politics

La jeunesse emmerde le Front national

Fascists, politics, video
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How can it be that this song and this slogan from it is once again relevant, forty years after it was first sung?

I love Bérurier Noir and this song, but it’s fucking frustrating that the same issues they sang against back in 1985 are still alive and kicking now in 2024. François Guillemot gets it exactly right her in this interview in The Guardian:

Because it comes at a really dangerous point in French history. It feels like we are at the turning point, and I don’t want people like Bardella and Le Pen take power because they will be dangerous.

It was easy to chant against Jean-Marie Le Pen because he was almost a caricature of a far-right politician: he was very bourgeois, very racist and that made it easy to stand up to him. His daughter, by contrast, changed her looks and has been very strategic in detoxifying the party’s image, for example by condemning antisemitism.

She and Bardella have managed to attract voters who are not ideologically formatted like the skinheads of the 1980s. These voters are ras-le-bol, fed up with the old way of doing things. They want to topple the system. I see it in a place like Lyon, where I now teach history at the university: inside the city, most people vote left or centre, but on the outskirts it’s mostly the National Rally.

I think Macron has to shoulder most of the blame. He had everything in his hands to create real change, but his arrogant management of the state managed to turn a lot of people against him. And with his unpopular pension reforms and the new immigration law he opened the door for the National Rally, because he normalised their ideas. The media, who have helped de-demonise the National Rally and played up Bardella as a pop star, have not helped.

The past four decades all through Europe and America we’ve seen our political choices being steadily reduced to one between cynical centrists slowly destroying the world to enrich their friends and literal fascists promoted as their main opposition as they’re less dangerous to the status quo than anything even vaguely leftist. Whenever anything on the left has had even a small change of getting near power it is stomped to death (cf. Corbyn) while people like Trump, Farage and Le Pen are activily promoted. So now in France you have a choice between Macron, already executing the sort of policies Le Pen would kill for and Le Pen, but at least there there still is a leftist movement to oppose both. In the UK meanwhile the only thing you can chose is the colour of the tie the leader of the crackdowns and austerity party will wear, while in the US it’s between genocide Joe and cheeseburger Nazi Trump. Forty years of neoliberal centrism really has achieved a lot.

Je ne suis pas Charlie

Comix, politics
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I’m always wary about people being overly supportive of causes that already have the support of everybody sane and the wholesale embrace of Charlie Hebdo and the right to draw cartoons offensive to religious nutters fits this to a t. It’s not just the War on Muslims terror fetishists like Nick “glug glug” Cohen who come crawling out of the woodwork whenever some atrocity happens close enough at home, but also all the earnest decent people on the news and out on the streets showing their disapproval for murdering cartoonists. What do you want to achieve with this, or with having Je Suis Charlie graphics on Facebook or Twitter? Especially if you don’t live in France? The murderers don’t give a shit and your government will only use your abhorrence as another excuse for more “security measures”.

I do understand the impulse to do something in the face of atrocity; it’s the same impulse when a particularly well liked celebrity dies a horrible death, that objectively has nothing to do with you perhaps but because you know so much about them, it still hurts you and you want to show that you sympathise with their friends and family. It’s a very human impulse and while we may often sneer at it, it is heartening to see those waves of sympathy cross the globe in the wake of tragedy (or even good news, as in every time an American state legalises equal marriage).

And on some level, the attack on Charlie Hebdo does touch me, not because it’s an attack on my freedom of speech, but rather because they are part of my tribe, of the great global comics family. Those were people I’ve heard of, have read strips by, knew about before the news broke about the attack. I knew of Charlie Hebdo and its irreverant humour even before their first Mohammed cartoons controversy, knew their history of kicking over any sacred cow they come across.

But I still don’t feel comfortable saying “Je suis Charlie”.

For two reasons. First, the murders are not actually a threat to our freedom of speech in Europe. Though it may seem strange or even callous to say this, it’s not actually that brave to make fun of Mohammed here. There isn’t the need to show you approve of the right to make fun of Islam because that’s already a given. Governments won’t prosecute you for it, newspapers won’t censor you, your neighbours won’t shun you, even with the threat of nutjobs coming after you. Yes, Salman Rushdie, yes there’s the murder of Theo van Gogh, yes, there are the Charlie Hebdo murders and there are always other headbangers wanting to martyr the next high profile cartoonist, but doesn’t actually challenge anything to joke about Mohammed or Islam here, in secular Europe. The vast majority of threats to free speech on this subject happens in countries like Egypt or Malaysia, countries our governments are happy to support, and comes in the form of state repression: fines, blasphemy trials, censorship. You don’t face that kind of everyday oppression here for being mean to Muslims, indeed your career can thrive on it if some government official does get shirty with you about it, as in the case of Gregorius Nekschot.

The second is, as I said in my first post, that I didn’t necessarily like what Charlie Hebdo did before the shootings and I don’t believe their murder should change that opinion.

Elite panic

politics
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This Bombsite interview with Rebecca Solnit is interesting just for the following extract:

AT One of the most interesting ideas in the book is the concept of “elite panic”—the way that elites, during disasters and their aftermath, imagine that the public is not only in danger but also a source of danger. You show in case after case how elites respond in destructive ways, from withholding essential information, to blocking citizen relief efforts, to protecting property instead of people. As you write in the book, “there are grounds for fear of a coherent insurgent public, not just an overwrought, savage one.”

RS The term “elite panic” was coined by Caron Chess and Lee Clarke of Rutgers. From the beginning of the field in the 1950s to the present, the major sociologists of disaster—Charles Fritz, Enrico Quarantelli, Kathleen Tierney, and Lee Clarke—proceeding in the most cautious, methodical, and clearly attempting-to-be-politically-neutral way of social scientists, arrived via their research at this enormous confidence in human nature and deep critique of institutional authority. It’s quite remarkable.

Elites tend to believe in a venal, selfish, and essentially monstrous version of human nature, which I sometimes think is their own human nature. I mean, people don’t become incredibly wealthy and powerful by being angelic, necessarily. They believe that only their power keeps the rest of us in line and that when it somehow shrinks away, our seething violence will rise to the surface—that was very clear in Katrina. Timothy Garton Ash and Maureen Dowd and all these other people immediately jumped on the bandwagon and started writing commentaries based on the assumption that the rumors of mass violence during Katrina were true. A lot of people have never understood that the rumors were dispelled and that those things didn’t actually happen; it’s tragic.

But there’s also an elite fear—going back to the 19th century—that there will be urban insurrection. It’s a valid fear. I see these moments of crisis as moments of popular power and positive social change. The major example in my book is Mexico City, where the ’85 earthquake prompted public disaffection with the one-party system and, therefore, the rebirth of civil society.