In the new essay of the sociologist, important factual errors are involving the analysis of the in progress conflict.
by Florent Georgesco
No one could criticize an old scientist, author of an abundant sociological and philosophical work, who touched the most diverse subjects, for no longer being, at 101, the energy and the curiosity to devote himself with rigor to new areas. But then common sense would like him not to write books on these subjects left in plan. However, this is what Edgar Morin has just done about Ukraine by publishing from war at war, and the result is perplexed.
The project to which this little book responds to a priori another. The author of the rumor of Orleans (Seuil, 1969) intends to put Ukrainian events in perspective from his experience of war, based on his commitment to resistance and eighty years of observation of global crises. He wants to warn against the mechanisms of “radicalization” that any war would entail, according to him. Firstly, a reciprocal “hysterization”, which would push to develop a “manichaeism” preventing to engage in an adequate “contextualization”.
How, however, contextualizing without knowing? After this lesson of warrior things, Edgar Morin comes to the particular situation of Ukraine, and the inaccuracies on history and the news multiply. To affirm that Ukraine “proclaimed its independence”, after the October Revolution, “under the leadership of the anarchist Makhno” has for example no sense. It was the rada (the Ukrainian parliament) which, on January 22, 1918, proclaimed independence, the fruit of a collective process on which Makhno had not weighed. Writing that the intervention of Putin’s Russia in Syria “destroys the [Organization] Islamic State” is regularly denied by all specialists. Likewise, it was easy, for the author as for the publisher, to verify that the Baltic countries did not enter NATO because of the invasion of Ukraine, since they have been members since 2004 .
on a ghostly scene
Again this series of errors, among others, does not affect the nerve of the arguments developed by Edgar Morin. On the other hand, the events which followed the pro-Western revolution of Maidan, in 2014, are, at the heart of his words. However, he seems to have taken the trouble to read the many works on the issue. The disorders then triggered in the Donbass are reduced to a “secession of Russian-speaking regions”, without any mention of the direct intervention of the Russian army, however very widely documented.
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