With the recent “pager attacks” in Lebanon, it seems that we are moving more and more towards a new kind of war, where we attack in a sneaky and unexpected way the private, intimate, family space of the enemy. We paralyze and stun him by allowing a mortal danger to hang over his every movement, his communication, his breath.
The great political scientist Bertrand Badie recently said that the hand-to-hand battles of the past presupposed at least a certain form of ontological equality between the belligerents, to the extent that, on both sides, people recognized a body, a face, a common humanity.
Now, Mars, the Roman god of war, has no more rules or borders, no more beginning or end, the enemy is invisible, omnipresent, omniscient, ready to strike at any moment. A prince, somewhere, decides, with impunity, with a blink of an eye, a tap of a key, to erase, thousands of kilometers away, lives deemed harmful, as in a video game. A spectacular war, which fascinates, no longer by its dramatic, atrocious, bloody nature, but by its hushed, fluid, sophisticated aspect.
For a little hope, I am waiting to be able to read Bertrand Badie’s new book entitled The Art of Peace. After Sun Tzu’s Art of War to be published soon, by Flammarion.