A new kind of war. A war with and without
borders, with and without states, a war doubly new because it blends the
non-territorial model of al-Qaeda with the old territorial paradigm to
which Islamic State has returned.
But a war all the same.
And,
faced with this war unwanted by the United States, Egypt, Lebanon,
Turkey, and now France, only one question is worth asking: What should
we do? How, when a war like this is forced upon you, do you respond and
win?
Principle number 1:
Do not play with words. Call things by their right names. Dare to utter
the terrible word “war,” a word that the democracies try to push out of
the range of hearing, beyond the bounds of their imagination, their
symbolic system, and their reality. This aversion to war is their
mission, their distinguishing trait, and their crowning glory, but it is
also their weakness.
Recall the
nobility and the candour of Léon Blum revealing, in a famous debate with
Elie Halévy in the 1930s, that he could not grasp the notion of
democracy at war, except as a contradiction.
Recall
the dignity but also the limits of the great consciences of humanism in
the second half of that same decade, when they watched with alarm as
Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, Roger Caillois, and others from the
College of Sociology called for the intellectual rearmament of a world
that believed, then as now, that it was done with its dark past and with
history.
That is where we stand today.
Thinking the unthinkable: war. Accepting the oxymoron of a modern
republic required to wage war to save itself.
And
thinking it all the more painfully because none of the rules laid down
by theoreticians of war, from Thucydides to Clausewitz, seem to apply to
that non-existent state that brings fire from a distance that is all
the greater because its front lines are fluid and its fighters have the
tactical advantage of making no distinction between what we call life
and what they call death.
France’s
government, including the President, understands this. French political
leaders across the spectrum have voiced their unanimous support. That
leaves you, me and society, both collectively and individually. Each of
us, this time, is a target, a front line, a soldier without knowing it, a
cell of resistance, a locus of mobilization and of biopolitical
fragility. The idea is heartbreaking and appalling, but it is a fact
that we must face.
Read more: Thinking the unthinkable: This is war - The Globe and Mail
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