This post is a reworking and extension of a short text that I published on Facebook. I am well aware that I am jumping from one subject to another and mixing different topics. Different but... connected.
When I was a teenager, in the seventies, I was following my history lessons and this question remained in my mind for a long time: how could people at the dawn of these two world wars have failed to see anything coming? They had it all right in front of them.
In light of recent years events, I understood that THEY KNEW. As for us today, all the cards were on the table. But then why didn't they react? I'm not talking about the few people who, on the sidelines, tried to alert, to do something. I'm talking about the masses.
Here again, we just need to look at ourselves. We don't move and we watch the dangers rise while following the evolution of Antoine Dupont's cheekbones, Elon Musk's fortune or this or that celebrity's twerking. Yet everything is right before our eyes BUT... We live in a system that prevents us from acting because we have to earn a living, eat, buy clothes and housing, and all that takes time and energy, and we have become accustomed to a level of comfort, however minimal, to which we cling. The upshot is that, like previous generations, we will wait for things to hit us right in the face before we do anything. We will wait until we have to.
The other aspect that seems important to me has to do with the nature of the protagonists. In this war, which for the moment is still “distant”, as in the two previous ones, whatever religion is invoked, whatever political sides are taken, we have totalitarian states or organizations that are attacking democratic countries (there's no point in trying to convince me that we are a dictatorship, ridicule doesn't kill, but still...).
States which, for example, have set up social credit system, states whose head has been there for 25 years continuously (see bottom of page) and in which the neighbor has just been voted “leader for life”, vote by show of hands of course. States where people are starving, where the leadership is passed down from father to son, states that send groups to break up newsstands and intimidate the kiosk owner if a poster does not present their leader in a good light, this in Paris as everywhere else in the world.
In a nutshell, we can clearly see that terrifying and recurrent mechanisms are on standby, ready to be triggered very, very quickly. And once it starts... we're up against the wall. Everything gets confused and accelerates.
Watcha Gonna Do?
I have often asked myself what I would do if a conflict broke out. Would I be able to discern what's at stake and make the right choices? People who have been on the wrong side of history are often looked down on, while those on the right are glorified. Consider the Second World War: things are often presented to us in an extremely binary way. On one side the collaborators (boo, boo, in the dungeon!); on the other, the resistance fighters (yeah, yeah, cheers!), forgetting, of course, that the majority of the people was somewhere in between and was just trying to survive, waiting to rally to the victory of one side or the other. And even if things had been so simple, so black and white, many of these “cursed” or “heroes” were very young, between 18 and 25 years old, when they were confronted with the choice of one side or the other.
I remember at that age I could be very stupid and make a decision on a whim, without really thinking, more out of instinct or contradiction than anything else. For older people, a father or mother could only be torn between their convictions, their family obligations, their humanity and the risks involved. In short, Matrix's red pill or blue pill is a simple and crystal-clear choise compared to what people in those days had to go through. So I asked myself the question several times. How far would I be able to go? How sure am I of my potential reaction?
The signalman
The first question, at the beginning of the 80s, while watching Shoah (Claude Lanzmann's film), a sequence made a huge impression on me: the one where he interviews the guy who managed the last switch before Auschwitz (or maybe another camp, it's been a long time since I saw it). And, unlike other inhabitants of the region, he completely denies having been aware of the final solution. Lanzmann asks him: “But surely, given the number of trains that were sent there, you must have realized that there were far too many people for a ‘simple work camp’.” The guy replies, “No, not at all,” and you can see very, very clearly in his eyes... that he is lying!
He is lying to protect himself, to avoid facing the implications of a positive answer. If he admits that he knew, or even had suspicions, he will never again be able to even pretend being able to look at himself in the mirror. I am certain that he has not been able to do so for a long time, but if he admits it, he will commit social suicide. Going further with my thought process, at that time, I asked myself what had led him to behave in this way: was he simply a coward or did he have a family to support, for example? Did he agree with Nazi extermination or had he realized the problem too late to act or react as he should have? Had he simply been a spectator of his own lack of reaction? In short, I really wondered what could lead a human being to a dead end as obvious as it still persisted forty years later.
Ten years later (in '91), I was hospitalized for a pneumothorax and I happened to read a poignant book about Drancy and especially about the children who had been left to fend for themselves in the camp once their parents had been deported. After reading this, I was at least certain about what I would or wouldn't do in the event of war. Some children had managed to escape at times and had knocked on the door of a farm or the first house they came across. Some people had opened the door to them, others had left the door closed and, even worse, a third group had taken them back to the camp and handed them over to the police again.
Testimony of George Wellers at the Eichmann trial: Children of the Veld'hiv arrive at the Drancy camp
That day I knew that I would be completely unable to leave a child on my doorstep and that I could never even consider taking him to an internment camp. But as for the rest, quite honestly, I don't know what I would have done at twenty-years-old, immersed in that total chaos. I hope I would have made the right choice, but I am in a good position to know that certain situations must be experienced, and not simply considered, in order to discover ourselves.
This is why I hope that we, and especially young people, will not be confronted with such dilemmas, forced to make choices that they will suffer with all their lives. But if war is to come, it will come. And we will have to stand up, be able to look at ourselves in the mirror without blinking.
Wesh Bro !
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Putin 25 years already
