The West vomits, Europe despises itself, France feels guilty even to self-hatred. A wind of disgust seems to have swept over the West, the past has lazily settled into the present, nothing finds favor in the eyes of certain intellectuals, writers, academics, and of a youth who are looking for something to revolt and who, for lack of anything else, spits on his ancestry, do you want some, consoling himself for his extinction.
The opening scene of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is an edifying example of anti-Westernism. In the UN compound, we discover French soldiers handcuffed and kneeling in front of the queen of Wakanda (an imaginary country in black Africa which holds first-class raw materials and technologies) who accuses them of abuse and looting . When in doubt, the representative of France in imitation Chanel swallowed. To believe that Evgueni Prigogine, founder and leader of the Wagner mercenaries, was hired by Disney, producer of the film, as a historical and geopolitical consultant as what is reproached to the French soldiers is the roadmap of the Russian mercenaries.
In France, apart from the healthy anger of Sébastien Lecornu, Minister of Defense, who recalled the sacrifice of 58 soldiers of the Barkhane force to defend the Sahelian territory against the jihadists, the silence is total. Because, for the majority of the press, it is a non-debate: Black Panther is only a fiction! A Disney family movie! Pass your argument! While fiction is constantly blacklisted by these same journalists who are offended by the slightest crime of imagination, there is enough to be challenged. As long as the West is in the hot seat and as long as it is designated as guilty, whatever the degree of truth, we must applaud or look elsewhere, because to defend the West is to defend Evil.
By denouncing the France of today, Black Panther puts back on the table “the dark hours of decolonization” by stubbornly refusing to look at the present: in exchange for the security of the rulers, Wagner gets his hands on the exploitation of raw materials, while causing more civilian deaths than the jihadists . But the Russians are not considered “white”, they are moreover in open war against Western domination, as the Kremlin propaganda constantly repeats. The crimes of European colonization are widely documented and fortunately taught, it is however very difficult to access the reality of the toxic loans that China continues to grant in all opacity, while buying back whole sections of African territory.
Defending a simple idea: universalism
There is not a day without a reminder of the Atlantic slave trade which dragged on over three centuries and involved more than 10 million people. On the other hand, it is illegitimate to refer to the Arab-Muslim slave trade which lasted ten centuries and which concerned the same number of individuals for a descent of… zero people due to systematic castration. The Arab-Muslim world has never questioned itself, never opened its archives, no memorial ceremony has come to recall the tragedy that was theother equally inhuman slavery.
In Mauritania, despite the official abolition of slavery in 1981 and its criminalization in 2007, it persists and still affects 2.1% of the population. What about the iniquitous treatment of sub-Saharan and Asian populations in the petromonarchies? It is today, there, before our eyes, that 40 million men and women are still enslaved, but all eyes are stubbornly turned towards the Western past.
A reader of L’Express having split a letter accusing me of being “obsessed with the obsession with identity”, I legitimately questioned myself, wondering if it was I who was systematically looking for the little identity beast or the identity calamity that was looking for lice in me from the early morning. Going back and re-reading myself, I can only see that I never imagined writing so much to defend this very simple idea that is universalism, and if I had been predicted a return of the races and a pillory of the West, I would have frankly laughed. I console myself by looking at Iran, Hong Kong or Ukraine, among so many other countries, where people fight and die for one day hoping to live in a western-style country where races do not exist and where freedom is as much a right as a duty. If that’s being “obsessed with identity obsession,” I bow happily.