General introduction to the brochure Islamisms, Islamo-leftism, Islamophobia. Part One: Islam on the Offensive, from Preaching to War, published in November 2015, text posted online in October 2016. -
The fact is obvious: Islamism, this Islam on the offensive, banal or warlike, spectacular or diffuse, is in Europe, for a long time and in all its forms. It is expanding and developing. The French territory, its institutions and, increasingly, its populations are stakeholders in this atypical world war in progress. The form that this confrontation will take depends first and foremost on its interactions with other contemporary crises, no less devastating, notably economic and energy, and now migratory, but also on what each of us thinks, says, does and is ready to do. In this nightmare from which we only wake up by falling asleep again, or by dreaming other nightmares, many of us want to end denial, amnesia and cowardice to face the very unpleasant realities that the precipitation of events reveals month after month. At this very late time when all the ideologies that have prevented us, for over thirty years, from becoming aware of the development of the Muslim extreme right and of the fact that it can hardly be overestimated today are collapsing, one by one, it is important to see clearly.
See clearly: that would already be good. This would mean knowing where we are speaking from, understanding the situation, measuring the stakes, trying to outline some paths – this is the ambition of each text in this brochure. Let us try, in this introduction, to give a general framework to these analyses.
Back to secularism
Let us enter, for once, through the main door, the consecrated passage, in other words the secularism, at the center of a vast falsification enterprise.
Historians, sociologists, lawyers, activists and other experts-in-the-matter compete in etymological analyses, legal reminders, legislative interpretations or grand flights of fancy around the mythical law of 1905: they make it pell-mell the foundation of the cohabitation of faiths, of the neutrality of the State in the exercise of religions, of the freedom for each to exercise in his own way, in short, a " modality of living together ", as they say. And our good souls mumble, in an absolutely improbable, that secularism constitutes the ultimate multiculturalism before its time, that is to say the form finally found of the plurality of religions and the possibility given to everyone to believe what they want, as they want, where they want, to manifest themselves in the public space as they wish and to finance their activities as they see fit. Is it necessary to underline the inconsistency of these empty speeches in the face of the neo-Muslim offensive? To show that they serve exactly the design of the Islamist who expressly needs, at this key stage of his conquest of a land of preaching (Dar el dawa), to freely multiply mosques, Koranic schools, proselytizing associations, propaganda media, communitarian reflexes, uniform clothing and fundraising in all places and environments? In the contemporary Mohammedan delirium, tolerance towards it can only be a recognition tacit acceptance of its supreme validity and an acceptance of its final domination.
To these laymen-there, who announce to us that we will have to get used to this unleashed Islam unless we move away from the republican spirit, it would be high time to recall some historical commonplaces.
First, the nature of the debates that took place at the dawn of the 20th century: it is perfectly clear that it was a question for enlightened society of get rid of of the Church in civil life, of religion in the exercise of citizenship and of superstitions in the life of the mind – and certainly not to ensure coexistence between those who think the Earth is flat and the others. It was this law that put an end, and under their pressure, to long decades of multifaceted anticlerical struggles. These explicit issues were therefore those of the people, who followed the development of the law closely.
What's more, 1905 was only a bastard outcome, a timid resumption of two people previous separations of Church and State: one instituted on April 2, 1871 during the Paris Commune, and the other by the Convention on 3 Ventôse 1795 (Year III), during two revolutionary episodes closed by the return of the reaction to power. And they themselves were only the crowning, the institutionalization of centuries of anti-religious struggles absolutely inseparable from the conquests of thought and the arts from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, from technical inventions and scientific discoveries, from the social and political struggles of the workers' movements or the currents for the liberation of women. The evacuation of the divine belongs fully to all this enormous effort that has been deployed for centuries and which has aimed at freedom, equality, the emancipation of minds and bodies, and the formation of individuals and societies seeing no basis for their will and their action except in the free exercise of reason and collective deliberation. This is the breeding ground for secularism, and that established in 1905 is only a dated compromise, a compromise which had to be, not could be that provisional (exactly like social security, the labor code or the amount of salaries) between these centuries-old currents of autonomy and the supporters of order and other heirs of monotheistic superstitions. And this is precisely the radicalism to oppose to religious radicalism, and which can only be profoundly "Islamophobic". This is what contemporary interpretations that are exclusively formal, textual, literal, legislative, legal, in short skeletal, cannot grasp never, and this is what we are left with must reconnect if it is a question of fighting, and it is the case, the return alarming by the religious offensive, even if it is exogenous – including for many Muslims themselves.
But the spectre of obscurantism has become unimaginable for an average Westerner, who has lost his free-thinking reflexes or, more simply, has forgotten the foundations of his freedom: he watches with the tender eyes of a cultural relativist as the bigot indulges in his profanity rather than asking him if he believes Actually to everything he (tells himself) and how he can live as he lives by claiming such nonsense. It is not about intolerance or oppression – strangely excused when they are spread out in a “sacred” book and minimized when they apply – but about democracy, a regime where everyone, since Athens, must Parrhesia, to account for and give reasons for what he thinks, believes and wants.
The West Disfigured
Islamism grows and prospers on this absence of anti-religious sentiment, just as the oligarchy plunders with impunity peoples who have deserted social and political conflicts or, in another area, merchants and usurpers proliferate since the exercise of intelligence, honesty and good taste have become irritating character traits. Because that is what is at stake: the decline, if not the pure and simple disappearance, of this emancipatory current that formed the West in its most fundamental aspects – and in particular the fact that in going through the history of humanity, the historians of the future (if they ever exist) will be forced to distinguish in this civilizational area the extraordinary absence of divinity[1]This decay of the West, to use the terms of C. Castoriadis who detected from the end of the 50s, behind the political apathy, a general loss of direction, and the Frankfurt School before him, draws on many sources, which need not be developed here. [2] : the ravages of "communist" totalitarianism and its Nazi competitor, the devastation of the two world wars, the technoscientific frenzy, the incorporation of the consumer society. Today, not only are our societies incapable of facing their own impasses (energy depletion, ecological devastation, oligarchic acephaly, financial madness, etc.) but their own "progress" has turned into problems: technical and medical successes have led to a global population explosion; freedom of expression has been perverted into intellectual and artistic pornography; ethnological interest has been transmuted into self-denigration; etc. All this goes far beyond the famous "contradictions of capitalism."
The fact is there, reviving the traditional declinist antiphons, and is verified on a geopolitical scale: not the emergence of a multipolar world (the West has always been) but rather the end of the modern nation-state, that is to say the progressive erasure of the only historical framework in which not the powerful but the peoples sought, and partially succeeded, in making themselves masters, for a time, of their destinies – erasure in favor of the return of the logic of empires [3].
The three roots of Islamism
Ce western void, notably and probably mainly spiritual, constitutes a first historical element favoring the rise of this neo or techno-Islam. Contrary to Islamo-leftist and conspiracy theorist discourses, this does not result from the clever machinations of omniscient and omnipotent Western powers, but quite the contrary of their progressive disintegration. The first Islamist surges coincide with the entry into deep crises (economic, but especially cultural and political) of the European and American areas in the 1970s. It is no longer the path of reason that makes us dream, the horizon of emancipation or equality for all, and even less freedom for its own sake, but only the opulence of the West, its techniques, its domination, its power – this is what the migratory phenomenon shows for the most part, more and more dangerously. This posture nihilistic, unassuming as such, believes it finds its supplement of soul by an increasing recourse to religion, but which cannot finally keep its promises of meaning than in the grandiose epic that is the global expansion of the kingdom ofAllah, until martyrdom.
This is where the second lever for the resurgence of Muslim beliefs lies: the vain desire to appropriate Western achievements without acquiring their springs. This is precisely the failure of Arab-Muslim decolonizations, not only to create types of societies that are specific to them (between " nationalismand arabic "," non-aligned socialism " and " re-Arabization ") but above all to intrinsically reproduce the Western "development mode" including and mainly in its capitalist dimension. These failures are easily explained: the modern personality, whether it is thehomo economicus or of the revolutionary anthropological type, took several centuries to form in Europe – like emancipation, accumulation for itself has nothing "natural" or universal about it. The atavistically predatory management of resources (oil or gas rents, geographic, historical, diplomatic or immigrant) provides elements of power, but without internal creativity, and furthermore involving a dependence on the ex-colonial West very full of resentment. It is precisely the latter which is expressed in the ways of the Lord, the compulsive reading of the Koranic corpus extraordinarily simplifying the problem, by constantly deepening it and making it rigorously insoluble.
Insoluble because as the Western imagination penetrates Muslim societies, the credibility of the Mohammedan prophecy. This is the last factor generating the Islamist phenomenon, and in fact the first: the humbug that could have suited the Bedouin tribes of the Middle Ages cracks before the accuracy of astronomical predictions, the abundance of mathematical demonstrations or medical successes[4]. Of the two currents that emerged from this inter-civilizational encounter (which is symbolically linked to the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt in 1798), one seeking and finding the means to make up for an unbearable delay by risking cultural hybridization, the other countering humiliation by constantly hardening dogma as it is denied on all sides, it is obviously the latter that is today sweeping away one or two centuries of mutual efforts. The contradiction can only become more pronounced: the hallucinatory propaganda on YouTube can only seek to corset a diabolical freedom that the Internet user has, through this means, largely incorporated since childhood, which the absence of limits has transformed into release from naked anguish.
We see that these three sources [5] of Islamism are far from being dried up, which bodes ill for the future: the escalation in the face of an irreducible Western imagination which makes authentic belief impossible[6] ; the failure to reproduce the dynamic foundations of this modernity as hated as it is admired; the progressive erasure of the perspectives of this modernity as the purpose of existence. Of course, many other non-Western regions experience similar situations, without however falling into the religious extreme right, contemporary Greece being one, particularly unknown[7]. This is because these "causes" only take on their meaning in the mythical, religious interpretation, Koranic, which is made of it: the lack of faith to which they are attributed constitutes the keystone which transforms a crisis which is certainly profound but circumscribed into a global civilizational conflagration with apocalyptic aims. [8].
Huge, titanic mechanisms, setting in motion entire continents and millennia of history, billions of human beings and unimaginable technical means of devastation. Totalitarian forces in full deployment in the face of which calls for a vaguely secularized coexistence are no longer enough to simply maintain appearances.
Islamist infiltration
This war, constantly declaimed, never declared, will crescendo, from Chechnya to Palmyra, from the districts of Bamako or Bombay to Xinjiang, from Nairobi to Ottawa, from the borders of the Philippines or Pakistan to Brussels, Paris, London, Trappes, Lunel or Roubaix.
In Europe, what was a terrorist subversion that states could claim to control has recently come to involve directly the populations, horrified. On the one hand, it is an Islamism in the process of merging with banditry, from the small suburban thugocracy to the barons trafficking arms, drugs, women or illegal immigrants, and likely to use all the reserve of violence and brutality that until now has descended into anomie, notably via the "lost territories" and, of course, prisons. And on the other hand, the fact, more evident every day, that Arab-Muslim immigrants in Western lands seem ready, for a frightening and growing part, to consider as infiltrators pacientes of Muslim domination, without violence but indisputably. Two things inconceivable to the average European, but difficult to refute, the sinister Kouachi taking action while millions of Muslims do not deign to publicly express any possible disapproval...
This pattern can only repeat itself, with the help of functional amnesia (here realizes that the Algerian process has largely begun[9] ?). But already, the next stage emerges, spectacular. It concentrates in itself forty years of "immigration policy" or twenty of "fight against insecurity" (which were only impotent attempts to rationalize the state of affairs); it condenses all the known phenomena of disintegration of the Arab-Muslim universe since independence: it is of course the massive and continuous arrival of millions of "migrants" on European territory since April 2015.
The migratory influx
Because what these population movements indicate is first of all the progressive collapse of the States of the Middle East, while waiting for those of the Maghreb, of sub-Saharan Africa, and above all the implosion of these societies which were only held together by a historical authoritarianism, which contained, in both senses of the term, the Islamist wave. The overthrow of these regimes seems to have repeated the end of the colonial regimes when, alone once again facing itself[10], the Arab-Muslim imagination has resorted en masse to the only "solution", intensely practiced by the dominant classes (including the independence activists!): emigration to the West. Less well known than the paradigmatic Algerian case, the Tunisian example is telling: it was only the reestablishment of the State and its borders at the end of 2011 that slowed the exile of the "revolutionaries" who were fleeing... the "revolution"[11]. Today, as yesterday, what is being fled is therefore much less "the" war or "misery" than the intense anthropological contradictions which devastate Muslim cultures and which, far from being resolved, are exacerbated in secular lands.
And this is what intuitively underlies the reluctance of indigenous populations, already confronted with victim competition, the basis for fragmentation and communitarian arrogance: everyone knows that this mass immigration is endless and without return, as the oligarchs are half-heartedly announcing, and that it will amplify and aggravate the disintegration which precedes it. The few proven facts that managed to filter through during October, for example on the accommodation centres in Germany, or even on the rafts, are chilling: it is not a question of the importation of a religious war, but rather of the continuation in European territory of theethnic-religious cleansing which has been sweeping the entire Arab-Muslim world for half a century and is reaching its final stage in the Maghreb and the Sunni Middle East. The fear and the effective departure of the Jews from France speak for themselves, like the silence of the apostates and other escapees from Koranic prisons, but in the desert of official indifference.
This popular fear found absolutely no echo in media and political circles: the feeling of a beginning of invasion, all the dominant classes responded with an offended smile and simple accounting reminders, omitting to mention, among other things, the predictable mechanisms that will increase the phenomenon tenfold (principle of family reunification, extreme fragility of the last border barriers, sinking of sub-Saharan Africa, inevitable consequences of climate change, etc.). The propaganda charge [12] which has been going on for six months does not seem to have any equivalent in history, given the stakes – a terrifying paroxysm, once again, of forty years of political correctness and accusations of thoughtcrime Orwell, pushing skeptics into the conspiracy fringes. Never had the convergence between economic interest and emotional blackmail, between liberal capitalist ideology and cultural leftism, been so evident. It is not surprising that the Eastern countries have remained totally impervious to this blackmail with good feelings poorly masking a huge social engineering operation in the purest Stalinist style, preventing any real reception.
The gap that already existed between the social and cultural erosion experienced directly by the great mass of the French population and the soothing speeches of the media-political apparatus, and on a multitude of points, has suddenly transformed into pit. Here too, latent phenomena seem to cross a threshold and suddenly accelerate; the situation seems to have become meta-stable, containing the main point of cleavage of the whole of society including its oligarchic strata. Precisely: what about the latter?
Oligarchic fumbling
Let us immediately break with the conspiracy paranoia, which fantasizes about an organizing center to cover up the chaotic and anxiety-provoking frenzy of the world: for us, the oligarchy is in no way a coherent social class with a defined strategy. Rather, it would bring together in a loose whole the summits of different political, military, economic and especially media pyramids, whose goal is no longer, for each, other than to maintain its domination in the short term. Their line of conduct for decades has been limited to overlooking bumpily an increasingly shifting context, constantly adjusting their unlimited kleptomania to the point of incoherence.
It seems clear that the influx of immigrants, increased since the end of decolonization[13], fully overlapped with the simply capitalist use of this "reserve army", traditionally used to break indigenous movements and organize a global competition of workers. It is also very conscious of these objectives, in particular, that the trade union and political organizations of the workers' movement explicitly aimed for internationalism. [14]. Similarly, the way in which the oligarchy, initially surprised, ultimately accompanied the emergence of community demands could only have one objective: to destroy what remained of working-class cultures, to fragment the institutions inherited from them, and, beyond that, to definitively put an end to the emancipatory heritage of the West. There is no need to show here how all the rubbish of post-modern relativism and cultural leftism, not to mention Islamo-leftism, both symptoms and causes of these disintegrations, are only a more or less verbose rationalization of them.
This is how we should understand the early complacency of the public authorities towards Islamist demonstrations in the 1980s: prayer rooms, adapted menus, veils, etc., very widely tolerated by a deeply open and hurry to evacuate any notion of conflict. The emergence of Islamist terrorism in the following decade could also have made it possible to put the entire population under pressure. But the all-out development of neo-Islam, and its diffuse penetration into all sectors of society and at all hierarchical levels, poses functional problems for capitalism itself, and terrorism instills an atmosphere of globalized civil war hardly compatible with increased consumption. The anthropological rupture itself (position towards women, in particular) seems to provoke diffuse and successive awarenesses, punctuated by the effective integration and progressive rise of these neo-Muslims, up to the highest levels of all institutions.
It seems that a fracture is gradually emerging in the oligarchic consensus, with January 2015 marking yet another important step in the who's who of nomenklatura[15], and the small political and media personnel who are the least distant from the field are gradually finding support among their superiors. Out of opportunism – responding to the pressing questions of an exasperated population that might not always remain passive – or through the intimate understanding that we are experiencing the historic end of a long period of civil peace, many oligarchs are gradually distancing themselves from their cynical counterparts whose apparent bet would be, whatever the price, toto put an end once and for all to Western singularity. These would dream of a permanent state of emergency. Between these two categories, probably the great majority, all those who navigate by sight and try to reconcile a necessary continuity in the institutions (rule of law, corruption limited to the elites, refusal of pure clientelism, etc.) and the popular Islamist pressures, which emanate from active minorities uninhibited and militant, faced with the observation of helplessness.
European authorities are caught between the formal republican principle of making social structures porous minima to the most active elements of the people and that of a continuity of the reproduction conditions of a democracy, or even more simply of a regime of relative freedoms. In other words: how can we give these neo-Muslims access to the highest positions without undermining the very functioning of the institutions?
Towards a popular awakening?
In this situation of abandonment by its elites, and despairing of a fundamental turnaround of these, the populations find themselves alone. And they have to face a significant and growing part of themselves for which the progressive and peacemaker submission to islam of the community is a non-negotiable horizon. An awakening is taking place within the social body, taking various forms, still capillary, diffuse, intuitive and above all very late. This is because the obstacles and divisions are numerous and, above all, internal.
First of all, there would be the ideological locks that literally bind consciences: of course all the "political correctness" that plays on Western guilt but also the extreme dependence on the State, more symbolic than real and above all the extreme novelty of the situation, from every point of view, and the absence of interpretative grids, which places, by default, the sinister Le Pen speeches on the front line facing the facts.
Then there would be, precisely, the political vacuum. The West has been satisfied with it, and even congratulated itself for forty years, watering the apathetic masses with ineptitudes from the left and the right. The political, practical and intellectual landmarks have been swept away so well that it is now a question of (re)discovering what we live for and are ready to die for, or, at least, to fight for, without naivety but avoiding the mimetic trap.
Finally, obviously arising from the above, the disappearance of all social life, of all people worthy of the name, of all collective belonging other than gregarious, of all identity which is not fixed or folkloric.
All this forms a coherent whole, which we will not dismiss with a wave of the hand (possibly electoral): it is indeed a lifestyle and lthe society that goes with it, which are likely to be upset. Adversity with Islamism, therefore, fact, with the oligarchy that brought us here, could well provoke the return of the people as historical actors, in other words the progressive reappropriation of the revolutionary heritage.
This is what remains to be saved from Western civilization: the constitution of autonomous popular organs of information and action independent of all powers. This is, in our eyes, the only radicality to oppose the return of obscurantism, the only roots which would allow the rebirth of a worthy social project which would bear in himself freedom and equality. As far as we are concerned, it is called direct democracy and appears to us as the only light, certainly distant but unique, in this interminable night which is advancing.
Common Places, June – October 2015
