We fear the night
We praise the day
Watch the beach
Evade the wave
It’s the somewhat rich
that we somewhat adore
It’s the harmless
non-white,
the poor, we deplore.
We issue medals
(oh, how proudly we wave)
camouflaged pop stars
singing their praise
Passing in silence
the villages we razed
Blessing our murderers,
Our leaders depraved
“Don’t call it aggression
Oh, how we hate that expression!”1
At the CIA’s dirty wars2
we only sneer
so for the CIA’s clean wars
we can revel and cheer.
- This rhyme comes from Tom Lehrer’s homage to the SCUM
- The term “dirty war” (Fr. la guerre sale) is deliberately confusing jargon. First of all it suggests that there is another kind of war which is somehow nice. The compatible Left generally decries “imperial arrogance” (I get tired of reading this cliché) when they apparently mean the “empire should be more polite in its oppression”. They deplore “counter-productive interventions” which means they support “productive invasions”. In short they would really like their rulers to subjugate the world without blemishes to their conscience.
La guerre sale is the French expression for their war in Algeria (1954-1962). At the height of the French (Fourth Republic) war against the people it had ruled in Algeria, through a combination of white colonisation and archconservative Muslim clericism, France was waging a major counter-insurgency (i.e. terrorist war against the local population) to prevent independence. French army officers analyzed this war and…