The Neo-pacifists make war... on peace

Robert Redeker
Translated by Douglas
French original: "Les néopacifistes en guerre... contre la paix"
(Le Monde, 2003/03/25)

No fate more tragic than that of pacifism. Claiming to combat imperialism, it has most often chosen the worst side — fascism, nazism, Communism — generally finding itself allied with the most resolute enemies of liberty. The anti-war demonstrations that are unfurling just about everywhere on the planet are not helping pacifism to escape its equivocal past: pacifist rhetoric, which divides the world into two sides (America and the people) has not demonstrated that it has abandoned the anti-American slogans of the 1950s, when the Movement for Peace took its orders from Moscow.

In order to exist, contemporary pacifism finds itself forced to conceal its past. Now that Communism has taken its place in the dust heap of history, the dichotomist and absolutist rhetoric employed from one demonstration to the next pursues an unstated aim: to have us forget an event that is equally as important as the Americans’ victory over Hitlerian nazism but never referred to. This repressed event, a taboo of memory, lasted several decades: America protected western Europe against Communism.

The American miracle in western Europe did one thing in particular: it formed an effective barrage, preventing red totalitarianism from extending its empire of camps, psychiatric asylums, mass executions and barbed wire as far as the Atlantic, allowing the countries thus protected (France, Italy, West Germany, Benelux) to witness the rise of a generalized prosperity such as the world had never known with a degree of personal freedom not seen before then.

May 1968, the child of Coca-Cola and Karl Marx, could only have been born amidst this prosperity and freedom — only within this geographic, ideological, commercial and historical space, sheltered by American military might. When we see what became of the European nations like Czechoslovakia, DDR or Hungary under the Communist chalice, we can measure the good that was dispensed to us by the Americans.

Pacifist rhetoric — scarcely peaceful in the aggressive violence of its statements about the US — presents itself as a rhetoric for forgetting that long-lasting event. These are America’s benefits to civilization — so much that all these demonstrations would hide the history of philo-totalitarian pacifism.

For sixty years, “War on America” has been the sole and solitary slogan of all pacifisms. It is however thanks to the United States, to the might of the American military, and despite pacifist hatred, that we are today neither “red” nor “dead”!

At this very moment, the neo-pacifists are busy concealing the good things America has brought in order to avoid recognizing a difficult double truth: on one hand, it was not the people who freed themselves from nazism. It was to the American army, “the Anglo-Americans” as Vichy propaganda said hatefully, that we owed this liberation. And, on the other hand, neither was it the people who assured western Europe’s protection from Communism, which held some charm for them. It was American policy. In the context of demonization, for which we have the opportunity every day on all the airwaves and in the endless, gaudy rosary of street protests, the phrase “the Anglo-Americans” echoes strangely in our French ears.

To include attacks on Israel in these diatribes, as happened in a recent demonstration, recalls the somber years, anti-British, anti-American and anti-Semitic, of the nazi occupation. At the time, nazi/Vichy propaganda emphasized (in the news, the cinemas) the imagery of “Anglo-American” bombing the better to accuse them of barbarism and inhumanity.

Far from raising itself above either side to a philosophical idea of peace, with its ambiguous vocabulary, contemporary pacifism proves to be quite opposed to peace when one examines the slogans it thunders aloud: it speaks in Manichean, unalloyed, dichotomist and partisan terms (there are only two sides: American and the people), exclusively oriented against the Americans (to whom the Israelis are sometimes attached) and violently aggressive. This planetary neo-pacifism is, in its violence and hostility toward America, another rhetoric of war. It calls to mobilization, to combat, to forms of war.

If, by means of a propaganda doomed to failure, Bush wasn’t necessarily correct in demonizing Iraq to excess — transforming ageless Baghdad into an enemy of the entire human race — the neo-pacifists are transmogrifying America into the world’s scapegoat.

The failure to recognize the debt to the dominant power comes of a massive resentment of the strongest and richest. As the very definition of de-politicization, sentimental rejection of power causes historic irresponsibility: rejecting power, in particular that of a non-totalitarian empire such as the United States that embodies democratic values, ultimately means fighting for the law of the jungle, for carving up the planet among warlords and ethno-crats, favoring neo-feudalism and endless conflict, infinite civil war. While they don’t know it, the neo-pacifists’ struggle is against peace insofar as it is motivated by the resentment of power.

The pacifists fail to understand that peoples are sometimes not to be trusted. They see right in numbers. The belief is that the people are the real good and popular speech the declaration of this good. However, generally, people do not seek good: they wish to be balkanized in peace, alienated (from consumption, from other religions, traditions and narrow-minded particularities). They seek a voluntary, peaceful servitude to symbols.

Those Iranians who fought the Shah — a battle supported by western intellectuals, including Michel Foucault, on the pretext that the Shah was a US vassal — far from fighting for freedom, were fighting for a servitude that was even greater still, more exalted in their eyes, for absolute religious alienation with a government of ayatollahs and mullahs.

People experience politics — and, in the case of the United States, politics are identified to power — as an obstacle to their devoutly wished alienation.

In identifying the real and the good with the people, with the progress of history, the pacifists begin all their systematic mistakes and make their choice in favor of totalitarianism — of which the ideologies always claim popularity — rather than the United States, of which the system of individual and democratic values displeases the pacifists to the exact degree that it is linked to power.

Robert Redeker teaches philosophy at Pierre-Paul-Riquet high school in Saint-Orens (Haute-Garonne) and is a contributing editor at the review Les Temps modernes.

[Posted 2003/03/27]

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