Mr President of the Republic, ladies and gentlemen, ministers, parliamentarians, general officers, in your ranks and qualities,
We no longer sing the seventh verse of the Marseillaise, known as the "children's verse." Yet it is rich in teachings. Let him give them to us:
"We will enter the quarry when our elders are gone. We will find their dust, and the trace of their virtues. Far less jealous of surviving them than of sharing their coffin, we will have the sublime pride of avenging them or following them."
Our elders are fighters who have deserved to be respected. These are, for example, the old soldiers whose honour you have trampled on in recent weeks. It is these thousands of servants of France, signatories of a forum of simple common sense, soldiers who gave their best years to defend our freedom, obeying your orders, to wage your wars or implement your budgetary restrictions, which you have soiled while the people of France supported them. These people who have fought against all the enemies of France, you have called them factual when their only wrong is to love their country and mourn its visible demise.
In these circumstances, it is up to us, who have recently entered the quarry, to enter the arena simply to have the honour of telling the truth.
We are from what the newspapers have called "the generation of fire." Men and women, active military personnel, all armies and ranks, all sensibilities, we love our country. These are our only titles of glory. And if we cannot, by regulation, express ourselves with our faces open, it is equally impossible for us to remain silent.
Afghanistan, Mali, Central Africa or elsewhere, a number of us have experienced enemy fire. Some left comrades there. They offered their skin to destroy the Islamism to which you are making concessions on our soil.
Almost all of us have known Operation Sentinel. We saw with our eyes the abandoned suburbs, the accommodations with delinquency. We have suffered attempts to instrumentalize several religious communities, for whom France means nothing - nothing but an object of sarcasm, contempt and even hatred.
We marched on July 14th. And this benevolent and diverse crowd, which cheered us because we are the emanation, we were asked to beware of it for months, forbidding us to travel in uniform, making us victims in power, on a ground that we are nevertheless able to defend.
Yes, our elders are right about the substance of their text, in its entirety. We see violence in our towns and villages. We see communitarianism settling in the public space, in public debate. We see the hatred of France and its history becoming the norm.
It may not be for the military to say that, you will argue. Quite the contrary: because we are apolitical in our assessments of situation, it is a professional observation that we deliver. For this decline, we have seen it in many countries in crisis. It precedes the collapse. It heralds chaos and violence, and contrary to what you say here where there, this chaos and violence will not come from a "military pronunciamento" but from a civil insurgency.
To quibble about the shape of our elders' gallery instead of acknowledging the evidence of their findings, we must be very cowardly. In order to invoke a duty of reserve that is misinterpreted in order to silence French citizens, one must be very deceitful. To encourage senior military officials to take a stand and expose themselves, before an angry punishment of them as soon as they write anything other than battle stories, you have to be perverse.
https://www.place-armes.fr/post/tribune-des-militaires-d-active
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