The crossbow, because too deadly, is likely to depopulate humanity. In 1139, faced with the recent improvements in the mechanisms that drive this new engine of war, the men of the Church urgently wish to limit its use. So they intend to use their power over society to mitigate the evils that this weapon can cause.
At the Lateran Council, in April, the Church prohibited the use of crossbows. She wants to limit, as quickly as possible, the possibilities of armed aggression between Christians, which could divide her moral empire. However, nothing prevents us from using this weapon against the infidels, against the disbelievers… But who will respect this division of the world? Hardly anyone. The crossbow will spread and revolutionize warfare. It will be about the same, in the XXand century, with the proliferation of the supreme weapon, nuclear power, carried by ballistic missiles.
The weapons change, but the war remains what it has always been: a disgusting butchery that incurable somnambulists commit among themselves.
In the puzzle of the crossed destinies which arise for humanity, attacking a territory and its population is always carried out according to the same patterns. The scenarios are reduced to three. Either you claim, to justify a coup, that the nation in front of you does not deserve to be there. It’s frontal. Either you say that these same people are oppressed and your action is to help them. It’s lateral. Finally, there is this variable geometry parry that allows you to throw your fist forward in the name of self-defense. It’s fatal. Poutine cheerfully mixes these three options in an old nationalist sauce of its own. To hear it, he swears that his hegemonic policy is a necessary prelude so that Russia can finally hear the sweet music of peace. He would like to stop a contagion, he repeats. That of a state that he proclaims to be in the pay of the Nazis. Ukraine is however led by a president of Jewish descent, Volodymyr Zelensky, part of whose family died during the Holocaust. When it’s time to go to the front, guns drawn, why bother with details? It is enough to have oneself from the front all around the head.
Opposition to his project of hegemony, the Russian autocrat confuses them with outbreaks of spiders just good to crush. His war is presented as necessary, in the same way as the legions of Caesar, Napoleon, the English, Hitler, the Soviets, the Americans or all the other conquerors of various sizes, in different eras, proclaimed.
Major military manoeuvres, always justified in the name of a desire to establish a calm that is to the advantage of the States conducting them, almost always have the reverse of creating series of anxieties. This leads, on both sides, to a crazy and disorderly race towards the illusions of a security always to be reinvented. The insecurity which results from it, very few periods in the history of humanity managed to avoid it. Those who, like me and so many others, grew up in the midst of the mad arms race of the Cold War do not feel without reason the anxiety of the return of the nuclear threat.
Putin’s untimely action, this booted Caligula, reminds us that, if the notion of sovereignty has been accepted everywhere for a long time, it is regulated, most of the time, by authorities who do not hesitate to deny it when it suits them, both to wage war and to make money. Do you remember the MAI, the multilateral agreement on investment negotiated on the sly by the members of the OECD? The deal promised to dispense with state sovereignty to speed up business progress. In other words, the strongest was granted the possibility of claiming its superiority over state legislation. This secret agreement ends up being thrown away, but we have seen new ones flourish, sprinkled with the same water. In other words, the war against sovereignty is fought in several ways, because of our own cowardice. It benefits from the lazy numbness of States, which have been made to believe that their disinheritance would ensure happy growth.
How dare Putin shatter the happy calm of peace on earth? He carries out, by iron, a policy of appropriation which already has course otherwise, less brutally. But let’s stick to the single chapter of the war. From 1496 BC to 1861 AD, when the United States was torn apart in a civil war, there were 219 years of relative peace, Jean Bacon had calculated. Seen otherwise, out of 3358 years, 3139 years have been devoted to warfare. Is it necessary to add the sad XXand century in the balance? The wars have never stopped. They have always been the expression of a political vision of the world. And yet, blinded to this reality, we are surprised that it starts all over again, to the point of making ourselves believe that it will mark the beginning of new times, those of a society freed from its subjugation to Russian hydrocarbons. !
During the war of 1914-1918, which promised to be the last of all, the nations spent, at the very least, 340 billion dollars. With such a sum, it would have been possible to offer all the families of the United States, Canada, England, Ireland, Germany, France and Russia, it was calculated, a decent house. . Every major city could have been provided with a hospital, a library, a university at the same time. During the Vietnam War, the United States spent 494 billion. In 1990, just in the Gulf blitzkrieg, 60 billion were spent. The human being is a thinking animal, a wonder of nature. It’s unfortunate that, when acting, he seems mostly good at shooting himself in the foot.