The Invisible Armada

2024/11/18

6- The transplant of Western democracy hardly took place until the last decades of the 20th century in Latin America, due in particular to the constant and brutal interference of the United States inclined to support military regimes and dictatorships under their control, it did not take not in sub-Saharan Africa where the conditions imposed by chaotic decolonization prevail, it did not take hold in South-East Asia where, once again, the fight against international communism leads the United States and the Western powers to support the most corrupt regimes (Philippines), the most authoritarian (Thailand, Burma), the bloodiest (Indonesia), without forgetting their puppets in South Vietnam during the Second Indochina War.

But it took hold in the Middle East, in the form of the State of Israel which, since its foundation in 1948, has continued to be praised crescendo , in the Western-centric discourse, as a model democracy, especially more remarkable that it finds itself surrounded by authoritarian regimes long bent on its destruction – the Arab States of the region.

The question here is not only that Israel has, over time and the wars won against the coalitions formed by its hostile neighbors, become ever more obviously a bastion and a lock of the West in the Middle East, - a strategic position and role in all respects, in a world where, in particular, access to oil resources conditions the maintenance of the status quo resulting from the Second World War and placed under the hegemony of the United States and its Western allies.

The question is, more substantially, if one wishes, beyond the geopolitical, geo-strategic issues which mark this period, that the Jews have become in the eyes of Westerners and, more generally of the whole world, full-fledged Whites only when and after  they accessed a state constitution (Israel understood as the state of the Jews of the entire planet, including the diaspora). It is, of course, and in an infinitely sinister way, the genocide, the Shoah, which gave them access to this condition, but it is undoubtedly also and above all the fact that their name as a “species”  has now found itself associated with that of a state, a powerful state and, moreover, a democracy modeled on the pattern of Western democracies.

Until the Second World War, Jews in general remained, in the eyes of the so-called Christian and white West, a variable, contrasting “species”, but generally intermediate or indeterminable, often labeled as "oriental" and, more or less pejoratively as “metique”. These discursive procedures (labelling, categorizing...)  extend well beyond anti-Semitic propaganda and its effects. Even those among the Jews who have been assimilated for a long time, in Western Europe, were not, until the Nazi catastrophe, completely white . Even after the Second World War, and not only in the Poland of post-Nazi pogroms, endemic anti-Semitism persists, in France too, in the United States, which thrives on the suspicion of an otherness, of a difference (with the 'intrinsic' white species) based as much on religion as on the alleged disturbing strangeness of the (supposed) Jewish people.

In truth, the Jews only became, in Western discursivity as in the strategic calculations of hegemony, completely white , that is to say full members of the white species, in the era when the power of Israel as a state asserted itself, in the Middle East and, more generally, in international relations.

This is what makes Israel an exemplary white democracy, from now on, that is to say an enclave of the West, an island of “civilized life” and immediately identifiable by the Western subject as placed under the same regime as its own– in contrast to everything that surrounds it and which obviously comes under another regime: that of heartbreak, unpredictability, lost wars and civil wars, perpetual crises, bad government and questionable morals – the Arab-Muslim Middle East, another world, another History, another species. The more Jews and, in particular, Israelis are included in the field of white history and civilization, the more, by contrast, those who are in conflict with them are estranged from it. The struggle to the death, understood as a war of species, which pits the expansionist and supremacist state of Israel against the Palestinians resisting their reduction to a residual condition, is placed here under the distinct sign of division between West and East, Whites and non -Whites. The maintained efficiency (effectiveness) of this sharing is never more obvious than in the conditions where it is apartheid which is its marker and  operator. In Hebron and Jenin, the race war is exposed – and white democracy is involved up to its neck: the Israeli soldiers who are hunting down Palestinian activists there are citizens of the exemplary Israeli democracy, called to participate in free elections with the same constancy and regularity that they are led to shoot on sight at everything that moves in the towns, villages and refugee camps in the occupied West Bank.

If there is a region of the world where, persistently, the separation between democratic regimes, democratic order, democratic civilization and what would be the opposite and the antagonistic has a distinct color (however fantastical and resistible it may be) , it is indeed the Middle East; for, ipso facto , it amounts to sending Arabs and Muslims, and not only those from this region, to the other side of the color divide, that of irreversible non-whiteness.

The imagination of color comes here to merge with another phantasmagorical register – that of religion. Arabs cannot be White as long as, as Muslims (of all kinds or assimilated), they are not compatible with Western-style democracy. Repeatedly, all attempts at “democratization” of these societies (even very recently: Tunisia) fail on the pitfall of their worrying and rogue otherness . Clearly, the acclimatization of democracy which now sees itself as the only civilized political constitution to these other spaces is proving to be an impossible mission – we are sparing no effort to export democracy to them – and see what they do with it... ( Iraq, after the two American wars, for example). The misery of the tattered universalism that supports this type of reasoning and the philosophy of history that goes with it is glaring here - and if it were not the "others" who did not pass the test of adopting democratic norms (and morals) but rather Western-style democracy frozen in its uses and presumptions which regularly failed to withstand the test of its transposition into other worlds, other cultural spaces, other historical environments ?

We therefore see it: Democracy in capital and as ideality, just as democracy as power only manages to redeploy and reterritorialize itself by re-separating itself, by redrawing its borders and by raising the barriers which separate it from the "rest" - by constantly inventing new lines of separation and sharing, fractures and oppositions – rigorous conditions of incompatibility. The factory of new whites functions just as much and even more as a factory of non-whites.

7- The process of globalization of democracy as a general norm and form deemed universal, an unsurpassable horizon of our time, is what defines the singularity of our present. But that in no way means that it is the indisputable truth. Indeed, this supposed universality is affirmed through interactions that are most often conflictual and which bring into play balances of force and antagonistic power relations. Democratic globalization (the “democratization of the world”) is not today placed under the sign of unanimity, of generalized agreement, but rather of the accumulation of disputes, of wrongs inflicted and suffered – of  radical dissent (différend) . It does not take the form of the natural expansion of a rational and moral principle placed under the sign of progress, but much more of a confrontation and a conquest. It is fundamentally about moving the boundaries between worlds and conquering new territories. We saw this clearly at the start of the war in Ukraine, when the phrase “NATO borders” emerged in Western public discourse, finding its place in a chain of equivalences that were both approximate and peremptory (“decisionist” ) where key words such as “democracy”, “West”, “Europe”, “civilization”, etc. enter into the composition. 

The war in Ukraine is the natural outlet for a lasting and tenacious effort to extend the frontiers of global democracy to the confines of Europe, it is the continuation of the Drang nach Osten of the West as an integrated power, it started from the first moment following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The horizon of this war, for Western chancelleries and elites, is the annexation of new territories united to the true white world , the one which places itself under the sign of global democracy. The driving force behind the expansion of white democracy is not the implementation of principles, values, ideals and promises, it is: do like us, be like us, rally to our white plume – and we will include you, we will guarantee your safety, as much as possible. It is a security, immune and mimetic principle that everything distances from any horizon of universality. Alignment, standardization, homogenization based on the principle of identity  and not the sharing of principles and ideals play the primary role. Supra-state organizations keep an eye on things, laying down the general rules of good state and economic governance and sanctioning deviations.

As a result, today's global democracy is no longer quite a political-military bloc formed with a view to a (possible if not probable) confrontation with the other camp, as at the time of the first Cold War, but rather a plastic and variable arrangement with a view to perpetuating and strengthening a hegemonic device. The horizon thus drawn is as much that of cultural battles and discursive clashes as that of military power relations. It is still and always, by promoting global democracy, tirelessly reiterating the operation of sharing between friends and enemies: when Joe Biden, barely taking office after his tumultuous victory over Trump, organized a big rally of the supposed democracies of the world, that is what it is about: as much about excluding, drawing borders, drawing lines of division as about bringing together and communing. Why, if we refer to principles and norms, is Bolsonaro in , does he have his place set at the banquet of global democracy and Duterte not? - mystery... It is certainly not, in this matter, the criterion of good or bad governance which decides, but rather the archaic and indestructible friend/enemy dividing line, the wrong of the unpredictable leader Filipino being to have had unkind words in the past for Obama, then in charge, and to have been tempted to stand on a middle line between Beijing and Washington...

It is still a war machine that we are dealing with, but it has gained in flexibility - we see this clearly today, with the formation, made possible by a combination of favorable electoral circumstances, of this continuous arc stretched all around the maritime facade of China, from South Korea to the Philippines - a system whose relays are friendly regimes and clients of the United States and whose primary vocation is to strengthen, on a scale of the Pacific region/East/South Asia, the global hegemonic system by forming a sanitary cordon  around China. But, whatever the cultural, ethnic and political diversity of its components, this war machine has a distinct color which transcends its heterogeneities – it is white, because it is entirely articulated on the Western-centric and white-centric hegemonic system of global democracy. There isn't, in this general arrangement, any kind of polycentrism or delocalization of powers, of multiplication of centers of decision - in the end, the effective basis of power is in terms of joint military maneuvers, of military bases, arms sales, deployment of naval, land and air forces - all constantly placed under the leadership of the hegemon – is what makes the difference. In this region of the world, the true face of global democracy is terribly martial – it is a military apparatus in “American” colors, a white war machine in camouflage uniform.

In a bloc like the Axis, during the Second World War,  distinct forces were brought together by limited, circumstantial common interests, which in no way abolished the differences existing between them. In the hegemonic formation whose implementation overdetermines all other games of forces today, to the point of defining the singularity of our epoch, everything is arranged around a center of power, its matrix, its center of gravity . What produces the illusion of diversity, even heterogeneity, is in truth placed under a distinct regime which is that of procuration – proxies whose margin of autonomy is in truth reduced to nothing – what would remain of the Zelensky's ranting in the absence of the political-military support provided by the Western coalition, what would be the future of Taiwan's chances in the event of an armed confrontation with China, apart from the guarantees provided by the means soldiers of the integrated hegemonic system, firmly established in the region?

From a dynamic point of view, that of the future of the conflict promised and announced in East Asia (as in Ukraine), the problem is that the hegemonic power has every interest in relentlessly fueling the war of the worlds, because that -this alone is able to maintain the cohesion, or even strengthen the cohesion of a formation which is by definition composite and fragile as such. Only such a movement forward (towards the abyss, in truth) can produce, contrary to so many things, a phenomenon like the recent and spectacular diplomatic rapprochement between Japan and South Korea, traditionally separated by heritage. poisoned with colonial history. What allows, temporarily, to overcome the disagreement is the intensification of shared hostility towards China and its ally North Korea. What is called upon to put into perspective or put on hold the past which does not pass, in relations between Japan and (South) Korea, is the return of a superficially made up form of war of the species – the war between everything which aggregates around the aversive signifier “China” and what gathers around the signifier “democracy”. But it is, whatever the variegation of what aggregates around the latter, never more than a hasty re-dressing of the immemorial war of species – Japanese and South Koreans are, in this configuration, only proxies, "delegates" of the real power - that which will only feel assured of having won in the war of the worlds the day when it has overthrown the power heir to the Chinese Revolution, as it thought it had erased the traces of the Russian Revolution after the fall of Soviet power (what came next shows that things are never as simple as the makers of Restorations think).

Many people, under Obama's two mandates, believed they could predict the irreversible decline ( demise ) of the American (US) empire, attested to in their eyes by countless converging signs, both in the geographical order -strategic only in forms of life; one of the most convincing of these signs was then, in their eyes, the spectacular withdrawal of the traditional interventionism of the United States in the affairs of the Middle East or even in Eastern Asia, in the face of the rise of China.

What appears ever more clearly today is that this apparent renunciation of the position of world policeman occupied since the end of the Second World War by the United States (and whose interventions in Iraq and in Afghanistan were the latest large-scale demonstrations) was rather the mask of a redeployment, a change of footing and perhaps of regime in the exercise of hegemony and practices aimed at maintaining initiative and supremacy. It is above all the tactics, the ways of doing things that change, with the passage of a paradigm of the greatest visibility intended to exhibit supremacy and the dominant position in the most spectacular and impressive way possible (the paradigm of the conquest of Iraq associated with terror, the frantic destruction of the state, the economy and the infrastructure of the country, therefore) to another placed under the double sign of delegation and discretion, even invisibility: to Middle East, the world policeman increasingly relies on its Israeli clone to maintain the disorder established on the scale of the entire region, to stem the ambitions of Iran, in particular, on the Ukrainian front, the forces local are placed on permanent perfusion in terms of military equipment as well as the supply of intelligence means, "intelligence" and the latest technologies of war - but this American and Western omnipresence, as decisive as it may be, is made as stealthy as possible - it's not tomorrow that the Russians will capture an American intelligence officer or military advisor on the front line... In Taiwan, it's the same: military equipment of all kinds provided by the United States is flocking, military advisors are hard at work, the military presence in the region and particularly in the China Sea continues to strengthen – but all this under the reassuring label, intended to lull world opinion , business as usual , routine missions, good, legal and legitimate use, “freedom of the seas”, etc.

We have entered the time of stealthy hegemony, disguised as defense of the status quo, stability and peace in a world whose vital and beneficial balances would be endangered by the new followers of the right of conquest, Putin, heir of the Golden Horde, Xi, the new emperor of China, prey to his dream of transforming the Middle Empire into a world power having eliminated all his rivals.

But this is only a low-cost narrative that only has random relationships with the reality of the present - the latest news is that it is not Chinese warships patrolling between Florida and Cuba, but rather destroyers, aircraft carriers, Western submarines – and until, very recently, a US coast guard, decidedly far from its shores, which ensures “freedom of the seas” in the Taiwan Strait and in the China Sea; according to the most recent news, it is even a vessel of the Italian navy which has just ventured into these parades, just to show, if necessary, the increased determination of the Western Holy Alliance to impose its conditions in this region of the world.

What is at stake, in these practical gestures and in the production of elements of language that go with them, is the production of images intended to support a practice of hostility now elevated to the rank of “systemic”; these language games and the gesticulations that go with them only aim to put into circulation a new version of the syntagm of the “hereditary enemy”, but extended, this time on a global scale; no longer the creation of an enemy deemed immemorial of the nation, but of humanity as a whole – therefore a concatenation of the “hereditary enemy” from the time of wars between nation-states and the “enemy of the human race” of classical political philosophy and modern revolutions; suffice to say, with such a load of superimposed intensities, the supersize enemies, the one that only total war would make it possible to defeat.

In other words: the dream enemy , tailor-made to the dimensions of the hopeless crisis in which the old world finds itself mired today. Contrary to what both Popper and Rancière20 imagine, what makes “democracy” have so many enemies, what ensures its ration of hostility, is not its intolerable pact with freedom or equality , it is more trivially that as a vector of white civilization and the supremacist disposition that goes with it, it cannot do without enemies . When it does not have any declared, it makes them and it is in this sense that it is a war machine which knows no respite