^{“THE PEN IS MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD”}

               AND OTHER THOUGHTS ABOUT ‘CHARLIE HEBDO’


                                          *     *        *         *        *

    

              A. WHAT SHAPED THE ATTACK ON ‘CHARLIE HEBDO’?


In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo killings many people seized upon Oliver Cromwell's famous remark that "The pen is mightier than the sword", largely ignoring the fact that Oliver Cromwell was reviled for centuries as a dangerous “king killer” before he underwent an almost total re-evaluation.


A WORLD OF PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY

Cromwell’s reputation was restored around 1895, just when the European nation states began to realise their full military potential as great empires and swept the world into an era of world wars. Nor is it coincidental that this is just the kind of “state establishment” that is going through a major crisis of credibility both in its European home base and around a world that has re-emerged from a period, when the leaders of such “great powers” and “superpowers” felt destined to rule the world in the name of progress and improvement, ideas that have not really ‘made it’ into the Third Millennium.


In 1895, however, the year when it was decided that Cromwell had been a hero in the struggle for parliamentary democracy and worthy of a statue placed before the Houses of Parliament, the man most likely to be a future Prime Minister, Joseph Chamberlain, was working towards a Teutonic Alliance of Great Britain, Germany and the USA, which would make a power block strong enough to govern world affairs: and the “centre-stage” politicians, who led the “Je Suis Charlie” march on the Sunday following the killings, only missed by default bringing together the heads of the full “Teutonic Alliance”. On the day it was up to David Cameron and Chancellor Merkel to represent “Teutonic” power, while President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron stood ‘shoulder to shoulder ‘for the world’s media at the first opportunity a week later, though that was perhaps even more importantly a reminder of the ‘special connection’ between the USA and the UK that had proved so crucial after the 9/11 attacks, when Great Britain became Americas major ally when President Bush responded by launching the War on Terror starting with Iraq, in spite of President Chirac of France’s veto on the last motion on the Iraq WMD issue that the USA/UK tried to get through the UN.


But under President Sarkozy France abandoned that its previous attitude towards ‘the Anglo-Saxon’ way including the war on Islamic terrorism, not only acting in concert with the “Anglo-Saxon” powers for example in support of the Arab Spring, but also as the former colonial power acting in support of the struggle against Islamic Fundamentalism in some of France’s former colonies.


But in fact, since the Fall of Communism and the end of the Cold War, perhaps even more of domestic and international politics has come down to the powerful countries and organizations merely trying to react to “events dear boy, events, much to the dismay of  to the Marxist British/European Historian Eric Hobsbawm who had lived through most of “The Age of Catastrophe 1914-145”, before being greatly encouraged by a post war “The Golden Age”, that then crumbled into an era of “The Landslide”.


By 1994 Dr. Hobsbawm was  an old man fighting back dark thoughts with no expectation of any better times while he lived, though he conceded that, just perhaps, things might look more hopeful after a quarter or a half of a century. But as for the present:


“The Short Twentieth Century ended in problems, for which nobody had, or even claimed to have, solutions. As the citizens of the ‘fin-de-siecle’ tapped their way through the global fog that surrounded them, into the third millennium, all they knew for certain was that an era of history had ended. They knew very little else…Thus, for the first time in two centuries, the world of the 1990s entirely lacked any international system or structure.” (page 558-9)


“We do not know where we are going. We only know that history has brought us to this point and- if the readers share the argument of this book- why. However, one thing is plain. If humanity is to have a recognizable future, it cannot be by prolonging the past or the present. If we try to build the third millennium on that basis, we shall fail. And the price of failure, that is to say, the alternative to a changed society, is darkness.” (page 585)