English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Mussolini and "the bomb in hand and the flower in the mouth" 0:00 So we're not going to discover every day, right, that people play the leftist, the rebel, when they're 15, 20, 25 years old. Some seem to be discovering that today. I forget which communist said in the 1950s that the worst of the far right recruits itself from the garbage cans of the left, the garbage cans of the left, those who started out that way, you see. And who, as soon as there are real class problems, as soon as one must conform to what's called democratic centralism, and to collective decisions, all of a sudden their petty-bourgeois narcissism takes a hit and they're the first ones giving the Hitler salute, you know.
0:52 They're not the last ones, in any case. To the point that Mussolini, to speak only of him, gives a whole speech on what real revolution is. And I shouldn't have said Mussolini, because I should have encrypted it and let you guess who said what I'm about to quote. And you would have said, but that's Cohn-Bendit, those are leftists, far-left demonstrators, antifas.
1:22 Yes. That's what Mussolini said, he said the revolution, the real one, isn't miserable stories about unemployment, wages, pensions. The true national revolution is "a bomba in mano e a bocca in fiore," the bomb in hand and the flower at the mouth. Really, Mussolini, that's very Cohn-Bendit.
1:54 Very 1968, the bomb in hand and the flower at the mouth. Good evening everyone. Increasingly happy to be with you again. You see that's changing. Before, I used to say I'm always glad to be with you again — not always, but increasingly so.
Announcements and method: the spiral and variation 2:30 Thanks to our young comrade friends from the OCF of the Alpes — I'll say the Basses-Alpes of Haute-Provence. It gets on my nerves, if I may say so. It's not only political correctness that made us go from Basses-Alpes to Alpes de Haute-Provence, but how ridiculous. So I call it the Basses-Alpes of Haute-Provence. There. Nothing to avenge myself over. And that their group has set up a Spotify channel where all my public talks will be broadcast as content on that channel.
3:19 Spotify and hence Deezer. You know better than I do the affinities between these labels. So, there's no time like the present for those — and I understand them — who might have tended to demobilize a bit following the silence I was forced into, both for health reasons and because of the lectures I was asked to give in the provinces. This might be the moment for those who are discouraged to subscribe or resubscribe.
3:53 Don't hesitate to do it, because it strengthens us in a way that's hard to measure. As good news never comes alone: not content with having created this channel on Spotify and Deezer for our talks, there's also a Discord server that will be identifiable through the link you'll find below the video.
4:23 For those who would like to take part in the discussions happening on this Discord, for which you'll see the link below, don't hesitate — the more the merrier, as the English say. In French we translate that as "the crazier we are, the more we laugh." Well, some might take that the wrong way. Not me, in any case. How does Baudelaire put it? "But the voice consoles me and says, keep your dreams; the wise have none so beautiful as the mad."
4:58 I'm going to try to give an increasingly synthetic shape to my talks. That is, to try to condense in them what I haven't stopped repeating since my very first public talks. And yes, I think I'm always changing the subject, taking detours. Actually, I find I say the same thing all the time. There, all right, none of that is contradictory. The main thing, as you already know, is that images give the mind a bit of rest from time to time when things get abstract.
5:32 It's the image of the spiral, isn't it? You have the impression of repeating, of going backward, but there's a slight shift such that the circle keeps getting bigger, and so on. There, it's not contradictory to always harp on the same thing, but how shall I put it, musically? Instead of always repeating the theme the way worthless music does, it's better to proceed by successive variation of the theme. There.
The West without history and the freedom of the Franks 6:02 And as for the theme, you know I'm always torn between transmitting scattered, precious fragments — not yet made into a system — of the cultural heritage that's been burgled from you over the course of nearly two past generations. I'm not looking for culprits here for now, among the powers that be of course, but I'll simply point out that what's called the West — and you know with what tongs I handle that term — the West has as its patron, diplomatically, militarily, financially, geostrategically, whatever you like, until further notice, a country which, whatever one thinks of it, good or bad, that's another matter, everyone can agree does not have a very ancient history,
7:13 and is therefore a bit at odds with countries with long historical resonance. I took part in discussions when I was in Germany last December, discussions on the relationship the left must have, or can have — not "must" in a moral sense, but the relationship the left actually has — with the French Revolution. You see already the historical depth involved, even though that's yesterday, the most recent period, rather it's even our period, our modernity beginning at that moment, when the industrial revolution was going to drive infinitely more peasants off their land than the communists ever threatened to nationalize, right.
8:10 I say that because some remember, when I was a militant in a rural cell in the Drôme, I recall the right-wing posters showing a kind of bird of prey that looked exactly like a black vulture, with a dripping beak like the vultures in Lucky Luke, flying over some poor little French village with its bell tower, and captioned: "The communists are going to take your land." Result: the land is gone, and we're still waiting for the communists.
8:42 There. I'll close that parenthesis. Yes, current events — the more the masks fall, the more things unthinkable just a few months ago now become mere factual banalities, trivialities, as they say in mathematics.
9:12 things that no longer surprise anyone at all — the harder it becomes, the more fascism reappears, the less masked it is, the less concealed, the less disguised as liberal discourse. Someday I should do a whole development just on that term, on "the free world," Free Town, Freiburg. The Franks — yes, the Germanic tribe that gave France its name — strictly means "the free ones."
9:53 A "free town" [ville franche] is a town that didn't pay too many taxes compared to others. You see? That's the kind of freedom involved. And so the Franks, in battle — Clovis, when he put his sword to a defeated man's throat, would say, "You've been defeated; now you're living your last quarter hour, or else you become my slave." Usually the other preferred to be a slave. And so Clovis himself remained a man who was, shall we say, free.
10:23 These are the throat-slitters, that kind of freedom. It's not that of the social contract. There. You see? I seem to be going fast like this, but it's precisely at the moment fascism reappears that one should talk about it least. Or rather, that means it's already so... not in power in the administrative sense, no, not yet. But it's already so sociologically widespread, you see, as I tread on eggshells.
The paradox of a fascism effective because invisible 10:58 It penetrates the middle layer of the middle class, you see, though there'd be much to nuance in all this. But people barely dare say to their neighbor, on the bus, at home, at a party, isn't that so — people barely dare say, "Don't you think there's a danger of re-fascization?" Oh, here we go again with the big words! You see, that stirs up indignation. Or else ridicule.
11:29 Ah yes, we see what that is, it's the Godwin symptom. That means, in very proper French, let me mind my language — either you come off as a fool, I don't know, or people find you in such bad taste that you'd better talk about something else. There. So we'll need to spend time on this paradox: why is fascism never so effective as when it doesn't appear as fascism?
12:02 Well, of course, I'm already acting as if I knew what true fascism was. And as if you knew it too, all the same. It's not that we shared a bit of content — yes, a bit of truth in all that, but still, seen up close, seen up close. Which is why it became the ultimate repellent, the "never again that," say, at the start of the Cold War, in a time when what was then called leftist required no circumlocutions.
12:34 Back then it was a political luxury. Even the right was Gaullist right. Now, among people who claim a certain anti-communist left, they'd weep with joy to have a quarter of De Gaulle's progressivism — De Gaulle, whom I voted against throughout the whole time he was in power, if that reassures you. Which just goes to show that moralizers get a poor reception.
13:04 But would that function of repellent, of absolute horror, remain the same as it was for fascism — I hope, for still the majority of those listening to me, I hope. Come on, quickly, and under — okay. Would it be identifiable as absolute horror in that way if there had only been Italian fascism, for instance?
The White Rose, Buchenwald, and Weimar 13:38 And God knows, if in France we underestimate the brutality and abuse that our Italian comrades had to suffer — the communists, of course, in the front line, but even simply some who nonetheless said the Gospel had never prepared them for this. Moreover, in Germany there was the same movement among young Catholics, in southern Germany rather, and in Austria too, in Bavaria and Austria, the movement called — some know it — "the White Rose."
14:16 Lovely, like "Rosa Weiss," the White Rose, with the wonderful — sorry, but I'm on medication coming out of the hospital after a small crisis, so some names escape me — but it comes back to me, those kids of 17-18 who had none of the experience the working class has of hard knocks, of militants, of police raids, and who handed out leaflets on trains, in 36-37, on trains infested with the likes of the Gestapo, and who all got caught, hanged, on butcher's hooks, girls of 17-18.
15:07 They were Catholics, yes. And when I visited the Buchenwald camp — I'm circling around our main topic — Buchenwald isn't Auschwitz, it's a labor camp, the mortality rate is the same, except you die from having to lift blocks of stone three times heavier than me, right, at least. At Buchenwald, that's the labor camps; as for Auschwitz, if on top of that you're Jewish, or suspected of being so, I mean, and if you're the absolute enemy, that is the Judeo-Bolshevik — Marx, Jesus, you see, the Judeo-Bolshevik — well in that case, you get liquidated the moment the train arrives.
16:02 I visited Buchenwald under the East German communist regime, the first German nation-state in history with a collectivist and pacifist vocation. The regime authorities who ran the tours of the Buchenwald camp — which, I remind you, is 3 kilometers from a little paradise called Weimar, and that's the whole German paradox right there.
16:49 The abyss of German barbarism is 3 kilometers from the center of Weimar, which is the summit of German humanism. It's the small square of the first national theater, because the Germans arrived late in the international European literary currents, exactly as the Russians arrived late to classical music, they who had such a wealth — still have such a wealth — of folk music with the immense reservoir of their rural population.
17:26 For the Germans, it was literature; the founders, whether thinkers like Lessing, the admirable Jewish Lessing, the one who was treated like a dead dog — no, the one who said that Spinoza had been treated like a dead dog. Of course, the founders, Herder, Goethe and Schiller, who are not at all considered romantics in Germany, but classics.
18:01 Goethe and Schiller stand arm in arm at that statue in front of the first national theater, only in the 1780s. One had to wait — you see, like Mozart writing Così fan tutte, the third opera of his Da Ponte trilogy — for the summit of barbarism to appear three kilometers away. And I had pointed this out: the East German regime had the intelligence to place, without any comment, a quotation from Goethe at the entrance of the camp.
18:38 "Whoever comes to stroll," says Goethe, "on the heights of the beech wood" — Buchenwald simply means "beech wood," as Birkenwald means "birch wood" — "but whoever sees this sight can only feel elevated sentiments in his breast." See the tragic German irony summed up right there.
Late nations, and the question "what do you call it?" 19:08 So, yes, should we talk about Nazism? I won't say "the return of fascism" anymore, but in its most openly unmasked form this time — condemnable, right. If nothing else had happened — and that's already saying a lot, no, saying too little, sorry — beyond Italian fascism. You know, the fascists liked to force prisoners to drink castor oil, so they'd relieve themselves in public, you see the kind of spectacle.
19:49 Well, that's not the gas chamber, that's not Nordic rationality, is it? So, all right, none of this is at all a matter of race, understand — there are histories and geographies, but above all histories. It's no accident that the two countries tempted by the fascist adventure, Italy first, then Germany after, are the two that were not nation-states at the point when their unification process began, which is very recent, dating from my grandparents' time or your great-grandparents'.
20:28 We're not going back to prehistory here. Yes, there are reasons why suddenly — all the big German cities, the further east you went the truer it was, had a Jewish quarter, a ghetto, which the Germans of the time referred to in the city the way the Marseille bourgeoisie talk about "the Arab neighborhoods." I say "Arab" in quotes, what they call, without bothering to know whether it's Maghrebis, Kabyles, whatever.
21:00 Who cares. And in a way, we're quite right, because after all this isn't a matter of identity. Every time, it's neighborhoods of migrants, people who aren't "from here," and not the richest ones either. Those neighborhoods. So yes, it's good, it's good to be worried about the rise of fascism. I'm not the only one, thankfully. No, no.
21:30 Simply, are we all sure we're identifying the same thing when we point a finger at fascism? So, I'll stop being aporetic, as they say in philosophy — that is, insisting almost only on dead ends, you see, on somewhat paralyzing contradictions. Some do that systematically to block discussion; that's called eristics in the ancient tradition, for example.
22:05 Instead of being aporetic, of defusing aporias, difficulties, in a word, let me recall that when I insisted on what specifies the philosophical field in general — we're no longer dealing with the problem of fascism here — the question is "what do you mean by..." more than the question "what is..."
22:36 That's exactly what I feel compelled to say, that we need to agree, isn't that so, on what fascism is — let's even grant that we manage to identify it, let's even grant that we arrive at a predicate for the subject "fascism," and everything that follows is a predicate, let's grant that we all agree on that predicate, even including the fascists themselves, you see, I'm dreaming, even including them.
23:07 Is that enough to reconnect us to what's most current? And why would history repeat itself identically? That practically never happens. And who's to say what threatens us now isn't perhaps even worse? No, no, we're not here to play voyeurs, don't imagine atrocities. Imagine something very simple, at least when it's stated abstractly.
23:39 It's that — I'll never stop repeating it, quoting Einstein saying that if there's a third world war, then the fourth will have to be fought with stones. And we'd be thrown back into a regression of tens of thousands of years. The danger before us is unprecedented. And we've never been so close to it. It's been a long time since we last spoke — three or four months without any publication, you see.
24:15 It's no accident that I keep circling back to this issue, and it's not about to leave it tomorrow either. It's not up to me to decide; current events, after all, have their say too — not the only say, but still a say — in the choice of our daily horror. And when I began my very first publications about a dozen years ago, my first series title was "Between Crisis and War, Philosophy, Question Mark."
24:52 You'll tell me, fine, we know about it. Yes, but the thing is, that was twelve years ago. The danger of war has been multiplied by, I don't know, I dare not say by what multiplier since then, and it keeps growing every day. What's more, the flashpoints, if I may call them that, the flashpoints where war can break out at any moment are now multiplying.
25:28 From the South China Sea, from Taiwan to Iran, with the invincible Armada, Venezuela, Greenland—I haven't even mentioned Ukraine. You see, that's how it is, and depending on the case, everyone couldn't care less. Twelve people died yesterday in Lebanon—so what, who cares? That twelve Lebanese were killed in violation of the ceasefire by Netanyahu's Tsahal. You see, with complete impunity, and there, no economic sanctions, as there are for China, for Russia, for Venezuela, for Cuba—no, is Cuba being strangled?
The falling of masks: "leftists" and Anglo-Saxon decline 26:12 For how long now? So, what we are currently experiencing—I'm just giving a few pointers so we can come back and not abandon our subject, far from it—what we are experiencing is the masks coming off. It's not the film coming back to haunt us. Take federal Germany, democratic Germany, because we are the democracies and facing us we have the authoritarian, if not totalitarian, states, we're all agreed on that, it's what gets drummed into us in all the media, so we, we are the good guys.
26:52 And at the pinnacle there is federal Germany, not even, isn't that right, as dirigiste as Jacobin, Gaullist, French communist—Gaullo-communist, we've had enough of Gaullo-communism, it was indeed the number two at the MEDEF who came out with that, of the current MEDEF, it's true. It's—no, I don't remember which, it's not the MEDEF itself but one of its followers who said something similar, that we must stop the return to Gaullo-communism. Do you think there's a danger of a return to Gaullo-communism? That should show up in the figures. For now, what I mainly see is the return of the Rassemblement National.
27:41 So, what is original today, which was not the case with all fascisms, not to this extent, is the disguise, the mask. As I said to our German friends in Leipzig last December, the worst of the current fascisms is the one wearing a face of the left, a face that far-right people call "leftist."
28:14 The word "leftist" does not come from the far right, it comes from Lenin. In Lenin it designates the exact opposite of what the far right now calls "leftist." Do you know what it means now? It's everything that's to the left of me, and I'm on the far right. Well, that's a lot of people then. That means Macron is part of it, Macron is a leftist. I don't know. Whenever there's an economic failure, it's the fault of socialism, it's already a disguised Soviet Union. I read it again yesterday, France, the last trace of the Soviet Union according to Trump's entourage.
28:49 Of course, of course, of course. We saw women ship captains in the Soviet Union, I saw them myself in the port of Abidjan, didn't I, with a library in twelve languages on a small cargo ship that was, in short, casting its nets in the rich fishing grounds of the Gulf of Guinea. Currently, that's what makes Trump so exasperating to a lot of people, often the least recommendable ones, even if he himself isn't exactly a joy either, but I mean, what they hold against him is that he lets the mask fall—people are tired of holding back.
29:47 I need Greenland, I need Greenland, there you go. Crazy, what is it, it's Danish, it's Inuit, what are Inuit people? Do such people even exist? Well, he'd already said "shithole countries" about African countries, remember, that was during his first term, his first mandate. But at the same time, at the same time, what people won't forgive him for is that he's giving the signal of decline, of a decrease in power.
30:18 A decrease in power is terrible, you know, when you've been an empire—as I keep repeating, since Waterloo the world has been run by Anglo-Saxons. It doesn't bother me personally, I'm not saying there aren't good sides to it, but at the same time, what came out of it—the two greatest carnages in the whole history of humanity? It didn't take long, just one 19th century, to go from feudal wars—which were already bad enough, war as Alculo called it, "war in lace," in that era—to the Battle of Kursk, the greatest tank battle in all of history, where there were tanks that had run out of fuel, two Russian, or rather Soviet, tanks like that, firing at each other crosswise, you see, to get past a German tank, in order to crush it.
31:15 In one century, and these two great carnages—and the second too often overshadows the first, I say this especially for France—France lost a million and a half of its citizens, a million and a half. It hadn't collaborated in 1914, as far as I know. And four-fifths of the destroyed territories were on French soil.
31:46 As for the death toll, unfortunately, the peoples who can share the dubious honor are the Germans, the English, and us, and the Belgians—it's the massacres, and I'm not even talking about Eastern Europe and Russia. Those Russians whom the Tsar sent to fight with wooden rifles, you know, just to scare the enemy from a distance—only one in ten had a real rifle. Are you surprised that army rallied to Lenin six months later? No, it doesn't fall from the sky, Nazism.
Clouscard and the two fascisms 32:17 So, what's happening now is good news for understanding, but terrible news as far as war and peace are concerned: fascism is starting to shed its masks, and thus what Clouscard, in total isolation—almost a generation ago now—I'm thinking of a title like Néofascisme et idéologie du désir—is coming to fruition. And at that time there wasn't a race to fascist government in every country in Europe the way there is now.
32:54 The German far right rarely scored above 3%, now it's between 30 and 40. In France, I don't need to draw you a picture, in Austria and Italy the threshold has already been crossed, and there's not a single Scandinavian country that would have a stable governing majority without the participation of far-right ministers. That's the country we were shown not so long ago, especially by the PS, by the anti-communist left.
33:28 Ah, the model of Swedish socialism—yes, well, we see the result. So, maybe there's at least this positive side to it: it makes it even more inexcusable for us to keep stammering when we talk about fascism. So I'll remind you of the modest contribution I can offer within our association on this point, and as always, when it's an idea that comes from me, I ask you especially to corroborate it, to make an effort to contradict it, to verify it in the sources: there are two fascisms currently competing in the world.
34:18 Not only competing with each other. There are two fascisms, two political forces that deserve, in a well-founded way that I do validate, the label of fascism, but which are sociologically, economically, and politically very different. The first is local fascism. In France it's the Rassemblement National, it's the AfD in Germany, in Spain it keeps rising, it's part of the white supremacist movement, which is now, so to speak, MAGA-fying.
35:02 Part of MAGA. These are local fascisms where you always find the same things—decadence. This lets me clarify something about semantics: there's a term that irritates me, "the elites." You can recognize someone on the right when they start criticizing the elites. The elites—that's Epstein, that's Clinton, that's Bush, that's Trump.
35:32 Yes, wait, wait. Those are the elites of money. "Elite" is supposed to mean the best. The best is Mozart. Mozart is buried in a common grave, you can't even find his tomb, that's how poor he died. To each their own elite, if you'll pardon the expression. If the elite now means the first idiot who just cashes his dividends after a 40-minute board meeting once a year, before going back to the island he bought between the Bahamas and the Great Barrier Reef.
36:06 That's geographically speaking what I just said, we understand each other. So, this right, I'll call it local, puritan—and opposite it there's Epstein. I say that because he's making headlines, but you know, there's worse in that department. Yes, indeed—if you reread The Silences of Colonel Bramble.
36:39 —by one of the best popularizers of American history for the bourgeois classes, I'm thinking of André Maurois, who, on top of his work as a historian, also tried his hand at writing some rather funny novels, including The Silences of Colonel Bramble. In it, he wrote: watch out—a father tells his French son, who is about to go live at an English university—watch out, over there scandals are much rarer than at home.
37:13 They don't forgive, they're serious about it. But you can do whatever you want as long as there's no flagrant offense. You see? Well, let's leave the anecdote there. Yes, I'll propose two fascisms. The first, which I've just named, is the one you're most familiar with these days, given the authorized demonstrations we've just witnessed. You don't need to look far to illustrate my point.
37:45 And then, this fascism doesn't hesitate and doesn't even flinch when accused of fascism. When it's not too public, when it's private, when it can speak freely, it won't try to exonerate itself. "It's not fascism." On the other hand, the second one, which is much more powerful, is what the people on the right, the first ones, the previous ones, what local fascism calls the elites—the globalized elites, as they like to say.
38:23 Personally, I have nothing against the world. I'm very attached to the sovereignty of my country, of our country, to its sovereignty. I've insisted enough on what we owe to Rousseau in terms of the creation—not of sovereigntism, which is a right-wing idea—but of sovereignty, which is the most progressive idea of the French Revolution. It means we bow before nothing—not before nature, nor before God, nor before anything—that has not been founded by the contract.
38:55 That is to say, by an agreement, not between us and some external order, whether divine, supernatural, or natural, but only before the decrees of our fellow human beings. Between the social contract and the order we're now being called back to, by people who claim things have gotten too lax, there's an abyss.
39:29 So, the second fascism—why go round in circles?—has been conceptualized, it has been named: libertarian liberalism. That is to say, the ideology most widespread among the bourgeoisies fighting over the planet since Waterloo. It's not complicated. It's unexpected that it should be so precise, but that's how it is.
39:59 And this has nothing to do with race. There are English and American people who died defending human rights against puritanism, the puritan tendency of the Nordic right. So, I'll propose a methodology to try to see a little more clearly through the fascist label. But you see how, every time an agreement seems to be moving forward in the Ukrainian file, at the last moment it's the European heads of state who come and shatter prospects for peace that were beginning to emerge.
Ukraine: European leaders against peace 40:43 Don't make me give an example, there are fifteen of them, just in the last six months. The first, and most famous, was when Ukraine, with Zelensky at the head, had accepted the agreement with the Russians in 2022. The war had only been going on a few months. There wasn't yet a million dead. That poor Ukrainian kid whom everyone has seen being kidnapped in the street, how they fight, how passers-by insult those who are abducting them.
41:18 That Ukraine we never hear about in our media. That Ukraine that sees entire units surrendering in the Ukrainian army. Yet at that point none of that was to be feared. Ukraine could keep the whole Donbas—everything, except Crimea, that is, all of it. Ukraine, in that Donbas, was losing practically no territory. And in exchange, it just had to recognize a relative autonomy, the kind that Europe grants very readily to any of its regions, to the French-speaking provinces.
41:58 I almost said French-speaking, you see—Russian-speaking. Yes, because the glorious era when we held Germany in a vice between France and Russia seems very far away now. But after all, that was De Gaulle's France, or the France of the last years of the Second World War, wasn't it? So let's really reflect on this particular case troubling us now.
42:29 the masks are falling, the danger, the gravest of symptoms, the gravest manifestation of fascism, is still war. Don't put words in my mouth—fascism doesn't have a monopoly on war, alas. In all of human history, we didn't wait for fascism to make of this world what Holy Scripture called a vale of tears.
43:02 Except that among fascists, war is programmatic—read Mein Kampf. So there will be people who'll tell you we're not there yet, we're not in fascism, look, well, you still get your medicine reimbursed, several parties can vote, all tendencies combined—yes, well, my wife, who has ten years on me and who lived through the Nazi period as a child, says it was paradise.
43:37 As long as you weren't Jewish or a communist. She still recalls the campfires, she was 12 years old. Don't try to feed her some line about Germany, she knows Germany. That's why she told me: my dream when I was in my final year of school was to pass my exams and go off to France, smoke Gauloises, drive around in a Deux Chevaux, and listen to jazz. That's not quite the Krauts' program. You know I love Germany, but I'm not too fond of the Krauts. I prefer the Germans.
44:09 There you go, this isn't a question of identity or biology. What's happening right now is that we're normalizing—not one aspect of fascism while hiding the others, no, on the contrary, the mask is falling on the worst part of fascism, which is war. We can't imagine what war really is, especially after such a long period of peace. Ah, but surely you'll admit that thanks to Atlanticism and Europe, Brussels' Europe, we've at least had peace.
44:44 Nonsense—well, all the same. It's true there was a period of peace such as we hadn't had in a long time historically, from 1945 until the '80s. I say that because we quickly gloss over the Balkans. It's as if they were North Africans or Black people, second-tier whites, so to speak. I'm talking now like a far-right man, but that's what a lot of Germans think. Just look at how Germany treated Greece at one point, not so long ago.
45:20 And rendered null and void the idea of a referendum in Greece. They weren't allowed to hold a referendum. So let's not beat around the bush. The worst expression of it is still war. And all our heads of state in so-called Western Europe agree at least on this point: that war must be waged. And Macron went so far as to say—it was in November '24, I need to pause a moment because the situation is unbelievable.
46:00 every time, I ask myself, did I really hear that right. Pacifists are defeatists. In November '24—now it's the exact opposite. Now they're trying to make people believe it's the Russians who are being stubborn, who don't want a ceasefire. Now they need them to back down. They need a ceasefire. So all of a sudden, the bad guy is whoever doesn't want a ceasefire. Back then, it was all the Western heads of state.
46:32 And so, back to it. When Ukraine was ready to sign this peace that would have spared Ukrainian youth first of all exile—seven million have left, seven million—and a million corpses, or wounded people who are so often just living dead. Well, right when peace was about to be signed, in came Her Majesty's Prime Minister, the other blond guy, who showed up and said, "If you sign, you won't get another penny."
47:12 There's a delay, someone said to Zelensky. That's how it's worked ever since. So we shouldn't speculate about the return of fascism. In many respects, it's already here. It's already here. Don't think that Germany woke up one fine morning, just like that, on a December 31st at midnight, and suddenly slipped into fascism. For the chancellor of that time to hand Hitler the office of chancellor, the von Papens and company, I don't know, for that bourgeoisie to have preferred Hitler to the Popular Front, which was far more dangerous for them.
48:07 So Hitler is put in power, and people are assassinated in the streets—what do you call them? The leftists, yes—Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, the two leaders of the German communist and Spartacist movement, lynched in the street, like in Texas, like African Americans in Texas. You know, when there's a rape in a town—not so long ago, in a small town, they'd start by lynching ten African Americans and only think afterward about who it might actually have been.
48:40 Well yes, that's what was done in the streets of Berlin. So there's the program awaiting us for the coming session, and I'd also like to hold a special session—now I'm shifting form but not content—we can keep talking about the return of fascism, but in a Q&A session, to be honest, because after such a long absence, there are still many pending questions I'd like to tackle, including some quite old questions that are being reactivated by current events.
Local fascism joins world fascism 49:30 don't hesitate, if you're kind enough to leave comments, don't hesitate to ask questions, because in doing so, you'll be shaping the program of our next session. You may have noticed that I alternate, for the technical setup, between Pierre-Alain and Adrien, depending on who's available at the time—I'm an opportunistic vampire, aren't I? I catch them whenever they're around, and frankly, between Adrien, who doesn't travel much but works hard, who has the merit of crossing the whole of Île-de-France by bike because he works under very difficult conditions—I can't say more—in a bar in Seine-Saint-Denis, the 9-3, whose girlfriend would like to see more of him, which means, unfortunately, he can only come on weekdays—I say unfortunately, selfishly, for my own sake—and Pierre-Alain, on the other hand, who has to be caught whenever he's in France,
50:40 Right? There you go, and besides, even in France, when he's at a festival in Biarritz or Cannes, that's not the moment to bother him with our problems. Well, there you go, he's at your disposal tonight and I'm delighted about it and I thank him. See you very soon, and we're waiting for your questions. Well, this isn't the first time I'll be accused of harping on, so you'll have to agree among yourselves between those who say I take detours and those who say I harp on, between the same and the other.
51:11 That's a nice dialectic. Well, it must be true in both cases. But I'll repeat what I was saying a moment ago, namely that for someone who situates themselves on the far right, that is, for more and more people, this is increasingly the ideology—not the dominant one yet, but still, I mean, local fascism is knocking at the door of global fascism.
51:42 "Elites," as local fascism would say, right? And at that point, they'll no longer be an opposition. Look how Bardella has already said there's no question of leaving NATO while we're at war. For 40 years they've been making people believe they're the only recourse against NATO, against Europe and all that, and then when the real stakes arrive, right? Everyone rejoins their barracks, right? So, when you're far right, you call everyone to your left "leftists"—well, that's a lot of people!
52:18 I told you there was Macron, but wait, everything that makes France proud. Go on, just this once. Personal anecdote: I had a girlfriend a while back, some time ago, whose mother was English, all right? And dare I say it, the daughter of an admiral? Yes, an admiral of Her Majesty's—not exactly the most pro-French circles.
52:50 So I'm saying this because she hated the figure of De Gaulle historically, because she's a bit younger than me, closer to my generation. But anyway, so I'm not talking about my girlfriend, I'm talking about that girlfriend's mother. And so, don't imagine that De Gaulle receiving a Westerner in uniform... and she only read The Economist.
53:20 You see, I don't know if you can picture the content—hyper-liberal, to a degree we can barely imagine. For those people, France is a country, I'd say, almost Soviet, Bolshevik. Why? Because as soon as she was sick, she'd come get treated in France. You see? Everything else was bad in France, but the healthcare system—without saying too much—that, mind you, back when it worked a bit better than now: I get out of the hospital, I spend four or five hours of my time there waiting on a chair.
54:03 I saw my first doctor at 2:30 in the morning—I'm not putting the hospital staff on trial, quite the opposite, I've never had so much admiration for the feats they're forced to perform. I saw nurses who didn't stop for a second, ten hours straight, that's their work shift, ten hours. And the doctors I saw, if I saw them so late, it's because they were prioritizing poor fellows who'd fallen off scaffolding and had their chest caved in, right? That comes before my little octogenarian's crises.
The right's debt to the false left 54:36 There you go. So I'm starting to get exasperated by this way of spitting on the left—not only that it's unjust, it's that it's not even grateful. Because the right-wing powers today—who do they owe their power to? If not to that fake left to which they'd love to reduce the whole of the left, right? To the left of the "Tonton mania."
55:07 You remember, the "Tonton mania" isn't that old. Mitterrand's two consecutive seven-year terms, that's still 15 years each time. It's serious. That's when—and Hollande never changed it, another socialist—that we rejoined NATO's integrated command. Which means two forces have been rising.
55:38 One might think it's a coincidence, that it has nothing to do with anything. Take whatever unit of measure you like to assess the danger of war, and the specialists on that, and take the aggressive neo-puritanism that keeps denouncing the depravity and corruption of the elites as if they were only just discovering today that capitalism worships capital. What do you want me to say? It's still unbelievable.
56:10 You'd have said the same thing 50 years ago. They'd have said, we can tell you're a communist, you don't like wealth. You see? There you go. So it's time for you all to be stricter with one another in vocabulary, in exchange. It's not interference to make an effort to draw distinctions. It's always progress. Like I remember making with Adrien a video that had success, by the way, precisely because—if it doesn't mislead people—on content regarding the distinction between the state and the state apparatus, from which it followed...
56:50 I'm not going to redo the whole thing, but it's very quickly summed up, and it's all the more striking when you sum it up. It's that we've never seen, we've never lived within the framework of a state apparatus as technologically powerful as now—listening, satellites, cameras, surveillance, in short, I'm not going to draw you a picture, you know that better than me, to the point that it's almost too obvious. But at the same time, this whole gigantic apparatus, next to which that of the Third Reich seems like some provincial tinkering, is now in the service of what?
57:24 Of this negation of the state that is the private sector. Go figure. There you go. Don't forget that when you hear people spitting on the left, on socialism, whatever it may be, the daughters of the Communist Party and all that—it's not all that. Without the anti-communist left, the right would never have had the power it has today. So don't be too ungrateful when you spit on the leftists. Thank you.
