Let’s reject this hypocritical demonstration

January 10 2015 | By patricJEAN

translated by Daphne Lawless

“Hypocrisy is the homage which vice pays to virtue” (La Rochefoucauld)

Three days after the terrorist attack, we are being drenched in a lukewarm, consensual and hypocritical discourse. The worst censors are crying over freedom of expression. Sowers of hate are begging for people to come together. The real questions are forbidden, and the only discourse tolerated is that of war, in which we occupy “the side of good”.

Sunday’s march will dismiss any disturbing questions and I won’t be attending this hypocrites’ ball, which, according to the Prime Minister, “will show the strength of France”.

Right at the beginning, I can’t see myself demonstrating side-by-side with the worst kind of right-wingers who don’t bother hiding their racism. Marching alongside [ex-President] Sarkozy? Alongside [conservative leader] Copé, who fretted about children not being able to eat pain au chocolat during Ramadan? Alongside [former minister] Horteffeux and his insulting remarks about Arabs? Do we need to remember that, when the revolution against the bloody dictator Ben Ali began in Tunisia, Michèle Alliot-Marie, then Minister of Defence, suggested French military aid to fight the insurgents? March tomorrow with the likes of them? With the very right-wing prime ministers of Spain and Great Britain? Benjamin Netanyahu was invited after kindly offering his help to France... That noted democrat, the President of Turkey, is sending his prime minister. It’s starting to look like one of Charlie Hebdo’s jokes.

Charlie Hebdo cartoonists look down from heaven. “Masses? The national anthem? For us?” “It’s hard to be loved by dumb-asses…”

It’s striking to see the Interior Minister today praising the police and the gendarmes whom everyone is saluting on social media. The intervention of the forces of order is essential when civilians are in danger. But have we already forgotten what we thought of these people when they killed a young, unarmed pacifist demonstrator a few weeks ago? Those who demonstrated then will demonstrate tomorrow, in a political hotch-potch which has lost all meaning. On the other hand, it’s also funny to hear the (former and current) people in charge of France Inter and Radio France crying for freedom of expression. Those same people who fired those who practiced it on their own airwaves: Porte, Guillon, Mermet... Or those who, elsewhere, allow the promotion of the worst kind of reactionaries and their violent and racist discourse.

All these hypocrites will be demonstrating tomorrow. Let’s not be seen among them.

After the death of Charlie’s cartoonists, we are “all Charlie”, united in a discourse totally empty of meaning which the victims would never have endorsed. This slogan, invented by an advertising creative, is a good reflection of our era. Let’s put our political opinions to one side, as if they weren’t at the very heart of what has happened. As if, all at once and at random, we were attacked by an external enemy with whom we had never had any prior relationship. As if the murdered cartoonists could become symbols for those whom they had always fought against.

I have already asked, right here, questions about the way in which our society makes monsters . Because, after all, these are our terrorists. They grew up here. Like the thousand or more young people who’ve left for Syria, today those who knew them are shocked. “Good little boys”, polite and friendly, but who became barbarians. Did they all contract the same mental disorder? The only answer we are given is that they were manipulated by fundamentalist Muslim ideologues. This is true. But don’t we have to wonder about the reasons why thousands of young people fall into their clutches? Don’t we have to see here the outcome of a society, a third of whose members are sunk in despair? Institutionalised racism, segregation in work, in recreation, in accommodation, police profiling, endemic police violence. But also unemployment, poverty, and above all a feeling of being trapped and of total, definitive and implacable injustice, for millions of men and women. Three million children live in poverty in France. Can we hope that none of them will become violent? What a pipe-dream...

On the other hand, Islamist terrorist violence, like all violence, has a history. That of the Muslim Brotherhood originates in a post-colonial context under dictatorships supported by our governments. In Afghanistan, the United States trained and financed holy madmen who did not become democrats after the Russians pulled out. Today, the foreign interventions of the United States, Great Britain and France repeat the same mistakes and reap the same consequences. The crazy attack on Libya by France at the instigation of [philosopher] Bernard-Henri Lévy, after Nicolas Sarkozy had welcomed its dictator with great ceremony (who no doubt brought some gifts with him), led to chaos in that country, and the arming of terrorist militias further south. What’s more, France feels obliged to intervene in its Malian backyard when the situation degenerates.

Finally, the thousands of young Europeans (a shocking amount in Belgium) who leave for Syria do not spark off the least debate on how we operate as a society. How a society whose ultra-individualist values have allowed the healthy questioning of alienating values, but also the growth of social relations based solely on competition, thus preventing any solidarity and thus any class consciousness or feeling of systemic injustice. Farewell to political struggle... Young people’s feelings of injustice have therefore found a new outlet to express themselves.

And from this outlet came the torrent of lukewarm water with which we have all been showered for four days. Charb, Wolinski, Tignous and Uncle Bernard [the murdered cartoonists] would laugh themselves sick to see their name honoured like this by the New York Stock Exchange or in churches. They would scream, hearing the President of the USA announcing that he was praying for them. Paying them homage like this tramples on what they were - radical leftists, often anarchists, atheists...

Because today, you hear everyone declare that the terrorists were not “real Muslims”. Even the President of the Republic, who is not usually considered an expert in theology, declares that this is not “true Islam”. This hypocrisy, once more, masks a much more complex reality. The three Abrahamic religions each contain, as do their holy books, everything and its opposite. It neglects to mention that the Judeo-Christian “thou shalt not kill” is followed, just a few pages later, by a divine injunction to commit genocide by killing men, women and children who occupied the “holy” land, and thus had to be gotten rid of. Depending on whether they read the texts from one point of view or another, a believer will develop a discourse of love or hate. Or sometimes both at different times. The Inquisition was carried out with Bible in hand. As is the massacre of Palestinians. Religion is only a way of expressing the peaceful or hateful spirituality which dwells within, according to what one has experienced elsewhere.

If we prevent ourselves from thinking, all the time screaming about liberty of thought, we’ll follow the same policies which have brought us to catastrophe. Our brains have been perfectly washed, and we refuse to discern in these events the slightest symptom of anything but “a war waged against us’. So that war will intensify, other dramatic events will follow, and we won’t be able to prevent them. At his worst, the Egyptian dictator Mubarak, friend of the West, had a million police officers, omnipresent on every street corner. But that wasn’t enough to save him.

Tomorrow, people will demonstrate alongside those who allowed neo-Nazis to spread everywhere with their disgusting ideas. These publishers and journalists who have popularized the people who dream of “deporting” all Muslims will be on the street. They have gotten rich from a very profitable audience and can play-act their anger against the consequences of what they themselves began.

Tomorrow, my socialist, Green, Communist and Left Front friends will demonstrate alongside the Right. I hope they enjoy themselves because, soon, they’ll be reduced to voting for it.

Note: I’m informed that Luz from Charlie Hebdo defends a similar point of view to that expressed above.