On November 18, 2017, Bernard-Henri Lévy delivered the key-note address at the Nexus Institute conference in Amsterdam.
An excerpt of his address on the Battle of Kirkuk, October 2017:
“In a sense it appeared as a very tiny event – who cares about the Kurdish people, betrayed since one century, on and on. For me, coming from there, coming from Erbil, coming from the battlefields where I filmed, shoulder to shoulder with the valiant Peshmergas, it appeared to me as a big date, as a real moment of the secret calendar of the modern world. Sometimes you have events that look like huge events, turning points of civilization – and they’re not. When Rome was sacked by the Gauls in 390 BC, the whole world believed that it was the end of the world. It was not. It was a false alarm. It was only the beginning of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire. When the Greeks were defeated by at Chaeronea by the Macedonians in 338 BC, or when the Macedonians were defeated by the Romans at Pydna, the direct witnesses of the event did not feel it as a huge thing, but it was. It was a turning point of the civilization at the time.”