What bin Laden's Death Has Hidden

If bin Laden had not been placed in a tomb of dishonor, two pieces of information that have been almost overwhelmed by joy — or, here and there, by universal consternation — have made the front pages of newspapers.

First we look at the moral and humanitarian catastrophe that is in the process of transforming NATO’s intervention in Libya. We ran to the aid of insurgent civilians as they confronted the madness of a paranoid tyrant head on. However, with the civilians suffering now more than ever, our air strikes have destroyed the country’s infrastructure. The insurgents are still running around while our intervention has made this dictator into a tearful father, since we have freely massacred children and grandchildren in violation of the U.N. resolution authorizing this intervention.

We have much reason to rejoice now that bin Laden is dead, but we must be careful not to repeat our mistakes.

The second issue pertains to Canada: Certainly, after the last election, the Conservatives have returned to power, but the left, at the last minute, sprang from marginality to make history by becoming the second most influential political force of French-speaking Canada. The bipolarity that has characterized the Canadian political system, in which Conservatives were at odds with Liberals, has been shattered as if by an earthquake.

However, this phenomenon is widespread. Therefore, what we are witnessing in the modern world, particularly the Western Hemisphere, is that a push to the left or a push to the right makes no sense. Actually, voters tend to reject the “dualisms” set, which can be equally beneficial to a new left as well as a new right. A new left is extremely radical, just as a new right is. The losers are the traditional liberals and the social liberals.

In Canada, with this new left emerged Vauvert from out of nowhere. Vauvert destroyed both the old Liberal party and traditional Quebec separatism, thus turning a new page. In Germany, the environmentalists (and to a lesser degree the neo-communists) publicly undermine CDU on one side and SPD on the other. In Italy, the traditional right and traditional left gradually disappear from the horizon in favor of a Piedmontese hegemony of the Northern ethno-centric League party. In Flanders there is a similar situation going on where major traditional parties are suffering and being jostled by a cultural and linguistic nationalism. In France, it is possible that a candidate representing the great liberal party of the right or the large Social Democratic party left is eliminated in the second round of presidential elections by the representative of a xenophobic and anti-liberal National Front. In Finland (just as in the Netherlands), the two regular parties, center right and center left, were overtaken by a newcomer referred to as the “True Finns party,” who suffer from an identity crisis.

Even in Peru, right and reformist liberals were eliminated in the second round of the presidential elections by a new nationalist left and a new populist right.

Finally, keep in mind that in Great Britain, the home of bipolarity in the last elections, neither the Conservatives nor the Labor organizations won a majority.

The French example, when looked at, is emblematic. Everything has been done institutionally to impose, at all levels of political life, a polarization of brass in favor of the UMP and the P.S. However, the electorate apparently seized every opportunity to escape this binary antagonism, with 19 percent of voters choosing liberal Francois Bayrou, another section of voters going for plebiscite Daniel Cohn-Bendit and then the environmentalists. These two parties were disappointed by inflating the sails of a Marine Le Pen, the way some pre-fascist parties did in the 1920s, utilizing an ideology of extreme right rhetoric that would not disown the extreme left.

What is new is the discrediting of old recipes, through the desire for “something new” that the liberal conservatism on his own or socialism in rabbit skin, can now invest in the worst and the best.

Said differently: After the double failure of political systems that have placed everything in the center, such as state and money, the requirement of centrality can be sincerely enjoyed by those who want the new place, center, race, blood or soil (or God, as the Islamists), or the new humanists who want to centralize the human in all its dimensions.

The responsibility of Democrats is even more serious.