Perhaps it would be a fitting gesture now if America would return the
Statue of Liberty?
See below a "Frog" who is still capable of sound reasoning. "The death
of any great nation is always a suicide." -Toynbee
Charles
----------
From: Pierre Joris <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Reegis Debray piece in NYT
Date: Mon, Feb 24, 2003, 6:58 AM
The French Lesson
February 23, 2003
By RÉGIS DeBRAY
PARIS - In the year 212, Emperor Caracalla granted
citizenship to all free men in the Roman Empire. Emboldened
by that precedent, a friend of mine, a former high French
official, once asked a president of the United States to
treat Europeans as compatriots. It was an agreeable
fantasy; only vassals were wanted.
For the current trans-Atlantic crisis to be defused, the
White House would do well to steer between those extremes
and to treat its European allies as what they are -
citizens of independent states, each with an idiosyncratic
history and geography. That approach would spare us many a
useless bout of hysteria as the Security Council this week
considers Iraq. To each its own geopolitics.
Eight out of 10 Europeans on the street agree with the
French-German position, and the governments of Britain,
Spain, Italy, et al., have cut themselves off from public
opinion. In confronting that awkwardness, the United States
has chosen France as its scapegoat. Not having any training
as a satellite state, unlike the countries of Eastern
Europe, France has assumed the right to judge for itself
(despite a number of elites firmly in the American camp).
The United States, of course, is free to decide that a
cadaverous satrap, kept under close surveillance, affects
its national (and familial) interests. If the American
administration is intent on precipitating the war that is
Osama bin Laden's fondest wish, if it wants to give
fundamentalism, which is currently ebbing, a second chance,
we can say only, so much the worse for you - while
regretting that history's most constant law, the perverse
effect, is not better known to the Pentagon. Provoking
chaos in the name of order, and resentment instead of
gratitude, is something to which all empires are
accustomed. And thus it is that they coast, from military
victory to victory, to their final decline.
"Old Europe," the Europe of Crusades and expeditionary
forces, which long sought by sword and gun to subjugate
Jerusalem, Algiers, Timbuktu and Beijing, has learned to
distinguish between politics and religion. In 1965, one of
its old champions, de Gaulle, loyally warned his American
friends that their B-52's would not be able to do anything
against Vietnamese nationalism - and that to devastate a
country is not the same as winning hearts and minds. Europe
no longer takes its civilization for civilization itself,
no doubt because it is better acquainted with foreign
cultures, notably Islam. Our suburbs, after all, pray to
Allah.
Europe has learned modesty. A civilization that believes
itself capable of making do without other civilizations
tends to be headed toward its doom. To be sure, in
defending its interests a great nation may end up promoting
freedom. Such was the situation with the concentration
camps. It will not be the case for the $15 barrel of crude.
The stakes are spiritual. Europe defends a secular vision
of the world. It does not separate matters of urgency from
long-term considerations. The United States compensates for
its shortsightedness, its tendency to improvise, with an
altogether biblical self-assurance in its transcendent
destiny. Puritan America is hostage to a sacred morality;
it regards itself as the predestined repository of Good,
with a mission to strike down Evil. Trusting in Providence,
it pursues a politics that is at bottom theological and as
old as Pope Gregory VII.
Europe no longer possesses that euphoric arrogance. It is
done mourning the Absolute and conducts its politics . . .
politically. It is past the age of ultimatums,
protectorates at the other end of the planet, and the white
man's burden. Is that the age America is intent on
entering? One can only wish it good luck.
"Old Europe" has already paid the price. It now knows that
the planet is too complex, too definitively plural to
suffer insertion into a monotheistic binary logic: white or
black, good or evil, friend or enemy. When, one wants to
ask, will Washington agree to count to three - and think
not this or that, but this and that? A sober weighing of
threats, without emotional obfuscation, is far more attuned
to our current world, which Balkanizes minds even as it
grows more unified in its implements, than an impatient
divine investiture.
Whence this paradox: the new world of President Bush,
postmodern in its technology, seems premodern in its
values. In its principles of action, America is two or
three centuries behind "old Europe." Since our countries
did not enter history at the same time, the gap should not
surprise us. But as to which of the two worlds, the secular
or the fundamentalist, is the more archaic, it is surely
not the one that Donald Rumsfeld had in mind.
Régis Debray, a former adviser to President Francois
Mitterrand of France, is editor of Cahiers de Mediologie
and the author of the forthcoming ``The God That
Prevailed.'' This was translated from the French by Jeffrey
Mehlman.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/23/opinion/
23DEBR.html?ex=1047049247&ei=1&en=a3db67dc9e58fdf0
___________________________________________________________
Pierre Joris
6 Madison Place And they call reading a sin, and writing is a crime.
Albany NY 12202 And no doubt this is not entirely false.
h: 518 426 0433 They will never forgive us for this Somewhere Else.
c: 518 225 7123
o: 518 442 40 85
-- Thomas Bernhard
email: [log in to unmask]
http://www.albany.edu/~joris/
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