Ubu is back, only this time in real life, and it’s not good news. Like the fictional figure created 130 years ago by Alfred Jarry in his play Ubu roi (Ubu the King), a farce as wild as it was visionary on how power can render crazy, he knows no limits to his greed. And, just like in the play, any reality that gets in the way of his thirst for conquering, domination and possession, he will throw it “down the hatch”, as Ubu liked to say, making it disappear into his insatiable ogre’s stomach.
In the space of one week, two peoples have been sent “down the hatch” by the resuscitated Ubu who since January 20th now presides over the United States. Down the hatch with the Palestinians! Down the hatch with the Ukrainians!
On February 4th, Donald Trump called for the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip by expelling its Palestinian population to Egypt and Jordan, with no right to return. One week later, on February 12th, after holding a 90-minute conversation with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, Trump announced the imminence of an agreement between their two countries that would end the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine, a deal which would be made without the involvement of the Ukrainian leadership, nor European governments.
These two dates, when the rights of the Palestinian and Ukrainian peoples were thrown into the same black hole, will become regarded as a double strike of the gong that announced when the world slipped into a radically new era. This crystallizing moment has been joined, these last few days, by a violent ideological offensive on the part of the new US administration against Europe, explicitly targeting its fragile cohesion and boosting the continent’s far-right, nationalist and xenophobic elements.
Instead of aiming at the institutional reality of Europe, the attack is against it is as a representation of democratic values, to which it lays claim however imperfect, since the end of the Second World War. That catastrophic conflict for all of humanity was created from the quest for colonial and imperialist domination, for which capitalism is the unstoppable engine.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
At the “Artificial Intelligence Action Summit” held in Paris earlier this month, US vice-president JD Vance launched into a diatribe against any attempt to regulate the digital revolution – the third industrial revolution – and he promoted the absolute right of capitalist monopolies to take control of it. Speaking at a meeting in Brussels of the Ukraine Defence Contact Group last week, the US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth made the brutal announcement that the transatlantic alliance, of which NATO is the strategic representation, is no longer of great concern for Washington – the US having other priorities, notably, he said, “focusing on the security of our own borders”.
Finally, at the Munich Security Conference last weekend, Vance delivered a speech that would not have displeased the ideologues in the Putin camp, who claim to defend traditional values in face of a supposedly decadent West. “There is a new sheriff in town,” Vance said of Trump, lending a cowboy image to the leader of a campaign against what he sees as the only threat – that of migration. “Of all the pressings, challenges, that the nations represented here face, I believe there is nothing more urgent than mass migration,” Vance told the gathering, before ending his speech with a “God bless you”.
In an Orwellian address that was in line with the censorship of language already launched by Trump – a speech in which “freedom of expression” was invoked as the weapon with which to combat the most elementary humanist and democratic principles – the US vice-president made a cardinal value, even a unique value, out of “the voices of the people” – reduced here to the one act of voting – to the detriment of any counter-power. "There is no room for firewalls,” he added, referring to the political tensions in Germany and the tradition by mainstream parties, now less robust, of isolating the far-right.
In the case of Trump, as in that of Putin, elections, be they manipulated or rigged, are the only remnant of democracy. The coup d’état in progress in the US seeks to establish the unrestrained power of the executive over the administration, society, the justice system, the media, and the opposition.
The choice of Saudi Arabia as the backdrop this week for sealing the alliance between Washington and Moscow was in itself a message. For this is a country with an absolute monarchy, anchored in fundamentalist religion, one of whose notable feat of arms was the assassination of dissident journalist Jamal Kashoggi in 2018. Thus it was in Riyadh that, under the high patronage of Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman, this oligarchal pact was signed, one year after the death in prison of Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny (on February 16th 2024), and three years after the launching of Russia’s imperialist invasion of Ukraine (February 24th 2022).
It marked a moment when, akin to the formation of a chemical precipitate, history suddenly accelerates, producing a menace which until then appeared as only a potential threat, and places before our eyes two truths that present us with a vital challenge.
The first of these is that we have entered into a period where the two former rival superpowers of the Cold War now join together to put an end, in a radical manner, to international law. For Trump and Putin, as also for their diverse allies, from Benjamin Netanyahu to Viktor Orbán, no supranational law, rule or regulation is legitimate. The only thing that counts for them is the balance of power created by a conflict. Above all, no fundamental human right can be considered as opposable to the policies they impose upon their people or upon those forced into submission. Their maxim could be that ‘the only thing that counts is what I believe is good for my people’ – a precept of Adolf Hitler's.
It is a notion that Trump recently promoted in a post on X which simply read: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” In the US, specialist observers of the far-right reported that the phrase came from a feature film on Napoleon. More chillingly, they revealed how Elon Musk, owner of X and who behaves like an unelected co-president, immediately re-posted Trump’s message in a post of his own showing 14 US flags – an apparent reference to two 14-word slogans peddled by an American white supremacist terrorist, and known as ‘The 14 words”. The first is “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”, which is followed by the secondary slogan “because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the Earth”.
At a diplomatic level, this rupture with any ideal of a world of common humanity and relationships is brutally demonstrated by the lot now dealt to Ukraine and Palestine. Trump can allow himself this coup de force all the more given the double standards of most of the West’s leaders in face of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza which have already damaged international law, which should have been untouchable .
To support Netanyahu’s war, his war crimes and crimes against humanity, is to play into the hands of Putin with his own war crimes and crimes against humanity. The United States and Russia speak the same language, that of the law of the strongest, one with no limits. Otherwise put, of the inevitable catastrophe of establishing a hierarchy amongst humanity, and between civilisations, religions and nations.
It is obviously not by chance that Trump, in authoritarian manner, has decided to criminalise the International Criminal Court (ICC), transforming its magistrates into delinquents. Netanyahu and Putin, both being subject to arrest warrants issued by the ICC, can only rejoice over Trump’s move. Since taking power in January, the extent of the White House’s new self-isolation from international co-operation, shutting the door on interdependence and multilateralism, is remarkable: Trump has decided to pull the US out of the World Health Organization, and to quit the COP 21 Paris climate agreements to limit global warming. He has ridden roughshod over the rules of the International Trade Organization by slapping steep tariffs however and wherever he wants, and has ordered the US is to exit several UN bodies, including those concerned with human rights and Palestinian refugees. Furthermore, he has frozen the funds of USAID, which provides humanitarian and development aid around the globe.
In another of Trump’s expeditious decisions, he suspended, with one stroke of the pen in a simple decree, an anti-corruption law dating from 1977, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. This prohibited US firms and individuals from corrupting officials abroad and, similarly, prohibited foreign entities and individuals from practicing bribery in the US. The move illustrates how the US president and his administration represent a Mafia-like capitalism, just like their ally, the Kremlin. An unregulated and unrestrained capitalism where only greed and enrichment count.
This Mafia-like capitalism, which Italian magistrate Roberto Scarpinato and his compatriot, the writer and journalist Roberto Saviano, both predicted and subsequently documented its establishment, unites the universe of Russian and American oligarchs. The Saint Petersburg mob who grabbed hold of Russia’s riches in the wake of Putin’s rise to power share the same predatory mindset as the Silicon Valley billionaires who spent a fortune to buy a presidency with Trump.
Like all Mafia organisations, their only ruling principles are (limitless) money-making, violence (the ends justify all the means), and secrecy (disallowing any scrutiny by wider society). One could also add the use of religion as an obscurant justification for the persecution of minorities, of dissidence and differences. In the same way that criminal gangs divide between them neighbourhoods and their trafficking activities, the oligarchs are ready to cut up the world according to their interests, in a rush of brutal extractivism whose target and victims are nature and humanity. From grabbing or even stealing raw materials, like oil and gas, to personal data, these oligarchs, whether Russian or North American, have in common their enrichment from the assets of others.
In these difficult times, despair is not an option.
After one has recognised this state of affairs, what remains now is to face up to it. “In these difficult times, despair is not an option,” US senator Bernie Sanders repeatedly advises, he who has become the voice of resistance in his country in contrast to the silence of a weakened Left. He says it with all the more conviction because, loyal to his founding stands as a rebel, he has never ceased sounding the alarm over the unfolding catastrophe. It is that of capitalism itself, from which, on its unbridled, predatory course, oligarchy is the inevitable offshoot.
Trump and Putin are not strangers to a supposed “happy globalisation” (a phrase coined by French businessman Alain Minc) which, after the fall of the Soviet Union, was the fairy tale that disguised the furious arrival around the world of the reign of merchandise, commodities, in total indifference towards the common good.
Within a given present moment, the past never repeats itself in identical fashion, but the memory of it always provides a warning of vigilance. The events over recent days were remindful of two historic precedents, the evocation of which is resonant and not anachronic. The first is the Munich Agreement of September 1938, which saw the cowardly submission of France and Britain in face of Nazi imperialism. Then there was also the 1939 Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact between the Nazi and Communist regimes, signed to the detriment of European peoples, and Poland and the Baltic states in particular.
Only the future will tell what significance history will retain of the speech by US vice-president JD Vance at last weekend’s Munich conference, or of the Trump-Putin pact, for which Ukraine is paying the price. Just as we still do not know what the so tardy, and so imperfect, European wake-up reaction to the Trump-Putin pact will result in.
But what we do know now is that there should be no shilly-shallying, which is what the 1938-1940 events tell us, because everything had already been put in place by all the abandoning, renouncing, and compromising that went on. The essential is now at hand – that is, the equality of rights which, since its proclamation by Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 18th Century, is the principle of emancipations.
We have an appointment with ourselves, our ideals and our principles, with what unites us in our diversity, what brings us together in our plurality. Just like those who, before us, put aside their prejudices and sectarianisms to join together to fight the Brown Plague* – for it is this same epidemic that faces us now, although carrying new variants of the disease.
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*The phrase “Brown Plague”, translated from the French “Peste Brune”, first coined in the 1930s, refers to Nazism and the brown uniforms of the paramilitary “SA” branch of the Nazi party (the National Socialist German Workers' Party).
- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse