the recent wars launched by the West – Iraq, Yugoslavia or Afghanistan – were in accord with international law. The one that came closest to observing international law was the war against Iraq. But even there, the equivalent of the jury – the Security Council – was pressured and coerced by one of the parties, the United States. In the case of Yugoslavia, there was not even the pretence of NATO abiding by international law. Finally, for Afghanistan, one power invoked the right to respond to aggression. But, even assuming the existence of a direct link between the events of September 11 and bin Laden, there was never the sort of constant assault on the United States characteristic of a war and thus calling for self-defence. A spectacular crime was committed and was used as a pretext to launch a war, period.
Many people will ask, what is so sacred about international law? And why respect national sovereignty? After all, most state boundaries are quite arbitrary and unnatural. They are the result of previous wars, not of any rational design. Besides, how can anybody in his or her right mind stand still while women and children are murdered or reduced to slavery across the border? To answer those questions, we have to think globally and ask what the alternatives are.
First, let us consider the internal level of political order. Since the 17th century, liberal-democratic reflection has led to the conclusion that there are basically three ways to organise life in society: (1) the war of all against all, (2) a Hobbesian sovereign that imposes order through force, or (3) respect for a democratically decided law as the lesser evil. The Taliban, like the Soviet communists before them, were playing the role of a Hobbesian sovereign. The arguments against that solution are well known. Such a sovereign may bring temporary benefits (Taliban order compared to the chaos reigning before and after them in large parts of Afghanistan – the war of all against all), but inevitably acts according to its own interests, provoking a cycle of rebellion and repression without end, because its power, being undemocratic, cannot be accepted by those on which it is imposed.
Now, consider the international order. The sovereign is the United States and the same arguments apply. Whatever benefits it may bring to targeted countries, the United States acts on the basis of self-interest that inevitably undermines those benefits. The prime interest in control of world petroleum and other resources, in investment opportunities and in strategic positioning clearly takes precedence over the welfare of populations. In its striving for world domination, the United States has promoted drug dealers and Islamic fanatics in order to destroy the Soviet Union. To control the Middle East, the United States has unstintingly backed the transformation of Israel into a garrison state and relentlessly worked to destroy Iraq.
As liberal theorists should expect, all this eventually backfires – an intractable situation in Palestine, and the World Trade Center attack. Who knows what the future will bring? Right now, the humanitarian warriors are celebrating. But perhaps some orphaned Afghan child will grow up and decide to learn physics or biology instead of the Koran and inflict massive nuclear or bacteriological damage to the United States. Unlikely? Not more than a bin Laden emerging from the anti-communist manoeuvres of the 1980s. No trillion dollar Pentagon budget can protect the United States from the unforeseeable backlash of its treatment of countries that today appear helpless.
The third solution would be to bring more democracy to the world level, via the United Nations. But that is exactly what Western liberals, who support ever greater destruction of a legal international order, in the name of human rights, oppose. Contemporary liberals are, by and large, perfectly inconsistent. They have turned into liberal imperialists: liberal in the internal order (at least at times and in places where the powers that be aren’t overly challenged), and autocratic on the international level.
Another line of argument is likely to be more controversial, but is even more necessary, I think. In Europe, those of us who criticise US war policy are often accused of being “anti-American”. We might as well frankly acknowledge that, in some sense, we are. Not along the lines of the “cultural” critique adopted by many Europeans who are quick to denounce the oddities of American society – its crass consumerism, its religious backwardness, its devotion both to the death penalty and to the absence of gun control, etc – while conveniently forgetting some not-so-pleasant facts about the material roots (the slave trade, colonial conquest, etc) of our own supposedly great civilisation. I mean being anti-American in the sense of good old anti-imperialism. The United States is now playing the role that Britain, France or Germany played in the past, only on a grander scale. What sometimes causes confusion is that the American empire relies far more on local collaborators than the old empires, leaving the countries it dominates nominally independent. The nature of this “independence” was illustrated when the new anti-Taliban government of Afghanistan asked the Americans to stop bombing their country. Too many civilians were being killed. A naive believer in the right of self-determination might be excused for thinking that the Afghans themselves should have a say in such matters. But the United States flatly said no and, within 24 hours or so, the “independent” Afghan government had seen the light and approved the US bombing. One can easily guess what will happen when some Afghans try to control a US pipeline going through their country.
Now, what is the main problem with US imperialism? First consider all the horror of the US wars: Indochina, Central America, the Middle East. Millions of people murdered. Then consider the crimes of their puppets: Suharto, Mobutu, Pinochet, the Argentine and Guatemala military dictatorships, the US-backed rebels in Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua, etc. Another few million people dead. But that only scratches the surface.
The real problem is, to use a huge understatement, the loss of opportunity for the Third World. At Porto Alegre, a new movement has taken up the slogan: “another world is possible”. If that is true, then probably another world has been possible all along, but has been beaten back and prevented from coming into being. Let us try to imagine what it might have looked like – it strains the imagination, but let’s try: a world where Congo, Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua, China, Brazil, Iraq, Guatemala, and countless other places would have been able to develop themselves without constant Western interference and sabotage. A world where the 19th century Arab enlightenment had been able to continue its modernisation of the Middle East, instead of being crushed by Western-backed obscurantism and turned into the besieged hinterland of US-backed Zionism. A world where apartheid would have been defeated long ago and where southern Africa would have been spared both Western-instigated civil wars and the “debt trap”.
What would such a world look like? No closer to paradise on earth than Europe in the centuries before it got rich on the Conquest of the Americas, modernised its agriculture and industrialised. There might well have been wars and famines and atrocities. But the condition of the majority of people would almost surely have been better with leaders trying, as best they could, to achieve independence and popular well-being than with leaders devoted to Western powers and their own personal enrichment. Compare, in almost every situation, the indigenous leaders and movements with those that the West favoured against them: Lumumba and Mobutu, Somoza and the Sandinistas, Goulart and the Brazilian generals Allende and Pinochet, Mandela and the apartheid regime, Mossadegh and the Shah, etc.
Nothing is more cynical than the eagerness with which self-styled humanitarian intellectuals cite Cambodia under Pol Pot and Rwanda as proof of the need for Western intervention. In both those cases, enormous tragedy resulted precisely from massive outside interventions: from the United States bombing Cambodia as a “sideshow” to its war against Vietnam, and from Belgium exploiting and aggravating the ethnic differences in Rwanda, following the classic “divide and rule” principle. The most decried ”monsters” of the Third World have not been produced by those countries on their own but as a response to the distorting pressures of Western power. It takes a heavy dose of racism to believe that, without our constant interventions, Third World peoples could not find better paths of development than the present ones. Try to think of the mobilising effect that a genuine autonomous but unimpeded development, undertaken somewhere in the poor countries, could have had elsewhere. For example, the excellent public health policies in Cuba would probably be emulated in the rest of Latin America (even to some extent in capitalist countries) if mere mention of Castro’s Cuba was not anathema to the United States and to the elites they direct. If one thinks it through, one sees that the countless losses of opportunity suffered by the poor majority of the world translate into tens and even hundreds of millions of lost lives. To contemplate this seriously is heart-rending.
Present day imperialism is even far less justifiable than its predecessor. Old-fashioned imperialism was more directly violent in its subjugation of peoples, but its “civilising mission”, hypocritical and self-serving as it was, brought some real advantages. Before the colonial era, the world was divided between vastly contrasting levels of development. However indirectly and often unintentionally, colonialism did make science and even enlightened ideas available to places where they had been previously unknown. But the situation is quite different now. In Asia and the Middle East in particular, the struggle against Western imperialism inspired strong movements aimed at appropriating the most progressive intellectual and political advantages of the Enlightenment for their own societies. The post-colonial policies of the United States have repeatedly aided obscurantist opposition to such movements. Worst of all, the more the West presents itself as both the champion of science and rationality and as a ruthless plunderer of all the world’s resources – not only natural resources, but also its cheap labour and even its grey matter – and the more it squeezes poor countries through debt and uneven trade terms, making genuine development virtually impossible, the more it gives the Enlightenment a bad name, notably in the Muslim countries. By its short-sighted egotism, the West is stifling the very universalism it claims to promote.
Let me now discuss some rhetorical tricks that are used to soften opposition to wars and that tend to be particularly effective within the left.
Fake Internationalism
The human rights ideology is often defended within the left under the guise of “internationalism”. We have, on that basis, to help victims of dictatorial governments in the Third World (like the Afghan women), possibly by supporting US and European interventions. But, again, this is mostly a delusion. What about child labour in Pakistan? Should we go to war over that issue? Yet, we can be certain that, if a major conflict between the West and Pakistan arises (which seems unlikely), this will become the issue of the day. Let us also think about past “issues of the day”. Who worries now about the situation of Indians in Nicaragua? About the drug trade in Panama? Or human rights in Kosovo? Yet, all those issues were picked by the powers that be, at a given time, as the most crucial issue to focus on, so as to justify their policies. A genuine internationalist position would at the very least lead us to think globally and democratically. And to get in closer touch with mass popular movements in the Third World (not small sects) and ask them what they think of the interventions of our governments. I suspect that a lot could be learned from such exchanges.
A related issue is the one of “nationalism”. The latter has become very unpopular in leftist circles and it is thus easy for the mainstream press to discredit any leader like Milosevic or Saddam Hussein by using that label. But this overlooks two factors: first, the extreme emotional reaction to the September 11 events in the US show that nationalism, in its most primitive and traditional form, is alive and well in that country. And, since the US is infinitely more powerful than Iraq or Yugoslavia, it is that nationalism which is the most dangerous. Moreover, and more importantly, the strategic orientation of capitalism today is very much anti-state. Multinational corporations are often far stronger economically than Third World states and are quite happy to see the powers of the state, at least some of them, be weakened or dismantled. Of course, nationalism per se is not a leftist value, but any condemnation of it in a particular instance must be done while keeping these factors in mind.
The “Neither-Nor” Position
It has become fashionable, in leftists circles, especially in France, to adopt of position of “neither-nor” (“ni ni” in French). Neither NATO nor Milosevic; or neither the Taliban nor the United States. And, probably tomorrow, neither Saddam Hussein nor whatever alliance the United States manages to set up against Iraq. Like all slogans, this one has some merit, but also serious deficiencies. Obviously, nobody opposing the war in Afghanistan is for the Taliban or wishes anybody to live under such a regime. In that sense, the situation is quite different from the one at the time of Stalin, for example, where part of the left did consider his regime as some kind of ideal (and the long influence of Stalinism in France may explain why the “ni ni” attitude is so widespread there). For reasons explained here, opposing wars of aggression can be justified quite independently of one’s views about the internal policies of the country being aggressed.
However, the neither-nor position gives the impression that there is some kind of symmetry between the two positions being rejected; but this is simply not true. It is clear that “Islamic fascism”, as the liberals call it, is a horrible movement (which harms Muslims most of all). But one cannot equate such movements to global US imperialism. First of all, consider the relationship of forces and the extent of the damage done. The Taliban were an extremely weak military force whose existence depended almost entirely on outside support (from Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, two staunch US allies) and the exhaustion of Afghan society from years of US-sponsored war. By contrast, the United States is the greatest military power of all times. The harm done by the Taliban is direct and visible (floggings, destruction of artefacts) but not comparable to the destruction – much of it indirect and hidden – wrought by an imperial power that has killed millions of people in its counter-revolutionary wars, and extends its economic and military power over billions of people. Moreover, the Taliban, and more generally “Islamic fascism”, must be seen in context as largely a by-product of the relentless US opposition to the unacceptable notion of Arab or other Middle Eastern nationalists that they might have the right to control their natural resources.
Most of all, perhaps, is the asymmetry of our own position: we are not judging the world from some point situated outside of space and time. We pay taxes to the United States or to its allies. If we do military service, it will be in their armed forces. We vote here. The people we meet and discuss with are in general totally hostile to the Taliban, but often support the United States. In that sense, our primary responsibility is to limit the violence of our own governments, not to denounce those of others.
Honest opponents of wars sometimes feel that they have the duty to denounce the other side to show that they don’t have “double standards”. But we need to keep in mind the actual consequences of what we say, especially for the victims of the violence of our states, not simply to show our purity or our absence of double standards. And whatever we say about the “enemy” is likely be to used to reinforce nationalist feelings of self-righteousness and other warlike sentiments. For example, any denunciation of Saddam Hussein’s policies, done in the Western press and under present circumstances, even if the statements made are factually correct, is likely to have as sole effect to strengthen the resolve of those who have inflicted and want to continue to inflict immense suffering on the Iraqi people.
Related to this, is the rhetoric of “supporting X”. In the dominant discourse, particularly in the media, opponents of wars are always accused of “supporting” the other side whether the other side is the German Emperor during World War I, Stalin during the Cold War, or Milosevic, Saddam or the Taliban today. This is absurd on two counts: one is that, if opposing a war against X means that one “supports X”, then even the humanitarian warriors “support” many X’s that do things that they don’t really like, unless they are ready to wage war against Morocco, Indonesia, Turkey, etc; indeed, most of the world, including Israel of course. The second problem is: how do the warmongers avoid the charge of supporting the US and its many unsavoury proxies? Well, they simply declare that they don’t approve “all US policies” (usually without saying which ones they don’t like). But they do not give even a hint of how they would curb the very policies that they object to; and, given the relationship of forces in the world, that is indeed a very big open question. By contrast, if I was to declare (which I am happy to do) that I don’t support “all of Saddam Hussein’s policies”, I doubt very much that it would clear people like me of the charge of “supporting Saddam”.
The European Illusion
Many leftists nurse the hope that Europe may distance itself from the United States and become a sort of counterweight to its global hegemony. But there are several problems with this hope. To discuss this, we need to have a clear view of what “Europe” is. Roughly speaking it is the global imperialist power of the past, which lost its place to the United States and would very much like to regain it. Of course, it wasn’t unified in the past, and lost its dominant role largely because of its internal divisions. Both its past and its present roles are justified in the name of unique “European values”, that are often contrasted, in the discourse of the European elites, with the rudeness and the commercialism of the Americans. But this, like the dedication of the United States to human rights, represents merely the usual ideological framework in which all powers operate and justify themselves. So, assuming Europe becomes more unified and more powerful militarily; what is to be expected? Either it remains a sort of a vacillating ally of the United States, sometimes agreeing, sometimes disagreeing, manoeuvring to defend its own narrow interests in the Third World when they differ from those of the United States. Or else it becomes a more determined adversary of the United States, and we are back to a sort of a new Cold War, with Europe playing the role held by the Soviet Union. Arm races, increased military spending, the threat of global destruction, are not exactly what the left should hope for.
The European political and military build-up should simply be none of our business. We should combat any effort to shift budget priorities from social services to European “defence”. Europe is sufficiently armed already to defend itself against a hypothetical direct aggression by the United States, which can best be prevented by political means, by allying with the rest of the world in favour of fair commercial arrangements, international law and measures to counteract the current polarisation of wealth and power. But it would totally foolish for the left to put its hope in the projection of European power abroad to play a progressive role.
Some Modest Suggestions
Although there are no quick answers to the question of what is to be done in the present world situation, one thing should be clear: Western intellectuals should stop spreading illusions about “our values”. All expanding empires pursue atrocious policies in the name of “values”, either the “white man’s burden” or the “civilising mission” or various Christian duties in the past. We should at the very least lucidly analyse and denounce the hypocrisy of those discourses.
But, more fundamentally, we need to operate a genuine cultural revolution in our attitude with respect to the Third World. Once upon a time, many socialists and progressives of differing persuasions swallowed the edifying stories about the “civilising mission” and believed that their main business was to educate the “inferior races”. This produced the first version of liberal imperialism. Later, during the decolonisation period, many leftist groups projected their “revolutionary envy”, so to speak, on the Third World, expecting to be saved by distant national liberation struggles. But if radical social changes are hard to achieve in the West, they may even be harder to achieve in the Third World. Dire poverty, cultural underdevelopment, and the heavy weight of feudal social relations are not exactly conditions propitious to the “development of socialism”, whatever socialism may be. But the fact that the so-called “socialism” in the Third World did not fulfil the (wild) dreams of many Western leftists led a number of them to a reaction of burning their former idols. Resentful at being let down, they have joined the new wave of liberal imperialism, brandishing slogans such as the “right of humanitarian intervention”, justified by the human rights ideology, or by a perverted “internationalism”.
What the world needs now, and what decent citizens of the West should demand of their governments, is to put a total end to Western foreign interventions and even to offer apologies accompanied by massive reparations for the pillage and exploitation that has drained the Third World for centuries. Do we feel altruistic and want to do “humanitarian work”? Let us cancel debts with no compensation, provide cheap medicines to cure AIDS in Africa, transfer technology free of charge, open our borders widely to refugees and immigrants. All this would do far more good than all the military interventions that the liberal imperialists can invent. And to the extent that we are not so altruistic – which is human after all – we should at least have the honesty to admit it, try to force our governments to keep their bloody hands out the affairs of the Third World and support efforts towards what people sometimes call a “second independence”: after the decolonisation, elimination of the neo-colonial regimes that have replaced the old world order.
There are many organisations devoted to “watching” human rights violations among the former victims of colonial violence. What is needed, besides and sometimes against those groups, are organisations devoted to “watching” interventions and plots by the imperial powers. The jingoists à la Bush are making the United States extremely unpopular in the world. In places with few or no Muslims, such as Argentina, South Korea or El Salvador, there are reports of people expressing their sympathies for bin Laden. This reaction may be shocking, but not more than, say, the attitude of the crowds in New York enthusiastically “welcoming the troops” after the far greater slaughter of the Gulf War. The gap between North and South is growing and the admiration for bin Laden reflects this gap. The use of force by the United States will provoke resistance (as Hitler and the colonialists did in the past) and, since there are many weak spots in the West, one can expect that there will be other events like September 11.
This spiral leads nowhere, or at least not towards what we would like, but rather towards more war and more repression. While leftist intellectuals congratulate themselves about “victories for human rights”, the poverty, humiliation and despair of much of the world breeds fanaticism. It is urgent that the Western left build real bridges with popular organisations in the Third World; but, to achieve that, we have first to clarify our views about the real relations of forces that shape this world, to take into account, in all our actions, our actual position in it and to expose the illusions spread by the liberal imperialists.
The slogan was repeated around the world: "no blood for oil". But blood and oil have flowed together for a long time. From the betrayal of the Arab world by the French and the British following the fall of the Turkish empire in 1917 to the latest war against Iraq, Western policy has been dominated by oil. Western thirst for oil has been satisfied through opposition to Middle Eastern reformists in favor of the most backward and corrupt traditional rulers, through support to the strategic asset of aggressively modern Israel, through fanning the flames of the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, then the 1991 Gulf War followed by endless embargo and bombing of Iraq.
In 1945, the U.S. State Department described the Saudi Arabian petroleum reserves a "stupendous source of strategic power and one of the greatest material prize in world history". Today Bush's war regime is less frank and pretends that the conquest of Iraq has nothing to do with its huge petroleum reserves. However, their soldiers massively protect the Petroleum Ministry in Baghdad while abandoning to looters and vandals the ministries responsible for public services, the hospitals and the country's priceless archeological treasures. The looting can serve to demoralize and divide the population of a conquered country and make it welcome whatever invader is able to use force to restore law and order.
Today there is universal rejoicing over the end of the dreadful dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, as if opponents and advocates of the war could at least agree that the Pentagon chose the right target. But the Pentagon has already struck many targets in the past, and will be encouraged to strike many more in the future, and crimes such as those attributed to the Iraqi dictator have little to do with the criteria for selection.
In their effort to escape from Western exploitation, third world peoples have produced many diverse leaders: Ho Chi Minh, Mao Tse Tung, Gandhi, Martin Luther King et Malcolm X, Lumumba, Nkrumah, Nasser, Allende, Fidel Castro, Amilcar Cabral, Arafat, the Sandinistas, Ben Bella and Ben Barka... All these leaders, and in Europe, the rare defenders of third world revolution, Olof Palme in Sweden or Otelo de Carvalho in Portugal, all of them, whether reformist or revolutionaries, socialists or nationalists, armed or non-violent, have all been reviled by the "Free World", and have been various plotted against, demonized, invaded, imprisoned or assassinated by the West or its agents.
In 1953, the CIA overthrew the reformist Iranian prime minister Mossadegh in favor of the Shah's dictatorship which led to the Islamic revolution and the regime of the Ayatollahs. In 1954, the CIA overthrew the elected reformist president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz, leading to decades of military dictatorship and bloody massacres. In 1965, the United States engineered the overthrow of the reformist Goulart in Brazil, the reformist Juan Bosch in the Dominican Republic and President Soekarno in Indonesia, with hundreds of thousands of victims. Mandela is recognized today as a hero, but it should not be forgotten that he spent 27 years in prison with the complicity of the CIA.
Whenever third world peoples try to free themselves by essentially peaceful and democratic methods, whether the Palestinians during the Oslo period, or Allende in Chile, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and today Chavez in Venezuela, their hopes are countered by violence and endless subversion. If they arrest their opponents like Castro, or turn to violence like the suicide bombers in Palestine or the Maoists in Nepal, their cause is reduced to their methods by Western humanitarians whose standards of pure non-violence never applied to the creation of the modern dominant nations.
Perhaps one should ask the imperial powers to spell out precisely what methods oppressed peoples may be allowed to use for their defense and liberation.
The failure of the Afghanistan war to catch Osama bin Laden or to create a new democratic Afghanistan is forgotten, just as the Bush administration can hope people will forget the pretexts for the war against Iraq, along with the nonsense about gas masks and duct tape. Richard Perle says the famous "weapons of mass destruction", neither found nor used during the U.S. invasion, may be hidden deep underground, or in Syria...
How many countries can be invaded in the course of this hunt? Now that the U.S. controls the terrain, any belated "discovery" will have no more credibility than the many discredited "proofs" and falsehoods offered by the Anglo-Americans to justify war. Besides, it is difficult to see how weapons of mass destruction possessed by a regime that does not use them at the very moment that it is toppled can be a threat to anybody. As for the accusation -- which polls indicate was believed by 40% to 50% of Americans -- that Saddam Hussein was linked to September 11, it remains as totally unsubstantiated as ever.
The only pretext left is "democracy", today the opium of the intellectual warriors. The official position of the reluctant European governments and their media is not very different: the war is an illegal and illegitimate aggression, but still, we hope it succeeds as soon as possible. Otherwise, it would be catastrophic for "democracy". The moment may have come to ask some questions about that concept. How does "real existing democracy" appear to people in the Arab world? Just how attractive is a system that gives full power to individuals such as Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, or Reagan's secretary of state George Shultz of the Bechtel corporation and Dick Cheney of Halliburton, whose companies profit rebuilding the countries they pick for destruction?
How impressive is freedom of the press when the mass media, concentrated in few hands, can convince the American public that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks? What do they think of being told by the star New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman that "we left you alone for a long time, you played with matches and in the end we were burned. So we're not going to leave you alone any longer". (quoted by Ari Shavit in "White man's burden", Ha'aretz, April 7, 2024). The same Friedman adds that the war against Iraq would never have taken place in the absence of 25 neo-conservative intellectuals, all near his Washington office, whom he could name. So much for democratic process. And what can they think of the choice of retired general Jay Garner, ardent champion of Israel, to be the new proconsul of occupied Iraq?
Enough abuse and hypocrisy can eventually discredit even the best ideas, democracy as well as socialism.
The new conquerors claim to want free elections in Iraq. Let them try. Certainly, it is odd to make war in order to have free elections in Iraq, when there are no such elections in countries already dependent on the United States, such as Egypt. Are there elections in Afghanistan? But the basic reason to doubt the authenticity of U.S. support for free elections in the Middle East is to be seen in the outcome of elections in Algeria, Turkey or Pakistan. The Arab-Muslim world today appears to be largely convinced that if secular nationalism has failed to bring full independence, it is because it was secular. God's help is needed, and God will only help the true believers. The voters will not choose the corrupt pro-Western elites, who more or less openly support Israel, that the West dreams of seeing legitimized through elections. Free elections would be won by political Islam, more hostile to the West than the existing undemocratic regimes.
For all those in the Arab world or in the West who doubt the existence of divine intervention in human affairs, this evolution can only be felt as a huge step backward. Regardless of their mistakes and crimes, Arab nationalists, like the communists, tried to improve human life on earth by the only means accessible: social transformation and not the interpretation of sacred texts. We may believe that such means are not exhausted, but belief in their efficacy has faded.
It is also interesting to contrast the reaction of mainstream Western intellectuals to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and of the Shah of Iran back in 1979. Both were ruthless dictators, both secular in some ways and both trying to modernize their country. And downfall of both benefits (or will likely benefit in Saddam's case) political Islam. One of them, however, was a close ally of the United States and the other not. The reactions are markedly different- in one case huge celebration, in the other, warnings that the next regime won't be any better.
It is not easy to be optimistic today as Iraq is plunged into a new night of colonialism. But if we take the long view of history, we can see that at the beginning of the twentieth century, all of Africa and a large part of Asia were under the rule of European powers. In Shanghai, the British could declare a park off limits "to dogs and Chinese". The Russian, Chinese and Ottoman empires were helpless to stop Western intervention. Latin America was invaded even more often than now. Since then, colonialism has been defeated and discredited, with a few exceptions, notably Palestine.
Even more than the defeat of fascism, this no doubt constitutes humanity's most important social progress of the 20th century. One of the underlying reasons for the "post-modern" pessimism of so many Western intellectuals, who deny that there is such a thing as historical progress, is that the very real progress of recent times has essentially been attained through the defeat of the West and the gradual emancipation of the colonized peoples. Those who want to revive the colonial system in Iraq -- and why else conquer the country? -- even with an "Arab façade" as the British used to say, are blinded by their military force to the awakened determination of all the world's people to decide their own future. The struggle for the genuine independence of the former colonized peoples is still far from completed, and cannot be stopped by occasional setbacks.
In its present stage, that struggle faces what can be called the "Latin Americanization" of the world, that is, the replacement of Europe by the United States as the center of the imperial system, along with the substitution of neo-colonialism for colonialism, meaning a continuation of traditional pillage, exploitation of third world resources and labor (with the more recent addition of brain-power, imported by the West to make up for the inadequacies of our own education system), combined with formal political autonomy and a correlative delegation of repression tasks. In such a world, there can be no real peace and no genuine democracy, which presupposes national sovereignty.
In 1991, the collapse of their unreliable but only potential defending power seemed to leave third world countries once again at the mercy of the West. The debt mechanism could be used for a gigantic hold up of the raw materials and industries of the south. Small recalcitrant States could be demonized and isolated as "rogues".
With the Oslo accords, the Palestinian resistance could be made to accept the endless fragmentation of the Occupied Territories into tiny bantustans strangled by armed settlements. And yet, things are not going so well for the West. The Americans were chased out of Somalia. The Israeli occupation force was driven out of Lebanon. U.S. control of Afghanistan is precarious. The Palestinians stood up to overwhelming destructive force in Jenin. In Latin America, neo-liberal illusions have evaporated and the neo-colonial system is facing rising challenges. There is no reason to believe that the Iraqi people are resigned to U.S. military rule and that various forms of resistance will not appear. Above all, worldwide opposition to U.S. intervention has never been so strong and widespread. The Bush regime is resorting to repressive measures at home, while its propagandists try to dismiss their ever more numerous critics as "anti-American" or "anti-Semitic".
A new worldwide movement is waking up to the fact that corporate globalization is directly or indirectly enforced by militarization, subversion, intervention and war. The struggle for secular democracy in the third world, if sincere, is inseparable from our struggle at home against Western imperialism.
Just Say No-to Imperialism
by Jean Bricmont ( in Zmag)
October 10, 2024
Interview met Jean Bricmont in Knack
10 oktober 2024
Waarover kun je het met Jean Bricmont allemaal hebben?
Over godsdienst, en waarom hij zo gloedvol pleit voor het atheïsme. Over Einstein, en de vraag of de wereld nu al dan niet écht bestaat. Over de oorlog in Irak, en de leugens die presidenten en eerste ministers in onze nek proberen te slaan. Over het postmodernisme, en de aanstootgevende gewoonte van sommige denkers om mensen te intimideren met een overdosis moeilijke woorden.
Over veel. Maar niet over álles, dat zou een beetje te gek zijn. ‘Er zijn dingen waarin ik gespecialiseerd ben’, zegt hij. ‘En er zijn andere onderwerpen waarin ik mij serieus heb verdiept. Maar daar hou ik het dan ook graag bij. Als ik ergens geen verstand van heb, praat ik er liever niet te veel over.’
Kom daar nog eens om, tegenwoordig. Enfin, helemaal aan het einde van het gesprek zal blijken dat we het bijvoorbeeld helemaal níét over Shakespeare zullen hebben.
Beroepshalve is Jean Bricmont hoogleraar in de natuurkunde aan de Université Catholique de Louvain _ hij denkt er onder meer na over de fundamenten van de kwantumtheorie. Waar hij zich serieus in heeft verdiept, is de oorlog in Irak _ hij lag mee aan de basis van het Brussells Tribunal, een op het anti-oorlogsactivisme van de Britse filosoof Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) geïnspireerd platform dat de neoconservatieve Amerikaanse buitenlandpolitiek onderzoekt en veroordeelt.
Waar hij zich ten slotte ook graag en intensief mee bezighoudt, is het aan de kaak stellen van postmoderne en/of pseudo-wetenschappelijke oplichterij _ hij is onder meer voorzitter van Afis, de Association Française pour l’Information Scientifique, een soort tegenhanger van wat bij ons Skepp is, de Studiekring voor de Evaluatie van Pseudo-wetenschap en het Paranormale. Later deze week is Bricmont in Brussel trouwens te gast op een congres van de European Sceptics, dat in het teken staat van Pseudo-wetenschap, alternatieve geneeskunde en de media. Hij zal er onder meer praten over het boek dat hem kortstondige wereldfaam bezorgde: Intellectueel bedrog, dat hij in 1997 publiceerde, samen met zijn collega Alan Sokal.
Een práchtig verhaal, dat boek.
Het was begonnen als een grap. Sokal ergerde zich aan de stuitende hoeveelheid onzin die al jaren wordt geproduceerd door, voornamelijk Franse, postmodernisten _ sociologen, filosofen en psychoanalisten à la Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze en Jean Baudrillard. Stuk voor stuk auteurs die graag verwijzen naar allerlei tot de verbeelding sprekende wetenschappelijke concepten, waaronder het beroemde ‘onzekerheidsprincipe van Heisenberg’ en de al even beroemde ‘onvolledigheidsstelling van Gödel’. Het probleem is alleen dat men op de planeet der postmodernisten totaal niet weet wat die wetenschappelijke concepten precies betekenen. Die lui verwijzen naar wetenschap en wiskunde om interessant te doen, om indruk te maken, om moeilijk te doen. Het is, kort en goed gezegd: aanstellerij, oplichterij.
En dus haalde Sokal een grap uit. Hij schreef zélf een tekst, boordevol dure citaten en nietszeggende verwijzingen. Onder de titel _ hou u vast: Transgressie van de grenzen: naar een transformatieve hermeneutiek van de kwantumgravitatie. Hij stuurde het artikel naar de redactie van Social Text, een Amerikaans vakblad voor postmodernisten, en wat gebeurde er?
Ze publiceerden het!
Jawel. Ze dachten dat het een boeiende, zinvolle bijdrage was. Ze vonden het interessant en leerzaam en zo. Terwijl de auteur zélf er geen letter van begreep, omdat er nu eenmaal niets te begrijpen viel. Het had hem zelfs veel moeite gekost, gaf Sokal achteraf toe, om zo onbegrijpelijk mogelijk te schrijven. In het lijvige boek dat Sokal en Bricmont vervolgens samenstelden, werd het pseudo-wetenschappelijk gezwets van voornoemde auteurs vakkundig onder het mes gelegd en aan reepjes gesneden.
’s Werelds sceptici hebben de handen vol, tegenwoordig. Vooral in de Verenigde Staten, waar fundamentalisten zelfs het onderwijs wetenschapsvrij proberen te maken, via de verplichte invoering van de zogenaamde intelligent design theory, een nieuwe vermomming van het aloude creationisme, dat zegt dat God het leven op aarde geschapen heeft.
‘Misschien zijn een aantal rationele en progressieve intellectuelen veel te lang veel te voorzichtig geweest’, zegt Jean Bricmont. ‘Iemand als wijlen Stephen Jay Gould vond dat godsdienst en wetenschap elkaar niet hoeven uit te sluiten. Die voorzichtige aanpak heeft het mee mogelijk gemaakt dat godsdienst in de VS weer bijzonder machtig is geworden. Dan hou ik meer van de aanpak van iemand als Richard Dawkins, die echt anti-godsdienstig is. Het klinkt eigenaardig, gelet op de universiteit waar ik werk, maar ik vind dat wetenschap godsdienst wel degelijk ondermijnt.’
Wat vindt u van al dat new-age-gedoe?
JEAN BRICMONT: Al die vormen van soft religion storen mij minder. Omdat ze geen politieke impact hebben. Als die mensen daar gelukkig mee zijn, ach… Anderzijds is dat gezweef natuurlijk wel een soort zuur waarin het vermogen om helder te denken helemaal kan oplossen. En dat is dan weer wel gevaarlijk. Uiteindelijk is elke vorm van religie schadelijk, omdat er nooit een zinnig argument voor bestaat. Je kunt geloven wat je wilt, er is geen logica, geen bewijs… Dat stoort me wel, ja. Laten we vooral kritisch genoeg blijven, om te voorkomen dat het ook bij ons de verkeerde kant opgaat, zoals in de VS.
Is godsdienst niet gunstig voor het individuele en collectieve geluk?
BRICMONT: Integendeel, misschien. Er bestaan studies waaruit blijkt dat minder religieuze landen ook minder sociale kwalen, minder misdaad bijvoorbeeld, hebben. Frankrijk, Japan, de Scandinavische landen zijn in dat opzicht beter af dan de Verenigde Staten. Dat hoeft geen oorzaak-gevolg-relatie te zijn: minder religie, dus minder misdaad. Maar het is op z’n minst interessant om te zien dat de relatie er is, en dat ze niet in de andere richting gaat. Maar het belangrijkste bezwaar tegen godsdienst is het gebrek aan argumenten. Er worden toch behoorlijk wat claims gedaan in naam van godsdiensten, over het hiernamaals bijvoorbeeld, over een almachtige God... Wat kan er nu gunstig zijn aan het feit dat je al die valse claims gelooft?
Het geloof, zeggen gelovigen weleens, is te vergelijken met vriendschap, of met liefde. Een partner kiezen doe je ook met je hart, niet met rationaliteit en argumenten.
BRICMONT: (grijnst) Jaja, maar u mag een actie en een geloof niet met elkaar verwarren. Als ik een relatie met iemand heb, is dat een actie. En wat mijn geloof in mijn partner betreft: ik heb bijzonder goede redenen om aan te nemen dat mijn partner echt bestaat.
De Britse theoloog Alister McGrath zei onlangs in ‘Knack’ dat het vooral de ‘verklaarbaarheid’ van de wereld is die verklaard moet worden _ vandaar dat we volgens hem naast wetenschap ook godsdienst nodig hebben. De wetenschap kan veel verklaren, maar niet het feit dát we zoveel kunnen verklaren.
BRICMONT: Alsof dat het bestaan van God bewijst. Een vreemde redenering. Andere diersoorten kunnen nog veel minder verklaren. Een kat weet zelfs niet waar het voedsel vandaan komt _ en de wet van Kepler kent ze al helemaal niet. (lacht) Het feit dat je iets niet begrijpt, betekent met andere woorden helemaal niets. Dat je niet kunt verklaren waarom we zoveel kunnen verklaren, wijst niet de weg naar God. Hoe zou het? We zijn nu eenmaal biologische wezens met een eindig verstand, dus er is geen enkele reden waarom wij alles zouden moeten kunnen verklaren. Het brein is een eindig orgaan, en dus zullen er problemen zijn die we nooit zullen oplossen. Net zoals we nooit de honderd meter in minder dan een tiende van een seconde zullen lopen, omdat ons lichaam eindig is. Er is helemaal niets mysterieus aan het feit dat we niet kunnen verklaren waarom we zoveel kunnen verklaren. Trap niet in die val, want dan staan de theologen inderdaad voor je neus: Aha, wij kunnen dat wél verklaren!
McGrath zei ook dat agnosticisme aanvaardbaar zou zijn voor een wetenschapper, maar atheïsme niet, omdat er evenmin bewijzen tégen God zijn als bewijzen vóór.
BRICMONT: Ik ga voor 99 procent akkoord met de paus. De paus is een atheïst wat betreft de Griekse, de Romeinse, de Filipijnse, de Afrikaanse goden. Hij is geen agnosticus, hij zegt niet dat hij niet weet of al die goden wel of niet bestaan. Hij is een atheïst, net als ik. Maar de paus houdt wel nog één God over. En dat doe ik niet. Een atheïst zegt gewoon dat hij geen argumenten heeft om in God te geloven. Zoals ik. Zijn mensen agnostisch met betrekking tot de theepot die in een baan rond Pluto draait? Nee, toch? Ze zijn atheïstisch: ze geloven dat er helemaal geen theepot rond Pluto draait. En terecht, want er is geen enkel bewijs voor.
Neemt de invloed van het scepticisme toe of af, de laatste jaren?
BRICMONT: Dat is heel moeilijk te zeggen, want hoe meet je zoiets? Ik heb de indruk dat er nog enorm veel irrationaliteit bestaat. Anderzijds is de invloed van godsdienst ook afgenomen. In de jaren vijftig, een periode die ik mij nog goed herinner, waren mensen hier nog diep katholiek. Dus in het algemeen is het irrationalisme afgenomen, denk ik. Maar als je je beperkt tot intellectuele kringen, dan heb ik de indruk dat die minder rationeel zijn dan in de jaren vijftig of zestig. Dat heeft te maken met de opmars van het postmodernisme. En als je naar de Fnac gaat, zie je dat de sector esoterie uitgebreider is dan de sector wetenschap.
Als wetenschapper houdt u zich onder meer bezig met de fundamenten van de kwantumtheorie, waarvoor Einstein in 1905 de basis legde. Welke vragen stelt u precies?
BRICMONT: Ik maak me zorgen over die fundamenten, omdat men over een aantal kwesties meestal nogal losjes heen gaat. Zo is er het zogenaamde meetprobleem: de kwantummechanica zou op een of andere manier aantonen dat de realiteit afhangt van de waarnemer (een lichtdeeltje zou twee verschillende trajecten tegelijk volgen en pas een traject ‘kiezen’ op het moment dat een waarnemer wil meten welk traject de lichtstraal volgt; red.) Toen ik het vak studeerde, leerde men mij dat wetenschap niets te maken heeft met de wereld, maar alleen met onze kennis van de wereld. Dus de wereld-op-zich, de wereld-zoals-hij-is, kunnen we nooit echt kennen. Dat druist natuurlijk regelrecht in tegen het materialistische en wetenschappelijke wereldbeeld dat we de voorgaande eeuwen hebben opgebouwd.
Had Einstein het daarom zo moeilijk met de kwantumtheorie?
BRICMONT: Precies. Hij zei bijvoorbeeld dat hij ervan overtuigd was dat de maan bestaat, ook als we er niet naar kijken. (lacht) Ik denk dat ook. Ik ga ervan uit dat de wereld die door de wetenschap wordt beschreven, echt bestaat. De wetenschap vooronderstélt namelijk dat de wereld bestaat. Daarom denk ik dat er een probleem is met de fundering van de kwantumtheorie. De theorie kan niet compleet zijn, omdat de formulering ervan niet kan worden verzoend met een zinnig wereldbeeld. Met die vragen hou ik mij graag bezig. Al zijn ze de afgelopen decennia een beetje onder de radar verdwenen. Voor de Tweede Wereldoorlog werd er diep filosofisch over gedebateerd, onder meer door Einstein en Niels Bohr. Na de oorlog veranderde de houding, en werd de theorie gewoon gebruikt, niet meer filosofisch ontleed. Het devies is sindsdien: Shut up and compute _ zwijg en maak je berekeningen.
De kwantumtheorie kan makkelijk worden misbruikt door pseudo-wetenschappers.
BRICMONT: Absoluut. Al die verkeerde interpretaties zijn natuurlijk makkelijk te weerleggen. Maar het centrale probleem is tamelijk ernstig. Het eigenaardige is dat de kwantumtheorie de mens opnieuw in het centrum van het universum lijkt te zetten _ omdat het bewustzijn van de observeerder zogezegd een invloed zou hebben op datgene wat er geobserveerd wordt. Dat zou echt een omgekeerde Copernicaanse revolutie zijn. Ik ga er, net zoals Einstein, vanuit dat de theorie gewoon nog niet volledig is.
Wat u ook met Einstein gemeen hebt, is uw pacifisme.
BRICMONT: Pacifisme zou ik dat niet noemen. De absolute weigering, onder alle omstandigheden, om de wapens op te nemen _ ik denk niet dat Einstein daarmee akkoord ging. Bertrand Russell evenmin. Russell was tegen de Eerste Wereldoorlog, hij was niet tegen de Tweede Wereldoorlog, maar wel tegen alle koloniale oorlogen en tegen de oorlog in Vietnam. Dus een strikte pacifist was hij niet. Ik voel me erg verwant met mensen als Einstein en Russell, vooral omdat ze voor mij een traditie van rationalisme vertegenwoordigen. Mij lijkt het coherent om je als rationeel denkend mens te verzetten tegen de oorlog in Irak.
Is dat dezelfde scepsis aan het werk: eerst zien en dan geloven?
BRICMONT: Ik denk het wel. Hoe kun je nu een rationalist zijn en je níét verzetten tegen de mystificatie rond die oorlog in Irak? Ik weet wel dat sommige voorstanders van de oorlog zich ook beroepen op hun rationalisme _ ze voeren oorlog om de beschaving te verspreiden, u kent dat argument. Maar ik denk dat er wel andere manieren zijn om de beschaving te verspreiden. Ik begrijp niet dat iemand die helder probeert te denken zich door al die nepargumenten in de luren laat leggen. Toen ik de Downing Street Memo las, besefte ik dat de leugens over die oorlog nog veel groter waren dan ik mij ooit had kunnen voorstellen: de Britse regering wist dat er geen massavernietigingswapens waren, dat er geen link was met Al-Qaida… Ze hebben gewoon een excuus gezocht voor de invasie. Hoe kan iemand die dat weet nog zwijgen? Dit was de grootste leugen sinds (denkt even na, lacht) de uitvinding van godsdienst! Het bedrog was van een duizelingwekkende, verbijsterende omvang. Daar mógen we toch niet over zwijgen.
Verzet als intellectuele plicht?
BRICMONT: Je moet altijd de waarheid spreken. Er bestaat wel degelijk zoiets als bewijs, als argumenten. Gebruik die dan ook. Ik heb geen grote politieke theorieën, ik heb geen oplossing voor elk sociaal probleem. Maar ik weet wel dat veel van onze politieke en sociale overeenkomsten worden bereikt op basis van mystificaties. Dat is precies hetzelfde verhaal als met de postmodernisten: mensen voelen zich snel geïntimideerd door allerlei moeilijke woorden en ingewikkelde verklaringen. Terwijl het soms gewoon leugens en mystificaties zijn, die speciaal bedacht worden om mensen te intimideren. Heel wat redeneringen die ons worden voorgeschoteld, deugen niet. Laten we die dan ook doorprikken.
Wat doet u, als erg linkse maar tevens anti-godsdienstige denker, met de groeiende aanwezigheid van de islam in Europa?
BRICMONT: Denk opnieuw aan Bertrand Russell en zijn standpunt over de Eerste Wereldoorlog. Hij vond dat je de Duitsers alleszins niet moest demoniseren, want dat hielp de zaken zeker niet vooruit _ hoewel hij niet echt een voorstander was van de Kaiser. Als de Britse pers melding maakte van Duitse wreedheden, wees Russell er altijd meteen op dat de Britten zelf al meermaals vergelijkbare wreedheden hadden begaan. Die houding spreekt mij aan. Om niet in oorlogspropaganda te vervallen, moet je de misdaden van de vijand relativeren, en vergelijken met de misdaden die je zelf hebt begaan en nog altijd begaat. En de islam in Europa? Kijk, het probleem is niet meteen dat ze hier de macht gaan overnemen _ dat zit er niet echt in. Laten we het probleem dus zeker niet overroepen.
De terreurdreiging is toch reëel, niet?
BRICMONT: Zeker. Maar dat lijkt mij het resultaat van het westerse beleid uit het verleden. Bekijk het eens vanuit hun standpunt. Als je in het Midden-Oosten woont, vind je de aanslagen in New York en Londen niet zo dramatisch, vergeleken met wat jezelf allemaal al is overkomen: de Algerijnse oorlog, de Suez-crisis, de invasie van Libanon, de aanval op Libië, de invasie van Irak… En voor wat met de Palestijnen is gebeurd, valt geen enkele rechtvaardiging te verzinnen. Als je mensen hun land afpakt en hen dan wegjaagt _ tja, hoe kun je mensen nu nog méér irriteren? En ze weten allemaal dat het wordt gedaan omdat ze moslim zijn. Wij laten geen gelegenheid onbenut om de moslims te enerveren. Laten we ons dat eerst en vooral al eens goed realiseren.
Een oplossing is dat nog niet.
BRICMONT: Nee, maar als je ruzie hebt met iemand en je wilt het bijleggen, dan is de beste oplossing om eerst en vooral zélf eerlijk te zijn, en te zeggen wat je zelf verkeerd hebt gedaan.
U situeert zich nogal duidelijk aan de linkerzijde van het politieke spectrum. Valt dat makkelijk te verzoenen met uw sceptische houding? Het is toch in linkse, en vooral in groen-linkse, kringen dat het anti-wetenschappelijke wereldbeeld overheerst?
BRICMONT: Dat hangt ervan af wat je met links en groen-links bedoelt. Heel veel groenen geloven in alternatieve geneeskunde en astrologie, en dat is natuurlijk onzin. Anderzijds houdt ook de wetenschap zich wel degelijk bezig met allerlei ecologische problemen. En ik denk dat dat dé grote problemen van deze tijd zijn.
Wat vindt u als fysicus van kernenergie? Kunnen we nog zonder?
BRICMONT: Dat is een onderwerp waarvan ik te weinig afweet om sterke verklaringen af te leggen. (lacht) Maar één ding lijkt mij wel duidelijk: toen het groene verzet tegen kernenergie begon, was er nog geen sprake van de opwarming van de aarde. Nu is dat wel het geval, en toch hebben de groenen nog geen jota veranderd aan hun standpunt over kernenergie. Dat is vreemd. Zeker omdat ik niet denk dat we binnen dit en vijftig jaar voldoende wind- en zonne-energie zullen kunnen gebruiken om aan al onze behoeften tegemoet te komen.
Tot slot: de Vlaamse Alzheimeronderzoeker Bart De Strooper vroeg zich onlangs af waarom studenten in de exacte wetenschappen wel een inleiding in de filosofie krijgen, en studenten in de menswetenschappen geen inleiding in de wetenschap. Wat u?
BRICMONT: Wij hebben het in Louvan-la-Neuve eens geprobeerd met een cursus Fysica voor dichters. Maar die had niet zoveel succes, waarschijnlijk omdat er toch nogal wat wiskunde bij komt kijken. Misschien moeten we het eens proberen met een cursus Biologie voor dichters. Ik voel die kloof tussen de exacte en menswetenschappen alleszins heel scherp aan, omdat ze in de Franstalige wereld nog altijd heel diep is. Wetenschappers worden sowieso beschouwd als slechteriken. Richard Dawkins, bijvoorbeeld: dat is een bioloog en een determinist, en dus gevaarlijk. Maar Heidegger, die toch een nazi was, staat nog altijd te boek als de grootste denker aller tijden.
En, om de boutade nog eens te gebruiken: wie niets van wetenschap kent, kan doorgaan voor een intellectueel, terwijl dat niet geldt voor iemand die Shakespeare niet kent.
BRICMONT: (lacht) Weet u wat ik vroeger vaak deed, bij wijze van grap? Als iemand over Shakespeare begon, dan fronste ik mijn wenkbrauwen en vroeg ik doodserieus: Wie, zegt u?
(END)
Jean Bricmont doceert natuurkunde aan de universiteit van Louvain-la-Neuve. Voor zijn onderzoek wordt hij in november bekroond door het Franstalige Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique. Hij raakte eind jaren negentig bekend met het boek Intellectueel Bedrog (Epo), dat hij schreef met zijn collega Alan Sokal. Hij is, via het BRussells Tribunal (www.brusselstribunal.org), sterk betrokken bij het protest tegen de oorlog in Irak. Deze maand verschijnt van hem het nieuwe boek Impérialisme humanitaire (Editions Aden). Op het congres van de Europese sceptici later deze week, van 14 tot en met 16 oktober in Brussel (www.skepp.be), zal hij het hebben over postmodernisme en pseudo-wetenschap.
La Libre Belgique 01 Mars 2024
De la Russie au Venezuela, de l’Ukraine au Liban, n’importe quelle élection, n’importe quelle décision gouvernementale importante suscite des indignations, des menaces, des interventions diplomatiques ou militaires américaines et, plus généralement, occidentales. On peut suggérer que le véritable équivalent occidental du « fondamentalisme » religieux n’est pas tant le christianisme, même dans sa version protestante radicale, mais plutôt cette volonté de contrôler et de dominer le monde. Cette ingérence tous azimuts se légitime au nom de la démocratie et des droits de l’homme, discours qui remplace les idéologies antérieures, christianisme ou « mission civilisatrice », ayant servi de justification au colonialisme.
On peut néanmoins se poser deux questions : cette ambition est-elle légitime et est-elle réaliste?
Pour que l’ingérence soit légitime, il faudrait que les buts nobles qu’elle s’assigne (propager la démocratie etc.) soient poursuivis de façon sincère. On ne peut pas prétendre secourir les gens lorsqu’on recherche en réalité son propre intérêt, économique ou stratégique.
La situation en Irak illustre parfaitement cette tension entre buts proclamés et buts réels: de récents sondages montrent qu’une grosse majorité d’Irakiens (de 70 à 80% selon les questions posées)[1], y compris de Chiites, souhaitent un calendrier pour le départ des troupes américaines, calendrier qui ne doit pas être lié à l’amélioration de la sécurité. Ils pensent néanmoins que, même si le gouvernement irakien « souverain » le leur demande, les troupes américaines ne partiront pas. Il n’est donc pas étonnant que près de la moitié des personnes interrogées (dont 41% des Chiites) approuvent les attaques armées de la résistance contre ces troupes. Mais qui peut imaginer une seconde que les États-Unis vont quitter volontairement et entièrement l’Irak en laissant derrière eux un gouvernement religieux, proche de l’Iran, hostile à Israël, et qui gère son pétrole comme bon lui semble ?
Ensuite, pour que l’ingérence soit légitime il faudrait qu’elle soit acceptée ou, au moins, potentiellement acceptable par les pays dans les affaires intérieures desquelles on s’ingère, faute de quoi elle entraînera des conflits sans fin. Nous nous indignons ici face aux manifestations qui, suite aux caricatures danoises, nous demandent de limiter notre liberté d’expression. Soit ; mais croit-on sérieusement que nos ingérences, bien plus nombreuses et plus radicales, sont acceptées dans le tiers-monde ? Rappelons-nous, par exemple, que, lors de son sommet de février 2024, le mouvement des pays non alignés (qui regroupe la majorité de l’humanité) a réitéré « son rejet du soi-disant « droit » d’intervention humanitaire, qui n’a aucune base dans la Charte des Nations unies ou dans le droit international.»[2]
De plus, le cas de l’Iran illustre pourquoi l’ingérence occidentale est inacceptable : elle viole radicalement le principe d’égalité entre les êtres humains, indépendamment du fait que les hasards de la naissance les ont placés dans des pays puissants ou non. La plupart des commentateurs qui s‘inquiètent du « défi nucléaire iranien » semblent oublier que la plus grande violation du traité de non-prolifération consiste dans le refus des puissances possédant déjà l’arme nucléaire de s’en débarrasser, comme le traité le leur demande-exigence sans laquelle ce traité serait d’ailleurs particulièrement inique. De plus, il est difficile d’imaginer qu’un gouvernement iranien, même s’il était laïc et démocratique, ne cherche pas à acquérir une force de dissuasion nucléaire pour faire face à l’occupation de deux de ses voisins par les États-Unis, à la menace proclamée par ceux-ci d’utiliser l’arme nucléaire contre des pays dépourvus de cette arme, ainsi qu’à la force nucléaire israélienne.
Comme s’il voulait justifier les craintes iraniennes, le Pentagone déclare, dans son récent rapport quadriennal[3], se préparer à mener une « longue guerre », agissant souvent de façon clandestine, grâce aux « opérations spéciales », dans des dizaines de pays et renforçant sa force de frappe aérienne pour faire face à la « menace chinoise ». Comme le fait remarquer l’économiste américain Edward Herman, « L’administration Bush s’est retirée du protocole de Kyoto, s’est opposée au plan international pour une énergie propre, s’est retirée de la Conférence internationale sur le racisme, a refusé de se joindre à la promesse faite par 123 nations d’interdire l’usage et la production de mines et de bombes anti-personnel, s’est opposée à l’accord de l’ONU pour limiter le flot international des petites armes illicites, a refusé d’accepter la Convention de 1972 sur les armes biologiques et toxiques, a refusé de se joindre à la Cour pénale internationale, s’est retirée du Traité de 1972 sur les missiles antiballistiques, a rejeté le Traité sur l’interdiction totale des essais nucléaires, entre autres choses. Elle développe des armes nucléaires plus raffinées pour pouvoir en faire un usage plus facile, développe des stations d’armements basées dans l’espace et a annoncé son droit de faire une guerre préventive quand elle le voulait. »[4]. Et le reste du monde est supposé se sentir rassuré.
Finalement, pour que l’ingérence soit réaliste, il faudrait un rapport de force suffisamment favorable pour l’imposer. On avait menacé les Palestiniens : si vous votez pour le Hamas, vous serez punis. Maintenant que les Palestiniens ont montré qu’ils préféraient mourir debout que vivre à genoux, que vont faire les Occidentaux ? Et si la minuscule Palestine résiste, à quoi peut-on s’attendre de la part du reste du monde ?
Il ne faut pas perdre de vue ce qui a été le bouleversement majeur du vingtième siècle : contrairement à ce qui s’était passé au cours des siècles précédents, les principales guerres menées par des pays « civilisés » contre ceux qui étaient supposés ne pas l’être se sont soldées par la défaite des premiers, qu’ils s’agisse de l’attaque allemande contre l’URSS, des guerres coloniales des puissances européennes ou de la guerre du Vietnam. L’aspiration à l’indépendance, qui est née dans les luttes anticoloniales, continuera à animer la résistance à l’hégémonie américaine, dans les forums sociaux comme dans les laboratoires iraniens, dans les rues de Caracas comme dans celles de Bagdad.
La question n’est plus de savoir si les États-Unis vont imposer leur hégémonie au reste du monde. Depuis 1945, leur puissance régresse, pas seulement économiquement, mais, en fait, aussi sur le plan diplomatique et militaire. Comparons la facilité avec laquelle ils ont renversé Mossadegh ou Arbenz dans les années 1950, et les difficultés qu’ils ont eues pour renverser Saddam Hussein (deux guerres et treize ans d’embargo), pour ne pas parler du régime iranien actuel ou de Chávez.
Le véritable problème est de savoir comment les Américains vont accepter la perte inévitable de leur hégémonie : par un atterrissage en douceur, ou par une explosion de violence dans laquelle l’usage d’armes atomiques n’est pas à exclure. Et, en ce qui concerne les Européens, ils ont le choix entre s’allier ou non au reste du monde contre un Empire moralement indéfendable et virtuellement en faillite.
Jean Bricmont
Membre du BRussells Tribunal
Auteur de Impérialisme humanitaire. Droits de l’homme, droit d’ingérence, droit du plus fort ? Ed Aden, Bruxelles, 2024.
[1] Voir http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/home_page/165.html?nid=&id;=&pnt;=165&lb;=hmpg1.
[2] Document final de la XIIIème Conférence des chefs d’État ou de gouvernement du mouvement des pays non alignés, Kuala Lumpur, 24-25 février 2024, article 354. (Disponible sur http://www.bernama.com/events/newnam2003/readspeech.shtml?declare/dc2502_final).
[3] Disponible sur http://www.comw.org/qdr/.
[4] Edward S. Herman, « Michael Ignatieff’s Pseudo-Hegelian Apologetics for Imperialism », Z Magazine, octobre 2024.
Jean Bricmont
L'impérialisme humanitaire.
Droits de l’homme, droit d’ingérence, droit du plus fort ?
200 pages Format 14 cm x 20 cm ISBN 2930402148- 15 euros
Une des caractéristiques
du discours dominant, de la droite à la gauche, même en allant assez loin du côté des « extrêmes », est que
l’éthique politique est aujourd’hui entièrement dominée par ce qu’on pourrait appeler l’impératif
d’ingérence au nom des droits de l'homme. Ce droit d’ingérence (humanitaire) est non seulement très
généralement admis, mais il est souvent devenu un « devoir d’ingérence ».
Pour l'auteur, cette idéologie est le principal obstacle à la construction d’un mouvement effectif
d’opposition aux guerres impériales. Cette opposition existe évidemment, mais elle est faible et elle est
surtout faible sur le plan idéologique, particulièrement parmi ceux qui sont supposés organiser ou diriger
le mouvement : les partis de gauche et d’extrême-gauche, ou les mouvements pacifistes.
Comme on essayera de le montrer dans ce livre, tout rapport de domination est en fin de compte militaire et
il a toujours besoin d’une idéologie pour se justifier. L’idéologie de notre temps, en tout cas en ce qui
concerne la légitimation de la guerre, n’est plus le christianisme, ni la « mission civilisatrice » de la
République, mais bien un certain discours sur les droits de l’homme et la démocratie, mêlés à une
représentation particulière de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale. C’est à ce discours et à cette représentation
qu’il faut s’attaquer si l’on veut construire une opposition radicale et sans complexe aux guerres
actuelles et futures.
Jean Bricmont est professeur de physique théorique à l'Université de Louvain. Il a notamment publié avec
Alan Sokal « Impostures intellectuelles » (Odile Jacob, 1997 / LGF, 1999) et avec Régis Debray « À l’ombre
des Lumières » (Odile Jacob, 2024).
Sortie le 15 octobre 2024