Effort de Paix [English translation]

1

The one who doesn't acknowledge his mistakes

Is unable to progress

On the scale of a society it's the same

So the same people will be oppressed

We're blowing, blowing a lot of hot air

Too much, maybe from being pressed

We are erecting walls and walls

We are taught that locking ourselves it's protecting ourselves

Pretexts are beyond measures

And the arguments too light

Islamophobic shortcuts here,

A kamikaze network on the other channel

External politic impetuousness

Lauded in the country as a beautiful project

And the same mistakes repeat themselves

Viewers, yes we will be able to blame ourselves for that.

Listen and look at what is going on!

Fifteen years of perfidious wars

One claims to defend the Human Rights

With the planes ready and full of missiles

Overbid policy

Who divides with its verb

But who divides spreads the seeds

Of a future civil war

Gentlemen, I would ask you to put your cynical look away

Condescenscion is full of flames

Wants to impose its own limits

Each one is defending his own propaganda

Nothing is truthful anymore

The inquisitor has always burned what seemed heretic to him

The same loop repeats itself as each time more global

Don't look for pretexts, our system doesn't have any moral

Built on profit and the debt and a total domination

To the very bottom of our imaginaries

Who is the architect of our dreams?

Only the walls are widening

The fears and the loads of chimerae

No there is no more democracy, the governments became fascists

Where are the weapons of mass destruction, we don't forget yesterday

Medias, accomplices of the lie, with their arbitrary information

Refrain :

We need a peace effort

No, the enemy is not the other

The fire is not a balm

Need to believe in humanity

A bit of heart between the men

Or the world will sink into horror

We need a peace effort

No, the enemy is not the other

The fire is not a balm

When our medias are just fear and hatred

Because our politics have a thousand reasons to make war

The one who never sees his faults is unable of seeing clearly

On the scale of a nation it's the same

Its own limitation creates its fall

Here, here the words are empty because the most beautiful

Are just façades and perjuries

At the time when the identitarians are giving the creeps by proclaiming

Their ideas of pure race

The lack of love everywhere

Fear is not to fight, it's to be reassured

Hatred is a poison, a blood-red cloud invading the azure

Without mutual comprehension, peace will never be more than a statue

Because we didn't learn to understand each other but to judge

The way will be long and abrupt

But first we have to know what we want!

Yes, and what do we want?

The solution or the problem?

Swallowing a mouthful at each wave because the plates are full2

So easy to accuse the other to mix the symptoms up with the causes

The arms business will always have blood as a promise!

Black gold makes the world spin and shakes the puppets

The pressure is mounting, we get used, the barometers can explode

Look at your mirror, the medias are not the only ones not to be honest

He will never understand the other, the one who has no ears

Conquistadors acclaimed, like a righter of wrongs

Terror is using god or security to justify itself

Legitimate resistance mixed in the load3

Peoples mutilated, whom the world never felt sorry for

In a nutshell what do we remember from the mistakes of the past?

Think by yourself, more important than what the others think

Not a threaten, but a mirror, the other is another oneself

Who seeds war harvests it like the echo of his own voice

Refrain

We need a peace effort

No, the enemy is not the other

The fire is not a balm

Need to believe in humanity

A bit of heart between the men

Or the world will sink into horror

We need a peace effort

No, the enemy is not the other

The fire is not a balm

When our medias are just fear and hatred

Because our politics have a thousand reasons to make war

1. The title is an allusion to the "war effort"2. In French, "la coupe est pleine" (the cup is full) is an equivalent of "that's the last straw"3. The word "amalgame" (mixture, amalgam) is used a lot in France to describe the dangerous and populist bias which consists in thinking that all the people who cricticize Israel are anti-semites, that all the muslim are terrorists, that all the demonstrators are rioters... more precisely, I think taht here the phrase is about the people in France who support the Palestinian people and stand against the abuses of Israel, and who are often accused wrongly of being anti-semite, who are mixed up with the loads of fascist people. Actually, the Gaza Strip issue is very important in the French left-wing, anti-racist, libertarian movement whose Keny Arkana is a major figure.

• Artist:Keny Arkana