The word stands out in red letters in all the windows of bookstores in Paris. As luck would have it, when the Russian tyrant launched his troops against kyiv, an unpublished manuscript by Louis-Ferdinand Céline entitled War. The text dated 1934 was found by chance last year, 77 years after being stolen from the writer, who was then fleeing France for Denmark. There is something unreal in seeing enthroned in the window these days this hallucinated story of a man injured in the arm and head fleeing from the front, this “international slaughterhouse of madness”, writes Céline. Words that teach us more about the war than all the reports that parade in a loop on the continuous news channels.
Reading this story made of blood and mud, it’s hard not to think of Ukraine and this war that drags on at the gates of Europe. In Davos, two weeks ago, a diplomat and a financier, both Jews, nonagenarians and survivors of Nazism, came to defend each in their own way their vision of this conflict, whose veneer of alliances is slowly beginning to crack.
For the multi-billionaire Georges Soros, at the head of the influential and controversial think tank Open Society, it is neither more nor less than a conflict of “civilization”. Regarding Putin, he believes that “the best way, and perhaps the only way, to preserve our civilization is to defeat him as quickly as possible”. Supporters of this thesis do not hesitate to draw parallels with the Second World War, painting Vladimir Putin as Hitler and the supporters of negotiation as Munich. It was in the capital of Bavaria in 1938 that the shameful compromise was signed authorizing Hitler to invade Czechoslovakia. We know the rest.
Such is not the vision of the man who can be described as the greatest diplomat of the second half of the 20th century. In Davos, from the height of his 99 years, Henry Kissinger had on the contrary come to plead for the return to the status quo ante which prevailed before February 24, even if certain territories were ceded to the Russians. “To continue the war beyond this limit would no longer be to fight for the freedom of Ukraine, but would amount to starting a new war against Russia itself,” he said.
Since 2007, the former Secretary of State of Richard Nixon and Nobel Peace Prize laureate has repeatedly said that Ukraine is located on a fault line between Europe and Eurasia and that, for this reason, it is condemned to remain a neutral country, as Finland was only yesterday. Member of NATO, it would become a permanent threat for the Russians as was Cuba in the 1960s. The one who met Vladimir Putin more than twenty times estimated in 2014 that his “demonization” was not a policy , but “an alibi for the absence of politics”. Contrary to what is said today, “Putin is a serious strategist”, he says, who bases his decisions “on the basis of Russian history”.
If we rely on some of his statements, we can sometimes wonder if Joe Biden and the Washington hawks are not seeking to subdue Russia more than to liberate Ukraine. History, perhaps, to teach China a lesson. Let’s admit that, until now, this war has been a blessing for Uncle Sam, since it has miraculously put NATO back in the saddle, an organization whose “brain death” Emmanuel Macron had nevertheless decreed. A real ordeal for Europe, the boycott of Russian oil and gas is a godsend for a country that is practically autonomous in this area. The same applies to the explosion of military budgets. We already know that the 100 billion euros that the Germans are preparing to spend on their defense will not be used to buy French Rafales, but American F-35s.
Are these short-term gains worth the danger posed to the world by an all-out conflict that would precipitate Russia, a nuclear power, it should be remembered, into the arms of China? In an interview at FinancialTimes, the same Kissinger recalled that it was “not wise to adopt an antagonistic position with regard to two adversaries in such a way as to bring them closer”. Whoever, in full “détente” with the USSR, organized the first visit of an American president to China, 50 years ago, probably knows what he is talking about.
As for Europe, unless it condemns itself to a new cold war of which it would be the first to pay the price, it will sooner or later have to renew ties with Russia. The fight against the Russian invasion is certainly a fight for the freedom of the Ukrainian nation, victim of a savage and unacceptable aggression. But it cannot be presented as the great fight of democracy against absolutism as we sometimes hear. By dint of ideologies and lame comparisons, we will end up derailing everything. This is perhaps what the French president meant earlier this week when carried away by a rare Gaullist impulse, he invited his allies and in the first place the Americans to “not humiliate Russia”.
In her posthumous masterpiece, Céline is far from these considerations. But he reminds us how much war is no small matter, rather a pot that can breed monsters.