English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
An impromptu live session on Niger and the Sahel 1:30 It wasn't planned this way, but everything is going to be a bit exceptional this evening. I thank those who are here. First, I offer my apologies on behalf of the whole team for having warned you so late that there would be a live stream this evening. You know as well as I do that the geopolitical calendar, the pace of geopolitical events, seems to be accelerating to the point that three quarters of what's happening right now — if you'd told me about it six months ago, I would have said no, come on, it's not April Fool's.
2:14 And yet, I believe I know the region a bit better than the average member of the public. So, forgive me if I seem to be putting myself forward and playing the prophet — there's nothing prophetic about it, you didn't need to be a genius to guess it. But what decided me — several people, I won't hide it from you — told me, why don't you do something on Niger, you who lived there, who know it well.
2:48 I hesitated at first because it's happening right now, while things are still hot. And besides, let me tell you right away that it will be less about Niger in its particularity than about what is happening in the region, because that's what's at stake, and Niger is a new episode — and what an episode! — but the cement is still fresh. So the matter is not centered on Niger. I'll speak less about Niger specifically than about what is currently happening, which is almost cataclysmic in geopolitical terms, in the Sahel, in this region right now.
3:26 But yes, I did hesitate to do something on this. First of all, I've left many friends there, on both sides. That is to say, one associates with those in power in these countries more easily than here, where there are so many intermediaries between the executive — to the point that it no longer needs us — and where, referendum or not, your opinion, mine, no longer counts, and it's all 49.3, decrees, or rubber-stamp parliaments, as they say, or puppet parliaments.
4:07 No, over there, no. And so, it's a matter of principle, I mean, I didn't want to put anyone in a difficult position. And what finally decided me is that there were two or three friends to whom I'd been saying for several months — and this is where I apologize for seeming to be a seer, but you didn't need to be a wizard — I had said, the next one to fall will be Niger. It's a simple shift eastward: Mali, Burkina, Niger. So in principle, Chad should follow and complete the series, as far as francophone Sahel is concerned.
4:42 But that won't stop the transformations currently underway across the sub-Saharan continent in general, across the Black continent. What's happening right now is enormous. And it's in order to better appreciate it, to take a bit of a step back and better appreciate what's happening, that Pierre-Alain and I decided to move things forward — thank you for being available, because it wasn't easy. We decided to move our next session forward to this Monday.
5:19 So the next live stream will take place next week. While I'm at it — and this has nothing to do with tonight's topic — let me say that during this somewhat empty summer period, in the sense of vacation and vacancy, even if I won't repeat it every day, still — even if each of you remembers Clouscard's formula that there's no vacation in the concept — well, one has the right to enjoy emptying one's head, especially when it's well deserved. But to stay in touch with you, and I personally care about that, and the team does too, there's a whole series of videos we've recorded for this purpose.
6:14 Most of them I owe to Philippe Moreau, our former stage manager, who now has so much to do between the Île-de-France region and the Rhône-Alpes region that he's often on the road and can no longer be as available as he used to be. And yet, despite how busy he is, he was kind enough to come to my place in Cachan to record videos, the first of which you've seen — the one about the Paris peasant reciting Aragon's magnificent poem — and there will be a follow-up, I'm telling you right away. Among other authors, there's an original text, this one, you see, a lesser-known text by Kleist, an essay — the exact title by Kleist is On the Marionette Theatre — it's a short piece, you see, it's not...
7:24 pretty much unique of its kind. Let me take the opportunity to once again thank the one among us, among you, who was kind enough to give me this beautiful edition of this magnificent text. I had it in an anthology, a compilation, so what a pleasure to read it in this format, with its illustrations — and I'm thinking of Joss Magne, who is in Toulouse, whom I greet, and who deserves a lot of credit for following our videos, and more generally for continuing to stay informed about what's happening, which doesn't always make her happy, no more than it does you or me, these days.
Nulle éclipse, an abecedary by Flora de Negroni 8:11 So, since everything is going to be a bit exceptional, for once I'm going to show quite a few video clips. First, to support what I'm saying — my commentary will pick up between two or three sequences — but before that, and completely off-topic, before we get to Africa, almost as a way of offsetting the grim and unfun content we're going to dive into for a little while, allow me to share a little infatuation of mine.
8:56 It's a book — let me tell you right away, it's a gem, a little masterpiece. A little masterpiece, I tell you right away. The author is Flora de Negroni, the daughter of François, who needs no introduction. But she is the author in a double sense. For the texts that punctuate this work — for example, here's a short text related to a painting — Flora, ever since I've known her, when I first met her, she was five or six years old.
9:39 When I used to visit her parents, their magnificent tower in the north of Cap Corse. But then the pace picked up in recent years, and what she's doing has drawn me in so much that I'm delighted she's found a publisher. I take the liberty... I didn't know him, but now I'm asking you to get to know him. This publisher — I don't know if it shows on the screen, it's written very small at the bottom, there, you see — it's Cap, like a geographical cape, Cap de l'Étang, Cap like a cape, Étang like a pond, one of those small, courageous publishers who made it possible for Flora to have her first printed publication.
10:32 I don't have time tonight — I'd rather talk longer about this than about the misfortunes we're dealing with right now — but you see, I'll give you an example of one of these paintings; most of them are on the borderline between the figurative and the abstract. That's a hallmark of her painting, you see — this one could be quite abstract, there's a touch of Max Ernst, not far off, but in a way, it's a concrete abstract.
11:03 And since Flora has done serious studies in philosophy, when I say concrete abstract, of course I'm not at all rejecting the Hegelian connotations of the phrase, especially since Hegel is among the fleeting quotations found in this text, which doesn't dot every i with heavy points — these are more like little petals, practically, falling onto the page, these texts, which are neither demonstrative, nor redundant, nor literary in the pejorative sense, in the sense in which Verlaine said all the rest is literature, everything that isn't poetry.
11:54 There you go. And I really loved the title 'No Eclipse.' There you go. I'll read you one anyway — here's the one commenting on this painting, which is... oh yes, because I'm forgetting, the simplest way to put it is that the book follows the progression of an abecedary. There you go. And so, under the letter D, for 'desire,' you see this sample of Flora's writing: 'O desire ever renewed, thirst to understand, thirst to know.'
12:29 One might have expected it to be about desire, libido, the classic stuff, I mean. But the main desire here is the desire to know and to understand. Thirst to understand, thirst to know. 'All men, by nature, desire to know,' she writes in quotation marks. It's Aristotle, of course. It's of course the very first sentence of Aristotle's immense Metaphysics. 'To curiosity never satisfied, I rummage through books, and so joyful when I understand new things, then there's a celebration in my little house, joy and the wind blowing outside, mingled with the blazing sun.'
13:09 I say this because, as summer reading, I don't see what better you could find in this format. There you go. Now, some of you might say, 'Come on, it's just cronyism between Corsicans, isn't it — Pagani, Negroni, what next?' Let me tell you right away that this is a misunderstanding. Actually, tough luck, as they say in refined French — it's not me who said it was a marvelous masterpiece. It's the publisher, in the presentation.
13:41 He himself fell in love with this author and her work. There you go. That's a quote from the head of Cap de l'Étang. There you go. Bravo, Flora. And I hope we'll talk about it again and, of course, we're waiting for what comes next. There you go. It's a bit hard to get back into what awaits us after such a work. So, I'd like to start with excerpts from videos I published well before the current events.
"Yellowing the corpses": the lesson of Vietnam 14:20 A year ago. But before my own — the excerpts from my own videos — I'm going to show one that isn't about me at all. It's a video that will help make sense of the title I chose for tonight's session: Should the corpses be blackened? What am I alluding to? Because it's not obvious just like that. It can be understood in various senses, even various misunderstandings.
14:50 No, no. To be very precise, I'm alluding to something the younger ones can't be expected to know — in any case, everything is done to make sure that memory, which could exist through press, study, or essay, doesn't persist. If it doesn't exist, well, I won't repeat every time that memory is a social matter. There are those who reduce it to biophysiological functions that do exist — every memory corresponds to very particular chemical traces.
15:20 It's not about saying just anything. But the social frameworks of memory — I often cite this very fine title by Maurice Halbwachs, the sociologist who published that in the 1950s. And the proof is that events which the media don't dwell on leave no trace whatsoever in public opinion. And conversely, when they want to blow up something trivial, but which they need in order to muddy the waters, so that people don't talk about what's actually stirring, then it's splashed across the front page of every media outlet.
15:57 So what am I alluding to? Let's be clear. During the Vietnam War, things started to make American officials squirm — on the side of the executive, of course, the White House and the Pentagon — with respect to public opinion. Once the return of coffins, of the boys, of the GIs, began to multiply, public opinion could no longer be satisfied with the discourse used up to that point; something had to be done to answer public concern.
16:33 But it was at that point — I have a slight doubt, was it McNamara who was directing military operations at that time, before running the World Bank? Yes, yes, yes — you think the World Bank only serves to help peoples develop. Well, at that point McNamara was still there. It was also Westmoreland, who was then the military commander-in-chief, so to speak, of the American expeditionary corps, which rose to 500,000 men — let's not forget, 500,000 men.
17:11 I'm going quickly, because I think all this is well known, isn't it? For the younger generations, it might be worth repeating that there were 3 million deaths — we caused 3 million Vietnamese deaths, 50,000 Americans who lost their lives, which is deplorable, kids every time. But still, 3 million dead in Vietnam. A Vietnam that had just emerged victorious from the Indochina War — the Vietnam War is against the Americans, the Indochina War is against France. Your humble servant was born in 1945, I don't know, in that context, and in Hanoi.
17:48 Vietnam managed to defeat the two greatest imperial powers of the time. So, my title still doesn't make sense — that's where we're about to see it. When they met to figure out how to make it go over better with public opinion, our operation — Westmoreland or McNamara, need to check — said, now it's time to yellow the corpses. We won't see as many soldiers, we'll see fewer...
18:19 We're not going to send new GIs over there, there are already enough, but instead, on the front line, in the fighting, we're mainly going to send Vietnamese against Vietnamese. The South Vietnamese government, which were puppets in American hands, suddenly found itself equipped with a super army. Doesn't that remind you of something? The Americans who say they're not intervening in a war, but who supply all the equipment, the training, the logistical support — maybe not yet as much help via satellite and drones and the like, but still, you see, they had to yellow the corpses.
ECOWAS, coups d'État, and development aid 18:57 Well, here we are on the verge of a light intervention — it's not certain it will happen, since negotiations are still ongoing, since it has just been announced that there will be a second visit by representatives of ECOWAS, the Economic Community of West African States, to put it quickly — and the first delegation came and left with its tail between its legs, not even having been received by Niger's new head of state.
19:32 I say head of state — I'll talk about the regime, about the executive, the new Nigerien executive — I won't use the contempt and arrogance of our officials, 'the junta.' How can that be said by a power that has multiplied military coups every time an African head of state became a bit uncontrollable and had to be replaced? And yes, the founding leaders of independence had Marxist sympathies — Modibo Keïta in Mali, do you think relations between Mali and France started today?
20:11 Modibo Keïta, the great leader who led Mali to independence in the 60s — a coup was engineered against him. Well, that's the scenario in Mali specifically, but it's repeated pretty much everywhere else too. Some of you have heard about Marshal Bokassa with the corpses of his victims in refrigerators — I don't know if it's true, but that tells you the kind of dictatorship it was, more or less nearby. Heads of state who were political figures, historic references for their people, were toppled.
21:03 They were replaced by generals, then when the generals became uncontrollable, or when they were tempted to turn to other powers, or others who paid more, they too were toppled — by colonels, the colonels by captains, the captains by lieutenants. When you get to the point of having a country run by warrant officers or grunts, you shouldn't be surprised that Africa — the African executive, because the populations know everything I'm telling you, they haven't forgotten anything.
21:33 But you shouldn't be surprised that they're in this state. I've just summarized 50 years, more than that, of development aid. While I'm at it, let me say I might seem dismissive about development aid. I'll never say anything against, I don't know, the young volunteer doing national service on the ground, giving injections in a hospital.
22:05 Bravo! No, but that's not the big thing that helps a country escape underdevelopment. But precisely — have you ever seen a country help another become its competitor? Name me a single country that went from underdevelopment to development out of a traditional poverty with dry seasons and... you know, between the moment the last raindrops fell and, sorry, between the moment the dry season is about to end, when people can't take it anymore, and the first raindrops haven't arrived yet, there's the 'hungry gap' period, and if it drags on, life makes people wonder whether they'll eat that year, whether they'll be able to plant and harvest.
22:54 So, how do you go from that? I don't know, to computers, cars, planes. Have you ever seen a country move from underdevelopment to development with the help of development aid, whether bilateral — France, the Netherlands, whatever, USAID, American aid — or multilateral, of course, the main ones, the IMF, the European Union, the World Bank, etc.? Name me one non-European, non-Western country — that word which serves more to hide than to express — that became one of the greatest industrial powers without outside help, precisely because there was no aid, because it decided to do it itself.
23:45 I'm thinking of Japan — the emperors, the Meiji era, for those who know a bit of their history, the end of the 19th century — who said, now, if we don't want to get devoured, we have to... Here I'm speaking a bit as a counterpoint to the beautiful text by Cheikh Hamidou Kane, the excerpt from the novel Ambiguous Adventure, the Senegalese author — Africa is in the spotlight tonight — where, if you recall, there's the trauma of the arrival of the whites, the cannon shots, the trinkets, the initial trauma, and then very quickly, the Grande Royale of the Diallobé, one of the main figures of authority, one of the leading traditional notables, who is one of the most opposed to the arrival of the new masters, and at the moment when the whole Diallobé community wonders whether — since it was the official order of the new occupiers — to send their children to the new school, ends up saying they must send their children to the new school, even though she is the one most opposed to the newcomers.
24:54 Why? And I quote, because she had understood that the strength of the newcomers lay less in their cannons than in what followed those cannons — science, technology, logistics, development. There you go. No, Africa — I don't want to get into the details of the negotiations that took place, for example, between the European Union and each country, right? Look it up. But it's not designed to develop — otherwise we wouldn't be here.
25:33 So that already existed, but now — let me get back to my point — if ECOWAS, the Economic Community of West African States, which is already very discredited among the populations of the region — it's seen a bit like, you see, like the European Union is increasingly seen by European populations, that is, as a leadership of largely unelected, technocratic people who, above all, I mean, couldn't care less about what's essential to any democracy, namely sovereignty.
26:14 I'm not a sovereigntist, I'm for sovereignty. I'll leave that distinction to your own reflection. Are there still people who believe there's more left, more right? The essential thing is to be a sovereigntist. Oh yes, of course. Yes, in the third row, they were sovereigntists too. No, I hold to sovereignty. It's no accident that I so often refer to Rousseau, who is the founder of the modern concept of sovereignty and the first to have modeled it.
26:48 So ECOWAS is a bit like the equivalent of the European Union in West Africa, for the states of West Africa. And it has discredited itself. Everyone in the African street knows that it does what its masters in the North tell it to do. France, when it comes to francophone countries; the World Bank, the United States — always the same ones. So apparently, military intervention is on the cards.
27:23 The military say they're ready, we hear, to intervene; they're waiting for the political green light, but it still hasn't been decided, even though the ultimatum expired yesterday at midnight. Actually, last night, sorry, at midnight. Because more and more countries are dragging their feet, thinking it would be an appalling bloodbath. I imagine, for those following a bit what's happening in Niger, you've learned that both Burkina Faso and Mali have said that if the ECOWAS countries — that is, in the mind of the African street, I remind you, the Westerners, whatever colors they wear — that's where we'll once again get to blackening the corpses.
28:09 if there's a military intervention against Niger, it would be a first. It would be considered a declaration of war on each of these countries. Algeria, which holds considerable power in the region, the sub-region, whatever you want to call it — I prefer to say in the region, given the scale of Algeria and the African continent — Algeria has said it is totally opposed to this intervention, that it would not take part in it, but that it would regard it as a threat to its own sovereignty.
28:45 Algeria has more than 1000 km of border with Niger, on its southern side. That's the main road axis that crosses the Sahara, passing through Agadez, Tamanrasset, In Salah, etc. So it's not settled yet. But if, despite all these difficulties—that's the least one can say, it's a euphemism—the military intervention is decided, there will be corpses.
29:24 But there's no question of the French intervening—there are 1500 French soldiers there. No, we're the humanists. We push them hard to intervene. But we won't intervene ourselves. The United States pushes the Ukrainians hard so that they don't make peace with the Russians. You know that peace had practically been signed between Zelensky and Putin, with mediation ensured by Turkey, but not even seven months after the start of operations.
29:57 We would have spared ourselves massacres, because what's happening on both sides is dreadful. Most of the time it's still kids, or old men, since that's all that's left to find now when there's a shortage of men. We were on the brink, and you know Boris Johnson was sent by the Americans to say, 'You stop this. Listen, Pagani, that's enough, it's the plot over there'—like the Americans in Vietnam, 'we need to blacken the corpses.' That's a quote I'm giving you, from an American Chief of Staff, firstly.
The speech of an American strategist 30:31 I'm laughing at your surprise, not at the content, believe me. And now I'm going to show you the first video. I spend my time telling you—when I sound like this, being a conspiracy theorist, that's what they call it. You know, there are only two political theories left, the official one, and as soon as you deviate from it by a millimeter, you're into conspiracy. It's well known that political powers have never conspired. It's extraordinary, really. Quite something, in my opinion—they've spent their time doing exactly that, since forever, even before history, since prehistory, in my opinion.
31:04 But, to show you that reality surpasses everything I say, I'll let a very senior American official speak—the one who heads one of the biggest think tanks, the lobby, etc., of strategic studies in the United States, who has the ear of the Pentagon, who—well, anyway, I'll let him speak. If you believe your ears, it's because you've seen some things. No? It's not very long.
31:35 I don't know about the United States. We have constant wars. Europe won't, I don't know, won't go back to eternal peace, but it will go back to humanity. They will have their wars, they will have their peace, they will live their lives. It won't be 100 million dead, but the idea of European exceptionalism—there are conflicts. There are conflicts in Yugoslavia and there are conflicts in Ukraine. As for the relationship with the United States, we no longer have a relationship with Europe.
32:09 We have a relationship with Romania, we have a relationship with France. There is no relationship with... Yes, the gentleman in the 4th row, here. Excuse me. By the way, I'm a subscriber. Is Islamic extremism really the major threat to the United States, and will it die on its own, or will it keep growing?
32:39 It is a problem to the United States. It is not an existential threat. It has to be dealt with, but it has to be dealt with proportionately. We have other foreign policy interests. So, the primordial interest of the United States, over which for a century we have fought wars, the first, second Cold War, has been the relationship between Germany and Russia, because united there are the only force that could threaten us, and to make sure that that doesn't happen.
33:09 What you do, if you're a Ukrainian, is essentially reach out to the only country that will help you, which is the United States. Last week, ten days ago, General Hodges, commander of the U.S. Army Europe, visited Ukraine. He announced that U.S. trainers would now officially be coming, not just unofficially coming. He actually pinned medals on Ukrainian fighters, which by protocol of the military is not the way.
33:43 Foreigners don't get to pin on, you know, medals. But he did, showing that this was his army. He then left, and in the Baltics announced that the United States would be pre-positioning armor, artillery, and other equipment in the Baltics, Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria, which is a very interesting point. So the United States, and now to yesterday, the United States announced that it would be sending weapons. Tonight, of course, they denied it, but they are.
34:14 Weapons will go. In all of this, the United States has acted outside the context of NATO, because NATO has to have a 100% vote. Any one country can veto anything, and the Turks will veto it just for giggles. The point is that the United States is prepared to create a cordon sanitaire around Russia. Russia knows it. Russia believes that the United States intends to break the Russian Federation.
34:47 I think that, as Peter Lorre put it, we don't want to kill you. We just want to hurt you a little bit. Either way, we are back in the old game. And if you go ask a Pole or a Hungarian or a Romanian, they live in a totally different universe from a German, and they live in a totally different universe from a Spaniard. So there is no commonality in Europe. But if I were a Ukrainian, I would do exactly what they're doing, try to draw the Americans in.
35:17 The United States has a fundamental interest. It controls all the oceans of the world. No power has ever done that. Because of that, we get to invade people, and they don't get to invade us. It's a very nice thing. Maintaining control of the sea and control of space is the foundation of our power. The best way to defeat an enemy fleet is to not let it be built. The way the British managed to make certain that no European power could build a fleet was to make sure the Europeans are each other's throats.
35:49 The policy that I would recommend is the one that Ronald Reagan adopted toward Iran and Iraq. He funded both sides. So they would fight each other, and not fight us. This was cynical. It was certainly not moral. It worked. And this is the point. The United States cannot occupy Eurasia. It's cynical.
36:19 It's immoral. But it works. And when I tell you that, not only am I not exaggerating, but this is the same view held by the top American military figure, General Milley, the army chief of staff, and much of the same, I'll say, from Austin as well.
36:49 This conference took place in 2015, seven years before Russian troops crossed the Ukrainian border. Everything was foretold, including the politics in the Netherlands — everything unfolds the same way, because things are serious. Well, I was told this evening wasn't very fun or very sexy, but still, everything isn't all doom and gloom either.
The pride of Nigeriens and the misery of water 37:19 If I focused on Niger, first, I'll go back to the cover photo, as we say in video-editing terms, that opened our show this evening — this photo was inspired by an old, old student from the music school that I had the honor of directing over there.
37:50 They founded an alumni association of the family, and they were surprised to see that I wasn't dead. And they were kind enough to make me honorary president. And they send me videos most of the time — it's the musical careers of the people who trained there back then. And among themselves, they exchange things, they talk about the politics of their country, and that's not the main part of what they exchange.
38:28 But since the arrival of the new authorities in Niger — you see, I'm careful not to say 'the junta' — I look at the posts, because I have access to their WhatsApp address, they talk among themselves, it's not addressed to me specifically, and I see that they share a pride, like a second wave of independence.
39:04 Niger is the poorest country in the world. I know that past a certain threshold, that can be disputed between this one and that one, but let's say it's one of the best-placed candidates, if I may say so, by antiphrasis. Life expectancy doesn't reach 50 years. The birth rate is the highest in the world. People have 10 children to keep 2 or 3. The others all die between 0 and 5 years old.
39:35 I'm talking to you about statistics, I mean the most common ones. There can be exceptions. Oh no, not diseases. No, no, it's... Most of the time, it comes from water. W, A, T, E, R. Yes indeed, gentlemen degrowthers, go and tell them they don't need industry, plumbing, running water, chlorine in the water, you know, everything that gives the ecologists a guilty conscience.
40:10 Because when it comes to the ecological, I'm one of them. The environment interests me. Naturalism, no. Yes, water — most of the time it's diarrhea. All it would take is saline solution with treated water. And that's it. That's it. That's how you cure cholera. There's nothing easier than curing cholera. Hegel died of it, by the way, because at the time, the hospital and socio-economic development of Germany wasn't what it is now.
40:53 Schopenhauer fled Berlin when he saw the epidemic coming, even though he was convinced, Buddhist that he was, of immortality. There, he made very sure not to stay in Berlin. There you go. No, no. It's cholera, dysentery, what comes from water, that's four-fifths of the deaths. I've seen children in the capital, because there, often, there's a strange intermingling of poverty in apparently residential neighborhoods where there are guards, servants, so the families come to live in compounds right next to the servants' families.
41:35 And it's very strange sociologically. Street kids, you know. When finally the first rains come, it's a relief for everyone, even for the camels. Nasty animal, because camels are wicked. They slash like that, with their bites — it's surgical emergencies. It's a beast you shouldn't bother too much. Even the camels, when the first rains come, you see them working with a load on their back, chewing grass in air that's finally breathable, a little softer, a little cooler, like what we've had for a while now before the heatwave comes back.
42:15 I've seen children, right from the first rains, immediately, there are huge puddles, the drainage isn't up to standard, there are no culverts, missing culverts, triple culverts and everything you like. The children bathe in the puddles, it's muddy water, so you can't see through it, but fortunately, because underneath you'd see all the trash that was there before the rains came. How could that not cause thousands of deaths? No, I don't need to exaggerate. All right? And it's this country that France has just cut off — they've just cut the electricity, all humanitarian aid, I mean, in Burkina, in Niger — I'm telling you what democracies do against dictatorships, it's time to give the word 'tribe' a purer meaning, you know.
"Death drives advance in silence" 43:07 There you go. So, I'd now like to show you some excerpts, sorry, since I don't have any more outside footage, but these are videos I broadcast in December 2021 and early 2022. I don't know if that's old too, but still. And well before, mind you, the break happened between Mali and France, then between Burkina and France, and now Niger.
43:41 Well before. Now, the first of these videos I had titled 'The death drives advance in silence.' Freud's famous formula — I maintain it's the most profound of Freud's, and yet there's no question of libido or sexuality in it. The death drives advance in silence. The fact of not expressing them favors the death drives. Besides, staying in Africa, because there, when there's a problem, when you start getting worked up in a haggling session at the market, the African often tells you, 'But, but' — implying, unlike you — 'you just need to talk.'
44:23 You just need to talk. Oddly echoing, like a counterpoint 6,000 kilometers away, the poet Novalis — undoubtedly the most romantic of the German Romantics, far more reactionary than Hölderlin, but that's not the point — an immense poet, who mostly wrote aphorisms, wrote few long texts, but who did write, 'Talking for the sake of talking'? That's the formula of deliverance.
44:55 You just need to talk. So, no, well, that was a video about the incredible media silence. You've guessed they're doing that about me over there too. They'd have you believe that Niger is pulling a fast one on us, a bolt from the blue, thunder in a clear sky — I don't know how to put it. Macron went so far as to complain about his intelligence services not having seen it coming. How could they not have seen it coming? Me, who is not in the services at all, but who has kept in touch with former students who now, thankfully, have careers and earn a better living than I do — that's what it was for.
45:30 Thanks to their... There are even some who left Niger and went where the money is, to Côte d'Ivoire, and who give piano lessons to expatriates' children, children who had come to Aillon, to our center, back in the '90s. They're the ones who sent me videos showing the protests and demonstrations that had been going on for months against the French military presence in Niger.
46:01 Well, you shouldn't take people for idiots. Nigeriens can clearly see that the difficulties — that's putting it mildly — that France encountered in Mali and Burkina meant that all the armed forces that were there — it was Operation Barkhane, which had succeeded Operation Serval — well, it's an enormous deployment — folded back onto Niger, which became the foreigners' barracks, as people in the street say. Isn't that so? And I'm talking about the French, who number 1,500 soldiers, but I mean there are planes, there are drones.
46:34 There is, about 500 kilometers north of the capital, in the desert capital of Agadez, the admirable Agadez — there's an American base, very discreet, the Americans. They leave the French with their pretentious arrogance. Have you seen our minister? It's frightening to hear her. I'm not talking about seeing her. The way she treats her interlocutors! There's a listening base — listening in today's logistical sense, I mean, with drones criss-crossing the whole region.
47:16 There's all that over there. And you think we can, against the will of the peoples, carry out our policy, our geopolitics, and tell them, 'Ah, you're not going to deal with the Russians?' 'Russians or others?' 'The Chinese?' Really, come on. Ah, but listen, since I'm talking about the Chinese, because there are those who say, 'Ah, the Chinese, that's...' Well then, they're worse than us, the exploitation of Africa by... It's extraordinary, isn't it?
French cooperation and Chinese cooperation 47:46 That we should give lectures on how development should be done — which we ourselves didn't do — telling the Chinese not to do it. Except they're actually doing it. They leave equipment behind. So, I'm going to make an exception to the planned chronology. For the videos, I'm going to ask Pierre-Alain to play our outside footage. I have trouble hearing and seeing myself, so we'll delay that. I'm going to show a video of someone many of you know, I believe, Idriss Aberkane.
48:16 We don't have the same approach, we don't have the same points of reference, and it doesn't matter, he's not at all an adversary. In any case, I'm often indebted to him for certain pieces of information — not about the region, the region I know, I've worked there enough, the region and the people there — but about some implications in other regions of the planet, with somewhat similar issues; he has very good sources. And here, I'm going to show it to you precisely regarding the comparison between our cooperation and that of the Chinese.
48:51 So, this won't be cheerful, but don't miss this clip. Very much déjà seen, isn't it? So, with thorium reactors, we wouldn't have needed Niger's uranium, but for now, the fact that there was a coup in Niger is extremely serious for the very structure of the influence network called Françafrique. There's also Burkina, which has revolted against France, to say the least. And Russia is always there to show its future non-aligned partners that they'd do well to leave the French sphere of influence.
49:22 So this really has dramatic consequences. France could have — actually the real problem is that Macron is completely perceived as a leader who is being led. Wokeism and all the stupidities being promoted in France, particularly in the national education system, and which are even reported by France 24, are absolutely infuriating for the countries in the French sphere of influence. And that matters too, since French soft power is absolutely devastated. But France could have kept its soft power, notably in Jacques Chirac's time, but it didn't keep it because its absolutely servile alignment with the United States earned it nothing but contempt.
49:58 And I won't even mention the little strokes of genius like sending an LGBT ambassador to Africa rather than sending people to build roads, bridges and hospitals. And besides, that's exactly the response the state that received a visit from this unbelievable ambassador gave. It said, listen, you're cute, but the Chinese arrive with highways, bridges and power plants, while there are 600 million Africans without access to electricity. And you, you show up with your woke nonsense — so, kindly, go back home with your chicken-in-a-basket-on-a-bicycle, and let us develop economically.
50:34 And that, to say the least, is quite telling. Sometimes you can't believe your ears. But it's no joke, the story of the LGBT ambassador — while they're waiting for equipment. Equipment — it's been 60 years of development aid and they're still waiting for equipment. They arrive, but it's not us.
51:07 How could there not be a loss of respect? And on top of that, we keep giving them advice on who they should negotiate with, who they should deal with, who they should cooperate with. It's extraordinary. Can you imagine Nicaragua telling France, 'You shouldn't belong to the European Union, you'd be better off joining EFTA, the Scandinavian countries' association'? But that's exactly what we're doing.
51:38 And when they don't agree, we send in the force. But we're dreaming. In fact, we think there are changes and upheavals happening. Maybe it's the opposite. We're still stuck in the old gunboat policy, as they called it at the time of colonial conquest. The gunboat. But the words have changed. We don't say we're bringing them civilization, etc. We say we're bringing them democracy, especially societal democracy, and as for the rest, they can go to hell.
52:08 But that's not how it's put. And since Idriss Aberkane made several allusions that really need to be picked up on, this lets me introduce the videos that will follow, the ones I'm telling you I'm going to title "The death drives are advancing in silence."
Public opinion, a new actor since the Enlightenment 52:42 because they tell you nothing, none of it. I mean, in the major mainstream media that shape public opinion, when a war is being prepared, this is important, what I'm saying right now. Sorry, it's not to myself that I'm saying it's important, it's to you, but I'm marking the point. Let's say it's more or less important in what I say, that's the least one can say. But here I'm taking a huge step back, and I'm saying that since the French Revolution, since the Age of Enlightenment, even before the Revolution—rather the Revolution is a consequence of what I'm about to say.
53:25 There is a new actor in geopolitics, as we say now, that has come into play and that has to be reckoned with. It's public opinion. Look at what Voltaire managed to do with the Calas affair, that man, that poor subject of the King of France, a Protestant, accused—it's appalling—who was tortured, who was subjected to breaking on the wheel, and who was innocent, and who was magnificently rehabilitated against all odds, despite the feudal authorities of the time, the monarchic-feudal authorities, by Voltaire.
54:07 Public opinion—we began to measure its strength, which has never stopped growing. Mr. Thiers—I'm telling you all this, it looks like I'm dropping Niger. No! The current events in Ronor, the events that could have degenerated into open war since midnight yesterday to today, during the night from yesterday to today—the current events are precisely about knowing whether a military aggression—that's what they're discussing at ECOWAS and with their Western partners, mainly here in the French executive—is about knowing whether an intervention wouldn't end up costing more in terms of public opinion in the countries concerned than what it could bring in geostrategic, economic terms, whatever you like.
55:03 Mostly geostrategic, actually, because apart from uranium, there's not much to scrape together. Uranium is not nothing. It's the essential part of the electricity you and I use in France. Yes, it's nuclear power, and the fuel for that nuclear power comes mostly from Niger. Not only, but mostly. That's what's going on right now. So I'm going to give you a first example of this new deal involving public opinion.
55:38 Voltaire, who initiated the process somewhat, who was one of the actors who became aware of the importance of this new player. And then there was a great massacre here at home. It's not like the anti-communist left-wing government—I'm thinking of Mitterrand—we made sure, when there was the scandalous bicentennial of the French Revolution, that we could barely speak of the victims of the Revolution, who are not only the actors of the Revolution.
56:16 And all that allows us not to talk, for example, about the massacre that was the Commune, the repression of the Commune. Why am I talking about this in connection with silence? Because Mr. Thiers, the executioner of the Commune, broadly speaking the political executioner—let's not do what our adversaries do, who talk about the "Butcher of Damascus," you see, who like to personalize things, like Rocky in his ring, boxing against a Soviet.
56:49 A profound stupidity of a world in decline. Mr. Thiers, after the repression of the Commune, after having taken things back in hand, nevertheless acknowledged this: he said, we cannot forever solve the problem with national guardsmen, with bayonets. Now we have to learn to win elections. You are the power. We are.
57:20 The greatness of Rousseau, who revealed our sovereignty to us. The strongest man is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms—you'll hear this sooner or later, before it's too late—unless he transforms his strength into right, and obedience—blind obedience, that is—into duty. There, I obey the law when I recognize it as legitimate. Besides, I voted for it.
57:50 It's an impersonal "I." There you go. That still makes us revise a few things. And yes, I told you this was an exceptional sequence, but not so exceptional that we forget we're doing philosophy—not just a current-events segment, geopolitics. I'm setting aside Aberkane's intervention from earlier. I mean, I also have to worry about seeing what is im Spiel, in the Beispiel, to borrow a Hegelian pun, what is at stake in the example.
58:31 You see the stakes. I know, Till Eulenspiegel, "espiègle" in French, the Germanic root. In the game, it's hard to do—I mean, it's hard to act behind the peoples' backs. That's how everything happens. But for that, you need to take care of the communication, you need to save appearances, as they used to say in the days when astronomers tried to preserve the Ptolemaic system, to preserve the geocentric system.
59:05 For that, there were mathematical calculations that proved useful—fine cunning of reason, which helped advance mathematics, but which tended to model a sky that only existed in their heads. There you go. They were trying to save appearances to explain away the fact that observations completely contradicted the old model, the pre-Galilean, pre-Copernican model. So let me come back to the Sahel, and the death drives advancing in silence.
The Téra convoy, seen by France 24 and TV5 Monde 59:39 No, I'm not doing a litany. It's that the event we're about to see now, in the video that's coming, involves two young unarmed people, protesters, angry but peaceful, unarmed, against a French convoy in late 2021. We're in 2023. We're in mid-2023. I'm talking to you about December 2021. A French military convoy is on the move.
1:00:11 It's coming from Côte d'Ivoire. It loaded up at the port of Abidjan, presumably with weapons. I'm not going to take a position on the substance. These are serious matters. But I know more or less—even the observers, more or less the majority of people, there's a consensus on this—that it was intended, of course, for our troops in Mali. Some, with worse intentions, said no, that it was also partly meant to help the jihadists a little. But I refuse to take a position on that point.
1:00:45 And I'll tell you why in the video that follows. It's very easy to go after grunts, to go after soldiers, people who risk their lives on the ground. Personally, I hold it against those who send them out there. Those who were landed in Normandy, those 50,000 young men who fell on the beaches of Normandy in the very first days—there were more afterward. I hold it against those who sent them—not against the fact that they sent them, on the contrary.
1:01:18 but against the fact that they sent them so late. Given how long the Nazis had been at it, we couldn't take it anymore. We'd passed tens of millions of dead, and finally a second front had to be opened. And the Americans finally made up their minds when the Russians were at the gates of Berlin. The danger wasn't Nazism. And the danger for you, for your generation, is—to catch themselves up—the same people who say, "But Nazism, but communism, it's the same thing anyway, it was voted on by the European Parliament. Come on, let's calm down."
1:01:49 It's serious, the world we're living in, the direction this world is heading. Like never before—I'm an old man, I'm walking toward my 80th year, I have never seen a danger of war as close as now. I'm not talking here about a small sub-regional war or a projection of our forces. No, I'm talking about the apocalypse. Everything is being done, on the Western side, to rush headlong toward it.
1:02:19 So I'm going to ask that we recall this event: this French military convoy crossing the region, it comes from the south, from Abidjan, it heads north, it has to cross Burkina—sorry, it has to cross Niger to reach, afterward, Burkina and then Mali. And here, in a region I know well, the Téra region, on the border, so to speak, of what's called the famous tri-border area of Burkina, Mali, and Niger.
1:03:00 Then, in passing, there's a lot of gold in this tri-border region, but let's not complicate things. The convoy, shortly before leaving Niger, was stopped by Nigerien protesters, the same ones I was talking about earlier, who were furious to see their country soon becoming the encampment—the barracks, even—of what, to them, was an imperialist attitude, and on top of that, by their former colonizers.
1:03:31 To clear the convoy, I was about to say, the French soldiers fired, and there were two deaths. Judge for yourselves. There are two documents I've chosen. Neither comes from Moscow or Beijing. One comes from France 24, which is the state channel—it's his master's voice. And the other comes from TV5 Monde. You know, TV5 Monde is a union of the television networks of French-speaking countries.
1:04:05 There's Belgium, Canada—basically, all NATO countries. So I mean, I'm not preaching for my own parish, I'm not putting my own flock forward, if you prefer to keep spinning religious metaphors. No. Except that the account, as you'll see—I'm telling you beforehand so you pay close attention—from France 24 recounts the events, shows you some crowd movements, doesn't give a single second of airtime to the victims' side, that is, to the protesters—not a single protester interviewed—whereas TV5 Monde does.
1:04:43 And there, listen—let's take it up properly. It's in the north-central part of Burkina Faso: French soldiers were on their way to Niger when men blocked their path. The group of protesters is opposed to the presence of the Barkhane force in the Sahel. A source at the French embassy in Ouagadougou, and another within the French army, confirm this blockade without giving further details. Report by Kalidou Sy. "French army, get out" or "Free the Sahel," one could read on placards raised by protesters gathered in Kaya, capital of the north-central region of Burkina Faso.
1:05:18 There are thousands of them gathered since Friday to block the passage of a French military convoy coming from Côte d'Ivoire and headed to Niger. It was first in the city of Bobo-Dioulasso that the convoy was blocked by protesters earlier in the week. Then, as it passed through here in Ouagadougou, the French army's convoy was able to continue on its way to Kaya. But it's in this city that the convoy, made up of several dozen vehicles, has been at a standstill since Thursday, facing pressure from thousands of protesters on site and their insistence.
1:05:48 This Saturday, shortly after noon, the French army carried out warning shots. These protests against the French army come a week after the jihadist attack of November 14 against the gendarmerie post in Inata, which killed at least 53 people, including 49 gendarmes and 4 civilians, according to a provisional official toll. Two days later, several hundred people took part in protests in several cities across the country demanding the resignation of the President of the Republic, Roch Marc Christian Kaboré, for, I quote, his "inability to put an end to the terrorist attacks."
1:06:21 Finally, a national demonstration is planned for November 27, again demanding the resignation of Burkina Faso's president, Roch Marc Christian Kaboré, bringing together the political opposition and a coalition of civil society groups. On the road to Téra, marks still bear witness to the previous day's violence. The French army convoy was met by a large crowd, at times vehement—several hundred people at least, perhaps thousands. This Sunday, the town has returned to its usual routine, but some residents and witnesses remain shocked.
1:06:53 "I went there in the morning with the whole crowd. I made my contribution because what concerns Niger touches me first and foremost. Unfortunately, some died for a good cause." The Nigerien Ministry of the Interior, in a statement, indeed reported two dead and eleven seriously wounded among the protesters. We were not able to enter the Téra hospital. No authority wished to answer our questions. A few people here agreed to testify. "My little brother is one of the victims. He was 23 years old."
1:07:24 "In the morning, he woke up. We prayed together." "I was there since the morning and none of our soldiers gave the order to fire. I can assure you it was the French soldiers who fired the tear gas and the gunshots." And all the testimonies gathered accuse the French army. "I thank the Nigerien army, which came to maintain order. It's mainly the French army that is behind this massacre." Some were present in direct contact with the convoy of soldiers and Nigerien gendarmes.
1:07:56 "They fired on us. The helicopter dropped tear gas several times. But if it's about shooting, it was the French themselves who fired at us. Because it happened right in front of me. They said it wasn't them, that it was the Nigerien gendarmes who fired at them. That's false. That's not true." The French army's general staff spoke to us. It does acknowledge shots being fired, but tear gas shots, warning shots, and shots fired at the ground to disperse a violent crowd, in order to avoid the looting of the convoy and to prevent endangering civilian drivers.
The jihadist argument in question 1:08:33 The arrival of this convoy is scheduled for Sunday evening in Gao, Mali. That was in December '21. I didn't think it would move so fast, but I could clearly see the situation would keep shifting eastward. There, we're in Mali—that it would continue into Burkina, which is already involved, then into Niger, which is already involved. Let no one say it was a surprise, a bolt of thunder out of a clear sky.
1:09:07 So, you'll tell me, yes, but still, I mean, our forces' presence there is nevertheless justified by the presence of a guerrilla, a danger of expansion of jihadist forces. We're no longer quite sure about "Islamists," "jihadists"—let's say jihadists, that's a bit more precise, those who are supposed to be waging holy war, even if—well, I'm not going to give a course on Islam, this isn't the place.
1:09:45 But come now, this is nonsense, people are being taken for fools. But these are our allies, the Islamists. Or else I've understood nothing, I don't know—wasn't that what we were told, the fighters in Afghanistan, the fanatics, those who blew up the Buddhas of Bamiyan, which belonged to world heritage, the Buddha carved into the cliff, along Alexander's route, in ancient Bactria. Those who stone women accused of adultery, those who banned musical entertainment, those who publicly stoned people who'd drunk alcohol—those are our allies.
1:10:26 It's with them that we drove the "Popovs" out of Afghanistan, yes or no? Honestly, I don't understand—we carried out military interventions in Muslim countries, but not to drive out the Islamists, rather to put them in power. We intervened militarily only in the secular countries—Iraq. I'm not speaking well of Saddam Hussein, but that's not a reason for me to sentence him to death and behead him in front of you. He put my comrades in vats of acid, he's not on my side.
1:11:02 One has to be intellectually honest, but still, I mean, going from that to those who wave the Islamist threat and justify our presence there with the same arguments as the obsession with the "great replacement"—no one knows where that comes from, those who have learned nothing and forgotten nothing, as was said of the émigrés, of the émigrés' return after the French Revolution. Those who learned nothing still understand nothing, but the difference from when they left is that now they're afraid. When you're afraid, you become cruel.
1:11:36 So don't trot out that argument that we're fighting a war against Islamism. What would we do without Islamism? We wouldn't be in Libya, we wouldn't be in Iraq, we wouldn't be in Syria—but we are in Syria. I believe that, thanks to the Russians, Syria was saved—the last secular country. There are American forces still in Syria, exploiting the little oil that country has, an extension of the Iraqi oil fields, well, anyway.
1:12:12 And as for France, you know there was the Lafarge affair, caught red-handed, dealing with the Islamists over there. What are you telling us, that we're fighting Islamism? No, you have it in for the Arabs, in your own suburbs. That's your problem, not that of the vast majority of our people. Because Islam, first of all—the largest Muslim countries aren't even Arab.
1:12:42 go try explaining that to people who listen to Zemmour. The largest Muslim country by population is Pakistan, and Indonesia. Neither of the two is an Arab country. We mustn't mix up the issues. That's why I don't have the same approach—I made use of Idriss Aberkane because he had shone the spotlight on the region we're talking about tonight.
1:13:19 But as I told you, we don't have, to say the least, the same approach. When he talks about "Françafrique," that's not my discourse. That's not my vocabulary. I'm not saying that something designated by the term "Françafrique" never existed. But those who use it as a term of infamy are the very ones currently running things in order to get rid of the forces in France that weren't Atlanticist—that is, the Gaullist networks. One needs to relearn a bit of one's history. It was to get rid of the Foccart networks.
Formal democracy and the La Baule speech 1:13:50 All the older people know full well what I mean. So we don't share the same approach. And also, I want to say, I'm not judging the man Idriss Aberkane, I said he wasn't an adversary, but he's not part of my current either. I'll stop there, because I have other, more serious cases to make tonight. And not ad hominem. And as for defending the idea that we're there to bring democracy back into line, because after all, I've been playing devil's advocate since earlier, since we resumed after the video—after all, there were indeed military men who staged a coup against a democratically elected head of state.
1:14:33 Yes. But I'm not speaking, I'm not making an ad hominem argument—I had the chance to know the head of state currently held captive, and I won't say a word against him, nor of course for those currently supporting him, most of whom, moreover, aren't even in Niger. But don't fool yourselves. Here too, the death drives are advancing in silence.
1:15:04 Nobody ever told you about the La Baule speech, except back when it was time for the PR campaign. Yes. Some people remember, Mitterrand, gathering all the leaders of Francophone Africa at La Baule to tell them, "France-Afrique is over now, from now on it has to be democracy." That's good, you'll tell me, I'm for it too. In fact, it was a matter of substituting for the Gaullist networks the networks you can guess, and that's today's Africa, considerably more bloodied than that of the Foccart era, and that was already grim enough.
1:15:43 The mercenaries, Bob Denard, that wasn't great either. But it's nothing compared to the chaos there is now. So, let me tell you, how many villages are there in Mali, Burkina, Niger, where people are having their throats slit in the villages, right? So, I've been to elections. I had the chance, a few years ago, to take part as a friend in an election campaign in the interior of Niger.
1:16:16 I won't say for which party or for which candidate. Things are raw right now, so this isn't the time. But the least peasant who showed up was recruited as a voter. I gave him the equivalent of one or two euros. If you want to know what democratically elected elections mean. There you go, I'm not calling into question at all the legitimacy of President Bazoum, who is moreover a colleague because he's a philosophy professor — that's how I came to know him, which is rather rare.
1:16:57 worth mentioning, that's his background. It's rare among heads of state, let alone among the heads of state of the region. There you go. And I hope he himself and his family come out of this ordeal as well as possible. But don't tell me, don't repeat the propaganda, the hammering of what we're being fed. What's happening is serious. When you want to wage war, you need public opinion on your side.
1:17:27 That's what has changed since the eighteenth century, since the Enlightenment. So, the way, propaganda, the media, etc., you see what's at stake, now we see it. There's war and peace behind all this. They don't tell you that, they tell you about the big problems — because I'm not saying the media say nothing, they say that it's just been measured, the oceans have never been so warm — while every day aircraft are crossing the border between Poland, Belarus, China, Taiwan, what are they talking to you about?
1:18:01 Sponges? Corals? If one day, I tell you, the corals are saved from destruction, I tell you it will be thanks to man, mind you. We'll talk about that another time, it's not tonight's subject. So, we're maybe going to move on now to the next video. And I believe it's one I had titled, not very long after the previous one, "Philosophizing under threat."
"Philosophizing under threat": insecurity in the Sahel 1:18:39 To show you how much what's currently happening in Niger was brewing at the level of the whole region. Since I was talking about death and contempt, I come back to it now. I think you understand these geographical back-and-forths, right? We're going to move to the Sahel. We haven't finished talking about what's happening in eastern Europe. I'll sum up the stakes for you right away.
1:19:11 I'm past 75, I have never seen a danger of war as pressing as these past few days. There you go. That doesn't mean there will be war. There are deterrent factors on both sides. But I have never seen the world on the brink of apocalypse to this degree, and I lived through the Cold War and the alert of the Cuban missile crisis, the Berlin airlift. We've seen others. Never has the worst been felt this much.
1:19:52 So, I come back to the Sahel. Why? Because I wanted to sketch out, right? They say we're there to fight against jihadism. Except that the peoples are chasing us out. The peoples we were supposed to protect against the rebels are noticing that since we arrived, it's been almost ten years now, seven years, the victims of jihadism have multiplied fiftyfold. Hence the military coups that our media designate with that arrogance I was talking about, that moneyed vulgarity, "the junta," right?
1:20:28 When you see the popular jubilation in the streets of Bamako and, more recently, in the coup that just took place in the last 48 hours in Burkina, right? A country right to the east of Mali, to the point that the [French] force is forced to fall back further and further east toward Niger and of course Chad, which has always been the barracks of French policy, with regional if not local cannon fodder — when you see this jubilation and our media lecture us on democracy — well if it were just our media, they're at the government's beck and call — but our minister, Madame Parly, minister of defense, you should see the violence of the terms in which she expresses herself toward the Malian authorities. And it didn't stay at words: Paris diplomacy got from ECOWAS, the Economic Community of West African States—
1:21:38 that is, a bunch of heads of state, some of whom illegitimately extended their term three times over, almost all of whom do nothing against corruption that's eating away at their countries — I'm not making a moral judgment for now, I'm just observing — when you come from that kind of context, you don't lecture on democracy a people who have just taken the risk of shaking off a yoke, the yoke of foreign intervention in their country. I'm thinking here not only of the French army — I already told you last time I spoke about it that I didn't have a word against the soldiers who are on the ground, they're there because they were sent there, and not everyone is in the position of those who are on the ground, some of whom lose their lives there — just yesterday there was another victim in Gao — no, I'm targeting here the politicians who send them into the meat grinder and who are on far better terms with those they're supposedly hunting as enemies. That's mainly it.
1:22:48 and the populations are starting to realize, to understand, that all the same — if you know the region a bit geographically, the Sahel is an almost permanent dust cloud throughout the year, literally I mean, a moped, when you see it on a dirt track even a kilometer away, it's an enormous cloud of dust. The desiccation, with the terrifying Sahelian and sub-Saharan heat, the desiccation of the soils means the soils are more powdery, and at the slightest breath — and God knows there is wind, coming sometimes from the Atlantic, sometimes on the contrary from deep in the desert, from the north, like the harmattan — immediately it raises enormous clouds of dust. It's not Vietnam, where the guerrillas could hide in the jungle. No, the slightest vehicle, the slightest moped, the slightest car, a fortiori a column of jihadists with their 4x4s and their machine guns, are spotted immediately from a plane, a helicopter, even from several thousand meters up.
1:23:58 And ten years on, you never really hear about a big hit, a battle, you hear there are captures, apparently. We neutralize a commando that fired on our troops, yes, that. But the peoples of the region no longer feel safe. And what triggered — I'm thinking of Burkina now, since it's the most recent one — what triggered the process that led to the recent coup in Burkina is the fact that the last straw that broke the camel's back was in June 2021: 164 villagers, women, children, the elderly, 30 children, were massacred in front of their parents, and the parents were then finished off, in small villages either in the north of Burkina, or in what's called the triple border area of Burkina, Mali, Niger.
1:24:58 Burkina sits wedged between the two big, immense countries, being itself a bit smaller — Niger to the east, and Mali to the west and north, which caps it, so to speak. So, an appalling massacre, that's the biggest one, but there's almost every weekend 50 dead here, 30 dead there in the villages. And then, a second serious event, on a smaller scale, 54 gendarmes — that was just before the holidays, actually in the course of December, sorry, no, in November, sorry, in November 2021 — who were murdered, again by these well-armed jihadists.
1:25:44 Nobody ever says by whom. They're poor wretches, in those regions there are only poor wretches, they barely have enough to buy food, how could they buy the most sophisticated weapons? And the gendarmes — what really lit the powder keg is that the investigation showed these poor gendarmes had become easy prey, because for ages they'd been abandoned by the central government — the one for which France is demanding they be returned to power, because it's scandalous, he was democratically elected, you know, formal law, that they know all about.
1:26:18 They had been abandoned by the central government, so abandoned that they had nothing left to eat, that they went hunting in the bush to feed themselves, and that even the wounded, resulting from these skirmishes they occasionally had while carrying out their duty as soldiers against the jihadists, no vehicles or aircraft were sent to bring them back.
1:26:48 You see why I didn't deal only with the Nigerien question? It's the whole region that is being diminished, but you'd think you were hearing what the new head of state of Niger declared the day before yesterday. If they decided on this operation, and to depose the former executive, essentially, they say, it was for reasons of security, the country was no longer safe.
1:27:23 That's exactly what was happening in Burkina and Mali. How is it that what justifies your presence, you, foreign soldiers, is to protect us against a threat, and since you've been there, the threat keeps growing? Put yourself in the populations' shoes. I don't have all the answers. I don't know. Just as earlier, I didn't want to settle whether it was really French soldiers who shot the two unfortunate young people who died in Téra, Niger.
1:28:01 I'm astonished that our state television wouldn't even have given a voice to that. After all, there are victims there. But anyway, I mean, I'm not settling it. These are serious matters. In serious matters, you need a minimum of responsibility. But don't tell me tall tales, that we are waging war there like some kind of crusade. I'm not going to start again talking about those who have forgotten nothing and learned nothing. There you go. I apologize for this impromptu digression tonight, which isn't in keeping with the continuity, although I could have developed it further, but we'd have strayed far from the events that concern us.
1:28:44 We'd have strayed far apparently. Well, I mean, I'm talking about the subject of cunning reason that has occupied us for some time already, and which we'll talk about again next time we meet live, next week. But this time you'll be notified in time so you can take part, even more of you than tonight. Thank you all in any case, despite the late hour at which you were notified, for being with us tonight. Thanks to everyone, one and all. I'm wary now.
1:29:14 But we're right. These are objective advances. And let's not forget that an ultimatum has expired, and that we need to stay tuned to the news flashes, checking multiple sources if possible. There you go. Thank you all, and see you next week. Thanks to Pierre Allain and the whole technical team.
