A-Infos (en) France, OCL CA #340 - Editorial: It was better afterwards (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

If the past and the external world exist only in the mind and if the 
mind is capable of receiving directives. So what? ---- George Orwell, 
1984 ---- After the first crisis following the industrial revolution, 
the first world war, the last of the last, the industrialists were able 
to send women back to their homes without a thank you and the 
politicians demobilized the riflemen survivors and prepare them for 
colonial exposure. ---- And wham! the Roaring Twenties. ---- After the 
second, the "time of the Americans" has consumed us, women can elect 
their masters and riflemen eager for war pensions are liquidated.
Night and Fog. Sorrow and pity.
Nuremberg Trials; creation ex nihilo of the State of Israel, a foothold 
of the West in the Middle East. Tokyo Trial; occupation of the Japanese 
archipelago, a foot of the West in the Far East.
Some retraining of intelligence agents and rocket technicians in the 
process.
And hop! The Thirty Glorious.

Subsequently, long colonial wars in Indochina/Vietnam, in Algeria; 
sometimes more "quiet" in Black Africa, some modern politicians having 
been trained in universities in the North. Elites for sure. The West and 
the East still use this playing field to impose themselves ideologically 
but above all to get their hands on endless deposits - diamonds, 
precious metals and today rare earths... Decolonizations, rarely total, 
never completed , partly in the midst of civil war, are still prey to 
the needs of formerly dominant or newly partner imperialist powers, such 
as China of market socialism.
Against an increasingly distant ideological backdrop, worried heads of 
state fear the members of their own governments and suppress their 
opponents. The rebels live on the peasants who "host" them and are 
punished for it. Ego issues like national interests, opportunistic or 
matured for a long time, explode and swallow up the needy lives that 
cannot help themselves.
But they are still developing!

Trade agreements, transfers of mining or forestry concessions, 
authorizations for military installations, "cooperation" of all kinds, 
from State to State, are the fruit of political and geostrategic issues 
on which populations have no influence. have no grip. The ground that 
they have sometimes tread on forever has become the terrain of 
confrontation for dominant foreign powers. What cannot be swallowed up 
through markets will be swallowed up through war, the other form of 
politics as one might say... So the Silk Roads - the old and the new - 
the trails and straits which lead to a strategic piece of land or an El 
Dorado are they the object of desire whose limits are constantly being 
pushed back, of History truncated into dubious legitimacy.

The world map, then, does not exist outside the heads and delusions of 
colonialist conquerors, soldiers and/or economic predators. The 
distribution of peoples, tossed from colonization to nationalism, 
ordered to behave as makeshift allies or enemy brothers, from forced 
promiscuity to arbitrary separation, from partition to reunification... 
nowhere corresponds to the borders that others have drawn. The fractures 
of the world, the sound and fury, the sweat, blood and tears and the 
smokescreens that accompany them are broadcast by satellites. One news 
chases the other, and emotions are first shattered by the scoops, then 
move away from them like the papers on the front page, all the way to 
the stall... This is the case with Russia and Ukraine; of Palestine and 
Israel, which relegate Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Syria, Kurdistan, Sudan, 
Ethiopia, to Congo Kinshasa, Sri Lanka, Myanmar; wherever hot spots are 
marked against the changing background of star presenters, analysts, 
experts, political scientists who debate and lecture from magazine to 
news flash. At a pace and in such a learned manner that the stunned 
common man is reduced to the state of collateral witness. And to explain 
to him this is how the world is going and that they take care of it.

The moving borders, the political walls, which are erected here and 
which fall there...
"Si vis pacem, para bellum".* Armed peace, nuclear deterrence, the 
balance of terror... all this reassuring and lucrative stuff is a sword 
of Damocles. Which is worth its weight in gold when it falls.
And boom, here we go again!

Boulogne sur Mer on April 21, 2024

* "if you want peace, prepare for war" Latin phrase with uncertain author

http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4154
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