by Giulio Meotti
“The Civil War in France” is an 1871 book that Karl Marx dedicated to the events of the Commune. For some weeks now, the specter of a civil war has once again dominated French politics and newspapers.
2,000 servicemen have signed a letter to President Macron and the government warning that France is on the verge of collapse and civil war because the state has “surrendered” to radical Muslims. The letter follows an appeal by 20 retired generals and hundreds of former officers, in which they speak of “disintegration and Islamization” in progress, and a document sent to Parliament by other generals and officers proclaiming: “We have been declared a hybrid war, it is multifaceted and will end in a civil war at best and a cruel defeat with no future at worst”.
The 2,000 soldiers, who this time remain anonymous so as not to incur the sanctions that are happening to the generals, claim to be soldiers who served in Africa and Afghanistan and took part in Operation Sentinel, the anti-terrorist patrols in the French streets after the massacres of 2015.
“Many of us have suffered enemy fire” they write in the letter published in the weekly Valeurs Actuelles and already signed on to by 109,000 people. “Many have offered their lives to destroy the Islamism to which you are making concessions on our soil. We have seen the abandoned suburbs with our own eyes. We have endured attempts to exploit religious communities, for which France means nothing, is nothing but the object of sarcasm, contempt and hatred. We marched on July 14th. We see communitarianism taking hold in the public space, in the public debate. We see the hatred of France and her story becoming the norm”.
The military compares their position with 1940, “while you abandon, without reacting, entire neighborhoods of our country to the law of the strongest”. This decline, write the 2,000 military personnel, “we have seen in many countries in crisis and it precedes the collapse. It announces chaos and violence and, contrary to what you are saying here and there, this chaos and this violence will not come from a ‘military pronouncement’ but from a civil uprising. Yes, if a civil war breaks out, the military will keep order in the territory, because they will be asked to do so ”.
This is the definition of civil war. “No one can wish for such a terrible situation, but the civil war is brewing in France and you know it perfectly well. Act, ladies and gentlemen. This time it’s not about ready-made formulas or media coverage. It is about the survival of our country, of your country.”
We would be wrong to think that what is happening only concerns French society, where the dynamics taking place are only more rapid and of greater intensity than elsewhere. Should it take place, the conflagration denounced by these generals and officers will not stop at the French borders, but will flood all of Europe.