The Cross September 12, 2000
"This can't happen to us..."
It took me an allusion in the Journal du Dimanche, then, above all, a detailed article by Jacques Isnard, the military affairs expert of Le Monde, for me to understand how much Poutin must be pitied. The unfortunate ! He tried to hide the submarine disaster, then he lied about the causes and the circumstances.
What striking proof that Russia has kept the customs of the Soviet Union and that democracy is still a long way off! His lack of democratic sense has fortunately earned him a drop in popularity !
And now I learn that, for more than thirty years, the French governments have been hiding from us that not one, but two French submarines disappeared, with their crews, the Minerve on January 27, 1968, off the coast of Toulon, its twin, the Eurydice, in 1970.
Neither the ships nor the bodies of the crews, more than 100 men, have been found. And since then, it's been silent, while other of our submarines have experienced incidents that almost led to their destruction. Military secrecy! If all goes well, we will know the causes when the archives open in 2018 (although our researchers regularly experience that the rules for opening public archives are hardly respected, nor the law giving the right to access to administrative documents): Knowing this, read the press, watch our televisions: what violent and contemptuous criticism of the Russian president, yet less guilty of concealment than our rulers, starting with General de Gaulle! With, expressed or implied, the usual affirmation: This could not happen to us. »
It's really a tune too often heard. Remember Chernobyl. Certainly, the German fears were excessive. But the atomic cloud which respected the French border, the impossible contamination on our territory: what blatant errors or deliberate lies uttered by rulers and scholars in charge of official functions! Today, we regularly learn that real and very harmful traces have been left in many regions by the said cloud. When an incident occurs in a French nuclear power plant, it is always benign, even if we learn later that we have come close to disaster. And have we heard of the Concorde near-misses, following tire bursts, before the recent disaster investigation?
The tragedy of the Russian submarine should have caused a wave of anger in France about the French tragedies hidden for decades.
Democracy is based, it seems, on respect for the truth and the citizen's right to information. If this is true, our French democracy is very incomplete. The efforts of our media to complete it are also very incomplete. What critical irony with regard to President Nixon, then de Bill Clinton! Just think: they lied, especially before a parliamentary commission of inquiry. In our country, presidents can lie with impunity, if only because our commissions of inquiry do not have the power to question presidents.
The media have this right, but they use it in a limited way. Jacques Chirac, on July 14, said that electoral fraud was unforgivable in a democracy, but that he could not say anything about Paris because justice had not yet been pronounced. None of the three journalists objected that the Constitutional Council had indeed proclaimed the reality of the fraud and had simply said that it had not been enough to reverse the result (we now know that it had underestimated the magnitude).
Do we really have the right to say: This could not not happen to us”, when it has already happened or when we know full well that it could. to arrive? Do we really have the right to condemn what is happening elsewhere when we ignore or ignore what has already happened at home? It may be about the past: in 1997, who mentioned the 50th anniversary of the appalling repression in Madagascar? What research, what publications has it given rise to? It is often about the present. Sometimes the Cimade or other volunteer organizations manage to draw attention to the detention centers for foreigners in Roissy or elsewhere. The attention falls quickly and we prefer to talk about similar events in England.
The tragedy of the Russian submarine should have caused a wave of anger in France about the French tragedies hidden for decades. It has not happened. Putin is a terrible character and Russia is not yet a democratic state. France; on the contrary... Really?
Alfred Grosser
