English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
The West is not a geographical concept 0:00 Good evening dear comrades, dear friends, dear members. I'll start by apologizing for such a long absence, to plagiarize a famous title, when thanks to Adrien we had gotten back into a regular rhythm, roughly twice a week. But well, I don't know, as soon as you give your reasons, you get the impression that you're apologizing and that it all sounds bogus. So I won't elaborate.
0:31 But I had some health troubles. I'll have more and more of them. It's fortunate that I'm still here in front of you. I have a lot of outside invitations. As some of you already know, I've been invited to give a talk on the theme of what the left has become today in Europe in general, and in the world, but especially in Europe. And its relationship with the French Revolution, in Germany, in Leipzig.
1:04 I haven't been there in a long time. So I'm going to see the two largest cities of the former East Germany, of the former Deutsche Demokratische Republik, Leipzig and Berlin. I won't see the Karl Marx Universität again in Leipzig, but I'm delighted to see again these places that are so important in the history of revolutionary thought, by the way. So tonight, I mustn't be the only one.
1:38 I am, tonight, if it were only tonight, given the times we're living in, I'm preoccupied by the acceleration—some will say the decline—of the West. Those aren't my own terms, but never mind. It's so we understand each other roughly what it's about. I'm using an extensive term like "the West." I'm not going to go back over it, I'm not going to repeat myself.
2:09 I know very well that I like going in circles, but still. I'll do it anyway because there are newcomers joining, and all the better, our habit of philosophical discussion. I have to remind those who haven't heard it yet that if you ask what the West means in the strict sense, it's the West, the direction. I'll go quickly, because I don't have the right to redo the whole thing every time.
2:41 In the Socratic manner: what do you call the West? It's what is to the west. Since the Earth is round, where is west? Wherever you want. You pull up your chair and you're always to the west. It depends on what. In Poland, you're east of Germany, and you're west of Russia. Poland is the West relative to Russia. I can even tell you that Russia is "the West." You only have to go for a walk at the eastern tip of Siberia, right there, where they're 5 km from the United States.
3:12 The Bering Strait, you see, where there's Alaska on the American side, and the Soviet Union, I was about to say—you see. There's no such thing as a slip of the tongue except from the unconscious, as the saying goes. There's a fulfillment of a desire there. The two meet at two small islands, Little Diomede and Big Diomede, originally inhabited by Inuit people, who are now overrun on both sides, American and Russian, with radars, equipment, military installations.
3:47 At that spot, the United States is east of Russia. Yes? No—see, "the West" isn't geographical, not since we've known the Earth is round; it's wherever you want it to be. "Oh come on, Pagani, don't give us these subtleties, I know perfectly well what it means, roughly, the Western countries." But no—the European countries, civilization, as if that were the only one.
4:18 The European countries—really? I thought the leaders of the West were the United States of America. That's not in Europe. Oh dear! You see, Socrates, that's the method. You propose a definition and you see the contradictions. But that doesn't work either. "Oh fine, that's enough now, it's the industrialized countries." Well, Japan is a Western country then. I thought it was the Far East, according to the geography books. But according to you, it's also the West. You see! We're not going to get there. Do you know why? And I'll wrap up this little reminder quickly.
4:49 We won't get there. Because it's not a positive concept, like I'd say the concept of a sweater, the concept of a keyboard, the concept of a computer, of a car, of a star. Fine, those give us something. We see things, we picture things. Whereas here, it's a word made so that we don't see, so as to hide something. It's called an occulting concept, if you want to sound clever. I can't just say "capitalism." Atlantic imperialism—now there, I know what I'm talking about. There, Japan is included.
5:20 Yes, yes, yes. It's allied with the Americans in this. And then there's a dispute with China, where it already caused 17 million deaths, but never mind, they're just Chinese. Just as the Germans caused 30 million deaths, give or take. Something Russia still hasn't fully recovered from. So there you have it. Why do I talk about the West? So as to stop talking about it—to say, let's have a shared code, I propose, we're not obliged to, but: Atlantic imperialism.
5:55 And at that point, it's not just the United States or Europe—there can be an African dictator entirely financed by the CIA who is more Atlanticist than that, even more so than our own leaders, which can happen too. And look at Latin America, don't even get me started. So there. Why do I not talk about France, when I said things are moving fast right now—well, moving fast. As far as having a government and a budget goes, we can't say things are moving fast. But what is moving fast is the deepening of the crisis.
The crisis and the wars against socialist countries 6:27 The deepening of the crisis. You know, for a long time people mocked—"Marx, damn it, Marx got it completely wrong." He announced the crisis of capital. It's never been in better shape, whereas as for the communist countries—you know what state they're in. Well yes. When you're hit with 30 million deaths, and when the bar keeps getting raised higher, especially from Reagan onward, when he launched Star Wars and the Russians, instead of building housing, healthcare, education, had to build cannons, rockets, missiles just to keep existing.
7:01 That certainly doesn't exactly favor development. Well, let's move on. I'm sure most of you are already roughly aware of all that. I was giving an example just today—I was using the example of Ethiopia. The very emblem of the country, you know, we've seen photographs of famines in Ethiopia, children whose ribs you could see. I'm not a voyeur, I won't dwell on it. Well, it's with countries like that—as soon as they gained independence and chose a Marxist, communist option, and God knows, at the time it was working, they even got a commendation from UNESCO for the success of their educational policy—it had been a world of illiterates and suddenly there was a remarkably fruitful school policy—that three wars were sent against them, three, three, three: one war via Somalia, one war via Eritrea, and one war via the South, via Sudan, where the Atlanticist allies were.
8:01 You see, it's... So why am I broadening things out like this? Because... to offer you a counter-argument, if that can be of any use. That's already something, if you like. It's not everything, but it's not nothing. You know, because you hear people say, "Oh, it's terrible, they can't manage to agree to form a government, that socialist one, France Insoumise, how can the left even still exist?"
8:31 We wonder. It's a line you hear often. Now we're allergic to the word "left." You can't say it's a very alarming left. You can't picture Hollande making MEDEF tremble. You have to have a sense of the ridiculous. France Insoumise, on Gaza, they really stepped up. They did the work. Well, I've always got an excellent friend—I won't give the name so as not to embarrass him—who's with France Insoumise and holds an important position, who's one of us.
9:02 There are disillusioned former Communist Party members, disillusioned former Socialist Party members, there are ecologists. It's a mess. On every side. You have to lump all these people together, right? No, no. But this left already terrifies people. You see the Bolshevik with a knife between his teeth. You see, Mélenchon, with a knife between his teeth. He's a good orator. Well, let's leave that. It's not the trial of the non-communist left that concerns me tonight. I won't say anything about it.
9:32 That non-communist and anti-communist left which began with the Cold War. That's another debate. I'll just say, for those who don't know it yet, that the person who financed the launch of Force Ouvrière to compete with the CGT, above all to cause a split, was an American from the CIA—he says so himself in his memoirs. I'm not into conspiracy theory. He says it himself. I'm not going to be more royalist than the king. I don't mean that everyone at FO is an Atlanticist. They don't all know all this, roughly speaking.
10:02 There can be sincere people in there who have illusions. Nor should we spare the right-wing parties. It's pitiful! France is more pitiful than other countries. Careful, when you hear that—France is the country of the revolution, and there's everything: De Gaulle is French, Pétain is French. I'm not saying good or bad things about France. Everyone has their own France. Mine, as you might guess, is not Pétain's, is not the counter-revolution's. But there is a constant since the French Revolution, which is denouncing Jacobinism.
10:41 Well, you know, most of you understand well what I mean. There you go—on top of it De Gaulle didn't help matters, a right-wing man coming along to carry out nationalizations, rather cornered, forced to, with one of the best governments we've ever had, when there were communists on the left and Gaullists on the right, to carry out nationalizations, to pull France out of NATO's integrated command.
11:12 Whatever. I voted against him the entire time he was in power, if that can spare some of you a misreading, since people keep trying to turn us against Gaullism—but not... I voted against him, so there are plenty of things I hold against him, but there are people who criticize him for having been too far to the left, I don't know if you follow. Just as people said that Roosevelt, at the time of the New Deal, was pursuing a Bolshevik policy. We'll come back to that in a moment. Because it's completely ignored.
Collective memory and false models of consensus 11:42 Those who have been listening to me regularly for a while know that I often cite a work by a sociologist from the 1950s, Maurice Halbwachs, a man of Alsatian origin, whose contribution can be summed up in this very fine title, The Social Frameworks of Memory. I recommend it to you, by the way, it can still be found. It means that in collective memory, in the way history is told, well, there's a part that isn't my area—so I won't get into biology, biology, the memory trace in the brain, not my field.
12:21 But that's not all there is. There are also things that have nothing to do with biology in memory. Are there collective relays? Because we're never told about what happened—I'm just picking something at random—during the Indochina War, the Algerian War. You'd think all we brought were schools, hospitals, roads. And not mud, blood, and tears, quite often. That poor Vietnam, which had to fight against the two greatest imperialist powers of the time, which first fought the Indochina War against the French, and barely bled dry, emerging victorious after Dien Bien Phu, got landed with the Vietnam War against the Americans.
13:10 Nice, huh? Well, that's not my subject, it's to recall what I'm in the middle of saying—why I take a global approach, why I talk about the West and not just France. And why I criticize those who say, "yes, but the French, anyway, they never agree with each other." They don't have—and here I get to it—the sense of consensus. You see, like there is in Germany, where there's a grand coalition between the CDU's right wing and even the far right. I'm not talking about today's far right, the AfD—I'm talking here about the right, about the far-right wing that exists within the party that governed Germany the longest in the postwar period, that is, the CDU, whose right wing is called the CSU, Christlich—well, anyway, the Christian Democrats, if you prefer.
13:58 That's the CDU of Bavaria. Small reminder in passing: the most Nazi places in Germany, historically, geographically—I mean the parties, as they historically manifested themselves—everyone believes Nazism is tied to Prussian militarism. Not at all. It's the south, the sunny, easygoing folks with a feather in their cap, tra-la-la, all that, you know. The Munich beer festival—the great sites of the NSDAP, the National Socialist party, are Nuremberg, Munich, and of course Hitler's homeland, Austria.
14:41 It's the south. There, I'll close that parenthesis. Well, we French supposedly aren't capable of building consensus the way the Americans know how to. Right now, for the Americans, consensus is hard. But still, most of the time... though right now, they're also stuck without a budget. They've got the shutdown. We don't even know yet whether Trump won't lay off tens of thousands of civil servants overnight. But above all, we have...
15:12 But wait, why are we constantly held up these countries as examples, especially Germany? What economic dynamism! They're a sea of strikes, unions striking, protests. Really? And the result is what? That Germany is on the verge of industrial ruin. No, but if it had succeeded, well now we see the result of these policies. England, I won't even get into it, has been stalled for 30 years now; economically, it's nothing but a swarm of financial districts, meaning money that leaves from there to end up there, but it's not the creation of new wealth, any of it.
15:44 There you go—Germany, ever since it gave up what made its industrial strength, namely having cheap energy through a pipeline, an oil—well, gas pipeline, to go back to French vocabulary, running from Siberia and arriving at Schwedt. You don't know where Schwedt is? It's in the former East Germany. There, poof, they switched to the tap instead of that. Now they're buying the most expensive stuff—gas already, produced by fracking underground rock.
16:20 You know the tenderness I feel for the environmentalists, so I'll let them handle that trial, it's already not pretty. And then it has to be liquefied afterward, mind you, to transport it in containers by ship, and that, in Europe, costs four times more, doesn't it, than the gas that used to arrive at Schwedt? S-C-H-W-E-D-T, if you're interested. So there, I'm giving you a counter-argument: by what right are we held up as an example—where are the successes in all this? It's the West as a whole that's in crisis.
16:52 What we're witnessing is serious. They tell you about France's deficit, but Japan has a much bigger deficit. It's true that Japanese debt remains owned by the Japanese, whereas for us, most of our creditors are outside France. Nice, huh? So there. That's my starting point—but you do hear about this, though perhaps not in the order I'm trying to reconstruct it—but now, all of a sudden, I've introduced a properly philosophical dimension that I borrow from a non-philosopher.
Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and the phrase on the death drives 17:25 Here again, it's an appeal I'm making. People often mock Hegel, who says—well, he never actually says that philosophy stopped with him, any more than art did, by the way; there are very precise passages where he says that art will never stop perfecting itself, what is finished is its position of representing the sacred, the absolute, well, anyway, whether we agree or disagree with the debate. But how ridiculous, "philosophy stopped with me." What is true, though, is that what has mattered after Hegel, in the history of thought, what has generated thousands of published books of reflection, is three authors, none of whom belongs to philosophy—in chronological order: Marx, Nietzsche, Freud.
18:11 So there, I'm borrowing from Freud, who isn't a philosopher—a doctor, a son, etc.—but who has inspired a considerable number, and continues to inspire a considerable number, of publications, and let me remind you that Marx and Freud are the two targets of the dominant ideology. I say this to those who would like to get rid of psychoanalysis. I've even seen people who were sincerely Marxist—sincerely, I'm not saying they truly were, but I mean, I'm not questioning their good faith—even activists who have said the unconscious doesn't exist.
18:48 I have rarely seen a repression as brutal as that simple sentence. I say this in a friendly way because it's someone of great worth, with a lot of culture and intelligence besides, but who has a blind spot at that level. But there are many like that, because in the dominant ideology—Deleuze, Onfray, mind you, it's not the same, Deleuze is a great philosopher, but who spent his time fighting what he called "the infamous dialectic."
19:19 That's the great philosophical counter-revolution that begins in the 70s. And then Freud too—a charlatan, you've heard it all—and besides, he had mistresses, can you imagine, how can you say intelligent and profound things if you indulge yourself a little from time to time, unlike, say, Sandrine Rousseau—if we can speak freely here, that's fine. There, that's what I'm borrowing from Freud. Right, back to my philosophical discussion.
19:50 The sentence, perhaps—perhaps the one I find most profound in him, and which speaks neither of sexuality, you see, nor of kinship, of Oedipus, nothing. It's this very simple, very short sentence: the death drives—you have to replace "drives" with "instinct"—the death drives progress in silence. That's why I try to speak to you, so as not to let the death drives spread unchecked.
Danger of war and the manufacturing of opinion 20:24 We have never been so close—I'm 80 years old, I keep saying it, I'm sorry—I have never seen a danger of war as burning as today. I'm not trying to scare anyone, I hope it won't happen, I'm no prophet, but what is certain is that I have never seen so little distance kept from the level of escalation, which is becoming uncontrolled. It takes nothing at all, at a given moment, to trigger what's called in the chancelleries a war logic, meaning nothing can pull it back anymore, not even the politicians.
21:01 You know, a plane that grazed another one, a ship that bumped into another. In short, afterward the general staffs get carried away, irreversible things happen. But we're not told about it. I've already seen a lot of people saying, "no, they're exaggerating the danger of war, and besides the Russians aren't as powerful as all that, it's a bluff, and by the way it's well known that in Ukraine they're taking apart refrigerators in the houses they've bombed because they lack the technology"—no, they sent the first man into space, they have missiles the West still doesn't have, hypersonic ones, but apart from that, I mean, they need Ukrainian refrigerators to scavenge, I don't know, resistors, gas, freon, I have no idea.
21:51 So there's a whole silence being kept, in order to listen—let me say something positive, because you might get the impression I'm doing what our leaders do, sowing fear—no, I'm giving a warning, there is a danger, but not fear, on the contrary, there's good news, I'm not talking about China, that's enormous, thank goodness that exists, no, that's not my subject, so I set it aside, but, to say there are still positive points, but there's above all the fact that since the end of the 18th century—and here, for once, you see, I give the point to Voltaire, not against Rousseau, because Rousseau would agree on this point, there are plenty of other points where he opposes Voltaire—but with Voltaire, this is one of the first uses of what has since been called public opinion, meaning that modern power would not be in power without you, so it needs, even if it means lying to you, deceiving you—that's why I talk about the death drives progressing in silence—it has an interest in doing so,
23:01 in saying, "the Russians, they'll be arriving in Brittany tomorrow, you saw, they dropped drones, strange drones, there were no explosives, there were just band-aids stuck on them," in Poland, it's really extraordinary—"ah yes, yes, but still, there are planes, ships that have crossed into Estonia's territorial waters," Estonia is in NATO now, Russia will see what's coming to it, NATO—it's true that NATO is overall, materially, more powerful than Russia, it's the sum total, but that's not enough, in Vietnam it wasn't enough either—but wait, we're not told this, there's the silence, silence is kept about the fact that the Russian ships were perfectly within international waters, except that Estonia decided, on NATO's orders, to unilaterally double the extent of its territorial waters, which is illegal under international law, such that the Russian ships found themselves—and they did like Macron, they tried to board a Russian ship, you must have seen it on videos—there were two planes, two Sukhoi 27s
24:11 that arrived, and the ships—the Estonian ships—didn't press the matter. So all of this is conspiring to trigger a war. As soon as public opinion is with us, we no longer need to hold back, you see, but it's hard to convince people, because public opinion, along with, I was about to say, the carnival—it wasn't serious—that we're witnessing, politically, at the very top of our state, I mean, at the top, plural. As for me, I don't dwell on the person of Macron; if he goes, there'll be another one.
1968 leftism, China and the emerging world 24:43 If he clears out, without changing anything, those who financed him, who put us through this, Sarkozy, Macron, Hollande, that makes a bit of a string of them. In all this, the left-right divide, not the one I defend, there is a left, there is a right, but Hollande is not the left. And I'm not going to repeat what I've often said. Yes, I will repeat it: what was being said to the left of the Communist Party in '68, that is, what were called the leftists, that is, I'm trying to be very precise tonight, the union, in the mathematical sense, ask your maths teachers, the union, within a set, of the chronological groups, so as not to upset anyone, the anarchists, the Trotskyists, and the Maos, the Maoists, the Maoists of the Latin Quarter.
25:33 I'm not talking about the Long March... That Mao, I pay tribute to him. That's not the China of the Red Guards. That's not the China of 15-year-old kids holding up a Party official with a Kalashnikov, someone at whose home they'd found a turkey and three hens, whom they denounced as an abominable capitalist, because Mao had somewhat lost his grip on the Party apparatus at that point. But there's a silence over that, including among Communists. Well, of course.
26:03 The worst anti-Communist-Party people were the pro-Chinese in '68. The Parisian pro-Chinese. The women who marched, the wives of the pro-Chinese. The MCJL, wait, the Marxist-Leninist Party, women's wing, with an F at the end for 'feminine'. Why not? I'm delighted when women demonstrate. No, no, but their slogan was 'We are not castrated, you see?' That was the revolution.
26:33 Right, then we surrounded the cities from the countryside, well, the folklore of it. Thankfully China has got rid of all that. And today it's giving hope back to the world, especially to what used to be called the Third World, which is now the majority of the world. And these are no longer small underdeveloped countries like that. Indonesia has over 100 million people. Pakistan, 200 million. India, almost as many as China.
27:07 Trump tried to tell the Indians, 'If you buy oil from the Russians, if you defy the embargo, I'll tax you at 50%, so there.' And then what? The Indians say, we get cheap energy, that suits us, tax whatever you like. He got a mouthful there. What am I in the process of recalling? That the death drives progress in silence. That's what we don't talk about, or the way that... No, it's not that we don't talk.
27:37 We don't talk about what I'm saying, but we're told something else. There's a whole other discourse keeping us on tenterhooks. I keep coming back to it: the Chinese are going to seize the whole Pacific Ocean, the Russians are going to come storming into Brittany. Unless we do like Macron, that is, unless we puff out our chest and send soldiers over there while we're at it. There's no more money. You know that. Hospitals, high schools, universities.
28:07 I won't sing a refrain you know well. It's important. It's even the most important thing. It's still the economic and social dimension. The government is mainly responsible, apart from security. I'm talking here about peace, about war and peace. Not the security that makes those in the posh neighborhoods tremble, when they've never had it so easy in human history. No. What's serious is what we don't talk about.
Structuralism against history 28:39 These are stories that haven't been restored, moreover. I'll stay in philosophy. The most important philosophical trend of the entire postwar period up to now, the latest one I mean, was structuralism. After that I won't even count the New Philosophers and the latest avatar, because that's not even on the same level anymore, it's nothing but media clowns, I'm thinking of BHL and all that.
29:12 No, I'm talking about structuralism. There were, after all... in the analytic field there was Lacan, in the Marxist field there was Althusser. All the same, these are real philosophers. One can have significant disagreements with them, but... Foucault, etc. But these people can't be lumped together. I'm not amalgamating one with the other. Some of them might reject being classed as structuralists. But there you go, there are themes. But I'll get to it, or rather I'll come back to it.
29:43 You might think I'm wandering off. This is one of those themes that was very common in structuralism, and it's fundamental. It's the critique of what they called historicism. You see? And the superiority of synchrony over diachrony. It's a bit more technical, but no, it's nothing at all. It's dead simple. Synchrony is everything that is simultaneous. Diachrony is everything that unfolds in time. History is in time. So it had to be criticized. That's the Marxists, giving importance to history. We're not even talking about Hegel. He knows nothing but history.
30:13 No, it's nature that matters, you know? Eternal nature. Mama Gaia. Do I sound like I'm caricaturing? No? I'm giving various attributes, some more caricatural, others more serious. But already, the fact that there's a silence about history, sometimes, in place of reasoning, of a constructed argument in a political discussion, it would be enough, to win over one's opponent, simply to restore, with testimony and sources of course, a historical sequence.
The nativists and the American far right 30:48 And I saw, three days ago or so, a documentary that I was looking for—I didn't stumble on it by chance either—but I was looking for the history of the American far right. Very quickly, I'll keep it short: there's a movement nobody talks about, the death drives progress in silence, but it was very important in the United States at one time, a movement called the Nativists, from 'natives,' which held: we've had enough of immigration, people should only be declared American citizens, with rights, economic, social, etc., if they are descendants in the biological sense.
31:47 Fascism begins as soon as you're in biologism—biology, I respect it, I wouldn't be alive without biology—biologism: being a descendant of the Pilgrims, the first ship, the Mayflower, in the 17th century, fled from Holland, right? Because New York, before, wasn't called New York, it was called New Amsterdam—I'm taking the chance to slip that in—because they found the religious authorities, listen to this, too lax, can you imagine, in 17th-century Holland, they had to be real extremists, what we'd call today, sorry, fundamentalists. Anyway, if you weren't—the Nativists are those who say only the biological descendants of the first arrivals should be considered American. There you go. So, I got interested.
32:57 And then, to be fair, to know intellectually, I'll continue my American historical sequence: Jefferson, at the time, one of the Founding Fathers, opposed them, and we are—oh, I'm going too fast—they were opposed to immigrants, but especially to Catholics, because the Protestant fundamentalists didn't want any more Catholics. So you see, all of Brooklyn, that's an Italian neighborhood originally, you've seen that in The Godfather, I don't know, the Italian-American community, the pizza chains, and the Mafia—to be able to carry out the landing in Sicily, the Americans worked with the Mafia. The Mafia is good, especially for fascism, very good, it did quite well in Pigalle, the Mafia, during the Occupation, you know, I won't remind you that there were a lot of Corsicans in it, I'll make enemies, but the names are well known. I'll go back to the United States, the movement, opposed by Jefferson.
34:07 You'll tell me, there are still Democrats in the United States. Yes, I prefer Jefferson to the Nativists, but still, he was a slave owner, like Washington, like all the Founding Fathers—that's something nobody tells you. The death drives progress in silence. We act as if there had always been people like that, falling from the sky, good people, there are the good guys and the bad guys, that's cinema, bad cinema, though it can be handled brilliantly, like in Westerns, there's always the federal army arriving at the end with the bugle call. And the movement almost died out, and it came back even stronger in 1850, so in the mid-19th century—I didn't tell you, but the Nativists, who wanted to reduce everything to the biological descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers, that was in 1788, you see it was really at the end of the 18th century, sorry, '98, the end of the 18th century—there in 1850, it takes off again even stronger.
35:18 And then an openly Nazi party is set up—look at the documents. At the end of the war, the time had come to hunt down those responsible for this barbarity. At the Nuremberg trials, several Nazi leaders are tried for crimes against humanity. Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels committed suicide. Eichmann and Bormann disappeared. There remain thousands of individuals who took part in the massacre to be captured. Part of the American services therefore launched into a hunt for war criminals, but only a small part. Robert Livingstone is a former CIC agent, the US Army's counter-intelligence corps. In 1946, he was sent on a mission to the Austrian Alps, precisely where many war criminals had found refuge.
Documentary: American services recruit former Nazis 36:15 The CIC was very preoccupied for a few months, maybe a year, with capturing Nazis. At the beginning, it was its main job, but that quickly changed. There was a poster we all had on our office wall, it was a list of people subject to immediate arrest. If you came across anyone from the Nazi party, you were supposed to arrest them. And I remember going into my officer's office, I asked him, so, where do things stand with this immediate-arrest list?
36:46 He answered me, forget it, now we're hunting communists. On each side of the Iron Curtain, it's now the Cold War taking shape. The hunt for Nazis turns into a race to recruit them. David Murphy worked for the CIA in Berlin in the '50s; for him, it was the Russians who started it. In Berlin, we knew perfectly well that they were running a major operation to recruit former Nazis and former army officers.
37:20 But in both cases, or in many cases, the Germans themselves came to see us. And they'd say, you know, the Russians asked me to do this, what should I do? They were trying to recruit them. We knew perfectly well they were trying to recruit them. And so we recruited them first and turned them against the Soviets. The race is on. The Soviets have a head start and the Americans are ready to do anything to catch up. In Brussels, we meet Peter Bagley.
37:53 In the '50s, he arrives in Austria. A few years later he would become, for the CIA, the worldwide head of counter-intelligence for the Soviet Union section. Our goal was always to recruit sources, information about the Soviet Union, about which we knew absolutely not enough. And we were always under pressure from our bosses in Washington to obtain data on the Soviets. And we looked everywhere for information.
38:24 And it's entirely possible that if someone claimed to have good information from the East, we would at least have talked with him. At the end of the war, Ladislav Niznanski is a young 27-year-old Slovak. He decides to approach the Americans to help them in their anti-communist struggle. Niznanski's past, the Americans know it well. They know he led a pro-Nazi militia unit attached to the German army. Among the achievements of this unit: a team of Anglo-American secret agents who would be deported to Mauthausen.
38:59 It's the only case in the OSS where prisoners of war in a concentration camp were savagely interrogated, tortured, then shot. And yet, after the war, the Americans recruited Niznanski? You know, the Americans recruited a lot of people. There used to be a saying in the American secret services: 'When we divorced the Russians, we married the Germans.'
39:35 In Bratislava, we found the man tasked by the Americans with interrogating Ladislav Niznanski the day he presented himself to them as a political refugee. This man is Joseph Vissen. Hello, welcome to our home. For the Americans, Vissen was a trusted man. They saw him as a source of intelligence on Eastern Europe. In his office, he tells us about his first meeting with Niznanski.
40:07 After about an hour of discussion, he started to think it over. I understood that something was breaking inside him. He told me, 'You know, I was hoping to meet someone I could talk to in confidence. I'm not a refugee. I don't need political asylum. I've been sent by the Czechoslovak army's secret services to spy in the American zone among the political refugees.'
40:46 The Americans became interested in him from the moment I told them he'd been sent as a spy. During our interview, one detail strikes us. It's these two small busts placed on the television behind Joseph Vissen. First statuette: Andrej Hlinka, founder of a militia bearing his name. Trained by the SS, Hlinka's Guards sow terror and eliminate resistance fighters. Second statuette: Jozef Tiso, head of a collaborationist government, responsible among other things for the deportation to the extermination camps of 70,000 Slovak Jews.
41:21 Sentenced to death, he was hanged in 1947. Who do these statuettes represent? Actually, yes, that's the Confederation of Political Prisoners. No, no, I'm asking about the statuettes. The first one is the former president of the Slovak State. That's for the first one. And the second is Andrej Hlinka, president of the former political party from the time of the old Czechoslovakia.
41:52 Doctor Tiso himself was elected president. He turned out to be a quality politician. You said earlier that you should have hidden these statuettes. Yes, I said that, but you, you're mixing everything up, you accuse them of collaboration, but that's not true. They have nothing to do with that. This has nothing to do with antisemitism. Vissen is one example among many of the more than dubious collaborators the Americans attached themselves to after the war.
Ukraine, the Baltic states, Bandera and “Judeo-Bolshevism” 42:24 And yet Joseph Vissen is nothing next to Gehlen's men, those famous CIA collaborators. We'll put the link to this video—I'm not a conspiracy theorist, I didn't find this in the archives of Beijing or Moscow. These are Americans quite hostile to Russia, but who recall this history. And on that same day, I come across investigations carried out by the Americans in Germany right from the end of the war, in 1945, 1946, 1947, to track down the perpetrators of war crimes or crimes against humanity.
43:12 It's a bit late for certain leaders who had shot themselves or been hanged, from Hitler to Himmler, in short. But there were plenty of people responsible for appalling local massacres, the most appalling—I mean historically, but the documents are unbearable, I mean I'm not a voyeur, so I'll skip over it. But trust me when I say appalling things took place, oh how strange, in Ukraine and in the Baltic states.
43:48 Well, well! Those are the very ones Macron relies on most to intervene. Strange, isn't it? Well, it must be a coincidence. Oh, Pagani, a bit venomous, making connections like that, amalgamations, right? There's a statue in Estonia, in one of the Baltic states, there used to be a statue. Of the monument to the Soviet dead. The Soviets left, if you can call it that, the trifling sum of 200,000 young men who died to liberate and drive the Nazis out of Estonia.
44:24 the statue was torn down and replaced with one of a former SS man. Didn't you know that? The death drives progress in silence. It's not that you don't know because you lack the right enzymes in your brain to have memory. I come back to what I was saying earlier, I'm not talking about biological memory here. I'm talking about real memory, the kind that matters in politics. The social frameworks of memory. There's no media relay, of books, of schools, of classes, of school curricula, in the media that repeat things often enough, because if I tell you once but 500,000 other times you're told the opposite, it doesn't stick in memory.
45:03 The fact is, the country that sent the most convoys to the death camps—I'm not even talking about the labor camps, the death camps, to Auschwitz for example—it's the Baltic states, well, well, and Hungary. Hungary at the time. The Germans could count on loyal allies. You know, because now they tell you—here again I'll give you a counter-argument—okay fine, there are some rather odd people over there in those countries, well, they have to hide their swastika a bit, but Ukraine doesn't hide the men from here to there, Azov, the Azov battalion.
45:44 And then there are Bandera streets, streets—these aren't a few hotheads soused on vodka naming the streets of a state. There are Bandera streets. Look into Bandera, ask your artificial intelligence for the details. It's unbearable. Against the Jews and the communists. No, I take out the 'and.' I keep both identities, Jews and communists, I keep them, but I remove the 'and.'
46:16 The Jews, and/or? That's exactly the logic. The inclusive 'or,' as they say in computing. And/or? Yes, that's what's being opposed now. The Soviets, they're antisemites, the former criminals, right, now? Better Hitler than the Popular Front, now, getting rid of that on street signs, they've got to do it. No, no, that's not it. That's not it. Reread the press of the period, don't just take my word for it. You know I detest gurus.
Nietzsche, Callicles and the return of force 46:48 That is, those who believe someone just because he takes their word for it, because he's said interesting things here and there, he's led you astray. No, no, check for yourself, independently of me, and look at the German Nazi-era press. The enemy isn't 'the Jews and the communists.' You see, I remove the 'and.' It's Judeo-Bolshevism. It's the same thing for a Nazi. The best example is Jesus. It's all Jews, all that.
47:18 You see? Pity, Christianity—I say this for the sub-Nietzscheans. You can't reduce Nietzsche to that. Still, Nietzsche said some catastrophic things about pity, calling it a feeling worthy of slaves. You know that theme, about inferior beings. Even though, to be fair, for Nietzsche it's not biologically inferior, it's inferior in another sense—for himself, he thought of himself as an aristocrat, not of birth, as he says quite clearly, but of spirit, essentially.
47:49 But still, I mean, it's terrible what he said there, isn't it—that everything that is altruism, taking the other into account like that, is proof of weakness. But well, I've already made a video about this, which I recommend, where I try to, how do you say, take down someone I didn't know at all, but a lot of young people of your generation, most of you—because it's not only young people who listen to me—kept telling me, you should do something on Rochdy. I didn't know who that was.
48:19 Well, afterward, I was stunned, I didn't know there were people that stupid. I thought he was joking at first, it was so ridiculous. Well, you don't need much to criticize Rochdy, but on one point, yes, because he constantly claims Nietzsche as his reference, that's why I'm bringing it up. And to refute him, I quoted a text by Plato that's 2,500 years old. No, honestly, where we see the negative character in the dialogue called the Gorgias, which I recommend, we see the character of Callicles, forged by Plato, whereas all the other characters are people who actually existed.
48:56 He's the only one Plato invented in order to carry the contradiction to its extreme, and he says exactly what I call sub-Nietzschean banality—namely, that pity, the judgment of souls, all that, good and evil, are themes produced by the masses, the majority of weak men, in order to hold captive the beasts of prey that the elite are. There, in short, I'm summarizing, simplifying, look it up.
An uproar that covers the silence: Know Nothing and the Cold War 49:28 So, it's in that video that I pointed out this comeback in force—of force, precisely. And I don't want to lose my thread, namely all these things over which silence reigns. Ah, but we're not in silence, there are 10,000 channels buzzing away, there are YouTubers, whatever you like, it's a din.
49:58 a rhapsody without sequel, as we find in Kant, right? But that doesn't contradict my story about silence. You can make noise, can't you, so that another noise isn't heard. I'd rather believe it's a storm to cover the noise of the plane coming to bomb you, you know. You can mask one noise with another. Now, in what we're currently keeping quiet about, three days before I came across the document about...
50:31 Yes, so six days ago, the document I was telling you about on the history of the American far right — but look it up, it was enormous, the party. Yes, it started — I didn't tell you the name — it was more the nativists, they were the Know Nothings, sorry, Know, from the verb 'to know.' It was a bit of a joke, if you will, because as it was at first a sect that later became an immense public party and all that, when you questioned one of them, they'd say 'I know nothing,' so they were called the Know Nothings, they knew nothing — silence again.
51:14 Look it up — it was a very powerful party, I say that because we spend our time being told there are two monsters, Nazism and communism, or Stalinism, whichever. There you go, and already that's clever, because I, who am neither one nor the other, am therefore among the good ones. And you never think about it, but it's simple. You know, Hannah Arendt — I'm neither Nazi nor communist, so I'm fine, I'm liberal, I'm the open society, as they say with Popper, you know, the one who took down Marx and Freud.
51:50 so that there would never be human sciences, only natural sciences, period. We'll talk another time about the classification of the sciences. There are big stakes there. Six days ago, I come across an American from the CIA. I'm not out chasing a conspiracy. In charge, precisely, of tracking down — I'm picking up my thread — the people who committed atrocities, that's why I made this detour through the Baltic states, Hungary, etc.
52:25 And especially to search, wherever they had hidden — most of them in '46, for example, had hidden, not yet in Latin America, some had already left, but most had hidden in the Austrian Alps. Bavarian and Austrian — you just had to cross a border. An American mission, very methodical, made a list of people who were considered to have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity.
53:08 And the guy I'm talking about, Bradley, and his colleague Livingstone, like the explorer, Robert Livingstone — this one, to give you the sources, arrives before his deputy at the office, takes up his post for the Nazi hunt, and says, 'So, this list, where are we with it?' That's when the other one, the head of the department, answers him: 'Drop it. That's over now, we're hunting communists now.'
53:38 in 1946. As soon as the Cold War begins, we miss a chance — I say that with great sadness. That's a euphemism. We could have done something extraordinary and unprecedented, after opening the camps. It was the Soviets who opened Auschwitz — I recall in passing, I don't want to interrupt myself, because it's the same subject as the first rumors that circulated about the horrors happening in the extermination camps.
54:10 The Anglo-Americans, I mean the services, the intelligence services, said at first, 'Don't believe it, it's communist propaganda trying to turn us against the Nazis.' You know, the Americans took a long time to enter the war. By the time they landed in Normandy, the Russians already had 30 million dead in the Gulags — sorry, in the war — and they were already at the gates of Berlin, roughly. At any rate, at the Vistula.
54:41 We don't say all that. Death drives progress in silence. I'm trying to make progress against this silence with realities you can verify, that you must verify. I recently questioned teachers about the official history curricula. I'm terrified. Europe — it's the European institutions, the history of Europe. I'm talking about secondary school. Parliament, the European Commission, the Court of Justice — the Soviet Union, it's the Gulag.
Lothrop Stoddard: race is not what matters 55:16 It's fantastic, really, the reduction to that. Anyway, let's get back to it. 'Drop it now.' At the very moment when we could have done 'I Had a Dream,' as Martin Luther King said, taught in schools all over the world so that this would never happen again. There you go — we should stop talking in terms of identity, of race, that's not what's decisive. I'm going to exasperate you with my apparent digressions, but no, I do need to illustrate what I mean when I say it's not race that's decisive.
55:50 It's not just Pagani's opinion. It's that the worst racists themselves are forced to admit that's not what matters. I'll tell you what I'm alluding to. Some of you have already guessed — the unspeakable Lothrop Stoddard. I owe this discovery to our dearly missed comrade whom we lost a few years ago, Domenico Losurdo, another Italian comrade who traces his whole body of work with his genius for finding things, like a water diviner.
56:25 Precisely, he reconstructs real history. This guy nobody talked about is an American who lived in the late 19th century, roughly, and who was pathologically racist. Except, here's the thing: he never talks about Jews, because in the Midwest, the danger was the Indians, not the Jews. You see what I mean? It wasn't yet, as I'll say later, a bit like in the movement I denounced earlier, the far right of the 1930s — but before that, there was already terrible racism.
56:57 By the way, you've all heard it said — finish my sentence — that a good Indian is a dead Indian, right? Indians, Blacks, and then it started a bit on the Pacific coast, the Yellow people, the Japanese. Well, when it comes to the Japanese, I'd say that too is underestimated — another great silence. There were pogroms against Japanese people in California. For that, I recommend a wonderful film with Spencer Tracy, the one who played the original version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a film called Bad Day at Black Rock, which looks like a western, but no, there are cars, modern cars and all, but set in a lost town in the Midwest.
57:41 There you go, I'll tell you about it another time, but it's about an old war buddy who comes to see his friend of Japanese origin, and throughout the film, the town refuses to tell him anything and even does everything to make him leave, because they don't want to admit he was lynched. Anyway. So where am I going with this? This Lothrop Stoddard — I haven't lost my thread — I'm going to show you that even the worst racists end up saying it's not a matter of color, nor of physical type. You classify races like that, the most eminent, the superior ones.
58:17 For him, it's the Scandinavians. You see, it's always Germanic at the root, but the pure ones are Germanic, not the ones in Germany who are already mixed with all sorts of other things from the continent. The Germanics, the Scandinavians, then you go down to the Germans, and then after that, people like me, Corsicans, wops, Italians, all that — not even worth mentioning. But in between, there are some complicated cases. For him, it's the Swiss — so what, how does he classify them? He found the 'Alpine race.' You see, it doesn't go looking far. But that's not what interests me.
58:47 When he classifies them, he says, and among the inferior races we must count the Blacks, the Yellows — we're not talking about Jews yet — the Blacks, the Yellows, the Indians, and the white socialists who defend them. What an idiot! He drops the mask without even realizing it. It's an inferior race, even if you're white, to be on the left. There you go. Lothrop Stoddard, look it up, yes, sorry, S-T-O-D-D-A-R-D.
The result is nothing without its becoming 59:20 And Lothrop, L-O-T-H-R-O-P, let me spell out Lothrop for you. We never talk about any of this. It's history that produced all this, of which we are the result. As Hegel says, the result is nothing without its becoming. What does Marx say? That the advances he was able to make are the synthesis of three historical contributions: English political economy, French political action, for which he had great admiration, and German theory.
1:00:01 You know, it takes centuries to produce all that. Those who call themselves Marxists and are completely ignorant of even German Romanticism, from which Hegel emerged. And it's precisely when he emerged from it that he became Hegel — the Hegel who matters. Restore the historical sequence. Try to do that. Don't let yourself be told... don't let legend replace history.
1:00:32 Freud, to come back to him, used to tell the people who came to see him to be treated by him: date your memories. Make an effort. Try to date your memories. What's the connection? Well, if you already see the connection with history, with dates. Date your memories, because if you don't fix them with precise objective reference points — this was that, but this was before, no, this was rather after...
Announcement of a cycle on revolutions and counter-revolutions 1:01:02 If you don't do that, very quickly, for each one of us, you think you remember well, and in fact you've already transformed everything in your memory. And legend has replaced history, at the level of each individual. So imagine when it's collective propaganda this time, and no longer individual subjects. There you go. I think in the next talks — I won't bore you too long — in the next talks, I'm going to, I'm opening a cycle here, I told you tonight, where I'll try to gather together everything that meant the horrors linked to the Third Reich and to the global far right in general, and Nazism in particular, did not fall from the sky by chance.
1:01:53 There aren't good guys here and bad guys there; there's a whole causality, a historical sequence in which capitalism is implicated, not just up to its elbows but up to its toes. There you go. And I'll sometimes leave things without comment on Facebook, and there, on YouTube, we'll put the link for today's two sources I gave you. The first, which tells the history of the nativist movement followed by the Know Nothings, right? And you'll see a lot of swastikas and you'll say, 'But was this filmed in Nuremberg in '36?'
1:02:26 No, no, no, no, no, we're in Chicago, we're in New York, we need standards! And with conspiracies, conspiracies by those very Nazis, and afterward, the one who said 'Listen, we're investigating the SS, all that, drop it now.' In '36, it's the hunt for communists. And the Cold War begins. If I were religious — I'm not — but that doesn't mean religion only says foolish things.
1:02:56 the notion of original sin isn't as foolish as all that. Even if Voltaire says it's stupid, to which Pascal responds — figuratively speaking, since Pascal died well before Voltaire — with words so beautiful that I won't distort them: that man is more inconceivable without this mystery than this mystery is inconceivable to man.
1:03:27 Yes, no, come on, let's be serious, I'm not speaking in religious terms — the original sin of our era, our contemporary one, in the West, this term I was denouncing earlier, that is to say, us plunged into the most terrifying threat of war there is, the one about which Einstein said: there won't be a third world war, or if there is, the fourth will be fought with stones. That's terrifying. And I tell you we've never been so close to it — that doesn't mean it will happen, it depends on each and every one of you.
1:04:04 For having developed the tensions that are now appearing on every side to such a degree — you can see it clearly, you've seen it, Madagascar, states, there are leaks everywhere, leaks in the sense of a water or gas leak in the system. Things are happening. Look at Morocco — who would have thought? The United Kingdom, it's not a dictatorship after all, they're our friends, they're the friends being courted against Macron to ally against Algeria.
1:04:34 he has to own up to his youthful past, he's the king. So, I'm announcing this cycle, plus the one about tracking down — I'll pick that up and finish on this: instead of starting with 'never again,' which I keep coming back to, because it's the beginning of my videos, the very first ones — I was born in 1945, if you will — 'never again' still means something for those born around that time.
1:05:11 There you go, now all people can unite together to say: we can have differences, opinions, disagreements, and all the better, that's what makes the rich diversity of the world, it's always a wealth — but they can at least unite on certain points, chief among them 'never again,' never again the unbearable. I refer you to the sources I alluded to, which will be posted once this video, sorry, this recording, is online.
1:05:41 So there you go, I'm opening a cycle on the fact that since the French Revolution, we have been — I've already said this, but I repeat it for newcomers — constantly alternating between revolutions and counter-revolutions, and the worst counter-revolution to date has been the Third Reich. Let's hope there isn't something even worse to come. I wish you a good evening nonetheless, and I've told you there are still reasons to hope.
1:06:15 It's that if there's so much propaganda, it's because they need you, your consent, to make war — it's a bit better than in the days when the king's emissaries, when mobilizing troops, would come to the farms, to the point that peasants sometimes cut off their own finger, sliced off their index finger, so as not to be able to pull the trigger, so as not to go to war. They need you, they have to convince you. And so, stop listening to me, listen instead to France 24, TF1, LCI, Europe 1, Arte — yes, it's not all the same quality, but politically, none of it is very far apart.
1:06:55 Have a very good evening, don't forget that death drives progress in silence. Big thanks to Adrien, who rides his bike across the whole Paris region to come give you food for thought. A thousand thanks to Adrien, to you, for your loyalty, and until next time. Thanks to all of you.
