Who’s the Devil: the Other or the West?

“We’ve spent nine trillion dollars bombing the Middle East like mad. We’ve sown death there, including our own. And what has it gotten us? Nothing.” Donald Trump, November 1, 2024. The figure of the devil has haunted our collective consciousness since the dawn of time. He structures our societies, whether religious or secular. Sometimes, the devil has been a friend before being “demonized”. Sometimes, by force of circumstance, he has become an ally. And sometimes, the devil must be eliminated to mask or even justify the errors of our societies. Thus, during the Second World War, we made a pact with Stalin to bring down a devil deemed more formidable: Hitler. In Northern Ireland, the British ended up talking with representatives of the IRA, just as the French did a few years earlier with the Algerian FLN. Recently, the Americans negotiated with the Taliban, another terrorist group, before handing over the keys to Afghanistan. Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad were friends of the West before the latter precipitated their downfall, even if it meant causing chaos in their countries. Régis Le Sommier has been a war reporter for 27 years, and has himself interviewed a number of infamous figures. His aim is to revisit the concept of the devil in the light of recent and current conflicts, in order to answer one question: shouldn’t the deleterious consequences of geopolitics conducted “in the name of good” lead us to doubt the validity of the actions taken by our governments, even today, against those they like to refer to as devils?