Sacrificing one's children for the war

Sacrificing one's children for the war

by Nicolas Maxime

From: https://www.facebook.com/nico.naf.735  

After Covid, with its moral pronouncements, states of emergency like lockdowns and curfews, and its health pass, now, since the beginning of the war between Ukraine and Russia, we are being told about a threat to our security as if a confrontation with Moscow were inevitable. Now, a chief of staff is barely concealing the idea that we should "accept losing our children." This is utter madness. The country is supposedly being forced to psychologically accept the prospect of a generational sacrifice to prepare for a war against an imaginary enemy. After all, Russia has neither the material resources nor the human capacity to open a front against Europe, and even less so against France—especially after the war in Ukraine.

What is shocking is not only the phrase itself—scandalous in its own right—but the intellectual climate that allows it. A delirious ideological syncretism is taking hold through an incoherent mix of war rhetoric, sacrificial storytelling, and rhetoric of perpetual crisis, ultimately blurring the lines between propaganda, tragedy, and absurdity. We are told that we must be "ready"—ready for what?—as if civil society were to convert to a military theology.

If this type of discourse now passes without provoking the moral collapse it should, it is because a society worn down by years of shocks (health, economic, climatic, geopolitical) now tolerates the idea of ​​a future where one could "sacrifice children." As René Girard demonstrated, societies in crisis always seek a sacrifice to ward off their own powerlessness—and now our elites seem to be rediscovering this archaic reflex by projecting it onto young people themselves.

Lacking a positive collective narrative, the terminally ill West can only mobilize an anxiety-inducing discourse by brandishing the impending sacrifice of a generation. When societies no longer know what to build, they preoccupy themselves with preventing what they believe they must destroy.