Staying Out of America's Iran Mess | by r------ on Feb 3rd, 2007 |

A bit frazzled by work these days, but enjoyed a lot of recent developments hereabouts.

Especially wanted to weigh in on Iran and Chirac's little faux pas, which if the PS is smart, should be used as a reminder that, notwithstanding any sort of residual Gaullist independance occasionally displayed by the French right (and spectactularly so by Villepin and Chirac in the '02-03 run-up to neo-colonial war in Irak), Paris is still taking orders from Washington. Lot's of good stuff on ET on the subject, both in the comments and in Colman's piece on it yesterday.

All this reminded me of a really good op-ed run in Le Monde nine months back, which I translated for Dailykos but which, in retrospect, would have been far more appropriately placed here (had I known this place existed).

From the diaries -- whataboutbob

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Dissauder l'Iran

Or how the EU must stay the hell out of Dubya's pending Iranian adventure

By Jean-François Bayart, Published 3 mai 2006

(The English-language rendition of the title is a Redstar translation, and assumes that there's really something to the Iranian chatter coming out of Washington politburo concerning a future Persian adventure, rather than yet another head-fake to dupe the idiotic "opposition" in the US into letting further escalation occur next door, in Irak. Which may be six of one, half-dozen of the other when it comes right down to it.)

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Le Sociologue Qui Démolit Macron

Le sociologue qui démolit Macron avec Jean François Bayart

Jean François Bayart, sociologist, researcher and professor has become, at 73, the world specialist in "the historical and comparative sociology of politics". He lives in Paris, teaches in Geneva. Erudite and restless, he published last year a huge 800-page tome entitled "The Energy of the State". The work - recognized by the university, but subcontracted in the French media - is a sum that thinks, deciphers and (us) projects into the history of empires and nation-states. A world book, a voracious book full of stories and quotes, "The Energy of the State" places the political life of our democracies in a saga that goes back to ancient Rome to land in France under Macron. Even if the name of the president is never mentioned, he is a bit like the ghost of the book. We often think of him and the excesses we are suffering and we imagine that the author has probably written his breviary to explain what history Macron is the name and the product of.

At the end of the book, page 729, Mr. Bayart lists a film credit that could be that of the characters in his book. The State is therefore the hero of his epic. It is also its "least recommendable" character: "The State is the unwanted son of the empire, of an unknown or difficult to identify mother, and whose most famous daughter is the nation, and the coolest democracy, although it can be criticized for loose morals. The sisters of the latter, most often described as authoritarian or revolutionary, are clearly less sympathetic, but just as changeable and equivocal." writes JF Bayart before saying: "The State is political society + civil society: a hegemony armored with coercion." Further on in the book, Bayart quotes Marx: "The State is an abstraction, only the people are concrete" or La Boetie "the tyrant enslaves his subjects one after the other."

After this gargantuan work, after fifty years of research, courses, conferences, and travels all over the world, Professor Bayart came out of his woods and his comfort zone to discuss, at the beginning of May, France under Emmanuel Macron. He did so in an article published in the Swiss newspaper "Le Temps" (link) which caused a stir. Denis Robert had mentioned it in his last editorial (link). He continues the work.

Macron is torpedoed by JF Bayart, reduced to the portrait of an "immature child, deaf to others, arrogant, incompetent... whose whims have the force of law in defiance of the Law or international realities". More seriously, Bayart, who we learn voted for Macron in 2017 and 2022, is convinced that under the illiberal leadership of this sick president, France will tip over. Towards what? Nothingness? Fascism? Techno-surveillance? Liberal and unequal violence?

The aim of this long and whirling interview is to try to answer this thorny question, among other things. Denis Robert wanted to present in this zoom-out the one who speaks and attacks Emmanuel Macron so harshly: a peaceful, talkative, cultured man whose anxiety of seeing the French state sink is contagious. Listening to this professor makes us more lucid about what awaits us. For that alone, we must cling to this conversation and share it. Bayart constructs a story that intrigues us and ends up destroying everything that Macronie carries and transports.

[machine translation]

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