Adversary Confusion: When People Lose Sight of their True Enemy

One of the more striking elements in many Africans’ response to recent events in the Sahel is a profound confusion as to who the real threat to several African countries really is. From an outsider’s point of view, it should be clear: the jihadist insurgencies that are destroying Burkina Faso and Mali and threatening Niger. They also are a growing threat to many of the states along the Gulf of Guinea, which Americans often refer to as the “littoral” countries. But for many Africans, the threat is France.

Anti-French protest in Mali. The signs read, “France is a terrorist state (the mercenaries and the drones)” and “Stop France’s genocide in Mali: Go home, and pillage our resources no more.”

I think of this phenomenon as a form of mental confusion. Let’s call it adversary confusion. We’ve seen it before. The example that comes immediately to mind is the confusion among many in France in the 1930s about who represented the greatest threat to their country. For some, the answer was clear: Nazi Germany. But for many, the threat came from other quarters. Britain was the most common example: Britain, many French people thought, had its eyes on France’s overseas Empire and was conspiring to undermine it and seize it for itself. For others, the threat came from Communists, Jews, or Free Masons. Antisemitism and anti-Masonism (yes, it’s a thing) were potent political forces in those days.

The problem came to the fore with the rise of the Popular Front, a left-wing coalition whose most prominent leader was the Jewish head of the Socialist party, Léon Blum. The Popular Front was a major political force in the 1930s, and Blum twice served as Prime Minister in 1936-1938, which were precisely the years when an aggressive response to Hitler’s rise had a high likelihood of success. Blum and the Popular Front had a strong anti-fascist agenda and were alarmed by the Nazis’ rise to power. The French Right, which might otherwise have embraced an anti-German stance, pushed back. The Right was uncomfortable with the Left and particularly with the Communists in the Popular Front, whom many saw as more dangerous than Nazis. The fact that Blum was Jewish was lost on nobody. Of course Blum was anti-Nazi, many reasoned, given the Nazis’ naked hostility toward Jews. Besides, many on the French Right sympathized with Nazi antisemitism. Finally, taking an aggressive stand against Germany meant working closely with the United Kingdom, the great imperial rival.

Anti-Popular Front image, insisting that it was a Soviet puppet. Léon Blum is the figure with the glasses. The others are Marcel Cachin and Édouard Herriot.

The result ultimately was dithering and the lack of a strong consensus about the Nazi threat. The confusion led to a lack of conviction even when the war began in 1939, and even after France fell in 1940. Vichy embodied the confusion, as those who saw Britain, Communists, Jews, and Masons as France’s true enemies came to power. (A similar thing happened in 1870-71, when many French politicians like Adolphe Thiers, who could not muster a determined defense of the Second Empire, were happy to come to terms with Germany to have a free hand against domestic threats, namely the Commune.) The Royal Navy’s destruction of the French fleet at Mers el Kéber in 1940 served to validate the Anglophobes’ position. For this reason, the French state under Vichy control was only too happy to hand over Blum (who spent the war in a German concentration camp) and collaborate with the mass murder of French Jews. In this context, the ability of right-wing officers such as Charles de Gaulle to see matters clearly and rally to London’s side is all the more remarkable. Even today, there is a fine but important line dividing the French Right between its Republicans and its anti-Republicans, between Gaullists (France’s main-stream rightist parties) and Vichyites (National Front).

Vichy-era propaganda poster identifying the threats to France as Free-Masons, Jews, de Gaulle, and lies.

In the Sahel, many insist on seeing France as the true enemy, notwithstanding the fact that France in 2013 went to war against jihadists, and that it’s the jihadists who are burning villages and slaughtering their occupants, who are blockading Sahelian towns and who seek to destroy Sahelian governments. They see ejecting France as a greater priority. They are hostile to other entities whom they perceive to be France-aligned, such as MINUSMA or, now, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). They rejoice at the arrival of Wagner, notwithstanding that Wagner purposefully kills Malian civilians and has been a party to massacres, which French forces have not done and will not do.

What is driving this confusion? Ideology. Long-standing grudges and resentment. The weight of the colonial past. Patronizing French rhetoric. Above all, there is a need to understand why things are going so badly in the Sahel notwithstanding French efforts to assist. The answer has to do with the conduct of Sahelian elites and profound economic, political, and social problems that are not France’s to solve but are, on the contrary, the necessary work of Sahelians themselves. So people seize upon perceived French crimes. There is a fixation on France’s handing of Kidal over to Tuareg independence groups rather than the Malian army, an event that features in the Sahelian imagination much as Mers el Kéber did for Anglophobic French people.

Adversary confusion is keeping many Sahelians and other Africans from clearly seeing the true threat to their countries and thinking pragmatically and strategically about how to counter the threat. The anti-French turn is psychologically satisfying, but the results are more likely to be tragic than otherwise. It will not be a tragedy for France, which can and will survive and prosper regardless. But for Sahelians themselves, who can ill afford to lose focus on the real threat to their well-being.