“From war to war. From 1940 to Ukraine”, by Edgar Morin, L’Aube, “Monde en cours”, 88 p., €14, digital €10.
No one could reproach an old scholar, author of an abundant sociological and philosophical work, who has touched on the most diverse subjects, for no longer having, at the age of 101, the energy and the curiosity to devote himself rigorously to new areas. But then common sense dictates that he should not write books on these left-behind subjects. Yet this is what Edgar Morin has just done about Ukraine by publishing From war to warand the result is puzzling.
The project to which this little book responds is a priori worth another. The author of The Rumor of Orleans (Seuil, 1969) intends to put the Ukrainian events into perspective based on his experience of the war, based on his involvement in the Resistance and eighty years of observation of world crises. He wants to warn against the mechanisms of « radicalisation » what, in his view, would result from any war. First and foremost, a « hystérisation » reciprocal, which would push to develop a “Manicheanism” preventing one from engaging in “contextualization” adequate.
How, however, to contextualize without knowing? After this lesson in warlike things, Edgar Morin comes to the particular situation of Ukraine, and the inaccuracies about history and current events multiply. State that Ukraine “declared its independence”after the October Revolution, “under the leadership of the anarchist Makhno” for example makes no sense. It was the Rada (the Ukrainian Parliament) which, on January 22, 1918, proclaimed independence, the result of a collective process on which Makhno had not weighed. Write that Putin’s Russia’s intervention in Syria “annihilates the[organisation] Islamic State » is an untruth regularly denied by all specialists. Similarly, it was easy for both the author and the publisher to verify that the Baltic countries did not join NATO because of the invasion of Ukraine, since they have been members since 2004. .
On a ghostly stage
Yet this series of errors, among others, does not touch the nerve of the arguments developed by Edgar Morin. On the other hand, the events that followed the pro-Western Maidan revolution in 2014 are at the heart of his remarks. However, he seems not to have taken the trouble to read the numerous works on the question. The troubles then unleashed in the Donbass are reduced to a “secession of Russian-speaking regions”without any mention of the direct intervention of the Russian army, yet very widely documented.
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