A sixty year-old horror

In the foreign policy marking - or marring - out rime, making distinctions between the "good" powers, those of democratic transitions of power, and those of acts of scheming, or of great evil or nationalistic fervour or chauvinistic gain, of short sight or the calculated gain of leadership as opposed to those of country (yet, in a good or inclusive or at the very least defensible fashion). One great upset of mine this year of bellum horribilis was the remark by a certain columnist at a certain liberal daily of the crime of the Russians of interfering with French "democratic stabilisation operations". This came too short after the too easy to deconstruct a neologism of "special military operation" and was too audacious not to be discounted but by the most gullible, ill-advised, frivolous reader, and thus must have been carried off gently into the night of no further questions. But only if it did not awaken certain harder-edged truths, concerning certain truths in our undead past (not going back to 1619, or even 1830) and symbolised, in its blood-soaked unraveling, by this night of October 17, in sweet and - to France - regenerating 1961. The facts of such a night has already been best penned by Peter Hitchens: 

Using pick handles and rifle butts, the police force of one of the world’s most civilized countries surrounded and savagely beat hundreds of dark-skinned men. They then threw them into the beautiful river that flows through a city celebrated for its cultural and artistic wonders. Those who were still alive after the beatings were left to drown.

This was Paris, City of Lights, on the night of October 17, 1961. To this day, nobody knows how many peaceful Algerian protesters died in this episode, concealed for years by menacing state power and a ­compliant press. Most estimates are in the hundreds. General Charles de Gaulle, towering hero of resistance to Hitler, had recently become President of France in an undoubted military putsch, tactfully concealed but firmly based upon paratroopers. He cannot possibly have been unaware of what was done that night.

This truth does not eradicate previous crimes from the French government, or succession of governments of colours, forms and sentiments as differing as to those of Germany or Spain, but were committed under the present, 1958 Constitution, and necessarily leaves a trace when the question of "democratic stabilisation operations" and the role of France in its ex-colonies ("ex" here denoting a relationship of enduring cohabitation, economic integration and recurrent violence) and the answer to the question why Russia, a lesser economy and a more shameful state - if we are to believe our democratic, or democratically necessary news outlets - seems to pull greater weight, and certainly sympathy, in these parts of the world and many others, in spite of the praises (and silences) of commentators so precious to our democracy as Mr. Jonsson and his ilk. 

Days such as this, who seem to walk with iron shoes and never be very far away - and undoubtedly carry certain day-and-party political inhibitions and designs - are necessary to reminisce in the hard facts that still govern our present day to day political affairs, and the relations between states which now - for a certainty - do not grow like a fungi towards universal hegemony for the free and open and democratic (terms that are internally as contradictory as they are fraternal) states or "the free world". Certainly France is now a polity better assuring rights for its citizens , and certainly these facts are much harder across France's own little pond - to the lands once united with this great union of free states, but sadly no longer - and not only or even deliberately on account of French politicians. No more than the guilt Rwandians issuing racist and race-designating passports, and then blows from the machete, thirty and thirty-five years after the departure of Belgian colonial administrators should or could be admonished, or neglected, nor minimised, nor should we forgive the acts of Algerian authoritarians (or African slave-traders, shut down by European colonial powers, with the black-shirted masters of the first fascist states being among the last). Here, I must say I have developed a sensation I once considered a defect, with the , albeit one united with relaxation of the one enlightened/blighted with the hard facts of our common past.