A philosopher is one who proposes a vision of the world, and if we were to summon Hegel, as an intertext to his account of the dialectic, he would tell us that history does not happen randomly, that there is a direction to events, which Karl Marx, after him, called the meaning of history. The difference between direction and sense in relation to history is that the former considers it to be guided by a spiritual precept above the world and the latter by a purely material principle included in the world. From the point of view of economic relations, we can only agree with Marx when he said that human history is the history of the class struggle, that is, between the dominated and the dominant. In the reading of history, there is only conflict and war. As Hegel said so well, evolution is conditioned by the idea of conflict. We can say that Marx inherited from Hegel the thought that conflict is the motor of history. All evolution in history has its origin in a succession of conflicts, themselves generated by the notion of competition between nations, and it is indeed commercial battles that are reflected in the current military interactions all over the world.
NB: Jacques Attali, far from being a communist, devoted a laudatory essay to Karl Marx on this subject, and it was he who was the first to point the sunlight in the direction of Emmanuel Macron. It was he who suggested Edouard Philippe as Prime Minister. Let’s move on.
Today, humanity is afraid of a nuclear war. It will not happen because it would not occur to a single man to extinguish the world. The war continues via small peoples and it will not be long before the school curricula include knowledge of the past world as long as there are irresponsible people like Volodymyr Zelensky, who is inclined to dispense with new neuronal connections that would have allowed him to be less stupid and less dangerous for his people.
Faced with Russia’s movements, some French politicians are bursting with a pathology that bites the sky. Beyond political interest and strategic measures, their affects sometimes get in the way of medical emergencies. For months, they delayed the validation process of the Russian anti-covid vaccine Sputnik V by the European Medicines Agency (EMEA) until it was excluded from the European health pass.
The deterioration of the situation has led to a rotting of emotions and has led Europe to a negative democracy which, little by little, leads to the abandonment of common perspectives among Europeans, and this is exactly the great problem of French democracy, which is still struggling to give up this negative passion of interests. On the international level, against the political heritage of De Gaulle in foreign policy, some French politicians only step out of the EU towards challenges that the American Zeus takes seriously. However, the Russian invasion of part of Ukraine does not worry the Élysée as much as the Sahel, which remains its major dossier. The exponential increase in security spending in the region at the expense of its development deserves to be questioned about France’s political, rather commercial, objectives and the extent to which it intends to achieve them. One has to have brain cells rinsed with dishwater to believe that its presence in the Sahel has no other reason than the annihilation of the jihadist clans. The political spirit of terrorism is on the table and the Western powers are burping it up, and it is eating its way through. And in the Sahel, more than 10 million people live with insecurity on a daily basis and face a dramatic increase in hunger.
France has always been in pole position in the growing competition for strategic minerals in African lands; it was perhaps with its help that Canadian companies took over the mining sector in Mali. The entire Sahel is rich in gold, bauxite, copper, cobalt, lithium, uranium and possible oil and gas deposits. Today, thanks to Algiers, Russia’s influence in the region is unquestionable and the Wagner Group, a private Russian military company with direct access to the military chiefs, the main sub-Saharan leaders, is giving President Macron a lot of trouble.
Since 5 July, Moscow has cleverly annexed the militarised framework of the Algerian state, which is of interest to Macron. The Sahel: this is the subject of his visit to Algiers and the famous “renewed and ambitious partnership” which he welcomed on Friday 26 August, during a speech to the French community in Algiers. Let’s not be fooled, it is not with the chiefs of the Algerian army around a Tebboune who is as dazed as an eccentric that he is going to discuss the future and the Algerian youth! The constitution of the Algerian regime is in line with Spinoza’s principle in his rhetoric on mind and body, there is not on one side, a political head of state and on the other, the army. The two are one.
After the military-led coup in Mali, the French soldiers were pushed out and replaced by the Wagner group, which President Macron calls a group of mercenaries, which is far from wrong. This is the same group that provides the close guard to the president of the Central African Republic, which has long been the preserve of France. In the aftermath of the putsch in Burkina Faso, the French embassy in Ouagadougou and the French institute in Bobo Dioulasso were attacked by crowds. In Algeria and sub-Saharan Africa, French flags continue to be burned against the backdrop of a war of influence between Moscow and Paris, with the thinly veiled complicity of governments in the region.
In order to prolong its military involvement in the Sahelian strip and take advantage of its wealth, France must reactivate the dialogue with Bamako so as not to leave the field open to Russia. Legitimate or not, it depends. In this respect, it needs Algeria’s support. Difficult, almost inconceivable support from a country considered a traditional friend of Russia, which arms and supports it. But President Macron knows that the anxiety that makes Tebboune and his generals sweat has a name: Ferhat Mehenni. And the invitation of the latter by the CNEW channel came at the right time.
Questions are needed. Let’s try to answer them with lucidity.
1- President Macron had called on the French public media, specialists in international affairs, to counteract Russian propaganda, which the latter had not accepted, going so far as to denounce in a press release “its interventionism in media that are supposed to be free in their editorial and working methods”. Why then, with regard to Ferhat Mehenni, have these journalists substituted arbitrariness for the honour of duty? Pride, presumption or arrogance?
2- The moment Ferhat Mehenni was invited for an interview as president of the provisional kabyle gouvernement, the Elysée knew it. Two minutes before his intervention on CNEWS, he was deprogrammed by the channel’s management. Why wait until the last minute?
3- If the order was given from the Elysée Palace, France, with regard to Kabylia, would enter the memory of General Jacques Randon. If this is not the case, why did the denial come from the French ambassador to Morocco?
Djaffar Ben
Ferhat Mehenni facing the Kafkaesque Franco-Algerian complicity against the background of global rivalries.
