I don’t recall the hesitation after the Bataclan Massacre, but I do remember the hand-wringing after Charlie Hebdo, and the attempts to say that their staff “deserved it” by misinterpreting their cartoons.
But that also raises a question about your article: The founders and editors of Charlie Hebdo *also* were considered children of the 1968 uprising, yet they were on the other end of the gun in 2015. Were there other ideas and influences with the students who participated in 1968, that did not rely on inverting “oppressor” and “oppressed”?
I’m sure you meant to imply that October 7th, 2023 was a turning point for the United States, with people like Gabriel Winant saying that the victims have been “pre-grieved”, not only minimizing them but also the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust (I’m not kidding; read what he wrote and said at the time. Even if it is time to find other things to say in the face of antisemitism, this is pure ghoulishness). It is depressing that this ideology has only grown stronger, but I am an optimist at heart, and simply saying, frequently, “this/you are crazy and you are abetting murder” will be enough. Eventually.
Many/most of us can see that we are increasingly in danger of Islamist terror. And yet we pretend it’s not a growing problem. We are frogs swimming in warming water.
I can't help but think of Girard here. Without a mechanism for controlling guilt, the natural tendency for society is to evolve grotesque and barbaric sacrifice rituals in a futile attempt to "balance the scales". The receding influence of Christianity is revealing exactly that.
Yea, do the French did feel residual guilt re the holocaust they laid off on Germans so easily? But still, If fellow French deserved terrorist death for colonial depredations of a national past they did not inhabit, is it time close that project? As the old American country western song goes is it a "Turn out the lights the Party is over " moment? At a minimum, it is a "please beat us some more shtick. You accept martyrdom for past sins and deny legitimate agency to resist it..
iDK how far these ideas carry in France. They don't go deep in U.S. The 68s plus the young, post modernist, colonial regret intellectual class is far less influential. In addition, the U.S. was never a serious colonial power and its Military forces do not lack the strength or size to resist.
Your perspicasious intuitions regarding the moral bankruptcy of people with no skin in the game posing as moral judges of the dead is incisive and cuts to the heart of the matter..
I had no idea the fake intellectuals of higher indoctrination in France blamed the victims for this appalling massacre. That is a most disgusting response. Words fail me.
Zineb, I'm wondering if you know Hussein Aboubakr Mansour and his work. He has been touching on some similar themes, particularly Third Worldism and decolonization, and he plumbs very deeply. His most recent piece is in moral sadism. I think you would enjoy each other's perspectives and ideas.
I agree wrt the toxic nature of Post colonialism as an obstacle in fighting off the jihadists gaining ground in North America and Western Europe to a dangerous extent (although I wonder why you didn't mention Frantz Fanon in this context).
But I think that France and the US faught absolutely senseless wars in Indochina (let alone NATO's 20 years lasting war in Afghanistan). And that the outrage of intellectuals wrt these wars was partly honest and heart felt. So accuse me of "bothsidism", but in this case it seems to be the only way to result in a balanced judgement.
"The audacity to look a mourning father in the eye and tell him that he was not the victim. To explain that his son or daughter was nothing more than an unfortunate casualty of history, a small figure swept away by a struggle that, according to this decolonial ideology, demanded its offerings. Some went even further. They suggested he might find a kind of consolation, that he might even welcome the idea that these so-called miscreants had been killed, or that music was forbidden anyway...
Islam, for many intellectuals, eventually entered this structure not as a religion but as a sign, a symbol, a flag. It became the symbol of the excluded and the humiliated, the permanent “post-colonial subject...
...a segment of the French intelligentsia recast Islam as political symbolism rather than a religious world. Jihadist violence was interpreted as a political expression, not cruelty...
This same distortion led many to misread the Islamic State. ISIS was not the voice of the marginalized but an imperial project seeking to overthrow Middle Eastern states, yet this reality was obscured by the insistence on placing it within an old anti-imperialist story."
This article is correct about the violence and anti-patriotism of the left, but it goes back much further than 1968. Much of the old Marxist left had always been in favour of violence against civilians and against any form of patriotism.
You can see it in the writing of George Orwell, who opposed these attitudes on the left of his day. In his essay Inside the Whale (an essay actually about the novelist Henry Miller), he goes on a digression to attack a widespread attitude he sees in a poem by W. H. Auden that talks approvingly of the “necessary murder[s]” needed to get to the Marxist utopia. Likewise, in essays like My Country Right or Left and The Lion and the Unicorn, he berated the failure of much of the British far-left to rally to the support of Britain against Nazism (until Hitler invaded their beloved USSR, of course).
What 1968 marked was the intellectual left’s abandonment of the USSR as the model of the future utopia (the suppression of The Prague Spring of that year is relevant here too) and its transference of the baton of “the right side of history” to Maoist China and the rest of the Third World, particularly the Islamic world. Israeli victory over Egypt, Jordan and Syria in the Six Day War the previous year also made it easier to portray Israel as a colonialist aggressor against the Arabs.
Very interesting to hear about this reaction in France. My sense from the UK and Germany had been that the reaction to 9/11 & 7/7 (and perhaps even Charlie Hebdo) was as you described here. However, something changed with Islamic State, both due to its undeniable self-advertisement of cruelty and the fact it was fighting the Kurds. Thus, IS attacks triggered a much clearer condemnation on the left.
I don’t recall the hesitation after the Bataclan Massacre, but I do remember the hand-wringing after Charlie Hebdo, and the attempts to say that their staff “deserved it” by misinterpreting their cartoons.
But that also raises a question about your article: The founders and editors of Charlie Hebdo *also* were considered children of the 1968 uprising, yet they were on the other end of the gun in 2015. Were there other ideas and influences with the students who participated in 1968, that did not rely on inverting “oppressor” and “oppressed”?
I’m sure you meant to imply that October 7th, 2023 was a turning point for the United States, with people like Gabriel Winant saying that the victims have been “pre-grieved”, not only minimizing them but also the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust (I’m not kidding; read what he wrote and said at the time. Even if it is time to find other things to say in the face of antisemitism, this is pure ghoulishness). It is depressing that this ideology has only grown stronger, but I am an optimist at heart, and simply saying, frequently, “this/you are crazy and you are abetting murder” will be enough. Eventually.
Many/most of us can see that we are increasingly in danger of Islamist terror. And yet we pretend it’s not a growing problem. We are frogs swimming in warming water.
I can't help but think of Girard here. Without a mechanism for controlling guilt, the natural tendency for society is to evolve grotesque and barbaric sacrifice rituals in a futile attempt to "balance the scales". The receding influence of Christianity is revealing exactly that.
I heard the same excuses from Europeans in particular and leftists in general after 9-11.
Yea, do the French did feel residual guilt re the holocaust they laid off on Germans so easily? But still, If fellow French deserved terrorist death for colonial depredations of a national past they did not inhabit, is it time close that project? As the old American country western song goes is it a "Turn out the lights the Party is over " moment? At a minimum, it is a "please beat us some more shtick. You accept martyrdom for past sins and deny legitimate agency to resist it..
iDK how far these ideas carry in France. They don't go deep in U.S. The 68s plus the young, post modernist, colonial regret intellectual class is far less influential. In addition, the U.S. was never a serious colonial power and its Military forces do not lack the strength or size to resist.
Your perspicasious intuitions regarding the moral bankruptcy of people with no skin in the game posing as moral judges of the dead is incisive and cuts to the heart of the matter..
Thank you Zineb for posting this. I've also written about the Bataclan massacre:
https://substack.com/@thelasthedonists/p-178743087
I had no idea the fake intellectuals of higher indoctrination in France blamed the victims for this appalling massacre. That is a most disgusting response. Words fail me.
Zineb, I'm wondering if you know Hussein Aboubakr Mansour and his work. He has been touching on some similar themes, particularly Third Worldism and decolonization, and he plumbs very deeply. His most recent piece is in moral sadism. I think you would enjoy each other's perspectives and ideas.
Here is a link to his latest piece: https://open.substack.com/pub/critiqueanddigest/p/the-age-of-moral-sadism
I agree wrt the toxic nature of Post colonialism as an obstacle in fighting off the jihadists gaining ground in North America and Western Europe to a dangerous extent (although I wonder why you didn't mention Frantz Fanon in this context).
But I think that France and the US faught absolutely senseless wars in Indochina (let alone NATO's 20 years lasting war in Afghanistan). And that the outrage of intellectuals wrt these wars was partly honest and heart felt. So accuse me of "bothsidism", but in this case it seems to be the only way to result in a balanced judgement.
This is perfectly articulated:
"The audacity to look a mourning father in the eye and tell him that he was not the victim. To explain that his son or daughter was nothing more than an unfortunate casualty of history, a small figure swept away by a struggle that, according to this decolonial ideology, demanded its offerings. Some went even further. They suggested he might find a kind of consolation, that he might even welcome the idea that these so-called miscreants had been killed, or that music was forbidden anyway...
Islam, for many intellectuals, eventually entered this structure not as a religion but as a sign, a symbol, a flag. It became the symbol of the excluded and the humiliated, the permanent “post-colonial subject...
...a segment of the French intelligentsia recast Islam as political symbolism rather than a religious world. Jihadist violence was interpreted as a political expression, not cruelty...
This same distortion led many to misread the Islamic State. ISIS was not the voice of the marginalized but an imperial project seeking to overthrow Middle Eastern states, yet this reality was obscured by the insistence on placing it within an old anti-imperialist story."
This article is correct about the violence and anti-patriotism of the left, but it goes back much further than 1968. Much of the old Marxist left had always been in favour of violence against civilians and against any form of patriotism.
You can see it in the writing of George Orwell, who opposed these attitudes on the left of his day. In his essay Inside the Whale (an essay actually about the novelist Henry Miller), he goes on a digression to attack a widespread attitude he sees in a poem by W. H. Auden that talks approvingly of the “necessary murder[s]” needed to get to the Marxist utopia. Likewise, in essays like My Country Right or Left and The Lion and the Unicorn, he berated the failure of much of the British far-left to rally to the support of Britain against Nazism (until Hitler invaded their beloved USSR, of course).
What 1968 marked was the intellectual left’s abandonment of the USSR as the model of the future utopia (the suppression of The Prague Spring of that year is relevant here too) and its transference of the baton of “the right side of history” to Maoist China and the rest of the Third World, particularly the Islamic world. Israeli victory over Egypt, Jordan and Syria in the Six Day War the previous year also made it easier to portray Israel as a colonialist aggressor against the Arabs.
Very interesting to hear about this reaction in France. My sense from the UK and Germany had been that the reaction to 9/11 & 7/7 (and perhaps even Charlie Hebdo) was as you described here. However, something changed with Islamic State, both due to its undeniable self-advertisement of cruelty and the fact it was fighting the Kurds. Thus, IS attacks triggered a much clearer condemnation on the left.