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DANCES
WITH BEARS
You who
applaud today, applaud France
By John
Helmer
MOSCOW - "O Liberty! O Liberty! What
crimes are committed in thy name!"
The person
who said that was Marie Jeanne Roland; they were her
last words. She was four months short of her 40th
birthday, when sharp at half-past three on a dull
November afternoon in Paris, the guillotine cut off her
head. The charge for which she was executed was trumped
up. Her trial was a mockery. Her real crime was that, as
one of the most eloquent and fearless women then
participating in the factional politics of the French
Revolution, she threatened Georges Danton and Maximilien
Robespierre, who were in power that year of 1793.
On her way to execution, she also managed to
deliver the famous curse on them, and on the crowd who
applauded whatever violence they were presented with.
"Those who send me thither," she called from the
tumbril, "will not be long before they follow me. I go
to the scaffold innocent. They will come there as
criminals. And you who applaud today will then applaud."
It is beyond possibility that George W Bush
would know the name and story of Madame Roland.
There is a better chance that the cleverer Tony
Blair, and their dwarf, Australian Prime Minister John
Howard - the three musketeers of today's world war -
would know how to look her up. But if there is a single
member of the axis this trio commands - a minister of
state, a civil servant, a military officer, an
ambassador - who recognizes the call to moral judgment
Madame Roland made, and the warning she uttered before
her death, there has been not a single resignation to
show that they exist. Protest, they must think, is the
irresponsibility of those without power. Moral judgment
is the responsibility of those who expect to win, or who
are afraid to lose (or those who happened to be
Yugoslavs a decade ago).
During the time of
Madame Roland's imprisonment, before her death, she
wrote to her political friends and allies that they
should flee for the United States, "the only refuge of
liberty", she said, in the midst of the French
Revolution.
Ninety years later, shortly before
his more natural death, Gustave Flaubert defined America
in his Dictionary of Received Ideas as the
converse of the political romantic. It was, wrote the
59-year-old novelist, a "fine example of injustice", by
which he claimed to mean that it had been misnamed.
"Columbus discovered it and it is named after Amerigo
Vespucci." Then Flaubert got down to practical business,
speaking of the two plagues on France, and on his own
pleasure, for which he blamed America. "If it weren't
for the discovery of America, we shouldn't have syphilis
and Phylloxera [the pest that nearly wiped out
France's vineyards at the end of the 19th century].
Praise it all the same, especially if you've never been
there. Expatiate on self-government."
This week
it was possible to listen to the only president of
France able to claim that he had really traveled the
United States - the current incumbent, Jacques Chirac. A
politician who for every good reason that can be
imagined detests both Bush and Blair, but whose public
displays of sincerity can be as waxy as theirs, Chirac
was obliged to refute Flaubert, and endorse Madame
Roland. He did that in order to defend the right of
France to say no to war. This, Chirac tried to explain,
wasn't anti-Americanism. It was, he implied, much closer
to the American ethos that France respects, and more
than the US or British leadership could possibly
understand right now.
Thus has the Washington
gang, which has devised the doctrine of preventive war
against an entire civilization that, in their
imagination, threatens their power, invited the world to
choose between what they call civilization and France's
alternative.
About Russia's choice to side with
France, there deserves to be at least as much
celebration in front of the French Embassy in Moscow as
there has been protest outside the American. But if like
most Russians you have a historically sound nervousness
of making a public demonstration out of your private
convictions, you can be reassured that the French know
what you think, and sympathize.
You see, it was
another Frenchman who wrote the secret psychology of the
Russians with such devastating accuracy that his book
was banned in Russia from its publication in 1843 until
1996. Astolphe de Custine was the author; the son of a
French diplomat and grandson of a general, both
guillotined in Paris before Madame Roland, and whose
mother, Delphine de Sabran, imprisoned at the same time,
narrowly missed the same fate.
In parallel with
his better-known countryman, Alexis de Tocqueville, who
went to the United States at the same time to find
lessons for the future of post-revolutionary France,
Custine entered Russia to see how the last of Europe's
despotisms was surviving. He went to Russia, Custine
wrote, "to seek for arguments against representative
government. I return a partisan of constitutions."
Democratic conservative that he was, Custine concluded
that under one-man rule, all Russians "practice the
obedience that perpetuates the evil which they inflict
or to which they submit". Custine had been hoping to
find evidence in Russia for an alliance with France. He
decided the time wasn't ripe. Russia, he thought, was
aggressive, fanatical, dominated by "a master who shows
mercy to no enemy, who considers vengeance as a duty".
Under despotism, the Russians, wrote Custine,
"are nothing more than a conquering community; their
strength does not lie in mind but in war; that is, in
stratagem and brute force". These days it is Bush who
represents local and global despotism. With France,
Russian President Vladimir Putin is trying to defend
constitutionalism.
All the Moscow think-tanks
that have received US funds are servile in their support
for Bush, and their criticism of Putin. Dmitri Trenin of
the Moscow Carnegie Center writes that in order to
modernize its economy, Russia "requires not just the
absence of confrontation with the US, but a genuinely
strong and deep relationship with the world's sole
superpower". Only US investment, on US terms, can save
Russia, Trenin argues.
This servility would be
unremarkable if Trenin weren't acting as if a decade of
Boris Yeltsin, Laurence Summers and the International
Monetary Fund hadn't already provided enough evidence to
refute the argument. It is precisely because the United
States proved so inimical and so untrustworthy in those
years that Putin must find an alternative now.
Unembarrassed to talk straight out of his
pocket, Sergei Markov of the Institute of Political
Studies attacks Putin's stance with Chirac by declaring
"we should not take too principled a stance". In
recommending subservience to Bush, Markov claims the
payoff will be in oil. "The price of oil will be decided
in the White House. We have to enter into negotiations
on a fair price, $19 a barrel."
Thus do those
who have made a career parroting US demands for market
reforms inside Russia believe Washington should be
trusted to accept, dictate and preserve a worldwide
cartel pricing formula. Nothing in a decade of US
behavior toward any of Russia's raw-material exports, or
its manufactures, allows the faintest support for the
view that Washington would make such a deal, or if it
did, that it could be trusted to honor its commitment.
In a world where no one in power can be trusted,
Putin and Chirac are saying quite simply that what is
right is what is lawful.
(©2003 Asia Times
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