English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Opening: a geopolitics split in two areas 1:47 I turn away from the orchestra conducted by Valery Gergiev toward you, and with the joy you can imagine at finding you again after such a long absence — to borrow a famous title. My very first words will be words of gratitude, which I will not develop because this is not the place for it. I am speaking here above all to the members, who know what I mean. And I will be more explicit with them on that point at the next General Assembly, which you have been informed will be held very soon, in the coming days of February.
2:29 A Sunday — it will be a Sunday, of your choosing. I was very touched by the movement of solidarity that was expressed. That said, I now go back to the program planned for this evening. You have been informed that I gave priority in this talk to the geopolitical situation, to put it simply.
3:05 These are notions I'm wary of, all this. But there are worse notions than that, that's not the issue. It can be used. Everyone knows what I mean. Except that once again, during this segment, this geopolitics, which implies a geography, is going to be split into two areas that seem completely independent of one another, that can no longer be separated from each other, to say the least — I mean Eastern Europe, of course, and the countries bordering Russia.
4:14 Roughly speaking. From the economic standpoint, and NATO from the politico-military standpoint. What is also called, in the same media, the international community. As if the international community could be amputated of one billion five hundred million Chinese, one billion two hundred million Hindus, Indians, one hundred million Russians, all the African countries.
4:44 I'll skip the rest. I'm not even talking about Latin America, etc. So, coming back to it, the same geographic split, because it's the same forces seeking and sometimes finding each other, isn't it, in Eastern Europe and in the very recent events that have just occurred — to the general stupefaction of the main parties concerned, of the outgoing ones, I'm playing a little on the expression, I'm thinking here of our executive branch, because Macron's and Madame Parly's policy south of the Sahara has just taken a double slap in a short time, first in Mali, then in Burkina in the last two days, and again in Mali today, where we learned that the Danish contingent we had brought in, you see, to redeploy our military activity in the Sahel — they're going to involve the whole of NATO outright, the NATO countries. They say the European Commission, yes, but it's the NATO countries.
Prokofiev's fifth symphony, composed in 1944 5:53 In fact, the Cold War is hunting down its adversaries both in Eastern Europe and south of the Sahara. I'll stay fairly general for now, since you're going to see videos about these events in a very short while. Before giving way to those videos, on which I'll do a follow-up that will be the real start of our session, since this is only an overarching introduction, let me also say a few words about those few bars of Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony, which is generally agreed to be the summit of his symphonic work, and that's saying something — but to tell you it was composed in 1944.
6:46 At the moment when he returns from abroad, Prokofiev finds his homeland thrown down, shattered — not broken, mind you, not in morale — victorious. But at what price? At what price? At the price of 30 million dead, at the price of 70,000 destroyed cities, at the price of the destruction of everything that had been built with so many sacrifices during the five-year plans.
7:20 I don't know — I'll say it right away to jump to the present — whether Russia itself ever recovered from such an unprecedented destruction of a nation-state on that scale. Well, and this symphony bears the mark of that tragic context in which he finds his homeland again after a brief stay abroad. Let me open a lighter parenthesis: he adored Paris, because he was a big eater, as one says in rather ungallant terms.
7:55 He loved good food. Well, what can you do? He's a bourgeois bastard, no doubt a fascist, since he likes... When a worker decides to improve the everyday fare a little on a Sunday, to put a more starched tablecloth than usual, or a more decorated one, and to have a slightly better wine than the kind that delights the heart and ruins the stomach — that's the advertisement for the one that delights.
8:28 And a better piece of meat besides, a change from frozen food and fast food. Now this worker is accused of fascism — well, of "fâchisme" — but that implies a contempt, I'm thinking of course of the way Fabien Roussel's remarks were received. I'm not defending any particular camp, I'm appalled by the hostility that was met, by the fact that he said — that's exactly what he said — that everyone should have access to those moments of happiness, of popular happiness.
9:11 Prokofiev loved, in Paris, going to the great restaurants when he could, and he had a terrifying Cossack appetite. I close the parenthesis. Here, you see, it's not the same tone. This symphony bears the mark of the tragedy his country had just suffered. Prokofiev discovers the first immense, gigantic, and terrible aftermath.
9:43 And if now and then — those with a trained ear will already have caught it — if now and then there are attempts by great Slavic lyricism to break through in spite of everything and open horizons of hope, they are quickly hemmed in by a metallic, chaotic, hostile, and dangerous world. That's the very beginning, what I just played for you. I'll stop there, because you'll get more thorough developments on this symphony in the closing credits of this video. But I recommend it to you, Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony, conducted here by one of the greatest living conductors — some say the greatest living conductor, even if some media don't like him, because apparently Putin likes to go to his concerts, which of course proves that this conductor is worthless.
The Biden video at the Council on Foreign Relations 10:29 This is the great Valery Gergiev, whom everyone here has been able to applaud at the Philharmonie, at the Opéra Garnier, at the Bastille, wherever you like, and who is here, of course, in his element with Sergei Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony. Now, the first video I'm going to show you — it's unbelievable, you won't believe your eyes — we see President Biden surrounded by a few super-consultants, I'll explain, talking about how he intervened with the Ukrainian government in 2018.
11:13 You see why I'm showing it? In 2018 — not that long ago — he was over there because things were getting a bit hot for his son, who had been caught over there for wrongdoing. And a prosecutor was about to indict him. Biden tells the story in this video — let me tell you the context, because information like this needs to be sourced. There are videos floating around and you don't quite know where they come from. This one couldn't be more secure. It's a CFR video, one of the most powerful think tanks, as they say, a lobby — the super-influencers, the small influencers that we are on YouTube, we're chump change next to these great American think tanks that have gigantic budgets and that sometimes make and unmake regimes.
12:04 And here, he thinks he's among friends, which is why he lets the mask drop. You won't believe your ears, I tell you, or your eyes if you read the text, because the text of his remarks, in English of course, is translated into French. You'll see it on screen. He tells how he went to meet the Ukrainian officials back in 2018, Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk — that government half of which was made up of openly Nazi parties, I'm thinking of the Svoboda party, which even bears the most extreme insignia of Nazi imagery.
12:47 That tin-pot regalia. And how he tells them, listen, we were ready to give you a billion because you do have one quality, which is that you're anti-Russian. But if your prosecutor keeps going after my son like this, I'm not giving it to you. And he tells this story right in front of us. The people burst out laughing, the great consultants. So we're not at Congress, we're not in a parliamentary setting, in a public interview — we're among ourselves, among the makers and unmakers of this world.
13:27 And so he tells how he said that if they wanted that billion, they had to start by firing that prosecutor. Yes indeed, by firing the prosecutor! I'm talking about the country that Russia is supposedly attacking, whose autonomy and independence it is supposedly violating. Look how much he cares about the independence of those countries — they're satellite states. Ukraine, the Baltic states, what Poland has become now — all under the boot of NATO's soldiery.
13:57 And it's almost unbelievable to see the credit the Americans still enjoy today in Ukraine after what you're about to hear. Because there, he says — I pick up the thread and I'll finish — fire me that prosecutor, or you won't get the billion. The others answer him, "but you're not the president." He was vice-president at the time. Oh really? He called the president. Already there's laughter, but not in the room where this conversation takes place. And Biden adds, listen, in six hours I'm taking the plane. Figure it out however you want. As long as that prosecutor is there, you won't get the billion.
14:33 And he concludes by saying, of course, they ended up firing him, that son of a bitch. And we put in place someone reliable. I understand, but there's nothing to laugh about, it's terrifying. The world we live in, isn't it? Because it's for these puppet governments, these marionettes, that all of French public opinion is being stirred up as if it were the victim of Russian troops massed on Russian territory — as an excellent post I owe to our friend and comrade Jean-Paul Legrand recently put it, and which he shared: Russian troops are on Russian soil, American troops are all over the world. From the China Sea to South America, through wherever you like, and especially in Europe.
15:30 There you go — the largest American base in the entire world, Ramstein, is not in Germany [as some think] — yes, same name as the band, everyone has their own tastes in music. There, time for the video — I had to give you the context, otherwise you wouldn't have believed your ears. I'll ask Pierre-Alain to play this barely believable document; we're in January 2018.
16:08 We spent so much time on the phone making sure that everyone from, at the time, Hollande, to Renzi, wouldn't walk away. They wanted no part of these sanctions on Russia. It had an impact on them. It was basically, you've got to do that. And thank God Merkel was strong enough at the time to, reluctantly, she didn't like it either. I went over, I guess the 12th, 13th time to Kyiv and I was supposed to announce that there was another billion dollar loan guarantee.
16:43 And I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor and they didn't. So they said they had, they were walking out to the press conference and said, no, I said, I'm not going to, we're not going to give you the billion dollars. They said, you have no authority, you're not the president. The president said, I said, call him. I said, I'm telling you, you're not getting a billion dollars. I said, you're not getting a billion, I'm going to be leaving here, I think it was what, six hours? I looked, I said, I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor's not fired, you're not getting the money.
17:16 Oh, son of a bitch. Got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time. Edifying, if I may say, isn't it? Edifying, terrifying, chilling, obscene above all. This obscenity, this vulgarity on top of it, you see? Son of a bitch. That vulgarity — vulgus means the people — I have nothing against the generous vulgarity of an Honorine. You know, in Pagnol's Marius, the fishmonger woman with her little stall in front of César's bistro — there's a popular flavor to that vulgarity that delights us when we hear it. You just have to go to the markets of Provence to understand what I mean. Or elsewhere. Vulgarity in the etymological sense, popular expression that cares little for figures of speech.
18:21 And then there's what's most obscene. The one unforgivable vulgarity, the moneyed vulgarity, with its haughtiness and its contempt. Since I'm on the subject of haughtiness and contempt, let me come back now. I think you understand these back-and-forth shifts in geography, don't you? We're going to move to the Sahel. We haven't finished talking about what's happening in Eastern Europe.
Danger of war and French failure in the Sahel 18:51 Let me sum up the stakes right away. I'm over 75, and I have never seen a danger of war as pressing as these days. There you have it. That doesn't mean there will be war. There are elements of deterrence. But I have never seen the world so close to the brink of Apocalypse, and I lived through the Cold War, the alert of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Berlin Airlift, we've seen others.
19:24 It has never felt this much like the worst is coming. So, there's another question. Let me come back to the Sahel, why? Because I wanted to sketch this out: we're told we're there to fight jihadism, except that the peoples there are in the process of driving 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, well, seven years — the victims of jihadism have multiplied by 50.
20:03 Hence the military coups that our media label with that haughtiness I was talking about, that moneyed vulgarity — "the junta," isn't it? 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 Faso — a country just east of Mali — to the point that our forces are being forced to retreat further and further east toward Niger, and of course Chad, which has always been, hasn't it, the barracks of French policy, with regional, not to say local, cannon fodder.
20:49 When you see this jubilation, and our media giving lessons in democracy — if it were only our media, they're under the boot, but our minister, Madame Parly, the Minister of Defense — you should see the violence of the terms in which she speaks about the Malian authorities. And it didn't stop at words. Parisian diplomacy got the ECOWAS — the Economic Community of West African States, that is, a bunch of heads of state, some of whom have wrongfully extended their mandate three times over — to act.
21:30 Almost none of them do anything against the corruption eating away at their countries. I'm not passing moral judgment for now. I'm simply noting that when you come from that kind of background, you don't get to give lessons in democracy to a people who just took the risk of shaking off a yoke — the yoke of foreign intervention in their country. I'm thinking here of the French army. I already told you last time I spoke about it that I'm not saying 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 on the ground, some of whom lose their lives there — just yesterday there was a casualty in Gao.
22:20 No, no, I'm targeting here the politicians who send them to their deaths and who have far better relations with those who are supposedly the enemies they're hunting — that's really the point — and the populations are starting to realize, to understand that, if you know the region a little geographically, the Sahel is a ball of dust almost permanently throughout the year, literally. A moped, when you see it on a dirt track, even a kilometer away, is an enormous cloud of dust. The desiccation, with the appalling Sahelian and sub-Saharan heat, the desiccation of the soil means the soil is more powdery, and at the slightest breath — and God knows there's wind, sometimes coming from the Atlantic, sometimes on the contrary from deep in the desert, from the north, like the harmattan — immediately it kicks up...
23:15 Enormous clouds of dust. This isn't Vietnam, where the guerrillas could hide in the jungle. No! The slightest vehicle, the slightest moped, the slightest car, all the more so the slightest jihadist column with their 4x4s and machine guns, are spotted immediately from a plane, a helicopter, even from several thousand meters up. And ten years on, you never really hear about a big strike, 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.
23:59 And what triggered — I'm thinking of Burkina now, since it's the most recent — what triggered the process that led to the recent coup in Burkina is the fact that the last straws that broke the camel's back, if you like, were in June 2021: 164 villagers — women, children, the elderly, 30 children — were massacred in front of their parents. And the parents were then killed in small villages in the north of Burkina, either in the north or in what's called the tri-border area of Burkina, Mali, Niger.
24:42 Burkina lies wedged between two large, vast countries — Burkina itself being a bit smaller — Niger to the east and Mali to the west, which sort of caps it, if I may put it that way. So an appalling massacre, that's the biggest one, but there are almost every weekend 50 dead here, 30 dead there in 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 2021 — people were killed.
25:23 Killed, always by these jihadists who are well armed — nobody ever says by whom. They're poor wretches, in that region there are only poor wretches, they barely have enough to buy food, how could they afford the most sophisticated weapons? And the gendarmes... And what lit the fuse is that the investigation showed that... the poor gendarmes had become easy prey because for ages they had been abandoned by the central government, the very one France is demanding be restored to power, calling it scandalous.
25:58 He was elected democratically, you know, formal law, that they know. They were abandoned by the central government, so abandoned that they had nothing left to eat, they went hunting in the bush to feed themselves, and even the wounded, resulting from the skirmishes they occasionally had while carrying out their duty as soldiers against the jihadists, weren't sent vehicles or aircraft to be evacuated to the medical facilities in the capital. It's frightening!
26:36 And now the Western authorities, as one man — you just have to see the condemnations coming from Brussels, right? Paris, needless to say, it's their own backyard. And there's worse. The new authorities who ousted these leaders unworthy of their people are turning to the Russians for help fighting jihadism. They've heard that in Syria they didn't last long over there, I mean, in the areas — except where the Americans are the ones protecting them, right? I'm thinking of what's happening in Deir ez-Zor, if you follow a bit what's going on in Syria.
27:21 So there you have it, it's serious, it's serious, as if we were there far more for geopolitical reasons, to stop the Russians and Chinese from coming to dispute our colonies, our perks with us — as if — I'm not settling the substance of the matter, once again I don't want to burden the ordinary soldier who's over there and risking a great deal. One must not shoot at the ambulances, nor at the coffins.
27:52 That's all, nor at the men who have the courage to take the supreme risk, right? Once again, I'm targeting the fact that they are being sent to their deaths instead. It's not them I'm speaking against. And all that for a bunch of things, interests, interests — if it were the interests of the French people or... It's the interest of a globalizing clique, isn't it, who share the same lifestyle in Amsterdam, Paris, Tokyo, more or less.
Western "values" and the obsequiousness of leaders 28:34 And the same values — they love talking about their values. Those countries don't respect our values. But values — isn't that what's happening in the United States right now, where everyone is congratulating Biden for nominating an African American woman to the Supreme Court? Can you imagine? But three generations after Kennedy, almost, after the end of apartheid — you have to call things by their name, that's how it was before Kennedy, right? Before busing, before Blacks and Whites could ride the same buses.
29:08 It was forbidden until — I was 12 or 13 at the time, I wasn't born under Vercingetorix. And here we are, still marveling, even today, in 2021, that an African American woman can reach the Supreme Court. And they give lessons. To whom? To the vile Putin, to this bloodthirsty monster who dares to imprison that scoundrel Navalny. I don't know if you're aware, but if Navalny were in Paris, he'd be lynched by the antifas. If the antifas were truly antifascist, which I very much doubt.
29:48 Well, but Mr. Navalny, who talked about Chechens and Caucasians, peoples of the former Soviet Union who belong to the Caucasus region, but as insects to be crushed underfoot, I'm quoting him! Xenophobic, antisemitic, caucasophobic, whatever you want to call it.
30:18 He's also involved in some very murky business dealings, including in France. There are French courts waiting to try him for embezzlement. But no, he's the victim, isn't that right? The hour is grave, because it looks like the masks are falling. I'm very happy to have already received a comment on this almost unbelievable video of Biden thinking he's speaking in confidence.
31:00 That prompted this comment from an old acquaintance, well, a rather young man who knows the history of cinema very well, who also makes giant... you know, and who is building up a musical culture with a lot of relevance. And I'm thinking of Sébastien Deville, who used to join us back in the days of our in-person sessions, as they say at Gobelins, in the 13th arrondissement.
31:34 Sébastien says the following after seeing this video—I presume you'll guess for yourselves, reading between the lines of what he says, how shaken he was too. "Reason in history has no use for our moralizing hesitations, and we have no choice about who is assigned this or that objective historical role." I'm pointing this out because when you come back to these images—the Biden video, that is—but you also remember everything these shameless murdering bastards have allowed themselves, as well as the cowardice, the deference, the obsequiousness of our leaders.
32:16 So you can see it clearly, you saw how Biden talks about Merkel, about the French, about Renzi, the Italian—it's like herding cattle in whatever direction you want. The obsequiousness of our leaders, who never knew how to answer him back, who even seemed to take pleasure in being humiliated—what better illustration, as Sébastien says here, than the Australian submarines affair? For a matter half as damaging to France, a De Gaulle would probably have come close to breaking off diplomatic relations.
32:57 And here we are, forming a... sacred union around the man who stole 11 billion in contracts from us at that level, if that were all, just to save face with the boss. So there you have it, as well as the cowardice, the deference, the obsequiousness of our leaders who never knew how to answer him back, who even seemed to take pleasure—there we go again—in being humiliated. "I don't see why," Sébastien concludes, "we should stifle even a little our deep sigh of relief and satisfaction when we see that finally someone"—guess who, Russia isn't far off—"even if it's not our cup of tea, [stands up to them]." We're not here to say "long live Putin, and if I were in Russia I'd vote for Putin." No, I've said a thousand times that if I were in Russia it's not at all obvious I'd vote for Putin.
33:54 But I will defend him. There's always something against the scoundrels of whom you just saw a sample on video, and who actually cause far more bloodshed and tears around the world, from Iraq to Afghanistan, and now sub-Saharan Africa. When we look at the Middle East—let's not even get into it, look at the state Libya and Iraq are in. When we see that finally someone, even if he's not our cup of tea, can tell them plainly, "Niet, that's enough now." And yes, Russia has been retreating since the fall of the Wall, hasn't it—that wasn't supposed to happen—in the face of NATO's forces, and now, as Russian officials say, they're at our doorstep. If you keep advancing, you'll be coming into our home.
34:49 There you go, I'm no prophet, I don't know how this will turn out, I'm somewhat reassured—I don't want to play the all-out alarmist either—by the fact that they've finally started talking, which is already a great victory for Russian diplomacy. Because at the start there was this arrogance, "what business is it of yours, Ukraine has the right"—it's an independent, sovereign country, so it has the right to choose its alliances, you saw. By what measure is Ukraine's sovereignty judged? By the fact that an American president can tell them, "I won't give you the billion unless you fire your attorney general"?
35:26 Really, really, what a farce, if it weren't so tragic. There you go, I remind you that... you might think there isn't much philosophy in everything I've just said. And yet, must I repeat again that I began all my public talks under the title "Between Crises and Wars, philosophized"—that was more than seven years ago.
Between crises and wars: the crisis and the Russian recovery 35:56 Between crises and wars—I hope we're still between crises and wars, this one being the effect of that one, let's be clear. And in that respect, we must see that it's no coincidence, just as the Second World War follows on from the gravest economic and financial crisis the capitalist world suffered since its emergence, the crisis of the 1930s.
36:29 Likewise, it seems here that... and the leaders of the capitalist countries, those who identify, from a politico-military standpoint, with what is conventionally called the North Atlantic Treaty—which should have disappeared when the Berlin Wall fell, since its purpose was to bring that about—but apparently it still has plenty of resources against any policy that wants to be truly independent of this club of superpowers.
37:09 It's important to see that the economic crisis has kept worsening since it broke out—since its sudden aggravation in 2008, it started well before that, but anyway, since 2008—with the injections of billions upon billions upon billions of dollars into the system after having made us feel guilty about the debt—you see how coherent all this is—it's spinning its wheels.
37:39 Meanwhile, China is advancing by leaps and bounds, Russia is regaining its dignity and part of its strength. Whereas in Yeltsin's day—the darling of Western leaders, among Western-oriented Russian leaders, this great democrat who is the only head of state, not just in recent years but of the twentieth century, of the contemporary era, who dared to have tanks fire on his own Parliament, to shoot at perfectly elected deputies, killing more than 150 of them.
38:19 He was our hero, Yeltsin, the one whose family members were found on the Côte d'Azur with misplaced credit cards. Russia has risen up from that humiliation. How did it rise up? That's why Putin is such a figure. And I repeat, to borrow our comrade Denis's expression, he's not necessarily my cup of tea, but he's still quite something as a figure. And I understand—I say this for those who believe he exercises a dictatorship over his people, as they'd like us to believe—do a poll in Russia, an independent poll, not to mention that more than 60% of Russians now miss the Soviet era. And yes, things are going badly for Western interests.
39:09 Things are going badly in Africa too, where we're being driven out. One last item, this is from yesterday. Yesterday, the government of Mali, pointed at by Brussels, by Paris, by ECOWAS—you know, those heads of state I mentioned earlier—gathered together and took measures, sanctions unprecedented in the whole history of post-independence Africa. The first time I've seen such severe sanctions taken against a country for the simple fact that it has reclaimed its sovereignty. And there you have it—and that it intends to lead the fight itself against its enemies who are slitting the throats of its people, several times a week—all these heads of state are getting slapped in the face at the same time as our own leaders, because France is struggling.
39:58 She said we're going to replace it. If only the French presence is there, we're now going to bring in European armed forces. Well yes, they're all NATO countries. That means NATO is setting up in the Sahel. Africans shouldn't be taken for fools. Yesterday, Mali asked the Danish contingent that France had brought in—without formally consulting the Malian government—to kindly return to their own country.
40:31 What's happening is serious. There's really a power struggle taking shape. Let's stay measured. I'm defending France here, even though "France" doesn't mean much when you stay that general. Pétain is no less French than de Gaulle, you know. Pétain and de Gaulle are no less French than the communist resistance fighters.
41:01 So to each their own France. You can well imagine which France I'm defending here. The one that's not resented in the Sahel. And even if, as you'll see in the video that follows—meant for those who still believe a military junta has crushed democracy in these countries—look how this people suffers under the weight of this junta. I'm going to ask Pierre-Alain to play a document filmed almost immediately after the military coup that just took place in Burkina Faso.
Report on Ouagadougou the day after the coup 41:42 Ouagadougou, the day after. The day after President Kaboré's fall, the avenue near Nation Square was packed with people. Impossible for drivers to make their way through. Vuvuzelas for some, photos for others. Here, everyone wants to take part in the celebration to show their support for the coup-plotting soldiers. "I came here this morning to support the coup." "We're waiting for the military to review things. There's too much corruption in the country. We want them to deal with it." "We want to move to a president... we want a transition of six months, a year, two years, three years. We want a transition that will bring the country back to normal."
42:20 Some hope the military junta will quickly put an end to the insecurity the country has faced since 2015. "We're tired of this situation, we're tired of crying, we're tired of always suffering because our brothers are being killed. We're exasperated." Anti-France placards, Malian flags, and pro-Russian chants. After President Kaboré's fall and faced with the jihadists' advance in the country, part of public opinion wants to radically change international partners.
42:51 "We need to do like Mali, the neighboring countries." "But frankly, we're with the Malians." "But we want to be free, we don't want to die as gifts." "We want France to say goodbye to us and we go back to Russia. If they don't work out either, we'll tell them goodbye too." While awaiting the first measures to be taken by the military, life resumed its normal course in Ouagadougou the day after the seventh coup Burkina Faso has experienced since 1960. There you go, I believe.
43:30 I believe there's no contest—there's a video. You don't get the impression that these young people we just heard, this young woman, these young men, are spies paid to talk in front of cameras. Well, still, you can clearly see an immense relief and above all the ordeal they've been through when the young woman says "we're sick of seeing our brothers murdered." Really, this simply couldn't go on any longer. And it's precisely this situation that justified the foreign presence.
The Gorgias and the patience of the concept 44:12 So, reminding you that my remarks have been situated for more than seven years between crisis and war, I still want to recall the philosophical stakes. And as long as we can talk about it, that's good. I brought back an excerpt from Plato's Gorgias not so long ago, a video I made following the demands I'd been under to comment on a video by poor Rochdi.
44:51 I had brought out this excerpt from Plato's Gorgias—now in the Gorgias, Callicles doesn't just develop all the pre-Nietzschean, sub-Nietzschean themes—there's something else too, fortunately, though it's those very themes that make his fame among the little would-be leaders out there. He tells Socrates outright, "if you weren't so old, you'd deserve a whipping."
45:23 There's violence looming, there's an outburst of violence hanging over this dialogue. And to the very end, Socrates fails to convince Callicles. People always think Plato steps aside. If Socrates tangles up his interlocutor, and Plato has his Socrates triumph the way Agatha Christie has Hercule Poirot triumph—no, that's not it. That's not how it works. At the end, Socrates says, "listen, since we can't manage to convince you, I'm going to tell you a story," and it ends with a myth, the myth of the judgment of the dead, and so on.
45:55 And that it's better to suffer injustice than to commit it. There you go, to show that the philosophical stakes aren't absent from these geopolitical considerations—far from it, they're immense. And perhaps we're even coming back to the essential. Perhaps all of human history, in its most invisible part, the part we talk about least, that of everyday life, of patience, of labor—I'm speaking of the furrows tirelessly traced by the plowman for millennia.
46:30 The plowman here, the one who harvests millet in the Sahel, and let's not even mention craftsmen, the working world, the industrial world—the patience of the concept, to speak like Hegel, the calvary of history. What's positive in all this is that we've been able to shelter a few periods of parentheses to protect ourselves from war.
47:00 They say the pages... the non-tragic pages of history, they say those are the blank pages. I pay tribute to those blank pages. There you go, I'm increasingly reorienting myself, on various people's advice, toward shorter formats. I think there's enough material already, given the news, to hand things over to our audience.
The Minsk agreements and the weapon of amnesia 47:32 I'll take a look anyway. So, I see a first question from Mounir Bougmati. Good evening, Mounir. "What about the Minsk agreements? Signing agreements and not applying them—isn't that perfidiously Albion-like?" Well, I don't think England is on the front line here, though it's not exactly in the back either. Let me open a small parenthesis about Albion before answering Mounir, but what a godsend for Boris Johnson, who is on the verge of being censured by his Parliament, isn't he? We don't know how that will play out, he's a wily one.
48:16 But I mean, he's really having a very hard time, let's say, in the House of Commons as we speak. And what a blessing for him to shift attention onto Ukraine. We absolutely must finish off the Russians, sell weapons right away, transfer weapons—England supplies anti-tank weapons via the Baltic states as intermediaries to the Ukrainians. We must always believe that aggression comes from the other side. The Russians, who are always on their own territory, as far as I know.
48:52 Whereas the Americans, the English, the forces massing—the French too, massing from the Baltic states all the way to the Black Sea—are, for the Americans, thousands of kilometers from home. Well, we've seen it already: Russian troops are in Russia, American troops are everywhere, Atlanticist troops—you know I don't like chewing on "American" as if it were some substance. Yes, it's good to recall the Minsk agreements, it's good because it's a way of fighting against the death drives progressing in silence. And one of silence's favorite weapons is amnesia. Stop talking about it. About what? Well, the Minsk agreements! Because there had already been— there are serious clashes that caused nearly 13,000 deaths.
49:44 Between the eastern part of Ukraine—let me sum up what most of you probably already know—which is Russian-speaking, very attached to Russia, and where cross-border workers, as they say, for generations have gone to find work and earn their living in Russia, leaving their country—and since Ukraine became independent and fell into a collapse and a level of corruption we can hardly even imagine, these eastern Ukrainian regions, which Kyiv calls the "separatist provinces"—which, strictly speaking materially, doesn't seem to be false—precisely in order to contain this internal Ukrainian conflict between western Ukraine, which is Catholic, Uniate, pro-Western, and which collaborated the most with the Nazis during the war.
50:39 The sins of the parents don't fall on their children. But still, the current leaders of Ukraine take up that torch in their own statements and turn those who collaborated most with the SS at the time into national heroes, as I speak. I'm thinking of Bandera, for those who know this history. So go look it up, it's easy, with the databases you have access to and navigate better than I do. So, to try to calm the situation between these two Ukraines—the agricultural, far-right one from the West broadly speaking, and the one that's pro-Russian and much more working-class, since the Donbass is one of the largest rust belts in Europe, originally home to a powerful steel industry—the stakeholders from the West got together.
51:36 You'll see why I say this. The two main belligerents, the Ukrainians of Kyiv and the Ukrainians of Donetsk, of Lugansk, to name the main so-called separatist cities, which border, of course, the Russian frontier—to calm this down, they got together. And the French, the Germans, and the Russians. So two stakeholders, the Russians of Kyiv—sorry, the Ukrainians of Kyiv—and the Ukrainians of the so-called separatist provinces, and three [parties] tasked with overseeing, well, guaranteeing the Minsk agreements, which called for—this is where Mounir is right to bring it up—which called for, and this was never applied by Ukraine, elections to be held in the eastern part. Not in order to separate, as the Westerners did with Kosovo, which was torn away from Yugoslavia.
52:44 I say that because now they're giving lessons. Crimea, Crimea—well yes, listen, you were the ones who allowed yourselves, weren't you, to throw the postwar status quo in Europe out the window. That whole affair cost 70 million lives, after all. Those demons should not have been woken up. And now the Ukrainians refuse to hold these elections. Again, it wasn't even planned in the Minsk agreements to give the eastern provinces independence, but simply to grant them relative autonomy, to allow them to speak Russian—which they've done for millennia—and for elections to be organized so they could choose their representatives within Ukraine. Ukraine has never wanted to apply them. It has even always said the Minsk agreements were a diktat imposed, wasn't it, by the other stakeholders who had bowed down before the Russians. You see, you see who we're dealing with.
53:48 The same people who, in less than six hours, according to Biden, halted proceedings against Biden's son over a billion dollars, right? A billion that, you can well imagine, didn't go to hospitals or schools, nor even—I'll finish on this point for now before moving to another question—even to buying weapons, no need, because—let me put it this way—I mean, these are Western figures, half of Ukraine's defense budget is given to it, gifted, by the West.
The CIA, Wagner, and the right to choose one's alliances 54:31 I know plenty of countries that have this advantage—that don't even pay for their own weapons. Thank you, Mounir, for that question. I'm delighted to greet our comrade Inès Oudoudeh, whom I presume is still in Brussels, even if she sometimes has to shuttle back and forth to her Latin America, which she knows well, better than I do. "Mr. Dominique, have you seen the CIA's black book, it's very illustrative of all the filthy things they do around the world with the help of German, French, English lackeys"—yes, of course, there are quite a few publications on that.
55:14 I preferred to dive into it through one well-defined fact—I'm thinking of the Biden video—otherwise Inès is right, there would be 50 volumes' worth, like the CIA book she's alluding to, which is very well done. You could make 50 volumes, the material is rich. Take the Vietnam War file, which resulted in the trifling matter of 3 million deaths.
55:44 That doesn't count, that's not worth one Navalny. Just take Vietnam alone. Everything the CIA did—the provocations in the Gulf of Tonkin, the cultivation of mountain tribes, always the same tactic of going to find so-called peoples oppressed by the Vietnamese—yes, not by the Americans, by the Vietnamese, up in the mountains there. You know, there are always some marginal ethnic groups to be found.
56:16 Yes, of course, we can never do enough of... peeling back the words progressing in silence, it's good to make heard what the CIA wants to keep quiet. The CIA and its allies—I'm actually harsher on our own leaders than on the CIA. Here too, an old acquaintance—well, a young man—an old acquaintance, Christian Régnier: "Are our politicians anything other than mercenaries without a conscience in the service of Western billionaires, in the same way Putin deploys the Wagner mercenaries in the service of his own?" We mustn't forget that the way people talk about the Wagner mercenaries is a Western way of framing things. Yes, it's a private company, quite true, it's not my cup of tea either, all that, I've already said it.
57:08 But really, if you're at all sensitive to the young men and women we saw earlier in the Burkinabé crowd, whose parents were slaughtered by whole villages – women, children and old people – you're not going to send them altar boys. You'll say, you're trampling on human rights. No, no more than any of the armed forces fighting against these warriors. Do you know what our forces are doing in Syria? We have forces there, the Americans have far more. Do you know what's being done alongside our allies who slit the throats of 14-year-old children in public squares? Do you remember Fabius saying "Al-Nosra has done a good job in Syria"? A good job.
57:56 So before pointing the finger at the Wagner mercenaries, I note that at least those ones are being welcomed with jubilation by the population that's there. I don't know if they'll do a good job, I have no idea, I'm not defending Russia, I'm not saying it's going to fix what took us ten years to make worse. I'm not saying that, I'm trying to stay intellectually and especially politically honest. What I am saying is you can't forbid a people who has just suffered what it has suffered – and when I say that, it's a manner of speaking, because there was Mali, there's Burkina, and in my opinion it's not over in the Sahel.
58:38 And here, I'll allow myself to prophesy because I risk very little, believe me, in doing so. You can't forbid them, however many decades after independence, from choosing their alliances. Come on, really! You can't force them to forever endure the former colonizer as the sole decider of their foreign policy and defense policy. That's really something! People need to wake up once in a while.
Where do the jihadists come from? Libya, liberal libertarians, Afghanistan 59:10 Geoffrey, yes, again I'm glad to see there's loyalty here. I don't understand who you seem to be attributing, directly or through intermediaries, the terrorist actions in this Sahel country to – the motives, the allied interests of this terrorist. Good question! Yes, because there's such a fog, the death drives progress in silence, nobody ever talks to you about it. Who are these terrorists? I don't know any more than you do in terms of identity, I couldn't say they're funded by so-and-so. What I observe, what anyone can observe, don't take my word for it, because here we come back to objectivity, is that they emerged right after our operation in Libya. That's ours.
59:47 I never said Gaddafi was my personal hero. First, I note the respect he was held in across all the populations of Africa, and especially the population in the street, in the countries of black Africa, sub-Saharan Africa if you prefer the politically correct term. And I note that when he was in power, Libya was one of the most prosperous countries in the region economically.
1:00:20 Now it's chaos, where you can't even move around freely in Tripoli, where militias shoot at each other in the very capital, years and years and years after they lynched Gaddafi in a horrifying manner. A troublesome witness had to be eliminated – I think everyone is aware of how he financed the election campaigns of some of our parties. But yes, I'm answering your question. These jihadists emerged thanks to the tidal wave of weapons that were in Libya and that poured down into the sub-Saharan region, into that area, to control places like that.
1:01:06 You can always put a Malian, Nigerien or Burkinabé policeman or soldier there – to talk about the Sahel, it's an immense country, Niger is more than twice the size of France. Those regions are gigantic, with very few roads and tracks in the desert. So it's a feast, it's the lawlessness that liberalism dreams of. I'll go a bit further now in answering your question. You know capitalism hates laws, regulations, things like that – except when it's the one making them.
1:01:40 But otherwise, it's against the state. That's the great common point between anarchists and capitalists, which helps us understand the immense depth of a Clouscardian concept like that of libertarian liberals. We understand it well then. In both cases – I'm not talking about the great anarchist tradition alongside the working class, I'm not talking about that, I'm talking about libertarian liberals, which is the opposite of the anarchists I just paid tribute to and just spoke of – who are fellow travelers.
1:02:11 You have to pay attention to my words, you have to be precise to be fair. That's the common point between that kind of anarchism and capitalism: rejecting everything they call the state. And so, you know, listening to me for a while now, it's not the state, but a gigantic state apparatus that can be hyper-oppressive economically, militarily, socially, financially, health-wise. But in service of that absence of state which is the private sector. That's the great scam and the great mystery of our era. There. Which is a bit less mysterious once it's stated this clearly.
1:02:50 When a state apparatus is in the service of the private sector in capitalist countries. Look at the financial flows, you'll quickly see who money is taken from and where it goes. So these jihadists are doing a good job, and I can identify some for you – changing region now – in Afghanistan, and you've seen the pitiful outcome to this day, the problems of Afghanistan are unfortunately not over, of the Afghan file: the Americans over-armed the bearded ones of Afghanistan, the Taliban, only to demonize them afterward or beforehand, because apparently they're not good with women – so why did they put them in power?
1:03:39 To chase out the Popovs – there was a pro-Soviet government at that time in Afghanistan – we can never be grateful enough to these bearded men, who are the only jihadists, in the sense of Islamist guerrilla – I never confuse it with Islamic – and by far, the main victims of these jihadists are Muslims. This must never be forgotten. Whether in the Middle East, in Mali, in Niger, in Burkina, they are Muslims.
1:04:09 Muslims who do their five daily prayers and have nothing to do with jihadism. So, back to it. The, the, the. It's terrible what happened in Afghanistan. It's the only jihadist guerrilla to which the Americans supplied the famous Stinger missiles. Yes, you should know, with these missiles a 14-year-old kid could take down a Soviet helicopter or plane. But yes! You ask me how to identify them. It's not that mysterious. Just like you hear about Boko Haram, always changing its name, Al-Qaeda in the Sahel. You can name them that way, amuse yourself pretending they're new identities when it's always the same forces behind them.
The tendential fall in the rate of profit leads to war 1:04:56 There you go. I don't know more than that, so I won't go further, but I'm pointing the gaze a little. Is capitalism, in its umpteenth crisis of the falling average rate of profit, leading us back into the pre-1914 war configuration? Christian Régnier, 150% agreed, Christian. That's a Marxist, even a Marxian point of view, in the deepest sense, isn't it? Yes, of course, of course, I recalled earlier that the greatest carnage to date, that of the Second World War, followed on from the crisis of '29, which was far from resolved, even with the New Deal measures of Roosevelt, which had reduced part of the unemployment but was far from returning to the pre-crisis phase.
1:05:53 Let's remember there were 20 million unemployed in the United States at that time, and in Germany there were 13 million – Germany was the hardest hit in Europe, and so on. And so afterward, that allowed Hitler to build his electorate. It was a dream come true. He could point the finger at this capitalism that had become indefensible – that capitalism, which in Hitler's mouth was a dirty thing, not because it was capitalist, but because it was Jewified and infiltrated by Judeo-Bolsheviks.
1:06:36 The same people who, following Hannah Arendt, groupie of the most Nazi of philosophers, the same people who have accustomed generations of high-school students, university students, and intellectuals of Western Europe to put communism and Nazism on the same level – these are the same people who had every interest in making people forget that Hitler lumped together in the same curse Jews and communists, Judeo-Bolshevism.
1:07:17 This isn't me talking, read the press of the time, it's documented, we're not in speculation here, in hypothesis, in imputing motives. It's an obsession. From his very first preachings, it's Judeo-Bolshevism. And if it were just him – the Nazi party afterward always picks up the torch. If you add to that that Chamberlain, the British prime minister at the time – yes, the same English who gave the center of democracy to the whole world, and who are often cited, Emmanuel Todd, isn't it? He comes to remind us that England has the oldest democracy. Yet Todd isn't a fool.
1:07:54 And he can be sound at times. The British prime minister, Chamberlain, coming back from Munich – a year before the German-Soviet pact, which is used to lend credibility to putting Nazis and communists on the same level, forgetting that if there was a German-Soviet pact, it was a reply to the diplomatic atrocity that had just occurred in Munich a year earlier. And yet, practically all of Central Europe was handed over to Hitler, and above all the gateway to the Soviet Union, in case they could get at them.
1:08:34 And that our main competitor – I'm thinking of an Englishman's head here – our main competitor, not enemy, Germany, and our main enemy, the Soviet Union – if they could weaken each other by fighting a war, that would be perfect. And indeed. The German-Soviet pact came to ruin that prospect. Now, what did Chamberlain say on returning from that scandalous Munich agreement which gave Hitler wings for the 70 million dead that would follow? He said "Mr. Hitler is a gentleman." And then, to continue on this chapter and still answer your question, to show that we really were coming out of a serious crisis, at the time the ambassador in London – the most sensitive post – of the State Department, of the American Secretary of State, of the State Department, was Kennedy's father, yes, John's father, who had such pro-Hitler, pro-Nazi sympathies, and there was a powerful far-right party in England at the time, very powerful even, he had such sympathies that Roosevelt was forced to recall him.
1:09:45 Things were starting to sour. So yes, its umpteenth crisis… I'd like to go back a second to Christian's question. Just a second, there. Its umpteenth crisis of the falling average rate of profit. That's the most intelligent formulation one can give this kind of problem. Because the tendential fall in the rate of profit is undoubtedly Marx's most profound scientific advance in the sciences of history, the most operative, if you prefer to profound.
1:10:20 One gets the impression it's metaphysical. No, the most operative, the most verifiable, meaning that all else being equal, except for conflicts, wars and such that come to disturb things, reset the counters to zero – as soon as it's cruising at speed, capitalism digs its own grave. That's a phrase of Marx's, isn't it? Well dug, old mole. A quote from Shakespeare's Hamlet. That is to say, the average rate of profit, by trying to stay competitive, very quickly – let me explain the formula Christian is right to cite here – the fall in the average rate of profit: to stay competitive, I have to lower costs, I have to lower prices. If my prices stay high, I sell nothing and my competitors win. So I have to lower costs, but by lowering costs, I lower my margin. Right? So either I shut up shop, or I compensate for the fall in the rate of profit by increasing the mass of profit.
1:11:17 I mean an establishment full of branches like FNAC, to take a random example – there are areas where it's even more obvious – would prefer to make a small margin, say 2%, on billions, wouldn't it, than a small local record shop, of which there are almost none left, since FNAC and others gobbled them up, would prefer to make a small margin on a very large mass of profits: 2% on billions is better than 14% on a tiny turnover.
1:11:52 So, tendentially, the average rate of profit falls, and that's what explains why capitalism periodically shuts up shop. Oh, not the capitalist himself, no, no, no, it's not the capitalist who goes to the unemployment office, no, no, he puts his employees out of work. You know, they say he likes to take risks. Yes, but it's others who take the risks, it's his employees who are on the front line. And when all economic resources are exhausted – we've tried everything, you've seen since the subprime crisis, we've poured millions of liters of gasoline on the fire: debt, deficit, the impossibility of reviving growth, because that's the crux of the problem, Japan being the best example.
1:12:47 They've tried everything there, nothing works. And in the end, there's nothing left but war to reset the clocks and falsify the data, and start over from zero. Thank you, Christian, for reminding us of such fundamental and such current things. Malou tells us that the USA could only get out of the crisis by entering the Second World War. Yes, that's roughly what I meant to say earlier, exactly. Historically, it's verifiable.
New Deal, military orders, and innovation 1:13:20 Insofar as, despite – and I'm not throwing stones at the New Deal, which achieved certain things, you know Roosevelt was called a Bolshevik by the most liberal circles in the United States because he dared to force private companies, for example the big monoculture operations – cotton, wheat, corn – to eliminate nearly 20 to 30% of their planted acreage to limit overproduction. He dared to double customs duties overnight, didn't he? And then indeed, employment came back.
1:13:56 But still, the crisis was far from resolved indeed when the Second World War broke out. And then, from that point, with military orders, that's always what revives the dynamic. But what we're seeing is serious. You see there's no separation here between the economic, the social, the military. No, these are not juxtaposed categories, independent of one another. The internet is a creation of the Pentagon, the holy of holies of the American military. There were walkie-talkies 50 years before mobile phones.
1:14:34 So it's not the principle – you know what they say, capitalism is great, Silicon Valley – they're not the great discoverers, are they? It's the needs of war and defense that produced the great discoveries. Afterward, there are a few clever ones who miniaturize all that to put it within reach of the general public decades later. That's what's happening. NASA, no longer having the budgets it had in its heyday, the first man on the Moon, the great space firsts, delegates to the private sector its fools – Elon Musk, whom people can turn into a modern-day little genius, when he's only working with know-how that was paid for by his fellow citizens' taxes for decades.
1:15:25 Yes, the USA... No one can get out of the crisis except by entering the Second World War. The day rises – which I see reappearing like a sea serpent. I'm not saying that. There are those who distrust the figure of the serpent, a familiar creature in Africa, you know, the serpent. Nine-tenths of the snakes we see are perfectly harmless. Doesn't the Covid crisis with its pharaonic recovery plans play the role that war used to play in previous crises of capital? Yes, they're sea serpents because from time to time I feel so close to it, then I stop hearing about it, then it reappears.
1:15:58 It's a bit like maybe the social media bots that dispatch the posts that way. And in any case, it seems to me that each time, "the day rises" does a good job. Not in Fabius's sense this time, but in the sense I give it, right? And I thank him for it. Doesn't the Covid crisis with its pharaonic recovery plans play the role that war used to play in previous crises of capital? I understand the argument. It's sound in principle, but not in quantitative terms, it's not at all the same scale. I'm much more worried about the staggering rise in military budgets, including in France.
1:16:45 We're not being attacked, I mean, we're much more concerned about increasing our military budget now than when Nazi Germany was on the Rhine. Now that was a real threat to us. But read the magnificent book "Strange Defeat," and you'll see there were quite a few who were counting on the Nazi hordes, in France, to get their revenge for what was to them the scandal of the Popular Front daring to institute such obscenities in their eyes as paid holidays and the 40-hour week.
1:17:26 There you go. Now, what's called in public opinion "Big Pharma" and so on, I understand, I mean, it's clear that some of them are making, to be a bit crude, a killing – not in gold but in diamonds. I've had my three doses, can you imagine what I've brought in for Pfizer. No, no, but it's incredible. When you look at the unit price, on top of it – it could play along. When you see such a volume of sales, normally you'd lower the unit price, not even.
Covid: media-political exploitation and biopolitics 1:17:58 There you go, so partly yes, I say "the day rises," there. But we're far from it. "How do you analyze the Covid crisis in the light of dialectical materialism? We find very little analysis from this angle. Without denying the virus storytelling, is it a consequence of the falling rate of profit, the falling rate of profit?" I'm not sure I understand, but that's my fault. I'm an old African, Africans love to speak in acronyms. They don't say the deputy secretary-general, they say the DSG.
1:18:32 In any case, the first part of the proposition. I wouldn't want to disappoint those who ask me about Covid. But do you find any? If there's a subject that hasn't been passed over in silence, it's certainly that one. We talk about practically nothing else, to fill, right, to cover up the silence cast over those we don't want to talk about. I try, for my part, to speak on subjects that aren't talked about and that are far more threatening, even though the health dictatorship, which I'm not the last to denounce, if you prefer. Except that, and here I think I hold roughly the same position as the "zombifiers" – that's a nice pseudonym if I may say so – without denying the virus, you see, so it's not paranoid either, that the virus was invented to enslave us.
1:19:30 I'll sum up my position on Covid like that, but I won't say much more. You said I don't really feel like talking about it. You'll find plenty of people to talk about Covid from every angle. From the most rebellious to the most hagiographic, the most compliant, the most defiant. My position is clear. The virus exists, it's not an invention, it's dangerous. I'm rather in favor of the vaccine. I know I'm not making only friends, even in my own camp. That's not the point.
1:20:01 That can be discussed. I'm not a scientist. That's an opinion I hold, it's not knowledge. But what I denounce, and what's scandalous, is the media-political exploitation, the way the state apparatus that governs us uses this pandemic for purposes far removed from our health interests. There, I can't be clearer than that.
1:20:31 "Is the Covid storytelling a consequence of the falling rate of profit?" I wouldn't say so, it's not that mechanical, that mechanistic, I'd say the storytelling is essential, isn't it – so we're talking about something other than the fall in the rate of profit, which isn't quite the same thing. There's also the ecological discourse, the planet and all that, I mean, excuse me, but I put them on the same level. And besides, one wouldn't have existed without the other.
1:21:04 Ah, but yes, listen, if you've followed the sequence of the last 50 years, you'll see it took decades of ecological awareness-raising. Or as I used to say to young people, good grief, when I was your age, it was only the old folks who kept saying "don't eat that, it's bad for your health, for your liver, for your cholesterol." It was only the old folks, now it's universal. I see young people looking at the boxes in supermarkets, at the ingredients – I'm not saying the best ones, even so. We idealize our grandmothers' cooking a bit.
1:21:37 Grandmothers have kind hearts. When it's their grandson visiting from time to time, they give the best, that's clear. But the everyday food of the time wasn't great, you know. I'm talking about the working class. I'm not talking about those who dined at the best tables in Paris every evening. No, no, no. If you knew the number of poisonings – reread the newspapers of the time – fatal botulism poisonings, that terrible infection that is botulism. The number of infections there were at the time, before refrigerators, when there were just pantries, the figures are terrifying when you look closely.
1:22:15 And I'm not even talking about water pollution, the diseases that came from water, I'm just talking about food here. So it took this awareness-raising about the ecological threat, so-called ecological, which I call "ecologist" in the discourse, to make citizens all ready to tremble before a virus, because the common point is health, is the body. We're right in Foucault territory here. You see? That's a very successful biopolitics. The sequence that runs from the ecological discourse spread among the masses to the health discourse, let's say meta-health discourse.
1:22:58 There you go. I'll sum up my position. The virus is not an invention, you have to protect yourself from it. Some countries have shown themselves far more vulnerable than us. China – how did it manage to contain such an epidemic? I mean, when you see the overpopulation, the neighborhoods, the crowding, and the number of inhabitants who are still in rural areas, right?
1:23:30 China, Vietnam – let's be honest – Taiwan, which isn't the same China, which has a fierce adversary, managed to contain it. Right? I mean, so there are measures to be taken, we can take them. What worries me is the way we're making a whole lot of things permanent. Every time we're... that's it, we're out of it, it's fine, I think the virus is starting to fade, we can go out, we can take off the masks, and bam, every time, it starts up again. Oh yes but there's a...
1:24:00 It's a new variant that comes from the Adriatic, I'm just saying anything, tomorrow it will be from El Salvador, and it means we're sorry but we're obliged to go back into lockdown, and maybe if we let them carry on, I'd be surprised at this rate. I see that you're vigilant and that you're wary of it, and that at least has the virtue of not letting them get away with it. But if we let them carry on, in 15-20 years we'll be at the 38th re-lockdown, at the 54th vaccine booster, there you go, I'm deliberately using hyperbole, but you understand what I mean.
Nigeria: ethnic identities and class struggle 1:24:36 And that's scandalous, the media-political exploitation of a pandemic that is otherwise quite real and that we do need to protect ourselves against. So, I'll now give priority to questions that aren't only about Covid. So, you who are knowledgeable about West Africa — yes, I know West Africa a bit better than the average French person from the mainland — I'm not what you'd call a specialist. Even though those they parade before us as specialists on our media make me laugh a bit.
1:25:08 So, do you think we're entitled to expect some form of 21st-century, Leninist class struggle in Nigeria? Why Nigeria? I presume my interlocutor is T.J.M. Bernard. I presume my interlocutor, since he's interested in Africa, doesn't seem to confuse Nigeria with Niger, as many people in France do. Let me remind you that Niger is a country of between 8 and 12 million inhabitants, which is French-speaking, and where roughly two-thirds of the territory is occupied by the Sahara, the northern and eastern part of the Sahel, almost at the junction of West Africa and Central Africa.
1:25:53 With its 12 million inhabitants for a territory almost twice as big as France, whereas Nigeria is a continent-country all on its own, with 160 million inhabitants and roughly a ton of oil per inhabitant. And so it's the country that weighs the most economically, demographically, and humanly in sub-Saharan Africa — or black Africa, if you like — along with South Africa; those are roughly the two greatest powers in that sense within sub-Saharan Africa.
1:26:32 We think we have some form of class struggle. Listen, that's a very good question, especially since we don't see it emerging. In any case, not in the form, I presume, that you're alluding to, with general strikes. Ah yes, very good, I'm paying attention to the details our interlocutor is giving us here. I thought of Nigeria because it's densely populated — well done, that's exactly right — and because it has an economy different from the rest of the region; it's very important in the region.
1:27:03 Well done. So, Nathan Taylor Cohn-Bendit knows this context well. Yes, I'll answer. I mean, what worries me — I'd really like — there are videos of it, you know. It's an immense country, there's an astonishing diversity of press, for example. That's actually quite rare in the region — there are controversies, there's dissent, embezzlement of such-and-such a budget, such-and-such a corrupt body, and so on.
1:27:34 But still, that's not quite class struggle, it's classic political struggle, with an opposition and a majority. What worries me, though, is all the stages the population has to go through before it can come to recognize — recognize that the essence of these problems, of this suffering, of what isn't working, needs to be formulated in terms of class struggle. Because there is such a hold of religious, fetishistic discourse — fetishistic, voodoo — well, voodoo-related, voodoo is more Benin but it's not far — ethnic, religious. Periodically, for example — he must know this, our interlocutor — Nigeria is bloodied by conflicts opposing Muslim populations in the north of the country, particularly the powerful Hausa ethnic group. I said it, I said it.
1:28:32 One of the most numerous — nearly 50 million Hausa in that region alone, which for sub-Saharan Africa is enormous for a single ethnic group, isn't it? And the Catholic-Christian-animist populations of the South — more evangelical than Catholic, animist, in the South, isn't that right? There's so much fantasy-driven thinking to get past, because the powerful of this world will never agree to drop the mask that covers up class struggle. They will always disguise it behind ethnic conflicts, regional or national identities — Slavs against Germans, Corsicans against the French, Hutus against Tutsis.
1:29:28 And all of that causes deaths. And rather than saying there are rich Bretons exploiting poor Bretons... Let me give a very precise example I owe to a former colleague, a comrade whom I salute here, a comrade who's with France Insoumise — I allow myself to call him a comrade because he deserves that title. I'm thinking of Arnaud Le Gall, if I may name him, because he gave me a very good example; he's from Carhaix in Brittany, his family is, and within Brittany, in Carhaix, there were only two major employers.
1:30:22 It was the train station and the hospital. Both were shut down. But the mayor of Carhaix, in protest against this loss of jobs — because he knew full well that to be re-elected he had to denounce these layoffs — said, 'Paris is plundering Brittany.' You see, as if only Brittany were being plundered by Paris, as if it weren't happening across all of France.
1:30:52 Wicked France, just as wicked Russia is supposedly plundering Ukraine, wicked France is plundering Brittany. It's terrible how we see the same patterns everywhere, as soon as things are framed in identity terms. So, our interlocutor specifies further: inequality becomes very visible — I'll take your word for it — to illustrate what Bernard is saying here. I know businesswomen, wives of Nigerian businessmen, who live in a bush town — I say that ironically, since these 'bush towns' have 2 million inhabitants, I'm thinking of Kano, Kaduna, in the North — and who take their husband's private plane to go shopping in New York and back within the week.
1:31:32 That's what Nigerians are like, it's not Chad or Mali, it's not poverty — apart from a small ruling caste, everything else is really in a kind of economic and social void. Inequality becomes very visible, but there are roughly three ethnic groups within a single state. I dare hope the internecine struggle will fade. Well, that's an excellent wish, and I share it with Bernard. The best way to make these fratricidal and too often bloody struggles between identities disappear is to strip away their identity status and return to the universal.
Algeria, color revolutions, and class consciousness 1:32:07 That is to say, there are exploiters versus the exploited, a few ethnic groups belonging to each other. Daniel Arias. Good evening Daniel, it's a pleasure. Daniel's interventions are always instructive, for everyone, including me. These past few days, tensions have been rising between Morocco and Algeria, friends of the Russians and an independent country. It's good to bring up Algeria here, because Algeria too — when Mali was scandalously penalized by that ECOWAS meeting I denounced earlier, by its heads of state — to whom the great Sankara alluded when he said, 'better water for all than champagne for a few.'
1:32:51 Well, it's the champions of champagne for the few who condemned, in the name of democracy — you'd have to see it to believe it — the jubilant populations you saw, or rather, the military regime that those jubilant populations were applauding and celebrating. In the images you saw, Algeria, when Mali was threatened with economic isolation, because they want to strangle it — it's the same as the sanctions on Russia, the same patterns.
1:33:21 It's this monotony of the new globalization. We always find the same patterns, color revolutions everywhere — find some small marginal ethnic group there, a Western-style town, that we then claim is oppressed by the state we want to bring down, and stir up guerrilla warfare inside it with columns of refugees, because there will inevitably be repression — it's the Yugoslav pattern, the Kosovo pattern. That's how the whole world ended up siding against the Serbs. The anti-Serbs. Indeed. Even though Belgrade was the only city in the world with a statue honoring France.
1:33:55 And we joined the NATO coalition to bomb that country, taking advantage of the fact that at the time Russia didn't have a Putin at its head but a Yeltsin. So yes, indeed, Algeria has offered its help as a kind of fraternal fallback strategy for Mali, with which it shares an immense border — you have to look at the maps — right in the middle of the desert. ISIS has been reactivated in Syria. I believe Daniel is alluding here — he follows current events closely.
1:34:30 With the prison events, it's war. At the same time, an attempted coup in Kazakhstan and rising Morocco-Algeria tensions. Well yes, the waves are churning. It's not a calm sea, in the period I'm talking about. That's why I feel the need to put war and peace at the center of our concerns. Thank you Daniel, it's good to remind us of all these conflicts, none of which unfortunately overshadows the others. Khaled Nordin: it's easy to criticize the PCF, our leaders, but where do we, individually, stand with our class consciousness?
1:35:02 Good question, Khaled. I wouldn't want to speak on behalf of Algerians, but I know, and I'm glad of it, and I'm very touched — I know that our talks are followed very faithfully, and if I may say so, that people make very intelligent, very relevant value judgments — I mean from people who are clearly well-informed. And among them, most of the time it's men, but there are also women — I'm thinking of that great mathematician Amel Boulahir, whom I salute in passing — and these are people who observe, who aren't aligned with anything.
1:35:40 They are truly independent people. Caught between their regime and those who are presented as the anti-regime in the streets and who are most often infiltrated by foreign powers, they deserve credit for maintaining lucidity and analytical relevance. Thank you, Khaled.
The finale of the symphony, Leningrad, and dancing peoples 1:36:11 Sarah, the Covid storytelling — I told you I didn't want to say too much more about Covid, but well, we did answer it anyway — is it tied to the profit rate? Sure, in part, yes, I repeat. If there are no other questions, since I see the same ones coming back, before I remind you of the continuation of this magnificent Prokofiev symphony, I'd like to point out that the most important thing, I think, is this dichotomy between the great Slavic lyricism trying to emerge from the orchestra's chaotic force, like that, isn't it?
1:36:52 In order to gain somewhat broader perspectives toward the immense horizon of the Russian steppe, which is being held back by mountains of suffering, of material devastation, of bombed cities, of burned farms, fires, and massacred populations. 30 million dead. There you go, before I... But let me also point out, for those who have the excellent idea of listening to the whole symphony, not just the excerpts from the first movement that I'm playing for you — each of the four movements is, on its own, a masterpiece. Altogether, this kind of symphony runs between 30 and 42, 43 minutes. I mean, if you take all four movements, it's not such a huge undertaking.
1:37:35 But the finale, in keeping with a classical tradition in the strict sense of classicism — that of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven — even though the orchestration is much more modern, much more post-Debussy, dissonant, at times you'll see, almost to the point of suffering, or provocation, which is often the case with Prokofiev — the finale leaves us on a happy note. The finale is a kind of gallop across the Russian steppe rediscovered all at once, where all the hopes that seemed forever abolished by that unprecedented carnage — and I maintain it still weighs down Russia's economy, demography, and development today.
1:38:23 You don't recover from a carnage like that in two or three generations. I'm not just talking about the dead, I'm talking about the material destruction. One detail to illustrate quickly what I'm saying, since we're so rarely told this: the siege of Leningrad — the siege of Leningrad, I'm not even talking about Stalingrad — the siege of Leningrad. There are what are called 'hero cities,' a title the Soviet Union awarded. In Leningrad, there was...
1:38:54 A million dead. Hitler made sure the population couldn't get out, so they would die of hunger and cold. There would be hunger through the Russian winter, and Leningrad is far to the north. A million dead from the war, from the bombings, from weapons, from cold, from hunger. A people — and the Soviets eventually broke the siege. It was a victory in the end, Leningrad.
1:39:28 At what cost, you might say — but it's a victory. A people who can withstand a siege like that — do you think we're going to break them with economic sanctions? Even by excluding them from the dollar zone, it makes the Russians laugh. The Russians, sorry — it makes them laugh. There you go, isn't that so? So let me get back to this symphony. It restores perspective and happiness on the horizon, in the magnificent finale of this symphony, with a rhythm — a rhythm that only the Russians, who are a nation of dancers...
1:40:06 The greatest nations of dancers are the Spanish and the Russians, in music, within the European tradition of classical and popular music. Classical music — far from being opposed to popular music, unlike 'people' music, which flattens popular music, levels it, wipes it out, and standardizes it across the whole planet — classical music embraces the rich diversity of popular musics. What could be more different than flamenco and a Cossack dance, a trepak, as it's called, one of the wildest traditional dances of Russia?
1:40:41 It's interesting to note that the two greatest dancing nations of Europe are at the two opposite ends of Europe. One with an African connection, Spain, and the other with an Asian connection, Russia. I'll stop there and urge you — it would really be a shame not to seize this opportunity, especially under the baton of this immense conductor. He conducts with a toothpick, as you've seen, that's his originality, and he's adored by orchestra musicians in several countries. It would be a shame not to listen to it all the way through, even if only in fragments, as they say in athletics.
1:41:31 Also, I'd like to remind you that it's now on Thursdays that we'll meet, every two weeks, so we'll see each other in eight days on Thursday, but we won't abandon you until then. Starting around next weekend, we've already recorded answers to your questions — we're very behind on answering questions, we tried, we made up part of that backlog in the days before with Pierre-Alain, and he had little time given his workload. So I'm letting you know that very soon on YouTube you'll have a recorded session of answers to questions that will pick up on what we're discussing now. So I say goodbye, see you very soon, and above all thank you, thank you so much for your questions, for your loyalty.
