English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Clouscard's Open Letter to Communists 0:30 This evening's session. Good evening dear friends, I'll start by asking you to please excuse us, excuse me, for the postponement of this evening's session, which should have taken place yesterday, yesterday at 7pm, and is now taking place today at 9pm. I thank Pierre-Alain, who's been running around like mad to get things sorted, if I may say so. So a big thank you to everyone for your patience and understanding.
1:08 As you'll have noticed, I've decided to suspend for a short moment our serial on the theme of the quest for the Grail. There it is. Insofar as we're more on the grill, so to speak, than on the Grail. I was going to say, since the results of the recent European elections. There, already, I'm starting to take a bit of distance from the ambient uproar.
1:47 Because, you'd think everyone is stunned and surprised, but I mean, really, it's been a long time, right — I don't want to speak myself, I'll let Clouscard speak. This is a small departure from what I'd planned, because I had other texts to go through first, but we can show Clouscard's text. There, thank you. Yes, you see, these are excerpts from the famous open letter to the communists, that is, to the French Communist Party.
2:26 I won't say more, well, what's important to tell you is that you'll find the full text of this letter published by Éditions Delga. So, we'll skip the paragraphs and go straight to the end, to see how this text concludes. You'll understand why I'm starting with the end of this text. Sorry, no, there — starting from the second-to-last paragraph.
2:56 'The crisis can therefore allow' — there, thank you, that's perfect. You see, the text concludes — I'll come back afterward to the beginning — it concludes with, don't let me lose my thread. I resent those who are surprised to suddenly see the far right in a position of strength. I'd say, after having done everything for that over the past 40 years, roughly speaking, that's how it is. No, I'm not accusing so-and-so, whoever, it's fine, what I'm saying is statistical. On the right as much as on the left. For longer on the left than on the right, actually — the Mitterrand years.
3:30 But let's not get ahead of ourselves. 'The crisis can therefore allow the French Communist Party to win back a large part of the electoral body, part of the new middle strata.' Clouscard has just made a crucial distinction, that between the middle classes and the middle strata. Don't think that splitting hairs like this doesn't matter — it's very important not to confuse the two. Because if we stick with 'middle class,' we're all in it, below the aristocracy or the MEDEF and just above those drowning in the Mediterranean. I mean, between the two, we're all in the middle classes.
4:02 So no, the middle strata are those that emerged from the new economy, which appeared with the Marshall Plan, after the war, combined [with other factors]. There. So, 'the crisis can therefore allow the Communist Party to win back a large part of the electoral body.' Well yes, I'm coming in rather abruptly, in a somewhat abrupt manner, because listen, it's time to understand that there is urgency after all. 'A large part of the electoral body, part of the new middle strata and of the traditional middle class.'
4:37 'The difference of the new middle strata. The Communist Party must fight against the two great perverse effects of economic and cultural liberalism in order to restore to workers their professional and moral dignity. This is all the more urgent as what could become a neo-fascism looms, which would be the sinister and heterogeneous collusion of Macron and Bardella.' No, no, no — he died before knowing them.
5:08 Clouscard, go on. 'Which would be the sinister and heterogeneous collusion' — listen, correct me if I'm wrong — 'of the privileged of liberalism who want to give up none of their acquired privileges, and of the old, vengeful right which, for its part, wants to reclaim its own.' Now, anyone who tells me this isn't a text for our times — well, that person, I mean, there's nothing more to expect from them, poor thing. No, if I may — some people know, but most don't.
5:41 When was this text written? In 1976. So, playing the surprise card in 2024 — no, listen, this is serious, what we're watching. That is, more than half a century later. It's incredible, really. It's serious, the situation, to play surprised. It's been more than half a century that people have been working to fascize society.
A model of the two far rights; Thomas Mann 6:11 For now, I said 'people.' Let's try to be more precise, but still. And... I'll go on. Because I have quite a few video sequences to show you, from various people, from the far right, from the left — I'm talking about today. Texts too, like Clouscard's, and even one of my own. That can happen.
6:41 But first, perhaps, let me share a model with you. No, I haven't become megalomaniacal. I mean, but it surprises me that this hasn't become a commonplace, or a standard part of teaching in political philosophy. It concerns fascism. Or, and, or, the notion of the far right.
7:12 Because you can see there's confusion. We're swimming in total confusion. Nowadays it's enough to be on the left to be accused of antisemitism. That's where we are, I mean. Which means the real antisemites of the old traditional right are rubbing their hands. Me, I put myself in their place — they have a reason, somewhere. Well, they have their reasoning. And this brings me to my model. You won't hear this anywhere else. I allow myself to say so. That doesn't mean there's nothing to refine.
7:44 It's open to discussion. But it lets us lift all the aporias, the contradictions, the difficulties, the knots we tie ourselves in as soon as we approach this kind of problem. That's not nothing. There, madam, there are two far rights that people keep confusing with each other. Hence the confusion. I'll start with the first. It's the one that constitutes the far right the least. There. So, I tell you right away that I'm not going to define it by what's in the heads of its representatives.
8:18 They're not Nazis with ideas of racism, antisemitism, anti-communism, everything that's the Nazi program. But what's Pagani saying? That Nazism isn't anti-communism? That it's the same thing, Nazism and communism? Well listen, when you think that way, you shouldn't be surprised that the far right gets scores like this, while the Communist Party, which according to this theory that they're the same should be at its peak, has disappeared.
8:52 So, let's bring in Thomas Mann. I'll suspend my model and let an authority speak who is neither a Marxist nor a communist, who's a rather reactionary German by upbringing, doubtless the greatest German novelist of his generation. That's what the textbooks say, I mean — we're not here to settle that. Best-sellers, as Sauerberg says — sorry — The Magic Mountain, Doctor Faustus, everything, for anyone who knows the musical repertoire, the kind worth listening to, to use a laborious periphrasis, and of incomparable richness, Buddenbrooks — anyway, he comes from the upper bourgeoisie of Hamburg.
9:36 Hamburg, in Germany, is where they receive the whole world — coffee, cocoa, all the stuff you don't get in Germany. There's money there. It was from Hamburg that Mendelssohn came, from a Jewish family, and that's why Mendelssohn was raised in happiness. His first name was Felix, which means happy. And in Germany, Mendelssohn is called glücklich und beglückend, happy and bringing happiness. And that's why for a long time he was taken to be superficial — a romantic, happy, therefore not profound. Nonsense, excuse me for saying so.
10:07 But there, no. Nietzsche — there, I'll give him credit — Nietzsche had the merit of rehabilitating Mendelssohn. I was going to talk about Thomas Mann, but I have to talk about Mendelssohn. The common point is Hamburg, the wealth. I'll come back to it, we have time. Nietzsche calls him the Halcyon master. Halcyon is the south wind, the one that makes a bit of happiness blow over romanticism. Who, at 17, wrote that prodigious masterpiece, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and presented it in front of his parents' family, four-handed with his sister, who was a great pianist and composer.
10:46 That's the milieu, Thomas Mann's — the great families with estates, it's their Riviera, the Baltic coast, you see, right there, where you find the most Nazi-leaning regions. How Nazi? How can you say that? They suffered under the Soviet yoke. Oh really? They suffered. What I can tell you is that those who suffered most, during the German occupation in those countries, were Jews and communists. Because no country had as many Jews deported per capita as the Baltic states. I'm starting to get tired of that refrain that excuses those Nazis with 'yes, but you have to understand, they're anti-Russian because they suffered.'
11:19 Oh really? They made others suffer. There were appalling massacres, killings, entire villages, people burned alive in their homes. Well, let's calm down. The hour is grave. No — it's one of those places, the Baltic beach, it's beautiful. It's beautiful. Regions with names like Mecklenburg. Emperor Wilhelm II, the fool who dragged Germany into the 1914 war, who isn't known for being the sharpest, is credited with this magnificent quote, if it's really his, where he said: 'If one day the end of the world is announced, I'll retire to Mecklenburg, because there everything happens later than elsewhere.'
Thomas Mann: fascism will return under the flag of freedom 12:03 So, Thomas Mann, let me introduce him — he's not at all revolutionary, knife-between-the-teeth type, not a man of the left to begin with, but he saved the honor of German intelligence when, seeing things heating up for him under Nazism, since he was critical of the regime, saying it was a shame for Germany, this regime — he left for England, made a series of broadcasts titled 'Deutsche Hörer,' 'Germany, Listen,' and he saved the honor of the German intelligentsia by saying this — text, please — 1943.
12:42 The writer Thomas Mann wrote, as early as 1943, placing on the same moral plane Russian communism — he's German, note, he doesn't say Soviet — Russian communism and Nazi-fascism. There was no Hannah Arendt yet, there wasn't yet the idea of a totalitarian center that had become as widespread as today, where now all the kids recite that it's the same thing, because it's in the official European curricula, and Europe has officialized it, Brussels Europe — and there, I have nothing against historical and geographical Europe, on the contrary, I find that Brussels Europe is a disgrace to the Europe I love, and that we love.
13:22 So this was well before, and he, you see, already placed on the same moral plane — so there were already those beginning to try to slip that in, you see, Russian communism and Nazi-fascism, both supposedly totalitarian — and in the best case, out of stupidity, he says, out of superficiality; in the worst, it's fascism itself. Is there more of his text, perhaps? No. It's another excerpt? No? There isn't one? Alright.
13:53 I can find it if you like. No, because — I'll tell you orally, it's quicker — there's a text where he says, I guarantee you that if Nazism ever comes back, coming back to current events, if fascism comes back, it will be under the sign and the flag of liberty. Well, well. You haven't experienced this — I say 'you' because, mostly, and I'm glad of it, my audience is between 20 and 35 years old, mostly — there are older ones too, fortunately for me, and younger ones as well. I'm quite moved by one of my followers who told me he loves my videos, that he's 12 years old, and I must find his first name again.
14:38 I'm a bit overwhelmed by today's news events, I'll find it again. I'm thinking of him especially tonight. So, he says, Thomas Mann, in this short passage, yes, that it will come back under the flag of liberty. So, you're young, they don't teach you history anymore. It's not that they falsify history, they simply don't teach it to you at all anymore. Or, when it is brought up, it's in a fantasized mode, but most of the time, you know, it's like people say, 'oh, look at those flared trousers, how dated.'
15:09 Now, everything's like that. Every 20 years, it's practically a whole new era. It's serious. Wait, wait, wait. Whereas, I'm showing you here that Clouscard's text dates from 1976. And that it's burningly relevant today. So, I'm fed up with... left, right — that means something to me, I won't go back over it, I did a broadcast on that. Left, right, progressives, conservatives, reactionaries, revolutionaries — that, that means something.
15:43 But not the dichotomy of 'outdated' versus 'trendy.' There's a way of making anything with historical depth seem outdated nowadays, anything that would tear off the masks worn by the worst of today's fascism. And there, I come back to my model. I told you there are two fascisms. Remember? Well, I'll start with the worse one. The worse one isn't the one you think. I didn't say it's fine — I mean the one of the Rassemblement National.
The first fascism, judged from the standpoint of the victims: Atlanticism 16:15 That's fascism. I'm telling you right away that the two will unite and ally with liberal capitalists to shoot us down the day they can. I have no illusions. But the worse one, from the victims' point of view — we have to stop starting from what's in their heads, let me pick up my thread again — it's not their ideas, fascist or whatever. Danger has to be measured at the level of the victims. The Vietnamese man whose eyes were running down his cheeks because of napalm bombing on the villages below — they didn't care whether the one flying the plane was gay or straight, Black or white, man or woman.
16:50 There weren't many women yet then. There are more and more now. All these talk-show debates that people only talk about since the fake left normalized this kind of thing — I said 'fake left' on purpose, because there are those who say it's the left insulting them. No, no. If you look from the victims' point of view, none of that matters. What good does it do the man who watches his three children burn, screaming in pain, in the fire of the beach hut?
17:26 Come on, let's wake up a bit anyway. Let me pick up my point and continue. If we take the first fascism, the more dangerous one — I maintain that, the more dangerous one — from the victims' point of view, that is, the deadliest one, the one that hasn't stopped since the end of the war, to take our bearings — we won't go back to Vercingetorix — a carnage that never stops. Ah yes, I see it coming, it's America. No, I've told you a thousand times, I don't go in for America-bashing.
17:58 It's Atlanticism. It's NATO. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, made from the start to prevent peoples who had tasted social progress — the Popular Front, wage increases — to stop all that from spreading like wildfire, to the point that when a country 10,000 kilometers from us, which poses no threat and is weak — Vietnam — decides to go communist, they wage war on it: 3 million dead.
18:28 Ah, you wanted to be a commie, we'll cure you of that idea. No, no, I won't stop there, because Vietnam followed, just two years before, Korea, the Korean War — North Korea, communist option, 3 million dead, and I'll spare you the details, I'm not a voyeur. If you know what the bombing of North Korean cities was like, we've never seen anything like it, it's appalling — maybe Dresden, Hiroshima, at a stretch — but there were plenty of Dresdens and Hiroshimas in North Korea, and nobody cares at all.
19:02 You'll be told about Tiananmen every single day — do you know how many died at Tiananmen? Oh no, the hour is grave, but not for the reasons people imagine. The hour is grave because we had to wait until '76 — Clouscard — we had more than 50 years to say there's a danger of neo-fascism at our door. Well, of course, once you've made disappear the one thing that really scared fascism — Clouscard.
19:33 Let me quote him again, but this isn't a written text — it's an excerpt from his inexhaustible oral speech, right? When he told me the only time they were scared, those guys — they heard the fascists — it's the Red Army, there, they didn't laugh then. That's gone. And yes, we defeated the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War. And yes, the Western and Atlantic tanks rolled in. But no, you know very well that we... Yes, that explains a lot of what's happening now.
20:04 It was the Soviet Union itself that did the cleaning up. Agreed? For better or worse, that's another matter. But it wasn't a victory of the Western armies. Let's never forget this land open to all winds — the Russian plain. I remember a debate involving Sanguinetti — you don't know Admiral Sanguinetti, that was under de Gaulle, never mind.
20:37 Everything anti-Atlanticist, on the right Gaullism, on the left communism — we're not supposed to talk about that anymore, it's outdated. Sanguinetti, in a debate with a very young BHL at the time, he was very young. His shirts were never so white nor his collar so open. There he is, sneering, in front of a man who fought in the wars. He was already sneering against the Soviet Union. What he has in common with Glucksmann, etc. Yes, it's the same crowd of the New Philosophers.
21:07 Old Glucksmann, Raphaël's father, that's my generation, BHL and so on. Oddly enough, their favorite target is the same as NATO's. Strange — Russia, China, Iran, incredible. It's incredible. Syria, how odd. Let's wake up. That's what I'm saying — everyone knows it, but no one wants to know it. Because in the spread of information, it's so marginal, or barely a few milliseconds of appearance, that people don't want to know, because it would disturb everything else.
21:51 So, there. I haven't finished my model, I've only done the first half. The point about fascism — call it what you want, NATO, Atlanticism — it's not America. There are Americans who oppose this, and on American campuses right now, things are happening. They're saving the honor. I used to criticize LGBT movements sometimes, but here, I mean, I give them credit. Because there, they're taking risks. Because over there, the repression isn't a joke. Here it's a joke, the repression. But over there, in the United States, watch out for the police.
22:24 Anyway. The hour is grave. And that's it — you can be American and anti-Atlanticist. You can be Swiss and Atlanticist, like those who organized that pitiful farce of a peace conference without the presence of one of the belligerents, Russia. So now all the media end up saying it was a resounding failure.
22:58 Not for the Ukrainians — I won't insult that poor martyred people, right — but for the clique, Zelensky and company, who keep demanding they get their hands on your taxes. Oh yes — Germany, 100 billion; alongside Ukraine, 100 billion euros that will go to the executive, or to enriching the most mafia-ridden country in Europe, along with Albania — two countries with which the Americans maintain, with which the Americans have their best relations.
23:38 It's a coincidence, no doubt. And there, I'm talking about America, about the American executive, it's GIs who are in Albania, it's not students on a campus. So that's the first fascism. Am I going to add up the dictatorships of Latin America, Plan Condor in Argentina, where warriors, police, and anti-guerrilla militias were taught at the time how to gouge out the eyes of communists, of the slightest guy who was a bit progressive, even pink, I mean, anarchist, whatever you like, with little spoons, they gouge them out.
The Belgian Congo, the social frameworks of memory, political consciousness 24:25 Frankly, it makes me angry because I don't understand that you—yes, for once I'm pointing the finger at whoever you like, that this 'you' is a very collective you—don't ask the question: from what year, on December 31st, at midnight, did this bloody, anti-communist capitalism, repressive, anti-guerrilla, anti-progress, anti-social—but explicitly, here I'm not talking behind its back—suddenly become the defender of freedoms.
24:55 Well, and I come back to Thomas Mann, who was prophetic when he said, 'If fascism comes back, it will be under the flag of freedom.' Throughout the Cold War, the three million dead of Vietnam, those of Korea, and I'll skip over Latin America, the Middle East, the permanent bloodbath, not counting the biggest mass grave of the whole modern, contemporary world. You're wondering what I'm talking about. Ah no, it's not... It's the Belgian Congo.
25:26 Yes, the figure is put at between 10 and 12 million dead. Women whose breasts were cut off, raw, just like that. Children—you have the photos on the Internet, look, the file is well documented now, rather late, isn't it? Then, well, who cares, they were negroes, I mean. That's how it was! The Belgian Congo was the private property of King Leopold. It didn't even belong to the Belgian people! The king owned it privately, and since rubber yields—there was no synthetic rubber yet—since the yield of the rubber tree was insufficient, orders were given to raze entire villages, to burn them down to teach them a lesson.
26:05 It's thought that between 10 and 12 million Congolese perished in that... We never talk about it! The social frameworks of memory—the old-timers, and those who follow me know I'm alluding to the admirable work of Maurice Halbwachs in the 1950s, a sociologist. Should I go on about his book, titled 'The Social Frameworks of Memory'? Because now some idiots, or rather ideological poisoners, will tell you that memory is a matter of enzymes, of stuff, of...
26:35 How do you say it? Brain imaging? Bio, bio... Well, Foucault... I'm going to get worked up. No, memory isn't only what's in my biology, there's everything that's external to it. What the media say or don't say—our memory depends on a whole host of factors that have nothing to do with our body. I mean, with the mechanisms at work at cruising speed in our body.
27:06 So, there you go, I mean, no one ever talks to you about that carnage in the Congo. I bring it up because there are people now who are surprised that Africans are so kind. They put up with that. I lived in the poorest country in the world, Niger, one of the three or four poorest. When I see the kindness of the people of that country—but if I lived in those conditions, I would be so nasty. I don't know. And... yes, it's... No, but I'm sick of the West because we defend our values, but those values—the carnage, the repression, the torture, the racism—but with a clear conscience.
27:46 So, I'm delaying, I'm delaying because it's probably in my own era that all this happened within capitalism. Now, no. Now it's the racists, it's the far-right people, it's Moscow, it's China, it's the dictatorships. We're the democracies and facing us are the dictatorships. That's exactly what you hear every day. I'm not inventing anything. I'm not interpreting. I'm repeating what I hear. Well, I eventually turn off the set because I can see there's a difference, an occasional dissenting voice.
28:16 Because supposedly we're not in a totalitarian country. So there should occasionally be another opinion. For three months now I've been hearing someone defending the Russian position. I've said a thousand times that I wouldn't vote for Putin if I were in Russia, and if it weren't threatened by nuclear-armed rifles pointed at Russia. Putin wouldn't be the first person I'd vote for if I were in Russia. So no one has any lessons to give me. And when I speak well of de Gaulle, I remind you that I voted against the Gaullist regime the whole time it was in power. I don't need any lessons. But good God, I'd trade all of today's left for a quarter of a de Gaulle, who never claimed to be on the left with regard to the Common Market, Brussels Europe, and NATO.
28:54 For example, it—[the left]—prided itself on the bond of blood with the communists during the Resistance. Anyway, in short. So I'll go back to my modeling. I'm done with that. I'm putting a provisional end to it. I'm setting aside what I said about the most dangerous thing. You now understand that I'm talking about Atlanticism, about the American executive, not the American people. One must have political consciousness.
29:24 Under a deluge of bombs like no other people has ever suffered, except perhaps Cambodia—it's a tonnage of bombs that's been measured, more than all the battlefields of the Second World War combined. Yes, including the Pacific War. Look it up. Even more bombs were dropped on Vietnam and Laos. And under those bombs, the executive in Hanoi, the North Vietnamese, the communists, said, 'We do not confuse the criminal attitude of the American government with the American people.' That's called political consciousness.
29:55 Whereas now it's identity against identity: Jew, Muslim, white, black, woman, man. It disgusts me. It should disgust everyone who knows even a tiny bit of history, all the same. False anti-racism, identitarian anti-racism that defends blacks against whites or the reverse. That is, in any case, racism. I'll remind you that Arabs are very, very, very well received in France, even if—and especially if—they're Muslim.
30:28 I'm saying that provocatively. I haven't said it's false. I said it as a provocation, because if I stopped there, it would be nonsensical. But it's true, it's true. I noticed it myself; I went to the Avenue George V, to the hotel. I saw an emir arriving, and a month before, the same thing had happened for the King of Morocco, red carpet, etc., done by people who probably vote National Rally, hotel staff. They're very well received. So you'll tell me, wait, you're kidding, it's not the same thing. But that's exactly what I want to tell you.
30:59 But the difference isn't that they're not Arabs. So the problem isn't Arabs, Europeans, Westerners. I'll come back, you know, to my diatribe against the term 'Western,' this completely imaginary thing that has existed nowhere since we've known the Earth is round. Or everywhere, if you prefer. We're all west of whoever we choose. And I move on to the second part of my modeling. This planetary fascism reigning over the planet, which is now declining—when I see the construction sites in China and the homeless multiplying in the streets of San Francisco, we can gauge the incredible changes happening before your eyes.
Local fascisms and the extreme center 31:39 We are living through an extraordinary era. But one that reigned—it's a shrinking share now, but it still reigns to a large extent over the whole planet. People tremble at the sight of a Russian base in Syria. There's only one abroad, one and a half. A few crumbs that barely count. And the Americans, they have—I don't even want to count them.
32:09 They have them everywhere. In every country, on every island, in every ocean, on every continent. Yes, you'll tell me it's for our freedom. Yes, that's what was said. That's how fascism comes back. Recall what Thomas Mann said—he wasn't in my camp, but he was in the camp of peace. That's the only camp I'm defending tonight. That camp of peace which Macron called defeatist a week ago. Yes, those who are for peace in Ukraine are defeatists.
32:40 There are still Ukrainians being sent to the slaughter. And besides, Russia is still too powerful, it has to be worn down. It will take as long as it takes. Do you think this is a war between the poor Ukrainian people and the Russians? It's a war between NATO and Russia. To better turn against China afterward, having worn down China's most powerful military ally. There. That's an ancillary bit of modeling. I'm going back to the main model.
33:10 This planetary fascism—I'll finish my sentence—greedily seeks, everywhere on the planet, wherever it has the means, local fascisms. In France, the National Rally, identitarian, Poujadist, originally defending small tradesmen, shopkeepers against—I don't know—people who pass themselves off as anti-capitalist, whereas it defends capitalism—it's not just about the shop, from the start. Father Le Pen had shares in outfits far more powerful than shops.
33:40 But there you go. And between the two—between the big borderless, globalized fascism, not nationalist, that's the clever part—and these hyper-nationalist local fascisms—I won't name the most nationalist regions of France, that would get me into trouble, especially since I'm about to go on tour in Brittany—well, I've said it now, in Brittany—well, it's not just that.
34:12 Although before, well, the Alsatians, the Corsicans, the Bretons, the Basques, are often the most turbulent against Paris, I don't know. I recall that my colleague, whom I salute here, who is not in my camp, if I even have a camp—he was with NUPES, I'm thinking of Arnaud Le Gall—who has a rich historical culture for his generation, well, I'm not here to hand out prizes, but who handles Mélenchon's security, among other things, I mean, he's got plenty of work otherwise, who studied at Sciences Po—he told me that the mayor of his family's town in Brittany, Carhaix, which isn't the most touristy part of Brittany, it's inland, there was already a Roman presence there under the Roman Empire—the mayor of Carhaix, centrist, of course, I'll come back to the extreme center, because we don't hear much about the far right or far left these days, on purpose, to cover up what's worst—and which took power in the Third Reich, the extreme center.
35:22 At the start it was that—I'll come back to it—so the mayor of Carhaix, unaffiliated, you see the type, Giscard, center-right, Mitterrand, center-left, you don't know, go figure, what's left, what's right, when you're in the middle of segment AB, M—that's a good one—when you're purple, you know, I'd said AM is red, MB is blue, the paint is still wet, what is point M?
35:55 Everyone knows he'll be purple, or if it's red and brown, he'll be red-brown, go work that out—the confusion of the center, the extreme center, we think they're moderates, we call them centrists, a little far from the extremes, but they're the worst. The proof is that all those who collaborated during the war—the worst of the far right, those who denounced—not the neighbor, etc.—so they'd be sent to Drancy, then to Auschwitz, those who denounced people—when they went back into politics after the war, keeping a low profile, they did so under a label: no label, unaffiliated, various rights, various lefts, moderates, centrists. Giscard, centrist—no, I'm not talking behind people's backs, I'm not interpreting Giscard. Giscard's most famous line from his campaign, the presidential one, a solemn declaration: 'France must be governed from the center.' The very man who threatened his resignation, which he presented to de Gaulle, if de Gaulle didn't pardon.
37:05 the assassins of the OAS, French Algeria—no, but all that's moderates, no but that's not the history taught in class, yet it's ours, the most recent. And do you think that since the communists disappeared on the left—well, listen, what remains of the Communist Party, we can't even call it communist anymore, not until they stop arming the Ukro-Nazis, I'm talking about the leadership; I've recently dealt with people from the PCF grassroots, they're among the finest specimens of humanity you can still find in France, I'm not lumping them together—since we got rid of everything that gave NATO a rash, there's a continuity in what I'm saying: on the right, the communists, on the left, the Gaullists, that is, from Giscard, Mitterrand, right up to today, passing through the entropy you know—Giscard, Chirac, Sarkozy, Hollande, Macron—there's no substance, it's not worth hypnotizing yourselves over Macron, enough already.
38:15 but what an honor you're doing him, what an honor—being an individual is a huge honor, not everyone is an individual—500,000 frogs, you see this in zoology, forming one gigantic orgy, with slime everywhere, you see it from time to time, mating season—there are individuals in there, and among the 300,000 eggs each will lay, when you don't confuse the biological individual with the ontological individual—let's not complicate things, I'm just laying out some leads for those who follow, but that's not for today—when everything that bothered NATO disappeared, on the right as on the left, we shouldn't be surprised to end up at this extreme center where the return of the far right is being cooked up, since those who collaborated, the real far right, the Pétainists, kept a low profile under that centrist label—here, I'm not interpreting, look it up, check the results, the legislative elections in the '50s, '53, '54, '55, right up to de Gaulle's rise to power and especially even afterward, because those people.
39:25 became anti-Gaullist and that gave them a left-wing aura, since de Gaulle at least had the honesty, compared to Mitterrand, of never calling himself left-wing—he never claimed to be on the left, broadly speaking he was a man of the right, more than broadly, it's not hidden—except that, to be fair, in his rhetoric he always placed himself above left and right, but in any case he never said he embodied the left, he didn't do what Mitterrand did, winking ten times over—except that when he winked he was lying, except once, when he said we can take 3 million votes from the French Communist Party, there he was serious. But as for the right, he did a good job of it, if there are still people who don't understand where the right is and where the left is, even today, I hope a few lights are starting to illuminate rooms that had long been left in the dark.
40:14 So there you have it, there are two far rights: one Atlanticist and national—not nationalist, not identitarian, mind you—which plays with all identities, which will fully play the Uyghurs against the Chinese, the Chechens against the Russians—it's not them who die, mind you, there isn't a single brick of a house, a building, a street, a city that took a single bullet scrape during the Second World War in the United States. And between us, all the better.
40:44 Personally, I'm not for people dying, I'm not for peoples suffering, I'm glad for them. But it's worth recalling that in all the wars they stir up, they make sure it's far from home, since there are people stupid enough to say, why did we send our children to Ukraine—maybe that's the moment, and that's what's being done with the upcoming election. But not at all, not at all, look at the one who's furthest ahead, who got the best score, the French far right, the National Rally, Bardella, isn't it?
Bardella at the Eurosatory trade fair: the far right rallies to NATO 41:19 What has he done? Well, he's supposedly a lackey of Putin, he looks favorably on the Russian side, on strongman regimes that repress gays, feminists, eco-... Oh really? Video, please. Surrounded by a swarm of journalists, Jordan Bardella went to the Eurosatory arms fair near Paris. Days before the legislative elections, he wants to reassure people about the RN's position on foreign policy.
41:50 Whereas in 2022, Marine Le Pen promised France's withdrawal from NATO's integrated command, Jordan Bardella once again spoke out against this position. 'France must not leave NATO's integrated command while we are at war, because it would considerably weaken France's standing on the European stage and, of course, its credibility with its allies.' The RN president did not escape questions about the war in Ukraine either. Jordan Bardella said he was in favor of military support for Kyiv against Russia, but firmly opposed to sending French troops on the ground.
42:30 I breathe a sigh of relief. But yes, but yes, you were appalled by the election results. You didn't notice there's at least one positive aspect. That's what we just heard, isn't it, so that's terrible—Bardella is in the war camp. I thought you were reproaching him for the opposite, that he was being paid by Putin to be a pacifist so that Russia would win, and that this doesn't hold up. No, wait, wait. Why am I breathing a sigh of relief?
43:01 Because I'm announcing—unless war breaks out—here I go back to the opening photo of this video—I'll be 80 next year. I've never seen such a danger of war. I keep repeating it these days, but what do you want? If it had calmed down, we'd know. Unfortunately, every day we take one more step toward war. And on the side of what's called the West. Let me remind you that Putin had obtained, in 2022, a treaty that Zelensky was quite ready to sign, in which he would keep the regions that are now annexed by Russia.
43:35 It was ten times more advantageous than today's situation, if they had gone through with it. That's when, on Atlanticist, American orders, that idiot—what's his name, Latinias, Johnson, Boris Johnson, I don't know—the most pathetic politician in postwar British history, the English will bring about his party's next election defeat too—came to tell Zelensky: that's not going to work, is it? Wait, if you want to keep getting money to keep your apartments on the Italian Riviera and all that, you'd better not sign a peace treaty with the Russians.
44:14 What's happening is serious, it's serious. No, the good news is that what fueled the rise of the far right—since you're against the rise of the far right, so am I, we agree on that point, that's important—and what fueled its rise? No, not recently, since Clouscard in '76, obviously, on the issues of a new fascism, which would be the collusion, I repeat, of libertarian liberals, those who are precisely LGBT, whatever, very...
44:46 Well, all right, I'll talk like Clouscard: repressive at the social level, permissive at the societal level—only Clouscard saw that. That puts everyone in agreement, both right and left, doesn't it? From a societal standpoint they look left-wing, provided that at the social level—pensions, you know, wages, inflation, food prices, I can't get over it—the rise, well, I don't want to change the subject, you know as well as I do that prices are going up.
45:21 the two fascisms. And that's where we were, you see, with Bardella. He drops the mask, he says, no, but I'm not—what made my fortune is what Marine used to say. Marine used to say, if I'm elected, we'll leave NATO, the EU—I'm exaggerating a bit, she wasn't that clear, I would have liked her to be—and above all, what she said in front of the microphones, she undid at the Assembly, where she votes like the MEDEF [employers' federation], well, against taxes on the rich, against unemployment benefits, against pensions—double talk.
46:01 But no, what's new here is that this far right, which used to be accused of being on the side of—us, we're the democracies, facing the dictatorships—sympathizing with—well, you just heard it as I did—no question of leaving NATO, we're at war—he talks like Macron. Macron, who called—who called, well, I presume some of you are more attached to peace than to war, generally speaking, it's not absolute.
46:33 I'm not against war when it's a Vietnamese resisting, for instance, against the three million dead that the Americans caused there. No, at every moment, all things being equal otherwise, peace is a thousand times better than war, there's no comparison, what's worse than war. So I presume I'm speaking to people who have a certain sensitivity on that level, and I hope, not just sensitivity, but reasoning, reflection, historical knowledge.
47:03 And I tell them, your taxes, including with the agreement of the new—what's it called—the New Popular Front. Well I never, some people must be turning in their graves, those who made the old Popular Front. Yes, I'm thinking of the women who brought food to the picket lines during the 1936 strikes. It's not the same picture. Nor the risk-taking, the clashes with the riot police. Well, anyway, in any case I'm not prescribing a vote one way or the other.
47:39 I'm telling you what worries me in each camp, more or less. But you are—I come back to it—pacifists, and even if you haven't noticed, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, let's say, you'd really have to be wearing blinders, for there to be, in your camp, only people who want war against Russia—but you read it every day. I can't turn on a screen anymore without hearing: no, we mustn't let ourselves be intimidated, it's a bluff when they talk about nuclear weapons, all that's a joke.
From Mitterrand's missiles to the two camps 48:16 Suppose there were Russian missiles at the border between Canada and the United States, right now. That's what's happening around Russia with NATO missiles, and it's been going on well before the Soviet—the Russian intervention in Ukraine. If there were Russian missiles at the Canadian border, north of the United States, and if there were at least as many to the south, at the Mexican border, and I'm not even talking about those that could be stationed in Cuba, anything you like—well, right away, I'd bet the Americans would have gone to war.
48:48 And from their point of view, they wouldn't be wrong. Right? Now, from the 80s, from the beginning of the 80s, when it came to installing missiles in nuclear Europe, with nuclear warheads, of intermediate range, that is to say missiles that don't leave from the United States, they're not ICBMs, Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, but IRBMs, Interregional, in short, missiles that need to be based in Europe to reach Russia more easily and more quickly, first in England, then afterwards, especially in Germany, that's where they had the most.
49:28 What did Mitterrand say? Against the movement of French pacifist opinion who wanted to oppose this deployment of new nuclear warheads on a continent that already had enough to blow up the planet ten times over. What did he say? The phrase is famous. The pacifists are in the West, but the missiles are in the East. And you think this business of bashing the Russians is something new? The Popovs, I prefer to say, because sometimes it's the Soviets, sometimes it's the Russians, they don't quite overlap.
50:02 Stalin was never Russian, Mikoyan, the great minister of foreign affairs, was Armenian, the maker of the Mikoyan planes was an Armenian, I'm not even talking about the Ukrainians who are a region of Russia, often historically and geographically, most of the great writers, the great musicians, I'm going to get melancholic. I wanted to remind you of that, the pacifists are in the West, but the missiles are in the East.
50:34 in [19]80, 50 years have already gone by. And people act surprised that the far right comes out on top. I am not fighting for or against the far right, not even against it, but against what's common to all of this. There are only two parties for me, you see, unfortunately none of them is organized as a party, but there are only two movements, groupings, that I consider, and into which you can sort the parties you know, wherever you want to place them among the two.
51:07 There's the camp of those who arrange for war. There's the camp of those who arrange for peace. When a country is emerging from a poverty that goes back several centuries, that goes back to the moment when the Westerners arrived, I'm thinking of China, because for a long time it was the world's leading economic power, even under the emperors. It's like a country that has known famines, the... When this country...
51:37 I see documentaries where I see machines, I didn't even think such things could exist, machines like that, which lay down a rail across dizzying chasms at 400 meters over the void, like that, a rail every 10 minutes, it extends on to reach the opposite mountain, to a bridge 2 km long, in the most remote places, while I see multiplying, once again, in the cities that used to be synonymous with standard of living, homelessness in California, and even Vancouver in Canada, I dreamed my whole life of one day seeing one of the most beautiful bays in the world, that of Vancouver, I see a documentary where there are homeless people, but over 10 km, not in a few spots in Paris, on the ring road, no!
52:16 There's a camp that has an interest in peace when there are construction projects on every side, when you're doing what the Chinese are doing in the desert, I was never pro-Chinese in '68, because back then it was the Americans and the Maoism of the time that were hand in glove against Vietnam and the USSR, pro-Soviet Vietnam and the USSR, yes, there are things you need to learn, but consult history, never take my word for it, I'm not a guru, I don't want to be believed on my word, I'm not afraid of others teaching you besides me, on the contrary, go corroborate it with whatever statistics you want, you're better navigators than me on the net, I'm sure, don't believe me, look carefully whether there wasn't a wonderful understanding between Deng Xiaoping and Nixon, to the point that Nixon's advisor, Kissinger, got the Nobel Peace Prize after having crushed Vietnam under bombs, yes, that's how it is, so, for once, I'm going to continue with a document,
Neither prescribing a vote nor abstention: the danger of apocalypse 53:28 we can send the document from our friends at Le Gros Rouge qui tache, from Étienne and Victor, or well, we haven't loaded it, I haven't loaded it, ah, okay, well, listen, allow me to refer you, we'll leave the link, Pierre-Alain, you have to remind me, absolutely, of an excellent clarification made by two comrades, I'm not in any party, but well, they're comrades, because I could co-sign 9.8 tenths of what they say, I always keep two small tenths back because, after all, I've always said I was neither Hegelian, nor Marxist, nor Leninist, nor Clouscardian, and even less Paganian, I don't know, because it happens to me almost every evening to wonder if I haven't said too much nonsense since the morning, but an excellent text on the situation, on the situation the results of the last elections are putting us in, to come back to it, a text made by, written by Victor Sarkis and Étienne Burle, some of whom are,
54:39 whom some of my listeners know well, and I remind you that this text appeared on the excellent blog of Benjamin Lelouarn, called « Le gros rouge qui tache », so I'm giving you all the references so you can easily find it again, right? and it's less compressed in number of lines than the one I'm going to read to you and that your servant has committed, and so, it would have been, also for timing's sake, fair to return the favor, it's a shame, I'd like to read every line.
55:19 the part on the Front de gauche, we notice, you're maybe not going to cut it up, but, the Front de gauche, sorry, the Nouveau Front populaire, there you go. I don't know if I should, what time is it? Sorry? Ah yes, yes, excuse me, because, ah well that's fine, that's fine, it's not even quite natural yet, okay?
55:52 So, I wanted to say, I've said what's on my mind, I'm not defending this or that party, I'm not here to prescribe a vote, nor am I here to dodge the ballot, let's be clear, I'm not saying, listen, frankly, abstain, we've already been swindled in 2005, you voted against Europe, it wasn't taken into account, we're not going to do that every time, it's over, no, I'm not saying that, it wouldn't be civic-minded, and besides what's worse for young people than telling them that, still, at my age I can retreat into my tent, but they still have reasons to organize, to militate wherever they want moreover, that's not the question, but, I'm telling you, the bottom of my thinking, there are two camps, they're not parties, there are two camps, the camp of those who have an interest in peace, today, and the camp of those who are hurtling us toward the apocalypse, especially since the leading world power, the number one world power, is headed by someone who doesn't know whether to go left or right, once he's finished stammering three things in front of a microphone,
57:05 but it's even more dangerous, the Pentagon military can get the decision from him, whenever they want, the signature, but what we're living through is serious, I'm not telling stories, I'm not trying to scare you, well, the situation is dangerous enough, if I had said all this, I don't know, a year and a half ago, I'd have been called a conspiracy theorist, seeing war everywhere, but no, I notice, and it's not reassuring, that almost all the editorialists say there's a danger of war, what's happening is huge, and I'm not even talking about the wars you know, what did they call them, asymmetric wars, fine, we're glorious because we defeated Iraq, because we defeated Gaddafi, well Libya, because we defeated, I don't know, and now we're shooting, shooting, and bombing, in Yemen, the Houthis, but wait, not so long ago, the UN was saying that it was, the humanitarian cause, that was before Gaza, the most dramatic one currently in the world, and now we're bombing them, we wanted, well, our regimes,
58:15 the so-called Western ones, you know that without American weapons, Israel can't bomb or fire anything at all, within three days, I say this because there are antisemites who believe it's Israel manipulating the United States, the whole world, no, no, if the United States stops, it's over for Israel, there is no more Israel, what we're seeing is serious, so, the war party exists, it's the party of those, you know, when there's a match, and there's a team that sees it's going to lose the game, it tries to break up the match, there you go, there are scuffles, the referee stops it, well, what's happening is serious, I mean, and there are convulsions over there, there are convulsions among the Puritans, I have nothing against Protestantism, I note that most of the countries that dominate the world are of evangelical, reformed religions, if you will, that is with a Puritan dominant in their morals,
59:28 do you think it's the war in Ukraine that's dominating the American electoral campaign? Do you think it's Gaza? The children operated on without anesthesia, screaming, etc., who cares, no, it's abortion that divides the American electorate, I'm laughing, excuse me, it's nervous, that's the Puritan world. So, there you go, I mean, I'm summing up the essential.
1:00:02 When I was 20, the French far right, the Front National, 20 wasn't quite yet, a bit after, founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen, founded at the start by Waffen-SS men, that's not propaganda, at least he didn't wear the mask back then, he didn't try to say more social than me, drop dead. He was polling at 2%. When we saw the few seconds of Bardella's statement at the aeronautics show, and where the announcer reminds us that, it's strange that he says that, because Marine Le Pen was saying, not so long ago, that NATO, well, she was distancing herself from NATO, that the other one, Bardella, has tomorrow ahead of him, that Bardella has tomorrow ahead of him.
1:00:53 so, you ask me, so, what is it? I'm doing like the journalists on those rotten channels, I make it seem like it's a matter of personality. Come on, it's magnificently complementary, Marine did the job. For 30 years, she built up this party, from 2 to 30%, precisely, by addressing those who used to vote left, in the working classes. Well, yes! It wasn't hard for her, since there were no more communist parties.
1:01:28 And they'll tell you it's all the same. No, what is the same is the Front National, I can't manage to say it, the Rassemblement National, all those who are for arming the Ukrainians and weakening Russia, for all the years to come, because this isn't going to end in the coming weeks. If that's the program, and if those who have that strategy remain in power. There you go, I've said what's on my mind, there's the camp that needs peace to keep developing and to enrich humanity.
1:02:05 I'm alluding to everything that's happening on that front, at the aeronautical and space level in China. There you go. I've never been pro-Chinese, I remind you, this is the several time I refer to China, it's not the same China as the one that handed a Kalashnikov to 15-year-old kids to gun down those who had accompanied Mao during the Long March, to help Mao regain power he had lost within the party. Yes, Mr. Badiou, the day the pro-Chinese of that era, who were feasting on the PCF, feasting on the CGT, do their self-criticism of that period, I'll speak differently.
1:02:40 I'm terrified to see they still haven't done it. The greatest carnage of the postwar period along with Rwanda is indeed what's still called the Khmer Rouge, if only, mind you, to give them a vague communist coloring, when these people actually started by genociding the pro-Soviet Vietnamese communists. To the point that an article in Le Monde, before the scale of the Khmer Rouge massacre had even been discovered, an article in Le Monde, speaking of the Mekong, said it saw thousands of Vietnamese corpses floating.
1:03:21 Ah, someone really ought to write the history of all that one day. No, actually, there are journals, there are specialists, there are historians, but the social frameworks of memory don't disseminate it, it's not covered by the media. Because then we'd pass from the scientific to the political. There, I'll stop there, because I'm sure there are some... Can you look at the comments on the side? Yes, yes, yes, good grief. Glasses. So, Inès Oudé, the Pentecostals are rotting Brazil.
Libya, Cameroon, Charlemagne and Maidan 1:03:56 Well yes, she knows well, doesn't she, our comrade Inès, who lives in Belgium, knows well the developments in her country, Brazil. She corrected me once, I remember, and I took it into account, because I had been a bit harsh with Lula, someone who knows Brazil well had told me, don't kid yourself, Lula is the Brazilian Mitterrand. Well, but that was back when he was in power, etc., he wasn't in jail, me, I'll never shoot at a guy who's in jail, even less so, with an injured man or a coffin, right?
1:04:29 But there you go, I mean. So, Abderrahim Driss, Libya was never defeated, France only sowed crimes and a chaos still inextricable there, it's really catastrophic, unforgivable. Careful, Abderrahim, how happy the Americans are when they hear that it's France that did the deed in Libya, no. France, it's like Macron, they send him there, French soldiers get sent to Ukraine, the Americans are thrilled that it's not the nasty American doing the dirty work.
1:05:02 But who's planning all this? Do you think French planes could fly for more than an hour and a half without being refueled by American planes, and that they could target Gaddafi in the car he was in when he was lynched in an abominable way, if there hadn't been American satellites to locate the car for them? And do you think in Mali it's the French? They were there, mind you, but they were there politically, but there's still, not for much longer, in Niger, that's a country that, as you know, I know a bit better than the others, and I also know Mali fairly well, but which is home to an American drone base that monitors the whole Sahara in a francophone country.
1:05:49 No, no, you're right, the tragedy, condemning what the French did there, it's abject, from Sarkozy to BHL, it's especially to put in power people who are now slavers, Islamists, let's be clear, they're not Muslims, they're Islamists, whose main victims are Muslims, and in particular black-skinned Muslims.
1:06:19 There you go. So, I fully agree with you when you condemn France, but limiting yourself to France is already playing NATO's game. Am I being harsh, no, I'm being precise, because now we mustn't make any more concessions, otherwise the far right will hit 70%, at this rate. There you go. Thanks for chiming in, it lets me clarify something. So, and the war in Cameroon, forgotten, which was as murderous as those in Indochina and Algeria?
1:06:53 Fine. So, there you go, if we started doing that, that's why I said earlier, I'm not going to make a list, because it's fine to focus on Cameroon, which is the country where the repression, by the French army, was the most murderous, against the UPC, the Union des Populations du Cameroun, which had the misfortune of having Marxist-leaning positions, and whose leaders I knew well, some of them. Remarkable.
1:07:25 Thanks for that reminder. Frédéric Cordier, an unknown, no, I'm joking Frédéric, this is the several time I've referred you to Frédéric's excellent videos, which are always captivating, surprising, and enriching. In these times, it does good, whether in literature, in history, and I was going to say also in politics, but it's always, if I dare say abstract, always through beautiful texts.
1:07:58 So, well, come on, I'll stop... What does he say? So, for example, scroll up just a couple of lines. You scroll down from the top. Yes, sorry, excuse me. So, I can't read anymore. On the anecdote, I'm putting it on screen. Sorry. There, a folkloric anecdote, perhaps, of this former Charlemagne member, we'll come back to that, who in May '68 was handing out Maoist leaflets out of incurable hatred of the USSR.
1:08:28 Well, leaflets, sorry, Frédéric adds. I remind you that the Charlemagne men were volunteers who went to assist the SS, to massacre the inferior race, the Slavs, the Russians, the Poles, the Czechs and the Ukrainians. At the time, no distinction was made, that term wasn't used yet. Actually, yes, the Ukrainians, they were used. Well, the Ukrainians, the hyper-Nazi party, to the point that even the German SS were stunned, appalled by the level of their criminal violence.
1:09:07 You know that to out-SS the SS, you have to get up early. Those are the famous Banderites, named after their leader, Bandera, right? They tell me, no, but those are the hotheads, a few of them remain in Ukraine, we shouldn't paint too dark a picture. You even hear that in the Communist Party. How, how, how? But since 2014, since Maidan, since that coup, we mustn't forget that legally, it is a coup. That's the last time we saw a legitimately elected president disappear through foreign help, since there was Victoria Nuland, the number two at the US State Department who handed out chocolate croissants to the Maidan rioters and especially, especially, the testimony of a collaborator of Catherine Ashton.
1:10:00 You've forgotten Catherine Ashton, I'm sure people remember, she's the one who was our minister, our, I'm speaking as a European, of foreign affairs. That doesn't exist, it's not a government, so there's no minister of foreign affairs in Europe, but she was the commissioner, it was Catherine Ashton, the one now replaced by the war-mongering ecologist. You know, Baerbock. So, yes, that extraordinary clip where you hear live Catherine Ashton's advisor tell her, but Madam Ashton, yes, I understand what you're saying, but it's true that there's shooting going on and there are deaths by gunfire, but it's not coming from the Ukrainian police, from the police of the former president's time.
1:10:46 It's coming from the rioters who are on the rooftops, snipers. I can't just listen, I can't spend the evening going up against the propaganda of a country whose history is recent and which dominates the world. And so, there are a few scores to settle with history. It doesn't exactly suit them, the historical depth of the United States. At least, their executive. A country founded by slave-owning perpetrators of genocide has no interest in facing its history.
1:11:20 Or else, it turned it into legend, even if it means producing masterpieces for Hollywood. I'm the first to find that John Ford is one of the greatest directors in the history of cinema. I'm not a cinephile technically speaking, I mean, but I notice that my cinephile friends, who are, who know that he was chief lighting technician on a 1923 film that nobody knows, tell me 'oh yes, yes, yes, John Ford, oh yes, it's not just there, besides, American cinema was never as good as in the '50s.'
1:11:51 Well, there you go. In a way, that reassures me about my tastes. But I'm not a great connoisseur. But on the other hand, I don't gobble up American propaganda, once again. I remind you that the founding fathers of democracy, Jefferson, Washington, they were all slave owners. Can you imagine? It's time not to rewrite history, definitely not, to be revisionist and even less negationist, on the contrary, but to produce a history we don't have, at least not in our school textbooks.
Anger is not enough: from revolt to revolution 1:12:29 a history that should be taught in primary school. The kids would be happy, we'll talk about cowboys and Indians. Differently. There you go. So, Geoffrey Joe, another new one. Hello Geoffrey. No, it's loyal. So, do you think we can use people's anger as the basic energy of a political movement? Words heard from a union comrade. That would be too general, Geoffrey. I said yes or no. Careful, I respect anger, it has plenty of reasons to erupt, I'm thinking of the Gilets Jaunes for example.
1:13:01 But, this anger, during the 1930s, the most serious economic and social crisis, where in Europe the crisis was hardest on workers, was in Germany, in Western Europe. and that anger led people to vote en masse for the NSDAP. Not as much as people think. It took having him in power, the chancellor, you know, the centrists, Hindenburg, the good man, the WWI veteran, entrusted power to Hitler, he said listen, take power because apparently the German people are on your side, well, the dynamic part of it.
1:13:45 But, I mean, electorally, the NSDAP had suffered setbacks. But, above all, what mattered was crushing the only force opposing it in the streets. There were fights every day between the Spartacists, the most powerful communist party in Western Europe, and the Nazis, before the war. There's a beautiful Hollywood film, a bit sentimental, but very beautiful, on this subject called 'Three Comrades,' 'Trois camarades,' 'Two men and a woman.'
1:14:21 Allow me to recommend it to you. You'll find it on YouTube. 'Three Comrades.' We mustn't forget that. Well, at that point, as long as that powerful Spartacist party existed, the game wasn't over. In the factories, one could still, I'm still answering Geoffrey, channel the discontent toward progress and social justice.
1:14:51 That's when the Nazi intervened who assassinated in the German streets the communist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. No, I'm wrong. He wasn't a Nazi, he was a socialist. Yes indeed, the one who said 'I will be the bloodhound.' I take responsibility for the repression of the communists. After that, after the Nazis, the road was clear. The anger was still there, but it was no longer directed against the Ruhr magnates, the cannon makers and those who were doing better than ever.
1:15:31 Hugo Boss, whom you know better than me, and Porsche, etc. All of these... And I'm leaving some out, I'm not even talking about the Krupp family, etc. It has never been so well described as in the Museum für Deutsche Geschichte, the museum of German history that was located in East Berlin, I don't know what became of the collections, but there was an extraordinary panel showing the profits of the big combines, no, the Konzerne, sorry, the big trusts who preferred the Germans.
1:16:04 This curve, from the moment the Nazis come to power, mainly from 1933 onward, how sharply does it shoot up? Because there are still people who believe – and this is what made the fortune of the National Front over the last 40 years – that it's directed against the world of money, of privilege, of capital, against, how do you say it? The elites. But what is that word? That's all we hear now. No, elites, for me, that's Mozart. Well, still, what are elites? That's Charlie Parker. That's Clifford Brown.
1:16:34 That's Marie Curie. That's what the elites of humanity are. No, but no, it's the people who have money. That's incredible, really. Elites are the best. It's not the fullest bank accounts, come on, really. Sorry, but that's my philosopher's side – on the semantic level, when you agree to speak a certain way, you can't complain afterwards when the Rassemblement National reaches 33%. There you go. Thank you very much. So yes, it's good that...
1:17:07 Anger in itself, it's good that people... There will be no revolution without revolt. That's where we agree. But if we stay only with revolt, without the detour through theoretical reflection – Lenin: without revolutionary theory, no revolutionary party – we stay with revolt and we miss the revolution, and we even play into the hands of counter-revolution. Or at best – well, at worst, for the main actors – the revolt is repressed very quickly, in the way the peasant jacqueries of the Ancien Régime were.
1:17:41 There you go. It's anger, but it's quickly repressed because there wasn't a strategy, a theoretical detour to base the revolt on a strategy, a governmental program, sorry. That's today's news. How do you explain? When Estavisky asks me how do you explain? Are there questions before I can put it on screen? Yes, of course, of course.
May '68 and the dismantling of EDF: how the left became Atlanticist 1:18:11 No, no, but he's a friend, he's a friend. What do you think, that's it, of Estavisky? Yes, yes, how do you explain? How do you explain? I'm reading the question. The ease with which the Atlanticists took over all the leadership bodies of parties and unions that were previously hostile. Excellent question. It's the one I was asking earlier. Tell me, on what year, on some December 31st, at midnight, did the left suddenly become Atlanticist?
1:18:44 The left, the left, the radical left, the one that questions capitalism. I'm not talking about the Socialist Party, I'm not talking about the Greens, I'm talking about political ecology. I won't repeat every day that I don't lie down under exhaust pipes breathing in their fumes with delight, enough already. Don't forget that the person most at the forefront of waging war on Russia in Europe is the Green foreign minister in Germany, or defense, I think it's foreign affairs.
1:19:15 It's often overlapping, but there you go, verified. So, well done, because it's a real question. So, the answer is purely correct. I say this to our friend Estavisky, and I thank him for his loyalty, always asking questions that allow us to raise problems. Necessary problems. Small parenthesis, Hegel: the necessity of a problem is by far the most important thing in philosophy. Because there are so many false problems.
1:19:45 Here, that's not the case. But I say, I'll give the answer, it's simply to restore the genesis, the chronology. It's not one December 31st at midnight, it's every day, progressively. The great turning point is May '68. I'll answer right away. I say May, I'm not talking about the great gains that, starting in June, allowed the working class to take advantage, right, of the state of weakness the executive was in at that moment, to push through union demands that had been pending for a long time and that ranged from wage levels, unemployment compensation, to, above all, the recognition of the status of company unions.
1:20:29 No, I'm not talking about that. But on the other hand, the great turning point is May '68. Why? Because that's when social demands started being obscured, first progressively, then brutally, by societal issues. It's like someone tells you, yes, okay, wages are important, but we can't reduce everything to that. When you start like that, you end up with Bardella at 33%. Yes indeed!
1:20:59 Look at the far right in Argentina, it's a hyper-liberal who came to power there. He's having difficulties, he shouldn't be in that position. But still, it's serious! Like the one – and Inès is right to point this out – who ended up, before Lula, doing something in the style that leads to concentration camps in Brazil, he had started off well. There you go. And I'll come back a bit to the small disagreement we had, and on which Inès kindly and pertinently corrected me, but still, I ask her the question: isn't this a better Lula, the one who came out of prison, who has now seen who he's dealing with in the world, who supported him at one time, right, because a social democrat is still better than communists.
1:21:50 Well, I'm thinking of the Atlanticist special services present throughout Latin America. There you go. That's a question I'm raising. I think he's now armed, better armed. Just as Chávez, after his failed coup attempt, understood that he shouldn't do what Allende did. Allende was a great humanist, a comrade I have the utmost respect for, but who had this weakness of saying 'I don't want people to be fired on who are rising up against me, because, well, I mean.'
1:22:28 And that's how Pinochet came to power. And you talk about fascism – this Pinochet was the darling of a certain left; I'm thinking of Solzhenitsyn who said 'if Pinochet didn't exist, he'd have to be invented.' Look it up, I'm not making this up. There you go. So, back to Estavisky's question. It's a good one, but it would take a long time to trace all these processes, the thousands of vessels, like blood vessels, the channels, how progressively everything that made France's political state at the end of the greatest carnage of all time – that is, the government born of the communist-Gaullist Resistance – functioned.
1:23:19 Right? It's not the same thing, far from it, see Friot, who knows this file well. But how did that suddenly produce something that had to be broken? How did we get there? I'll take a specific case to answer Estavisky again and to show how impertinent the question is. How did we go from an electricity distribution system that the whole world envied France for over a generation? I'm thinking of EDF, of course, which produced the cheapest electricity in Europe, by a wide margin.
1:23:56 And you see, if the energy source isn't expensive, you see the consequences for prices, competitiveness, industry. How did it come to the sorry state EDF is in now? From the moment European laws forced EDF to align, right, with the conditions of others. And it started with – listen, the one who ran it, who was questioned recently, right, by the National Assembly, Ployot, I don't remember anymore, sorry, as I get older, I've made a lot of names.
1:24:38 Let me make a small philosophical remark: I notice that more and more, I'm drowning individuals in categories and as a result I forget their names. Well, individuals who aren't really individualized enough. No, but it's good, he gave a good testimony and he said, well, we torpedoed it, as we had, particularly from Germany's side – it's not being anti-German to say that Germany never digested the fact that this country it had defeated during the war held it in check afterward, right? And you could say that the whole European construction was a way of protecting, organizing, protecting Germany's recovery, and now Germany is putting over 100 billion into armaments and no longer needs to be fascinated by it since Macron is offering to share the atomic weapon with it.
1:25:26 And we come back to the beginning, to the image preceding this evening's video. Why did it seem exaggerated? A bit misread, the cartoon, as they say. Our image there, someone saw an order, boom, atomic explosion. I'm not saying if you vote, we'll have war. No, no. But this vote that will go to Raphaël Glucksmann, to Bardella, to Macron, it's the same thing. It stems from war. That's my dividing line.
1:25:57 So, thank you Savisky, I took the example of EDF, I think we understand each other. Proglio, thank you very much Savisky, I'll say Ployo, sorry. Yes, Proglio, who summed it up well – look at the hearings on YouTube, they're there in full – explaining how it was dismantled from the inside, by the executive, he says so himself, by the French government and the European Commission, both of which broke this tool the whole world envied us for.
1:26:27 To the point that at one time, EDF was the principal, the company that took out the largest loans in the world on the capital markets for power plants. Sometimes hydroelectric, sometimes nuclear, and sometimes – less and less – the most polluting ones, thermal coal power plants. So yes, we need to reconstruct the chronology, but I mean, let's say the accelerations – there's a continuum, as always, and then there are moments, suddenly, where there's a discontinuity in acceleration – that's May '68, which will decline from then on, how many times do I have to repeat it?
1:27:12 And that's not just another opinion – take your ruler, so to speak, your ruler, and measure, look at which parties grow and which decline from the moment Cohn-Bendit starts making headlines. Cohn-Bendit is a metonymy, a puppet, playing his role at a given moment. You'll notice it started with him not over pensions or wages – those are real demands – but, as they said at the time, these leftists, the Cohn-Bendit type, who were never really of the left.
1:27:42 I say this because on the right, anyone to the right of the person speaking gets called a leftist, and since that person is generally on the far right, 'leftist' ends up meaning everyone except them. No, no, I'm talking about leftists scientifically, that is, the mathematical union of the oldest anarchists, the somewhat later Trotskyists, and the Maoists of the sixties. So, Cohn-Bendit, who is one of them, how did it start? He first revolted because you couldn't go see the girls in the dormitories, in the student housing.
1:28:14 Yes indeed, that's social. Oh, I didn't say it's wrong to go see the girls. I would have followed him to see the girls too, because that's a personal matter. As a guy, I mean, as a student, as a young person. But still, that's not what moves things forward, jeez. Those are signs, when it starts like that. And then later, when instead of talking about wages, pensions, it's young against old, black against white, ontological identities, gay against straight, I mean, when we legislate against the vile repression of homosexuality.
1:28:55 Not so long ago, in Egypt, where people were sentenced to death. That wasn't so long ago. I'd be first in line. But limiting political debate to these identity debates, that's why I call them all ontological. That is, where action doesn't matter, you either are or you aren't. Being a man, it's about being. There. My answer is incomplete. How could it not be, my dear Estavisky? But I'm calling for a team, a team that should work on restoring the chronology we're owed between the Trente Glorieuses and the state of France.
The Nouveau Front Populaire and the question of war 1:29:37 Now, if only on the strictly economic and social level. That would answer the question. There. Julien Bellemonde: shouldn't the fight for authentic debate stand against the sectarianism looming over us, which pits two blocs or more against each other that can no longer talk to one another? You mean the pro-Russian bloc and the anti-Russian bloc? No, I'm joking. I'm joking bitterly. You're talking about a divide between two.
1:30:08 That's formal, it's the content that matters. It's been months since I've been waiting for someone to defend the Russian point of view – I mean the Russian point of view, not Mr. Putin's political theories claiming it's because of the communists and Lenin that Ukraine was sold out, etc. That's something else, and it leans a bit toward the Greater Russia of the Tsars. No, but which is a thousand times more imperialist – sorry, I mean a thousand times less imperialist than the French and English were in the colonial era, and than the Americans have been since the end of the war.
1:30:42 It was already pretty bad before, but now, it's planetary. There. So, no, wanting to reduce the divide to two is fine, but in that case, you have to give content to that dichotomy. And that content, for me, I tell you, is the camp of those who need peace versus those who need war. I'm repeating myself, but since it's the essential point tonight, can it ever be repeated too much?
1:31:16 There. Calopune – I don't think we know you, but delighted to see a new face, so to speak – it seems to me that we must identify, analyze the divide within the NFP, I presume that's the Nouveau Front Populaire, which is supposedly about antisemitism and which is really about precisely this question of war or peace. The question is oddly phrased, but interesting. Phrased syntactically, I'm not one for proper French, but I mean, probably because the person, and I understand them, on this slippery ground, must have hesitated.
1:31:55 It seems to me that we must identify who the divide within the NFP is, which is supposedly about antisemitism – so, in other words, if I understand correctly, Calopune doesn't accept the accusation of antisemitism. Well, you know, I've painted a dark enough picture of the Nouveau Front Populaire since it practically capitulated on many points – not on the social front, thankfully, we'll come back to that – but on war and peace, which is still the most important thing, capitulating to someone who was never on the left, who has always been the economic and political far right and an Atlanticist, namely Raphaël Glucksmann.
1:32:40 So, supposedly about antisemitism – yes, I'm familiar enough with the Nouveau Front Populaire to acknowledge that one of its main components, I'm thinking of La France Insoumise, well the main one originally, because now we're seeing the old warhorses, the dinosaurs, I thought they were dead – not physically, I wish death on no one – but the zombies, the Jospins, the Hollandes coming back, there's a political obscenity going on right now in France, I don't know, personally I'd hug the walls, but no, there they are, under the spotlights, well, anyway, and we might end up with Hollande as prime minister, if we let it happen, if we really believe these are people of the left.
1:33:27 As I once quoted someone I've criticized a lot, in a particular video, I'm thinking of Foucault, who was at the forefront of the counter-revolution in the theoretical, ideological and philosophical domain – that's not nothing, that's not trivial, it's someone who knows, so he's more guilty. As I once said, still, Foucault did have one intelligent line, one day, when he said 'Mitterrand is Vichy' – he knows his recent history. And now, I don't know, but it wasn't at that time that this left was accused of antisemitism, it's now, that's curious, that's strange, I don't know.
1:34:05 We must identify an accusation that is supposedly about antisemitism and that is really about, precisely, this question of war or peace. I think I understand Calopoun to mean that in fact, the real stakes, inside the Nouveau Front Populaire, are war or peace. I don't get that impression, unfortunately, my dear Calopoun, I wish you were right. But it's precisely these issues, war or peace, as you rightly put it, and that's the essential thing, it's good that you note it and insist on it.
1:34:35 Bravo, if I may make evaluations, I'm not qualified for that. But on the other hand, unfortunately, I must tell you that it's precisely on this point that they capitulated to Glucksmann. If by some miracle – it won't happen, but if by some miracle – the Nouveau Front Populaire came out on top, and if, I'm making this up, Clémentine Autain as prime minister, I'm making this up, I'm exaggerating a bit, our taxes would go toward sending hundreds of billions of euros to Zelensky.
1:35:14 Ah, if it were for the Ukrainian people, I'd be happy, they need it badly. No, no, to the clique in power, which is sustained by the largest armada of all time, by NATO. There. That's how I answer you. It's precisely on war or peace that the NFP is anything but clear. Well, it's clearly belligerent, like its Green colleague in Germany, like the rest of European social democracy, or what's left of it. There.
1:35:44 There's one who paved the way before everyone else for Bardella, who dropped the mask of the far right, showing that the far right isn't, as we were led to believe until the last European elections, the expression of people who love dictatorships as opposed to us who are attached to democratic values. No, it's Meloni, the Italian. She's clear, she's for Brussels' Europe, for NATO, and she's thick as thieves, that's a French expression, otherwise I wouldn't allow myself to use it, with, what's her name, the one who might go to prison, if we can dream, von der Leyen, the one who runs that Europe.
1:36:27 It's a strange era, a president in difficulty – I don't want to demean the very elderly, Biden – but who could push the nuclear button at any moment. I'm summarizing the gravity of the situation. Right? But, rest assured, he won't be elected against the other one, who isn't reassuring either.
1:36:58 As they say, the populist, when you want to get rid of someone. They don't criticize him for his far-right positions, because he has plenty of points on which he's the idol of the American far right. No, they criticize him for having, at one point, lent credibility to the fact that he had excellent relations with Putin. It always comes back to the same thing. And yes, yes. Because you might tell me at the start of the video, but you're not doing well, you're always crossing borders, you're always talking about Russia, China, NATO.
1:37:34 But elections, that's about our own affairs, it's about wages, it's about pensions. Yes, but when the floor was given, you see, to the Nouveau Front Populaire candidate, that's why I put this up, he did nothing but rant against China and against Russia, Glucksmann. What do you want me to say? And do you want us to talk about his social program? Oh, he won't show it to you. But there's no need, because we can catch him red-handed with what he did when he advised the head of state of Georgia. Do we have the document?
Raphaël Glucksmann's social record in Georgia 1:38:05 Here's the social record of Mr. Raphaël Glucksmann when he was dictating to another crook – I say crook because he's facing trial in his country, he's banned from entering it, he took refuge in Ukraine, that is, in one of the most corrupt countries in the world. So, here's Mr. Glucksmann's record in Georgia. Abolition of the minimum wage. There you go, imagine tomorrow we abolish the minimum wage. Layoff of 60,000 civil servants. This is Georgia, that's enormous, proportionally. And you know, in these countries, civil servants – I've seen these kinds of countries – support an incalculable number of people.
1:38:41 Lowering of corporate tax. Well, well, doesn't that smell a bit like Macron, from 20% to 15%, and dividend tax from 10% to 5%. Not a bad deal for some. Reduction in the number of universities, some social program, from 237 to 43. And various measures in favor of private higher education. So there you have foundations coming from Texas, Oklahoma, California, coming from wherever the money is.
1:39:12 The poorer a country is, the more vulnerable it is, right, to the political machinations of whoever has the money. Believe someone who, like me, spent a long time in the field known as development aid, when weighing what I'm saying. Layoff of 80% of customs personnel. Yes indeed, customs, that's over, let it go, let it slide, let countries in – I don't know – that squeeze the sweat out of people, and where it's disguised slavery. Layoff of 80% of customs staff and 2,200 civil servants from registry offices.
1:39:46 Abolition of various public structures for the benefit of... Before you tell me 'Wait, where are you getting this from?' Where am I getting this from? I was reading the Wikipedia entry on Glucksmann, on Raphaël Glucksmann, because he also has his father, who wasn't exactly cheerful either, the 'new philosopher.' And you'll notice, for those who can read, from the very first paragraph, how favorable this Wikipedia entry is toward Glucksmann.
1:40:17 Yes, regarding Glucksmann, I'm stunned to see the growing coloring of Wikipedia, when he has been, well now, unmasked from the very start. And despite that, you find all the points I'm listing here, a bit drowned in the paragraphs, but they're there. Check for yourselves, never take my word for it. Removal of various public structures in favor of privatization, repression against social movements, and you know, that's a euphemism. There was incredible violence, the ransacking of the main opposition TV channel, there are videos of this, you see people beaten, beaten in the stomach, on the arms, with clubs, in the opposition TV channels.
1:40:56 It's well known that we support democracies, isn't it? Later on, taken over by an ally of the ruling party, ban on creating new state regulatory bodies. But this recalls Ukraine. No one ever says that Zelensky suppressed all opposition parties, banned the Communist Party, of course, we promise, let's not talk about it, tortured opponents, liquidated them. And that's what your taxes collected by the left of the new Popular Front will be used for, at any rate that is its foreign and military policy.
1:41:33 If the opposite happens, believe me your humble servant will be the first to be glad. But for now, that's not Glucksmann's program, is it, to advocate discussions, I won't even say peace, let's not go too fast, but at least discussions between the belligerents, between the Ukrainians and the Russians. So, ban on creating new state regulatory bodies, fascism always begins with hyper-Poujadism.
1:42:03 The small shopkeeper against the big ones, you see, against the State. Yes, not against those who are responsible for their difficulties, that is, the big companies that devour them one by one, the small ones, isn't that so? It's not the herring that devour the sharks. No, no, very cleverly, capital manages to make the private sector attack the State. Because the State is the common enemy of the anarchist and the Poujadist, curious gathering, isn't it?
1:42:37 And of course, the MEDEF. Listen to the MEDEF, every day it tells you there are too many regulations, too much stuff, the State is too present. Ban on creating new state regulatory bodies, ban on the State holding shares in commercial banks. I almost want to say that if economic fascism is limiting public debt to 60% of GDP, when Japan has long exceeded 200%, not to mention the United States which will never pay off its debts, that's also why they need war to do a reset, as they say in computing.
1:43:13 Ban on communism, that goes without saying, doesn't it? Fascism as much as you like, but communism, no—that's what I answer when people talk about the new Popular Front, precisely regarding foreign policy, and God knows how in these times that's more than vital, isn't it? War or peace, this isn't a war coming, it's nuclear war, you know, Einstein said there won't be a Third World War, or if there is one, the fourth will be fought with stones, meaning we'll have regressed more than 10,000 years, that's what's at stake today, excuse me, but for me that takes priority over stories about societal issues, identity stuff, much more comfortable, that's what, what I forgot, someone, uh, yes, priority to questions
The appropriation of Clouscard by the far right 1:44:23 rather than to statements, which I find enriching but less stimulating than questions, and above all, which challenge me more, the questions do, thank you very much, how do we fight against the appropriation of Clouscard by fascists who use Clouscard, so it's not me speaking, excuse me, that's the pseudonym, not me, though it is indeed me reading it, how do we fight against the appropriation of Clouscard by fascists who use Clouscard to attack everything societal and push their reactionary ideas while being anti-commie, hence fascist, well, first I say that's a very good question, but anyway, I've often answered, I've devoted entire videos to it, especially when I feared that the excellent tutor's video might be misunderstood by quite a few of those who have precisely been influenced by this right-wing appropriation of Clouscard, and so I was a bit mocking those who can't count to 3, isn't that so, who are binary, what am I referring to, it's simple,
1:45:33 I seem a bit cryptic, it's dead simple. Clouscard—I put myself in the head of these fascists mentioned, rightly, not by me—they say to themselves, Clouscard attacks the leftists, so he's right-wing, you see, whereas Marx devoted thousands and thousands of pages, and what he made of it, to attacking what passed for the left of his time, whether anarchists, certain unions, certain liberals—not liberals in today's sense, mind you—think carefully about that, and I'm not even talking about Lenin, who wrote 'Leftism, the Infantile Disease of Communism,' which shows the link between leftist ideas and, sociologically speaking, the so-called 'petty bourgeois' world, an expression used all the time now indiscriminately—the petty bourgeois is a precise economic category, and that reminds us of the great distinction Clouscard made between the middle class and the 'middle strata.'
1:46:41 Clouscard, to attack everything societal, small caveat there, not me. No, Clouscard doesn't attack—well, yes, they benefit from it, you're right—to attack everything societal, but Clouscard, no, he takes sides within the societal sphere. I remember now, he used to say that in the café he went to fairly often, it was full of what we'd now call 'bobos' [bourgeois-bohemians], the term wasn't yet common, all of course leftists, Trotskyists, Maoists, anarchists, anti-Communist Party, anti-CGT, and I remember Clouscard saying, if suddenly the workers came in and started attacking you bobos—he didn't say we, since we were in the café—it's clear we'd call the police, and the police would side with the bobos against the workers.
1:47:44 No, no, but he does take sides, Clouscard, even on societal matters, he talks about the poor girls who are subjugated. I quote word for word from that masterpiece called The Country House at the End of the Capitalism of Seduction. Those who formed so-called back-to-nature communities in the Ardèche with daddy's money to buy 200 sheep, abandoning studies which are still harder. In short, the marginals, as they were called back then, there was a cult of the marginal.
1:48:15 To which I replied, because I'd been asked, what do you think of marginals, Pagani? I said, take your school notebooks and you'll see there's a margin, but there also has to be a page. There. So if you're against the page and for the margin, that's your business, but I notice the margin loves the page, without which it couldn't feed itself. There. Sorry to be a bit elliptical and cryptic, but I can't answer 10 questions at once, let me go back to those not from me.
1:48:45 There. It's not the societal ideas we're railing against—I include myself, since often we said much the same thing on that level. It's against the fact that they occupy the whole field and serve as a pretext never to truly address the social problem as a power relation. You'll say, but no, some say, look at Clémentine Autain, but that's not incompatible at all, it's not contradictory.
1:49:18 I won't put words in your mouth, what an admission, if it's not contradictory. Why did a Clémentine Autain say, on the very evening of the most heated conflict there had been over pensions almost more than 10 years ago now, when the riot police were approaching the picket lines near the oil reserves at the gates of Paris, in the shelter, she said in an interview that evening, it struck me. I was waiting to find out whether there would be a clash between the strikers and the riot police, and I hear her say, in any case, the only opposition to capitalism now is homosexuals—what did she say—immigrants, excuse me, in short, marginals.
1:50:03 it's against societalism that we were railing, not against what's legitimate—again, I find it appalling that one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, I'm thinking of Oscar Wilde, went to prison for homosexuality, just as I find it appalling that a ladies' man like Baudelaire went to prison for writing some of the most beautiful poems evoking feminine erotic resonance.
1:50:34 But there, but yes. We're not anti-societal, that's not the question. But that it occupies the field and allows—well you know this now, the Yellow Vests, how did that start? With a cry of anger against ecology. That's no accident. On that point, the people are not mistaken. I'm fine with that, the people are actually the first to suffer from real environmental harms. Me, I don't care about nature. It's the environment that matters to me. I look around at my environment, there isn't much that's natural.
1:51:07 Right? And even out in the countryside, I've told you a thousand times, I won't repeat it, that hedgerows, fields, etc., haven't been natural for thousands of years, but it's the landscape that speaks of a prodigious labor of human hands, arms, legs and brain—nature has been brought to the landscape. That's the splendor, the landscape. I refer you to 'Nature or Landscape,' go to our YouTube channel, dominiquepagani.fr, you'll see, click on video and you'll see a series called 'Nature or Landscape?'
1:51:45 So there, I mean, I'm not... People often tell me, come on, you're joking, you're the most eco-friendly man in Europe, and you claim to be anti-ecologist. I say that because when I go mushroom picking with friends and I tell them to speak more quietly, it's the hour we might see roe deer, and they come out. But of course, I'm a philosopher, I attack discourses. I respect reality, after all. But still, that Oscar Wilde went to prison for homosexuality at a time when there were obscene postcards in every neighborhood, isn't that so?
1:52:16 But that was between men and women, so that was allowed. So the feminism that rails against that, well, I fully support it. But not bourgeois feminism, not the one that invented the concept of woman-as-object. Because I knew, in what used to be called the Third World—wrongly, as if there were a first capitalist world, a second communist world, that's where the term comes from, and a third made up of countries that were neither one nor the other, seeking their own path, like India, I don't know, and Cuba—where do we put that then?
1:52:50 Communist, so it's not already in the Third World, it's in the second. There, and South Korea is in the first, it's a bulwark of American capitalism in Asia. Anyway, we understand each other when I say the Third World. When, at that time, the Malian woman, to take an example from one of the poorest countries there is, I mean, that's not her problem, she doesn't suffer from not being a 'woman-object.'
1:53:26 It's not the fact that she suffers an assault in the subway, it's that she'd love to have running water at home—she wouldn't say, ah but you're mixing up the social and the societal, but we can't reduce everything to the social—go tell her that. You'd get lynched by Malian women. And I don't know if they'd be right, they're never right to lynch, but they'd have some reasons. You can have reasons without being right. Having reasons means it's explicable.
National sovereignty and distrust of Mitterrand 1:53:57 It's not that reason is absurd, it's rational, otherwise it wouldn't be real. There. Clomici—I've always paid close attention to what Clomici says. Mr. Pagani, do you think that leaving the European straitjacket must go through a process of national liberation in order to regain our sovereignty? Do you share the view of the LGRQT blog that the RN [National Rally], that the RN what?
1:54:29 Ah yes, is a necessary dead end. That would be the saddest of news to think that. For me, sovereignty is an extremely important thing—well, never mind what's important for me. The founders of the Republic, Rousseau in particular, when they speak of the sovereign in The Social Contract, it's an important notion. It's irrefragable. Without that, there's no point talking about democracy. We voted against the European Constitution and it was imposed on us anyway.
1:54:59 That is to say we've had no sovereignty for a long time now. I'm for regaining sovereignty. That's not nationalism. It's national. Not the same thing. Just as I always distinguish ecology, the real one, real environmental problems, from ecologist discourse and its excesses, isn't that so? Its cynicism, depending on the case. So, there. And it would be the saddest of news to say that the only defender of our sovereignty is the National Rally.
1:55:33 I played you Bardella earlier. He says he's for NATO and for Europe. Some sovereignty, that is. All it takes is America telling Macron, listen, we're not well placed, we don't want to always play the villainous American, go ahead a bit and say maybe we should send soldiers and not just weapons to Ukraine, because right now, we're getting eaten up on the ground. The Ukrainians, they're more resilient than we thought. That's how I answer, dear friend.
1:56:08 Thanks anyway for always asking the essential questions. So, what point should we return to? Sure, I'll take two questions, but sure, it's possible Glucksmann manages to dominate the NFP, but how can we not put the media's anti-Mélenchon frenzy at the center of our analysis? It really is a march toward war. Ah, but I agree with you. There's no limit, isn't that so? We'll defend, we'll blow NUPES out of proportion at a certain point in recent history.
1:56:45 There. And as long as the National Front isn't yet—I told you earlier, Marine did the job of going from her father's 2% to 30%. Once you have a National Front exceeding 30%, you no longer need NUPES. When I say 'you,' I don't mean me, I don't mean you. I mean those who run things, those who remain of the so-called Western world. And those who want war. That's precisely what I'm saying. And don't put words in my mouth that it's the Americans, it's the Atlanticists.
1:57:16 Of course, the flagship of the Atlanticist fleet is the American executive. Not all of the United States, far from it. Sure, it's possible Glucksmann manages to dominate the NFP, but how can we not put the media's anti-Mélenchon frenzy at the center of our analysis? I quite agree. I've already spoken with Mélenchon once. We agreed on a wariness toward German policy. And those who know me know I'm one of the most Germanophile Frenchmen there is. Let's not start saying Mélenchon is antisemitic, not okay, and Germanophobic.
1:57:49 Ah, people are quick with that with those folks. There. No, but it's good to defend Mélenchon the person, who is far from the worst in his movement. But within his movement, I know someone I won't name because it's a friend but who holds an important position, who told me, 'This party has disappointed Communists, disappointed Socialists, ecologists, and so on, to bring all that world into agreement,' and contradictions. There. I'll stop there. But anyway, I agree with you that Mélenchon is far from the worst.
1:58:19 For my part, I'll tell you right away that he is by far the best orator in the whole field, not just of the left, but of the entire political spectrum. That matters, a tribune. Someone who knows how to speak, articulate, deliver a speech—it's not just formal and literary, it means he knows how to address a population and hence a people. Still. What remains of my wariness toward Mélenchon—I say this to people close to me who know it by heart, sorry to hear it for the umpteenth time, but I'm saying it publicly this time—is that as long as he hasn't criticized, hasn't taken a minimum distance from Mitterrand—I know there are plenty of reasons to remain loyal to Mitterrand, that's his business and loyalty is always honorable—but as long as he hasn't formulated precise criticisms of this Mitterrand, of whom I said, via Foucault, that Mitterrand is Vichy, we shouldn't be too surprised that we've now ended up with the far right.
1:59:16 That's the normal state of capitalism. It's returning to its normal state, which was interrupted for a certain historical period by union demands when the communist parties were strong, but it's no longer afraid of that, that's over now, capitalism. Mitterrand paved the way. I ask—that's the only thing that makes me wary, otherwise I'd be a militant in his party, where I have excellent friends, I have comrades in the PRCF, which has nothing to do with NUPES, though at one time there were alliances that seemed like synergies, as my old boss who worked in the Hachette group used to say, Lagardère.
2:00:00 But I salute the PRCF's current position, which is fielding, I believe, three candidates in the Paris region, and I salute them and am ready to help them as much as I can, with my very limited means. But I mean, I have friends, I gave a talk at the Marxist café on the situation in French-speaking Africa, which was commissioned—well, requested—of me by the PRCF, by comrades from the PRCF, I say comrades in the broad sense, you understand, I'm not a PRCF member.
2:00:38 I have gripes with NUPES, I have gripes with the Communist Party, I recently gave a talk to the Communist Party section in Castelsarrasin. I could have talked about the Cathars, sounds like Cathars, no, let's be serious. No, they asked me to talk about why in Africa people everywhere say 'Macron get out' and why suddenly, my former students from Niger, we see underground videos, we see Russian flags in the streets of Niger. Well, there. I'll go quickly.
2:01:09 I'll answer very precisely, I'm not out to get the person, I find it more than appalling that the antisemitism question comes from the most antisemitic circles, the far-right circles of the executive or of the opposition, National Rally—I can't get it right, yes that's it, National Rally, it's more foundational, in the executive. In both cases, Mélenchon—yes, from the moment he suddenly started counting a significant number of votes, then it turns against him.
2:01:45 It's no longer a small fringe group, now, you see, there. If you want me to officially proclaim my indignation at seeing Mélenchon accused, Mélenchon and the people of the Front de Gauche or NUPES or, I don't know, things move a bit too fast for me, around Mélenchon, of antisemitism, I'll do it right now. It's more than appalling, it's a betrayal. It's serious, a betrayal.
Man and citizen; an RN that has always been pro-European 2:02:17 It's the boundary between the political and the legal. So, Valentin Gosset, who doesn't want to know anything—no, I'm joking, Valentin—who says the problem with that is that some take advantage to advocate the opposite, the opposite of what I was criticizing earlier in the false left, a left that only talks about the social while eluding or rejecting societal questions.
2:02:48 Well there, I ask you where you'd find that one. I turn to the left of Mélenchon, for a socialist and ecological left, yes or no? And then, he has feminist lieutenants, male or female, on the front line. Everyone knows who they are, I won't name them. They deserve neither this excess of honor nor this disgrace. The Communist Party, same thing—they still always join in, now, Marx used to mock the phrase 'the rights of man and of the citizen.'
2:03:22 He says, 'Find me, in human history, even anthropologically, even going back to prehistory, a man who is not'—an individual human who is not part of some group. The city can be the horde, the tribe, the village, the Greek city-state, the empire, the kingdom, no matter. But whoever says man says citizen in any case, if it's a republic, or subject, if it's a king—but why 'and'? As if there were a man, an essentialist, substantialist human essence, worse than essence.
2:03:55 There, an already-there, before the pebbles were cracked open and we passed from zoology to anthropology. No, that didn't happen at midnight in some given year, it takes millennia. There. And the movement isn't finished. There wasn't the animal and now there's man. No, man is the movement that takes us from animality toward a humanist ideal, and that movement isn't finished.
2:04:28 And it never will be entirely, because we'll always need to eat to live, at the very least that. So there will always be an animal part in us, I'm not complaining about that, that's not it. What's scandalous is that in 2024, in the richest countries in the world, there are still people struggling with hunger. Whereas Neanderthals had solved that problem, they were excellent hunters. So there, no, dear Valentin, when you find me a left that talks only about the social, send it my way, I feel like answering a bit like Clouscard: if you find a consumer society, tell me where it is, I'll go there right away, that would be communism realized.
2:05:06 He says, I look around me and see producers, I don't know where you live to see only consumers, but there you go. Well. Pauline Sailly, brilliant philosopher. No, I'm not being ironic, Pauline, I read your papers, which are sometimes abstract and difficult, but I admire them, you work hard. You don't skip what Lenin called the theoretical detour—without revolutionary theory, no revolutionary practice. Well, I won't make you out to be a Leninist, I don't know and it's none of my business.
2:05:38 The quantitative rise of the middle classes helps explain many facts and phenomena at every level. Yes, that's right, yes, provided, Pauline, if you'll let me hammer the point home again as I did earlier, that we clearly distinguish within these middle classes the emergence of the new middle strata, roughly from the late 50s, early 60s onward. That's the beginning of rock and, curiously, of the vogue for baroque music among the classics. B-A-R-O-Q-U-E, baroque.
2:06:11 Ah no, I'm scattering some leads here. I explored this a little in my short film, La fausse note, for those who know it, there it is. I'll refer you to La fausse note on YouTube. False note, I didn't add "Pagani" to the title because it's not one that belongs to me, and there are other pieces having to do with music called La fausse note. The RN has always been pro-European and only uses the sovereigntist argument to deceive its voters. Yes, Abderrahim! Oh dear!
2:06:41 It has to come from people of culture, sorry Abderrahim, but of extra-European origin, isn't that so? Just as one has to wait for a country at the very southern tip of Africa — I'm not talking about the Jews here. What audacity! The Jews demonstrate against Netanyahu every day, by the tens of thousands. No! But for the Israeli executive to be brought before the International Criminal Court, it has to come from South Africa. Thank you Abderrahim for saying "don't tire yourself out, Pagani."
2:07:12 that's not how you'd put it. I know that well. The RN has always been pro-European. But then, he's speaking gold, because he has memory. And believe me, your generation — I don't know your age — but your generation can have a historical culture equal to or even greater than mine. Some of you clearly do. But for that you have to work at it. What happened in history doesn't just get picked up off the pavement. It takes an enormous effort, because everything is arranged so that you don't see how it really happened.
2:07:44 History is the taboo, it's the forbidden thing, what actually happened. I'm not quoting Lenin, I'm quoting Churchill. Churchill was a fierce anti-communist, he's the one who created — it was he who said we needed a cordon sanitaire, the wall, the Cold War, to protect us from the Bolsheviks with knives between their teeth. As if, when Europe lay in ruins, the problem began with the poor Russian people, the Soviet peoples, mainly the Russians, with nearly 30 million dead — as if the first concern was already to come charging into Brittany.
2:08:20 Well, all right, history — Abderrahim reveals a fundamental aspect of it to us, which is that it's materially true. Look at the position of Jean-Marie Le Pen, who was far more openly fascist than his daughter — I say openly. You know his famous jokes, the crematory ovens being a mere detail of history, and then there was a minister under Giscard named Durafour, on whom he allowed himself that pun, Durafour, ellipsis, crématoire.
2:08:54 That's what Jean-Marie Le Pen was like. Here too there's a question, one that was raised earlier. How did we get, isn't it, how did the Front National go from changing masks to the point that, with Marine Le Pen, they were on the verge of "more Marxist than me, you die"? I'm exaggerating a bit, but you understand what I mean. But that's how she brought back a working-class electorate that hadn't existed before. She only had a few CIDUNATI, as we used to call them, meaning craftsmen, tradesmen, artisans.
2:09:25 There you go. But now she has a lot of young people from the housing estates. The argument "the RN has always been pro-European" — yes. Old Le Pen was furious at de Gaulle's empty-chair policy in Brussels, at the Commission. He fully defended the positions of Brussels Europe, and you can understand why. That Europe was built by one of the pillars of the European tradition. That's the famous Monnet, who's presented as a saint in schools.
2:09:56 But it's appalling. Yet on the side there's a school named Jean Monnet. He's a fabrication of the CIA and of Pétain both. It's really extraordinary. Anti-Gaullist and anti-communist, need I say more. And it only uses the sovereigntist argument to deceive its voters — yes, the Front National. I myself have mixed with people from the far right. I was raised among the French of Africa. The French of Africa, you know, that's French Algeria. Mine was black Africa. But anyway, "that bastard de Gaulle is selling Algeria to the Arabs."
2:10:27 That's how it was for me, among the adults when I was in tenth grade. I had classmates who told me, "You're a Gaullist!" because their father was a French gendarme over there in Ivory Coast. You see? Why do I bring up these memories? Because they were all fiercely anti-Gaullist and pro-Jean-Marie Le Pen, who scores enormously among the French of Abidjan. And has for a long time — not just since these European elections.
2:10:57 No, but I know these files well. You see? He's right, Abderrahim. Because by being pro-European, you fight against "Gaullo-communism" — social security, pay-as-you-go pensions, the policy of friendship with everyone... the all-azimuth defense policy. Let me come back to burning issues. I can say this. It's not... Yes, no, now it's defense against the East, period. There's no other option. De Gaulle's project was to prepare an all-azimuth defense.
2:11:28 Danger could come from any direction. It seems — I should check this, it's fuzzy in my mind, I'm not sure — but under Kennedy there may have been assassination attempts against de Gaulle. We know there were plenty against Castro and interventions in Cuba, some of which ended miserably, like the Bay of Pigs. But apparently the same thing happened with de Gaulle. Someone — we knew who. All right, I'll stop there, I'm going to end it, because people will think I've become a Gaullist.
2:11:58 If you can show me the political poverty we're in, then yes, I'll say good things about de Gaulle. Frédéric Cordier, Castelsarrasin, would that be in Lomagne? But how... Frédéric, who's in a lovely town that thanks to him I've come to know, in Belgium — I love that country very much. I'm not saying this to please Frédéric, I've always been struck by the kindness of people in Brussels. I know the population of Wallonia better, I think — I shouldn't say Wallon, it sounds too Germanic — than Flemish.
2:12:40 I mean, I've been to Brussels more often than to Antwerp, hardly at all really. But if you ask for directions in Belgium, in Brussels, the guy will get into your car and drive the other way, to where he was going, just to show you where you need to go. No, that's... Sorry, I'm wandering off, but every time I see Frédéric's editorials or videos, I tell myself, my God, I miss the days when I traveled so easily.
2:13:15 For reasons both physical, financial, and of the age of my arteries, I do it less now. Still, I try to keep going. Yes, it's in Lomagne, the Lomagne region — how do you know that? Sorry, I'll use "tu" with you, Frédéric, but how do you know that? It's incredible, wonderful, that region. There you go, it's a bit south of Montauban. And Castelsarrasin sounds a bit Cathar. When we're making — let me move to Patrick Tango France, I'm glad to have so many new pseudonyms.
Abstention, Russian music, Adorno; Palestine 2:13:54 Sometimes, since I'm a bit pessimistic, I tell myself these might be old regulars changing their pseudonym. No, they must be new people. Patrick Tango France, who tells me: when you manufacture an FN scarecrow, it'll serve for another eight centuries. He's anxious, and he's right, about liberalism — old man, shouldn't we elect them to stir things up rather than play beaver for the eleventh time? That's a question I won't answer. I'm not saying vote Rassemblement National, but personally I'd find it hard to vote for a party — for the party of war, which is what it currently is, unless I'm mistaken, though I'd be delighted to learn I'm wrong.
2:14:39 You can imagine. It's the same with the Front Populaire, the new Front Populaire. There you go. While I'm ready to subscribe to the excellent provisions of its social program — but that's not what Glucksmann drafted, I suspect, because what he did, what I read you earlier, his social program is to cut off the arms and legs, whatever's left of them, of the workers. There you go. No, I've never been for the politics of the worse, but I agree with Patrick Tango France that the situation can't go on forever like this, where it's me, the democrat, facing dictators or fascists, or worse, fascists who are sympathetic to and paid and manipulated by dictators.
2:15:32 In short, every time you say something bad about the European Commission or NATO, it means you're being paid by Beijing and Moscow. No, but that one really needs calling out. It means there's no opposition left. No opposition is tolerated anymore. You don't realize it, and it's those very people who ask us — claiming their opponents are the totalitarians. I've never seen anything like it. I'm nearly 80 years old. Yes, that's the third time I've said I'll turn 80 next year. I need to be careful, one rambles when one gets old. But no, it's to help you gauge that I'm not speaking entirely lightly here.
2:16:02 I mean, I've never seen the claim that opposition is no longer tolerated. Really, France used to be known for always arguing in cafés. For or against, for or against — it goes on and on. Men against women, Blacks against whites, gays against straights — fine, you can chat endlessly about that. But the moment it's a class struggle, then, well, that's my second answer to Valentin from earlier. But this can't go on.
2:16:33 The good news, as I told you, is that the FN won't be able to use this weapon anymore. The trick won't work anymore, the scam that Patrick Tango France rightly denounces. So it will soon no longer be relevant. Suddenly you notice that all this is like what's called, in geography, a watershed — lots of little streams first, then rivulets, then rivers, all flowing into the same river which then flows to the sea. And if that sea is a sea of sulfur, it's war.
2:17:10 So it doesn't matter which tributary claims to come from a so-called left or from the right, the far right, I mean, the liberal, the libertarian — all of it converges to finish off the muzhik. The "n*gro of whiteness," as I've called it before — deliberately, I say "n*gro" on purpose there, as a metaphor, meaning slave. The Slav, Palestine, I love you, Ismaël, twice over, there.
2:17:47 All the parties do what they want, it's NATO that decides. No. Well yes, that's why I took the example of 2005. But of course. No, it's not enough to just love Palestine. I won't lecture Ismaël, I wouldn't allow myself. I say it's good to love it, but you need more than love. Because, you know, there are women who get impatient when their suitor tells them for the fiftieth time "I love you" and leaves them in the lurch, not doing much at all — not even on the amorous and erotic level.
2:18:18 So no, that irritates women. No, there you go. You have to do more than that. It's not enough. It's a good start, though. In any case, what's happening in Palestine is atrocious. I can't speak on the same register as "I love you." It's not on that register when I speak of Palestine. It's more than atrocious. It's... Well, you know, except that those who protest against it in the streets get themselves...
2:18:48 I see police violence in Germany, in England, in the United States, but also in France, but in Italy. It's unbelievable. People complain about the Front National's numbers, but across all of Europe the far right is rising. One really needs to think about that. I'm speaking to the other interlocutor from earlier who believed that with France... No, but still. Don't forget that pointing the finger at France, whatever position it's in, whether for its far right or its far left, always plays into the hands of Atlanticism.
2:19:20 That's exactly what Macron denounces on both sides. Because he's the furthest right of the three, since he's in the extreme centre. There's the riddle I put to you. It's not hard to solve if you look closely. And yet, Stravinsky really is the king of the phrase. And yet the Firebird also moves us. Yes, when he agrees to take the knife out of his teeth and compose the Nutcracker, I'll admit.
2:19:51 It's true that, since Stravinsky has given us a little musical interlude, it's true that Russian genius — I use the word genius, big words, which apply above all to literature but not only, but especially to Russian music — its success lies in the world of childhood. No doubt this is due to its long rural tradition and the importance of the folk tale. Don't forget that well before structuralism, a title like The Morphology of the Folktale was written by a Russian.
2:20:23 And yes, I think of The Nutcracker, I think of Peter and the Wolf, worldwide successes for children. In fact, I recommend — you can find it on YouTube — a magnificent recitation of Peter and the Wolf, with a narrator who introduces all the instruments of the orchestra through the drama of the wolf, in short, performed by Gérard Philipe with his marvelous voice. There you go. Thank you.
2:20:53 My friend Stravinsky — I wouldn't have thought of it, but I'll dig it out. To think one can achieve things through voting is to live in illusion. Yes, well, here we go again — but '68: elections, a trap for fools. But I don't criticize those who choose to abstain either. Yet I can't preach abstention to young people, unlike those worn down by age, by experience, by bitterness, some of whom no longer vote.
2:21:28 That's defensible on an individual level. But I can't discourage young people who need to be active, to invest themselves in a cause, to put up posters, to hand out leaflets in the street, to sound the alarm. There, "workers and peasants, sound the alarm." Tomorrow the enemy will know the price of blood and tears. So I can't glorify abstention, but neither will I demonize those who abstain.
2:22:00 How to fight the galloping adherence to "ED" ideas among the working classes? That's Zemmour, isn't it? No, because now with the acronyms I get mixed up — far right, far right. Ah yes, right. Yes, same thing. How to fight the galloping adherence to far-right ideas among the working classes? It's hard not to side with Adorno: myth is stronger than the will to be free.
2:22:33 Yes, I don't know if detours through Adorno would be the best path out of this, because Adorno was one of the pillars of the Frankfurt School, that is, of what helped Germany take refuge behind social democracy in order to feed its anti-communism. And yes, I'm sorry. No, but Adorno is by far the best of the bunch. He's a great, highly cultivated thinker who knows the texts of Hegel and Marx admirably well. I'm not trying to belittle him. But you must never measure ideological and political relevance by other kinds of relevance.
2:23:09 One can be a genius. I think of an emblematic example: Heisenberg, doubtless one of the greatest physicists of modernity, to whom we owe... he's one of the founders, the builders of quantum mechanics, the uncertainty relations. That's Heisenberg. And his sympathies for the Third Reich were well known. His sympathies — he never played a leading role in it. But still, there it is.
2:23:40 It's not because one is cultivated, intelligent, and pertinent in a domain that belongs to the understanding — that's not where one does philosophy in the Kantian sense — the pure intellect, the if-then, non-contradiction, the positive sciences, which are necessary, I never say a word against them, but which must not serve as a model for other domains of reflection. The sciences deal with the true and the false, not with good and evil.
2:24:11 One must not look for political lessons from the most intelligent people, whether in literature, science, or ideology — Adorno included. And brilliant, Adorno, very brilliant, doubtless the most brilliant. He's something else compared to the rest of the Frankfurt School, but still. There it is. Except that he understood nothing about jazz. But that... there have to be a few shortcomings, a few blind spots.
2:24:41 It's 11:25 pm. I can just pass on a message from Ismaël, since you missed it, it's already gone by. What was it? Let me put it up for you... I don't know. Ismaël: "The Israeli government killed my parents with their bombing." Well, Ismaël, I saw that post. There you go. And so, I'm right there with you, without any misunderstanding this time. And you're not the first among the friends, the close ones I have, who has lost the people...
2:25:14 the closest and dearest to them in this carnage. There you go. And it's extraordinary that this has been going on for 70 years — not with this intensity, but still, the essentials: the occupation, the imprisonments, the murders, the torture in the prisons — that it's lasted 70 years. And that it's almost never talked about, far less than Tiananmen. Every time I ask, well, how many deaths have there been, nobody knows, we're kept in the dark. Some say 300,000, some say 15,000.
2:25:47 Oh dear! And now we're at nearly 40,000. Well. And under what conditions. There you go. Sorry, the subject is grave, I've lingered on it. I believe the game — no, it's not a game — the stakes are worth it, if I may put it that way. Perhaps it's time to blow out the candles and get some rest. But in any case, a thousand thanks for your questions. I'm sorry I can't answer all the ones piling up, but I promise I will.
2:26:18 Likewise, as I leave you on this note, I'll answer Martinez, who asked me an excellent question about the notion of the whole in philosophy in the last video, back when I was still on the subject of the Grail. Don't think I've forgotten. All right? This was a parenthesis due to the political circumstances. I'll soon get back to our ongoing series, which doesn't mean I'll stop, as much as I can, trying to pass on the little I can say, at the small scale that is mine, against the immense danger threatening us.
2:26:55 There you go. Thank you for taking part. Thank you, Pierre-Alain. And thanks to my cat, who behaved very well throughout this session. I send you my regards, and see you next time.
