Who's the devil the other or the west?

Régis Le Sommier

Parution le 25/04/2025

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Résumé

It's rarely good to be right before everyone else

The figure of the devil has haunted our collective consciousness since the dawn of time. It structures our societies, whether religious or secular, to identify an enemy. And at some point, when circumstances demand it, we are obliged to associate with him or make a pact with him. At another point, a friend becomes the devil, and you can't talk to him - you have to kill him.
During the Second World War, we made a pact with Stalin to bring down a devil deemed more formidable: Hitler. In Korea and Vietnam, we negotiated an end to conflict with the Khmer Rouge. In Northern Ireland, the British finally sat down around a table with representatives of the IRA, just as the French had done a few years earlier with the FLN in Algeria. More recently, the Americans negotiated for years with the Taliban, another terrorist group, finally handing them the keys to Afghanistan, twenty years after they were ousted from power. On the other hand, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi and Nicolae Ceaucescu were friends of the West, and had to be killed because they failed in their duties.
Régis Le Sommier, who worked as a war reporter for Paris-Match for 27 years and won several awards from the profession, has interviewed a number of infamous personalities himself, and has decided to revisit the concept of the Devil in the light of current contemporary conflicts, betting that we'll be doing it again with Putin and Hamas, in one form or another, at some point or another.
This book is a plea for journalism and a denunciation of the war communication that all too often replaces it today.

Aged 54, Régis Le Sommier is a senior reporter, Europe 1, CNews and Radio Classique columnist and former deputy director of Paris Match magazine. He also teaches journalism at CELSA and ESJ. Founder in 2022 of Omerta media, a digital platform for documentaries and investigations.
In 2017, he received the Grand Prix de la Presse Internationale for his coverage of the Middle East, and in 2018, the prize for best journalistic investigation awarded by the SEPM (Syndicat de la presse magazine) for his coverage of the battle of Mosul.