\n«McNamara had played a role in the invention of strategic bombing during World War II, and when it came to the Vietnam War, he firmly believed that bombing would be key to American victory. Proven wrong, he became so hinged that President Johnson feared his secretary of defense would end as \u00ab\u00a0another Forrestal.\u00a0\u00bb At McNamara’s last top-level meeting, he went ballistic; \u00ab\u00a0The goddamned bombing campaign,\u00a0\u00bb he screamed, \u00ab\u00a0it’s been worth nothing, it’s done nothing, they’ve dropped more bombs than in all of Europe in all of World War II, and it hasn’t done a (expletive deleted) thing!\u00a0\u00bb<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n»McNamara did not kill himself, as his predecessor did – but he spent his four remaining decades a haunted, haunting figure. As he had tried to tame the nuclear beast and failed, he had tried to undo his mistake in Vietnam, and failed. As the war raged on for most of a decade more, he never openly denounced it – nor any of the other futile American wars that followed. He was as broken as Ahab – and Forrestal – but was cursed to wander on, a living pariah of regret.<\/em>»<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nLe d\u00e9but du texte de Carroll rend compte effectivement de cette dimension spirituelle, voire mal\u00e9fique, du Pentagone, avec cette terrible analogie du capitaine Achab parti \u00e0 la poursuite du grand cachalot blanc, son obsession, sa maladie intime; et si l’analogie convient effectivement \u00e0 McNamara, comme \u00e0 Forrestal avant lui, elle est aussi, selon l’intuition de Melville, la m\u00e9taphore de la psychologie am\u00e9ricaniste et, partant, de l’esprit de l’am\u00e9ricanisme, de cette pathologie de la psychologie qui renvoie \u00e9galement au d\u00e9veloppement g\u00e9n\u00e9ral de la modernit\u00e9 comme phase finale de la civilisation occidentale entr\u00e9e dans la subversion d’elle-m\u00eame.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\n«‘Moby Dick’ is the saga of the American soul, a cosmic contest with an \u00ab\u00a0intangible malignity.\u00a0\u00bb The sea monster was \u00ab\u00a0the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies . . . all the subtle demonisms of life and thought, all evil . . . all the general rage and hate\u00a0\u00bb felt by the human race \u00ab\u00a0from Adam down.\u00a0\u00bb Onto this enemy, Captain Ahab \u00ab\u00a0as if his chest had been a mortar . . . burst his hot heart’s shell.\u00a0\u00bb<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n»Ahab’s corpse wound up lashed to the hump of his nemesis, but what if Herman Melville had ended his novel differently? What if, in defeat, Ahab had been cursed to survive for decades more, wandering the back alleys and waterfronts of whaling cities, an embodiment of impotence and hubris, a living figure less of tragedy than pathos? Then the story would have been not Ahab’s, but Robert S. McNamara’s.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n»A Washington cliche refers to the Pentagon as the Great White Whale, the leviathan on the Potomac. Yet that something monstrous had indeed been loosed there was hinted at in 1949 when the first secretary of defense, James Forrestal, fell into a catatonic state at his desk, only to commit suicide a few weeks later.<\/em>»<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nCes r\u00e9flexions, pour nous rappeler la r\u00e9alit\u00e9 transcendantale de cette trag\u00e9die de la civilisation qu’est la transformation de notre organisation g\u00e9n\u00e9rale en un syst\u00e8me m\u00e9caniste, appuy\u00e9 sur le technologisme et le bellicisme, capable d’inventer une pseudo-spiritualit\u00e9 pour habiller d’atours s\u00e9duisants cette transmutation monstrueuse, qui semble anim\u00e9 d’une volont\u00e9 propre et qui fait de ceux qui le servent \u00e0 la fois des complices et des victimes. Cette id\u00e9e ne doit pas nous quitter, tant elle est essentielle.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
McNamara \u00e9tait l’arch\u00e9type du complice-victime, du coupable enchaîn\u00e9 \u00e0 l’in\u00e9luctabilit\u00e9 de son crime. Son destin nous conforte dans la conviction que la puissance d\u00e9chaîn\u00e9e de notre civilisation, si compl\u00e8tement nihiliste et impuissante au bout de sa course, entraîne un enchaînement des hommes \u00e0 ce qui est devenu une sorte de \u00ab\u00a0force sup\u00e9rieure\u00a0\u00bb. Pour certains, McNamara \u00e9tait passible des tribunaux humains pour les crimes dont il \u00e9tait le responsable. La validit\u00e9 incontestable de ce jugement ne rend pas compte de la totalit\u00e9 du cas, et, si l’on en reste au jugement, justement, cela qui satisfait \u00e0 bon compte notre intransigeance morale, on \u00e9carte toute chance de comprendre la v\u00e9ritable substance de notre crise de civilisation.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Mise en ligne le 14 juillet 2009 \u00e0 10H43<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
McNamara et le grand cachalot blanc James Carroll est certainement l’historien am\u00e9ricain (pas am\u00e9ricaniste, dans ce cas) qui a le mieux \u00e9crit sur le Pentagone, nous rappelant le surnom de Moby Dick que le secr\u00e9taire \u00e0 la d\u00e9fense Cohen avait donn\u00e9 \u00e0 ce monstre indomptable qui a install\u00e9 une m\u00e9canique implacable au cœur du syst\u00e8me,… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3369,7921,8472,3966,5286,6521,3014,1010],"class_list":["post-70909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bloc-notes","tag-carroll","tag-dick","tag-forrestal","tag-james","tag-mcnamara","tag-moby","tag-systeme","tag-vietnam"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70909"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70909\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}