Note: This article first appeared in the journal Mezetulle.
Two pamphlets have just been published that seem to come from two different planets. One, by Patrick Boucheron [1], a renowned medievalist and professor at the Collège de France, offers a reflection on the catastrophe and would like to be a warning signal against what there is perhaps still time to avoid and which is being prepared before our eyes: the advent of the extreme right. The other, by Pierre-André Taguieff [2], philosopher, political scientist and historian of ideas, analyzes the Islamic theological-political matrix that has revived the demonization of the Jews and which finds support in a certain Western left making the Palestinian cause a new "cause of the people". Two intellectuals who propose tools for deciphering the "morbid phenomena" specific to the present times.
Patrick Boucheron, The Time That Remains
Reflection on time has become one of Patrick Boucheron's specialties. As usual, he conducts it in a more literary than academic way and, even if it means exaggerating, what one gains in pretty style (because if one wants to leave if not one's mark, at least a trace, it is better not to write like Mrs. Ernaux), one loses in demonstrative clarity - even if, of course, one does not exclude the other. The fact remains that one will read with profit these considerations where it happens that a formula, a metaphor, far from being false, becomes a tool for deciphering. Instructive, the passage (p. 25) on the distinction between prophetic time and messianic time; but it is to see, on the next page, Greta Thunberg transfigured into a modern-day Joan of Arc (and the reader still thinks of Marx who evokes the coups d'état of the Bonapartes: a first time as tragedy, a second time as farce). This part of the pamphlet, unless I am mistaken, invites the reader to become aware of the seriousness of the situation, to consider that action must be taken.
But that's just the appetizer. No need to have looked at the menu to know the main course. The waiter, an allegory of a ruling class zealously preparing for the worst, raises the cloche and here comes the far right. The subject is never defined, as if the text was not ultimately intended to be widely distributed, as if it were intended only for a happy few admirers, who, as professional anti-fascists, know well what fascism is; a text addressed to the faithful listeners of Radio-France radio stations where an atmospheric leftism reigns (let's give in to fashion and decline Gilles Kepel's happy formula on jihadism). Too intelligent to be content with fossilizing the FN or fascism, which is what all those who warn us do, with a stiff index finger, that nothing has changed, Marine being only Jean-Marie in a skirt, the author sees clearly that some want to merge with the heroes of the immense dramas of the past and that "a certain radical left, in particular, affects this posture of a safe clandestinity" (p. 60). He would like to give in to audacity.
This great connoisseur of Italy (words to be taken literally) unfortunately fails to convince that Giorgia Meloni is the abominable continuator of fascism in a different form and which rages in a different way. If we understand the author correctly, this right wing that tore, in 1995, in Fiuggi, his black shirt (and not "brown" - p. 55 -; the brown shirts were in Germany) is not in power; and we must therefore not follow the naive or the accomplices who speak of post-fascism to "euphemize [this] extreme right" and who, from then on, are guilty of a "moral renunciation" (Ibid.). [3]. But if the author often goes to Italy, he cannot help but realize that it is indeed the Prince of Lampedusa that must be referred to – everything must change so that nothing changes –, more than, as he suggests, Machiavelli – “we must preserve the shadow of ancient customs” in order to change not the but the regime (p. 53). Italian analysts and commentators are not mistaken and speak of a center-right coalition, more or less a continuation of the policy of the previous government. Patrick Boucheron here gives substance to Alain Finkielkraut’s formula according to which the slogan of the post-modern resistance is not: “Fascism will not pass!”; but: “Fascism will not die!” ", so indispensable is it to them, even if they have to fantasize about it - and the sentimental passage on the weight of ghosts, here that of the 1930s (p. 55-57), inconclusive, loses us in the clouds.
Seeming not to know what form to give to his inclinations towards commitment, towards the end of the brochure, the author confesses that he will try "all his life to defend unwaveringly the cause of books" (p. 62); here is a very bold historian but who does not however go so far as to denounce the culture of erasure defended by wokism - whose home is the university - which loves so much to warm its sweet fanaticism at the bonfires of the books that it proscribes - does the historian have his neck blocked to such an extent, his panicked gaze fixed to his right, to the point that he sees nothing of what is happening on his left? He thus prefers to denounce the deadly ideology of rootedness - how can one enjoin one's fellow citizens to remain faithful to a homeland, a civilization or a religion? And if, according to him, the latter's supporters are already dead, he still encourages us to fight their corpses (it would become Shakespearean)... Simone Weil, writing that "rooting is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul [4] " has it become unfrequentable, cancelable? Reading the great republicans of the Glorious Third would show Patrick Boucheron that not only can universalism be rooted but that this rooting is the condition of a humanist universalism. Against the identitarians, the author proposes to invent "a response and, ultimately, a displacement" - fine, but this displacement makes him fall into the arms of the "great thinker of ecofeminism Donna J. Haraway" who wants to teach us to "live with the disorder" - thank you, but a great writer will be enough for us. The historian puts forward this idea: to ward off the storm, "concrete utopias" would suffice... Against the sad fellows of the right, he invites us to "a fierce joy, made of patience and outbursts, of gentleness and fervor - a Spinozist joy, in short" - who said that Mr. Boucheron was not capable of self-irony if he thus parodies himself? In any case, he is right to deplore the comfort of lamentation in which the reactionaries bask; but is the fiercely joyful denial, therefore, of the slow collapse of a nation, of a civilization, or rather, deep down, the evil joy that it is happening, better?
Patrick Boucheron, inspired by Walter Benjamin, thinks that the catastrophe is not in the emergence of the unexpected but in the continuation of the worst. So for him, for whom the left is the camp of Good, the worst can only come from the right in power, which is preparing the advent (the return) of the extreme right. The historian would gain from considering that the worst can also come from elsewhere, from his own camp for example… This is why we will read with profit the recently published “tract” by Pierre-André Taguieff. Forget about aesthetics, he demonstrates. Radical lucidity is his trademark.
Pierre-André Taguieff, The New Opium of Progressives - Radical Anti-Zionism and Islamo-Palestinianism
The pogrom perpetrated by Hamas on October 7th served as a revelation, confirming with sinister brilliance the author's previous analyses on the metamorphoses of Judeophobia, on those of antiracism and on Islamo-leftism or even Islamo-leftism. Anti-Zionism now serves as a screen for what the author calls the neologism "Judeomisia", which would have partly replaced the old-style anti-Semitism (Christian, nationalist, racialist) that persists in right-wing extremist circles reduced to a bare minimum.
To advance one's pawns more easily, and to exonerate oneself from the infamous accusation of anti-Semitism, one replaces, as is well known, "Jew" with "Zionist" or "Israeli", which facilitates the recycling of clichés such as that of the global Jewish conspiracy: the masters of the world are, therefore, the Zionists, the Israelis (p. 40), the same ones who, as we saw during the response that followed the violence of October 7, "massacred Palestinian children" - reactivation of the centuries-old image of the ritual murder of children by Jews (p. 56). For this substitution to work, it is necessary that among the different, sometimes contradictory, meanings of anti-Zionism, the one consisting of "the denial of the right to exist of the State of Israel as well as the project and the will to destroy this nation-state in order to replace it with a Palestinian State or an Islamic State" (p. 10) prevails. This is because the Palestinian cause has been Islamized, especially, according to the author, since the Iranian Islamic revolution of 1979 (p. 16). For Georges Bensoussan, we can already see this will in the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amine al-Husseini, at the end of the 1920s. [5]. Pierre-André Taguieff cites the Hamas charter of August 18, 1988, which places the fight of its militants under the aegis, in particular, of Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood: "Israel will rise and remain in place until Islam eliminates it, as it eliminated its predecessors." The author mentions this document several times to support his demonstration (pp. 10, 39-42). Some will object that it was amended in 2017 in the sense of an attenuation; but it will suffice to recall the events of October 7, nothing but the facts, to show that in spirit and in deed, Hamas still has the 1988 charter as its guide, that the genocidal will of the movement has not weakened. ref See https://www.mezetulle.fr/hamas-terrorisme-au-service-dune-visee-planetaire/[/ref].
Following this anti-Zionism, a victim inversion gradually took hold and the Jews were portrayed as new Nazis. [6]– accused of committing genocide in the Gaza Strip –, Muslims being converted into… Jews: we remember this environmentalist senator posing, during the demonstration against Islamophobia on November 10, 2019, alongside people wearing a yellow star (not a Star of David since it has five branches) flanked by a yellow crescent and on which was not written the word “Jew” but “Muslim”. The radical anti-Zionism of the Islamists converging with that of the far left, has taken place since the 1960s “a slow reinvention of an anti-Jewish vision of the world, one of the main features of which is that it was accomplished on left-wing and especially far-left lands in the name of “anti-racism” […]” (p. 15), a neo-anti-racism making the Palestinian cause the cause of causes (p. 17). Thanks to Islamo-leftism, a concept coined by Pierre-André Taguieff, a certain left has found a new proletarian to defend, the Muslim – conveniently essentialized to be more easily recruited. The enemy is therefore the Islamophobe – by arming itself with Islamophobia, a Brotherhood invention consisting of disqualifying any criticism of Islam itself, the left, formerly anticlerical, rehabilitates the crime of blasphemy…
And so "the Islamo-leftist view is highly selective, in that it is only indignant when faced with what it perceives as "right-wing extremism", which is supposed to be "reactionary", "racist" and/or "fascist". (p. 18) An old Stalinist process: whoever does not think like me serves Nazism. Woke ideology is in every way compatible with Islamo-leftism, which is even one of its elements (the passages devoted to Judith Butler, Médine, Dieudonné, La France Insoumise, the Ecologists... with extensive quotes to support them, are at the very least enlightening). He reigns supreme at the university and if his pamphlet had appeared a little later, Pierre-André Taguieff would undoubtedly have mentioned the presidents of the prestigious American universities of Harvard, Penn State and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who responded on December 5 to members of the Congressional Education Committee asking them whether calling for the genocide of the Jews constituted a violation of their regulations, that it "depended on the context."
Since the Islamo-leftists defend a multicultural and multicommunity society (p. 31), their adversaries are the republicans insofar as they are universalists, proponents of secular public education, attached to a sovereign nation-state (article 3 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789). Also, these republicans are camped as fundamentalists, as identitarians, playing the game of Le Penism (and, for some time, of Zemmourism)… “The criminalization of republican secularism has become a rallying sign.” (p. 30)
Communism is dying, if not dead, and intellectuals in need of thrills are turning to Islamism. This new opium "derives from a small number of contemporary mythologies, fabricated on the basis of false or dubious, even delusional ideas" (p. 46). According to the author, we can see in it the components of today's anti-Zionist and pseudo-anti-racist vulgate, four components in number: first, the replacement of anti-Semitism by Islamophobia; then, the confusion between the fight against Islamism and the rejection of Islam; then Islamophobia considered as the main cause of radical Islamism; finally, the demonization of Israel and its corollary, the victimization of the Palestinians.
Pierre-André Taguieff believes that many French intellectuals, obsessed with Islamophobia, the extreme right, and populism, have "largely ignored, neglected, or underestimated radical Islamism, minimizing jihadist terrorism by attributing it to marginal minorities - a serious misinterpretation - at the same time as they looked away from the anti-Jewish wave carried mainly by Islamist propaganda and its political-cultural relays on the far left that claims to be "radical"" (p. 49-50). The fact remains that this propaganda has not only infused the far left, and one would be tempted to qualify the scope observed here of the divorce between two lefts. If Belgian socialism offers a nice caricature of it, the French government left has long since abandoned universalism, secularism, indivisibility, assimilationism (and even the idea of integration) and has shown itself to be receptive to the Freemasons through the "diversity religion" (Mathieu Bock-Côté), then to Wokism. There remains this left which positions itself in the middle of two monsters: Islamism and the extreme right - the two jaws of this famous "identity pincer" which are supposedly of equal force. However, according to Jean-Yves Camus, who directs the Observatory of Political Radicalities of the Jean-Jaurès Foundation, "the far-right movement remains reduced [in France] to around 3 individuals, it progresses very little over the long term. And neither the RN nor Reconquête have any interest in demonizing themselves by welcoming into their midst radicals who, moreover, find them too cautious. [7] " Are the promoters of the identity pincer movement therefore falling into what Lionel Jospin called the anti-fascist comedy? [8] ? We would have liked a word on this question because if, as Pierre-André Taguieff notes, the Jews are afraid, after October 7, if, after having already fled Seine-Saint-Denis, "they are preparing to flee the "sensitive neighborhoods" all over France, these Islamized neighborhoods where they have become targets" (p. 56), it is not because of the extreme right.
No doubt our intellectuals have difficulty in getting rid of their old explanatory schemata. Institutional conformism, incapacity, fear of isolation? But their moral duty or, if we want to put it another way, their professional responsibility is, in troubled times, to forge new tools to understand the world. Some are striving for this, first and foremost for many years, Pierre-André Taguieff who, by shedding a harsh light on reality, helps us to better "see what we see", to decipher what is coming and therefore to arm ourselves intellectually, morally and politically.
