President Bush and the Five Halloween Monsters. Part IIIa – France

President Bush and the Five Halloween Monsters. Part IIIa – France

By Prof. Dr. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis

Among the five key realms for which America must shape a long-term policy within its genuine effort to promote Democracy, Freedom, Human Rights, and Multiculturalism throughout the world, France is the most important in terms of diplomacy, international politics strategy, sophisticated cultural, intellectual, academic and philosophical policies, enduring imperial aspirations, and global predominance. In our world, France is the all-threatening Leviathan.

Pondering on what the long term global policies and strategies of America should be, we dedicated the first two features of the present series of articles to the vastest and the largest realms of concern for America, namely Russia and China. These two countries truly impress with their size and their population, but can hardly be considered as imperial realms conducting global policy at all levels. Of course, they attempted to exercise a global impact, when they both were centers of emanation of a type of Communist ideology. Russia was more successful in this regard, having managed to extend its influence from Vietnam to Ethiopia, and from Angola to Cuba, whereas China had to content itself with tiny Albania.

But either Russia or China were hardly great colonial empires; the latter was rather colonized by Japan to large extent in the 1920s and 30s, and many believe – with respect to an earlier stage of somewhat limited colonization – that, if WW I had not taken place, England, France, Germany, Russia, America and Japan would have divided China into six zones of influence during the 1910s.

Russia was a colonial empire, already before the 1917 October revolution, but its real expansion was not overseas. It was a long gradual 18th and 19th centuries expansion a) to the south, namely the Ottoman territories in the northern coasts of the Black Sea and around the Sea of Azoff, as well as in the Caucasus mountains, and b) to the east, namely the Ottoman and the Persian territories around the Caspian Sea, the Aral Sea and the entire Central Asia.

The Russian expansion was impressive because it encompassed the totally uninhabited Northern part of Asia, plus Alaska that was later sold to America in 1867 (Treaty of the 30th of March) for US $ 7.2 million. It may be an extraordinary landmass but this was never the essence of Colonialism. Russia may have extended from Warsaw to Canada, but her attempt to invade part of the oil rich Middle East, to arrive to Jerusalem, and to reach a harbour in the southern seas (Mediterranean Sea, Persian Gulf, Indian Ocean) were met with decisive failure.

Whereas Britain was able to control India, Russia could not dominate Afghanistan, and though France ruled Indochina, Russia could not govern Eastern Turkistan and Tibet. Furthermore, Russia was inexistent in Africa, America and Oceania, continents in which France and England were unmatched, especially after the collapse of Spain and Portugal. Even Germany, reunited as late as 1870, was able to embark on overseas adventures and pinch Cameroon and Tanganyika! And Italy did not refrain from invading the Eritrean Red Sea coast and inland, declaring war to the African Christian – Monophysitic relic of Abyssinia, and from expanding in Eastern Somalia and in Libya. The tsar would have never dreamt of invading the Dodekanese islands, nearby the South-Western coast of Anatolia, as Italy did, when Rome declared war to Istanbul in 1911.

Briefly, Russia was just a larger picture of Austria – Hungary, but at the same time much less developed.

France – a Vast and ‘Secret’ Colonial Empire

Contrarily to Russia and China, France was the colonial imperium par excellence. France started late for America, if compared to Spain and Portugal, but endured more, preserving colonial territories down to our times. Ariane, the European Union satellites, are launched from French Guiana! Quite contrarily, when the colonial structures collapsed in 1991, Russia has left somewhat exposed and actually depends on Kazakhstan’s good friendship, since Baikonur spaceport is on Kazak territory!

If France came to the colonial competition relatively late, it soon became the country that gave to this phenomenon of modern European expansion and global dominance its real intellectual – theoretical background. This has to do with France’s aspirations to reestablishing the Christian Roman Empire of Charlemagne, and ultimately the Roman Empire itself. No other country developed this concept so clearly and so systematically, and at so many levels, from the economic to the scientific, from the cultural to the military, and from the political to the ideological.

Many have a tendency to view the French colonial empire as just Africa. This is wrong. The most vital part of Canada was French (Quebec), a large part of the US was French (Louisiana), and after the French lost India to the British (end of the 18th century), they were able to ensure the entire Indochina for themselves. The British certainly proved that going across Africa from North to the South is more easily done, and the French West to East axis ended with the famous Fashoda incident (1898), but the French impact and predominance throughout the Black continent have been immeasurably heavier, larger and more determinant than the British influence.

In Oceania, the roles were reverse; the British opted for the Australian landmass, whereas the French colonized a multitude of islands in the Southern Pacific, the so-called French Polynesia that accounts for no less than 5 million km sq (i.e. two thirds of the Australian) surface. When you are in Papeete, it is as if you are in Toulouse, purely French territory. Well, if you might be there, do not try to consume Coca Cola! It is of exorbitantly high price, since it is transported from … mainland France, and not from neighboring Australia!

Many have the inclination to view France’s colonial dominance as less important than Britain’s. This is true only at the quantitative level of the total surface. Quite contrarily, when it comes to ideas, culture, education, art, intellectual life, France imposed French culture to far greater extent than Britain diffused its own. An average Indian, Kenyan and Nigerian are much less acquainted with John Locke and S. T. Coleridge than a Lebanese, a Senegalese and a Cambodian are with J. J. Rousseau and Victor Hugo.

More than diffusing French culture among colonized peoples, France created an entire system of study, perception and interpretation of the History and the Cultures of the various Asiatic and African peoples – colonized or not – the so-called Orientalism to serve its imperial purpose.

France – The generator of Orientalism, the Colonial Ideology par excellence

Orientalism is not just an erroneous intellectual construction, and a false approach to any case study, but it is also a prearranged system meant not to challenge the basic French Colonial approach to the World History and the French ‘Universal’ Culture, namely the Greco-Romano-Christiano-Europeano-centrism, whatever discoveries may be made at any possible moment in the future. And actually, despite two centuries of Orientalism, the Colonial French Historical Dogma expanded and prevailed allover the World, although it is proven false and obsolete by numerous discoveries, findings, and breakthroughs in many sectors of the Orientalism.

The issue may be vast even for the size of a book - and Edouard Said contributed an excellent one to the modern bibliography (‘Orientalism’)-, but here we have to stress the political utility of the Orientalism and as well as of all the emanating subsystems. It is essential to realize that, if the French academia developed such a vast system, the interest was not mainly Knowledge itself, but ultimate intellectual, cultural and political imposition and predominance. Certainly there was a genuine interest for understanding and recording things, events, situations and details, but the target was Global Dominance, not Truth.

By establishing the various disciplines of Orientalism, France intended to
a. break down local cultures,
b. isolate and disconnect various peoples, cultures, and countries one from another,
c. reject and annihilate any other global perception of the World History,
d. impose French culture, and
e. lead the colonized peoples to the unconscious acceptance of derivative systems, concepts and ideas – totally false and anti-Historical, that would engulf them in permanent strife, ignorance and underdevelopment.

Of course, many other European countries contributed to the formation and the development of the various disciplines of Orientalism. However, none could be compared to France and to the French contribution to the elaboration of the Orientalism and its derivative subsystems, and to their successive linkage with foreign policy, diplomatic choices, and colonial aspirations. This is due to various reasons.

1. Some countries had a significant academic establishment but did not colonial ambitions at all, either they were big or small, so they did not view this theoretical and academic discipline as so vital and foreign policy-oriented (Austria-Hungary, Prussia, Piedmont, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden)

2. Some countries did not have a significant academic establishment, and in addition they were instrumentalized by France, Russia and England against the Ottoman Empire, the main target of the colonial powers, and of France more particularly, so they had to focus exclusively on developing mean nationalistic ideologies, and bogus-historical dogmas, and on pursuing a vicious anti-Ottoman policy (Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece and Montenegro).

3. Some countries had a significant academic establishment but at the same time they either had limited colonial ambitions (Holland, Belgium) or were in political – military decay (Spain, Portugal).

4. Some countries with very strong academic establishment came to the colonial arena very late (Italy – after 1860, Germany – after 1870), so the link between Orientalism and Colonial Strategy was relatively poor. Imperial Germany had certainly colonial projects of industrialization in mind, as proven by the Berlin – Istanbul – Baghdad railway connection, but one cannot attest among German scholars of the Belle Epoque concepts similar to the French plan of developing and exporting Pan-Arabism among the non Arabic masses of the Middle East.

5. Tsarist Russia saw its colonial expansion in terms of simple land expansion at the prejudice of the Ottoman Empire and Imperial Persia, as a simple clash of religions and as a Christian Orthodox superposition over Islam. Expanding over Islamic territories in the late 19th century, Russia was rather acting as a medieval power, like Byzantium in the late 10th century Reconquista of Crete and Cilicia. It is not strange that Russian Orientalism was a pale copy of its French original counterpart.

6. Britain was certainly committed to the development of the Orientalism, but the British effort was lacking totally the French originality. It was rather done as an opposition to the French Orientalism. Britain did not offer Orientalism a single personality like Jean Francois Champollion, Auguste Mariette, Gaston Maspero, Certainly Henry Creswick Rawlinson was the first to decipher Cuneiform Assyrian – Babylonian, but he was an innocent and naive idealist, if compared to the notorious Paul Emile Botta, the French consul at Mosul, who made pioneering linkage between Orientalist discoveries and French Colonial needs in the Middle East.

More convincing an argument about the British not conceiving but rather imitating and opposing French Orientalism and Colonialism is the fact that never did England embark on a vast work similar to the venerated archetype of Orientalist work, La Description de l’ Egypte. The comparison is awesome because the French carried out this work while almost isolated in Egypt, with the fleet of Napoleon destroyed at Abuqir (1st August 1798) by Nelson, and with the Sultan having declared war on them, whereas the British were not able to come up with something similar, let’s say a hypothetical ‘The Description of India’, even after 150 years of colonial rule allover the subcontinent!

The globally disastrous results of French Colonialism, Orientalism, and their derivatives

France had very clear ideas when embarking on its Orient adventures. The demolition of the Ottoman Empire and Imperial Persia, the containment of Russia in the North, and the imposition of the French republican secular model in large parts of Europe were at the top of the agenda. It could be viewed as a remaking of the Crusades through Western secular – not Christian – forces. All the French newspapers of the end of the 18th century presented Napoleon’s secret and sudden arrival in the Orient as just the next step after the Crusades. But this would be an incomplete view.

The French colonial concept encapsulated the ultimate materialization of the Crusades’ target, the remaking of the Roman Empire, the rejection of Christianity in the West (introduction of the festivity day of the Supreme Being – l’ Etre Supreme, plus a different calendar), and also the imposition of barbarism, ignorance, underdevelopment, poverty, and impotence throughout the Middle East and Africa.

The racist character of the French plan has been meticulously covered by French extravagance and grandiosity that was meant to distract the focus from the essential. There is a vast difference between the Roman Empire of Octavian and Trajan and the final target implementation stage of the French colonial imperial dreams. When Rome ruled throughout the lands around the Mediterranean, Antioch, Caesarea of Cappadocia, Ephesus, Alexandria, Edessa of Osrhoene, Caesarea of Palestine, Cyrene, and other cities in the Eastern part of the empire were more developed and more civilized than any city in Gaul, Britain, and Iberia. But the French imperial - colonial plan’s final implementation stage would bring about a bestialized South and East, meant to be just a barbaric circumference to Europe, an area to be exploited with respect to its natural resources. When pro-French or pro-Western indigenous were for studies in Paris, they were not given the same in-depth approach as their French and European colleagues, and these Orientals’ degrees were just ‘bon pour l’ Orient’!

By colonizing no less than 7 million km sq of Ottoman land in Africa (Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan – useless to nominate the final recipient of some of these territories, since the conception was French, and this matters mostly), France did not have the slightest intention to help local peoples develop their culture and civilization, their ideologies and arts, their religions and their philosophies. The same concerns the colonized Asiatic parts of the Ottoman Empire, Syria to Yemen. It is essential to realize that France did not wish to make of these colonized lands countries – copies of the French model. And the French attitude towards the Aramaeans and the Copts, the Christian populations of these Ottoman provinces was even crueler. To fit the Colonial Scheme of France, the exportation of French culture and French ideas had to be different from Italy and Greece to Algeria, Egypt and Syria.

The nationalism, the republican – secular model, and the educational system had to be different from Italy to Iraq, and from Greece to Yemen. A bogus nationalistic ideology, Pan-Arabism, was therefore created – as a subsystem of the Orientalism – in the Dr. Jekyll’s French ateliers of Historical ‘Studies’ in order to engulf several different peoples into the colonial marches of identity loss, disconnection from the Historical Past, political unity fake illusions, and – as a consequence – permanent underdevelopment and ultimate barbarism.

It is seminal to focalize now on the design itself of the French imperial colonial ambitions that had to bring about – as it finally did – different zones of influence around metropolitan France.

A. Within a first zone covering most of the European territory, from Spain to Greece, from Finland to Portugal, and from Romania to Norway, nationalisms should be moderate, except when targeting Islamic countries (Ottoman Empire). Furthermore, these nationalisms should motivate educational and cultural interests for the exploration of the local historical past, for its eventual manipulation and use against various forms of surviving Christianity (Catholicism, Orthodoxy), and for its ultimate incorporation into the modern cultural and behavioral systems. These nationalisms were therefore a mixture of ideas of Renaissance, Classicism and Romanticism. A certain universalist dimension should be present in these systems but not dominant, in order to guarantee for France that no other European country would challenge, transform or refute the French conception in any way.

B. In what was meant as a farther periphery encompassing lands from Tunisia to Lebanon, including Egypt and Iraq, Mauritania and Oman, Iraq and Somalia, nationalism should be fake and extreme, of totally Romanticist origin. Because different peoples lived in all these lands, the French wished to impose on them a false History that at the same time would disentangle them from all periods of local past, and would create among them a feeling of communality. Through this falsehood (the so-called Pan-Arabism) that took the French more than a century to develop, lack of educational and cultural interests for the exploration of the local historical past would be guaranteed, eliminating therefore the rise of any local refutation of the anti-historical, racist and perversely erroneous French Colonial Dogma of History. All these countries populated with different peoples were proven unable to study and use their past, pre-Christian, Christian and Islamic, in a way similar to that of the Italians, the Spaniards, and the Greeks. Cut completely from their roots, they were consequently disinterested in studying, knowing and assessing the past of any other, being therefore deprived of any access to Universalism.

The French Colonial Scheme guarantees for France that its imperial aspirations remain unchallenged either a targeted country remains under French political control or not. We observed this very well in the case of Egypt, where the French were politically predominant only until 1882; under British control ever since down to 1952, Egypt moved on the path France had assigned for that ill-fated dominion of colonialism.

- A small elite kept absorbing – imitatively and not creatively – French daily life culture and behavioral system.
- A massive local reaction to this elite took the form of sterile sticking to local traditions (Islamic movements).
- Disentangled from their multileveled past, and disinterested in learning and incorporating their past into their uncultured and semi-barbaric present, either the elite or the local masses were unable to set up a properly and genuinely Egyptian ideological, cultural and behavioral system.
- Engulfed in their isolated spot, either the elite or the local masses were unable to get rid of political myths of possible and even profitable (!) independence from Istanbul and the Sultan, and remained therefore easily exploited at the political level without understanding it, provoking a continuous deterioration of their situation until they were proven of lesser importance than a tiny state, Israel, created no less than 148 years after the French puppet Mohammed Ali ‘took over’ in the Nile Valley.

To all this, British colonialism did not change anything.

It would look as a French success over the Ottoman Empire, but it is about to cause a Western catastrophe. The abnormal French concept of using what was wrong in the Ottoman empire against the Sultan led to the collapse of the only state that could prevent a slow but stable rise of the most abominable barbarism in the History of the Mankind, namely the Islamic Extremism and Terrorism.

By exacerbating the barbaric and uncultured ‘raw material’ left in place after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, France generated a false dynamics of perversion, limiting the game among a) obscurantist and islamically uneducated sheikhs and b) cruel, ignorant, tyrannical rulers. Pan-Arabism was so false a theory and so flagrant a violation of the Middle Eastern History that, instead of generating cultural interests like the Pan-Hellenism in Greece, pushed people to extreme Hatred, anti-Semitic Hysteria, nauseating Materialism, and absolute Detachment from the local Cultural Identity, bringing therefore about Islamic Extremism and Fanaticism as a natural reaction to political humiliations, military defeats, and economic misery.

Acting thoughtlessly, irresponsibly, and criminally, France created indeed Ossama Bin Laden.

This is the top conclusion an American must have in mind, when beginning to explore possible options for an American policy towards France. Having created Islamic Terrorism, having plunged Africa to meaningless borders, genocidal leaders, economic stagnation, poverty, illiteracy and starvation, having contributed as no other country to the formation and the continuous rekindling of an extreme Anti-Americanism – which is suicidal for its bearers, like Saddam Hussein – having generated a plethora of dysfunctional states (from 1920 Yugoslavia to 1962 Algeria), and having incorporated vast territories against the will of the indigenous peoples (from Corsica to French Polynesia), France is totally dedicated to the destruction of America. What are the stakes and the correct measures for America to take we will examine in the second part of this analysis.