Europeans: the disastrous blindness of the World (and of the semi-anti-fascists)

In an editorial published on the eve of the European elections, Jérôme Fenoglio, director of Le Monde, explains to us that Europe has locked itself into “a fatal blindness in the face of the danger of the extreme right”.

All this despite 80 years of anti-fascism, despite incessant warnings against bad winds or the return of the darkest hours of our history…

So yes, there is a real danger from the far right in Europe, in Germany in particular or – more marginally – in France. Certain identity movements are indeed the subject of close surveillance for the political and terrorist threat they represent.

But no, there is no rationality in confusing populism (criticized in itself), national right and extreme right (if the extreme right defines itself as a project of calling into question democracy, parliamentarism , republican order and the dignity of people). There is no rationality in pretending to believe that sovereignism, the desire to control migratory flows or Euro-critical discourses would necessarily constitute a far-right political project. Debates must take place fairly, not by disqualifying one’s political opponents on the grounds of (pseudo) morality.

Yes, it would be a shame to deconstruct through national withdrawal a Europe which has given us a lot, including – and even a lot – through its openness to the world and through free trade. Considering our productivity, our innovation and our level of growth, the purchasing power of the French would have stagnated for 30 years if it had not been for international trade and European competition law.

But no, there is not a single possible destiny, a single “suitable” political vision for Europe. Europe has also suffered its share of failures and strategic errors; the energy crisis or the agricultural crisis that we are going through remind us of this on a daily basis. Critical speeches are not all speeches aimed at killing Europe. The democratic malaise that we are going through would undoubtedly not be what it is if the promoters of the “circle of reason” and the holders of a self-claimed monopoly on competence had wasted less time discrediting their adversaries or their critics. and invested more energy in facing reality. The remark applies to these fact checkers and other decoders who so often only project their ideological prism onto reality. We remember in particular all those who, through the French press, explained that Donald Trump, then president, was seriously mistaken in pointing out the energy dependence in which Germany had locked itself in vis-à-vis Russia. What followed showed us the quality of their fact checking…

Undoubtedly worse, chanting indictments on the danger of the extreme right without mentioning that of the extreme left or that of Islamism is an intellectual imposture.

Nothing in Mr. Fenoglio’s editorial evokes the fascistic drift of a part of the Insoumis who nevertheless apply exactly the same strategies as those described by Stefan Zweig in Le Monde d’hier, his latest book, in which he evokes the rise of fascism in the 1930s. Nothing about conspiracy, the doubt cast on the regularity of elections, the discrediting of the police as a republican institution, the threats against opponents, the mock executions, the anti-Semitism. At most, the evocation of an error in electoral strategy (talking only about Gaza and not the rest).

Nothing about the democratic rot represented by the calls for civil disobedience led by parties supposed to be republican. Nothing about violence as a political method claimed by activists certain of the justice of their cause (does he remember Sainte-Soline?).

Jérôme Fenoglio probably never took the trouble to read The Management of Savagery, this manual for the perfect jihadist which describes the strategy for establishing a Caliphate in the West and details the interest in the multiplication of knife attacks.

Didn’t bother to read the Syrian theorist of “decentralized” jihad, Abou Moussab al-Souri, who in 2014 recommended attacking Europe first and particularly France because he sees “the soft underbelly of the West”: “when the enemy is no longer assured of his right, has lost the pride of what he is and the validity of his principles, the war will be won sooner or later. War is not fought only with weapons but also, and this is just as important, with ideas and the will to win. »

He probably considers that being alarmed is racist and Islamophobic, just as it would be racist to wish to control migratory flows and to provide the political and legal means to do so.

Mr. Fenoglio must also never have looked at these electoral maps which show that the map of the Trump vote is superimposed on the map of the number of deaths from opioids in the United States, which itself is superimposed on the map of Counties without palliative care that pharmaceutical companies selling opioids have targeted as a priority. The voters whose choices distress him are not all thick brutes incapable of appreciating what makes up their lives and their difficulties and doomed to silently suffer the contempt of those who think they are everything…

He probably also did not look at the victimization surveys on the reality of the rise in violence in France over the past ten years after a long decline.

The problem is not that the danger of the extreme right is underestimated in Europe but that minds like those of Mr Fenoglio have ended up pushing tens of millions of voters towards populist and/or extreme parties. right across the continent for lack of being heard by their elites, by the more traditional parties or by dint of having restricted the field of popular sovereignty to the point of suffocating democracy in the name of its defense. As in the United States anyway

Who weakened the classic republican rights by muzzling them through ideological intimidation as they were accused of fascism at the slightest mention of the failures of integration or if they demanded more regal firmness?

Who weakened the republican lefts by suggesting so often that attachment to secularism was only the false nose of a supposed Islamophobia (a concept cherished by Islamists to reintroduce a crime of blasphemy by establishing a confusion between racism towards people and legitimate right to criticize a system of thought)?

The blindness of “right-thinking” elites is a democratic poison.

And the tears shed on the far right are often crocodile tears from petty bourgeois people in search of strong narcissistic sensations by playing resistance in the face of relatively virtual dangers – in France at least. No one will throw Jérôme Fenoglio in prison for his writings. No one will come and carry out a Kalashnikov attack on the premises of Le Monde because of its denunciation of the far-right. Neither he nor his journalists will have to live under police protection for the same reasons.

Europe is more useful and necessary than ever, writes Mr. Fenoglio. We can agree with him on that. Europe must know how to stand up to the attacks of authoritarian regimes already engaged in a hybrid war. Facing the Islamist project which sees it as a soft underbelly. Knowing how to listen to the warnings of the Emirati Foreign Minister who predicted that there would one day be more Islamists and jihadists in Europe than in Muslim countries and who today considers that this day has arrived.

Europe can and must help us preserve the treasure of liberal democracy. To preserve a heritage of freedoms and emancipation of individuals. To break this feeling of powerlessness of public action that political, economic or geopolitical interdependencies have given rise to. Faced with Big Tech or AI, States are just actors among others. A form of return to a feudalism that we had forgotten.

Europe must also be able to understand that the legacy of 1945 will end up being shattered if the jurisdictions and constitutional blocks patiently constructed to protect us from possible democratic outbursts end up strangling the right of people to decide their destiny. Let us accept the idea that calling into question the state of law is in no way equivalent to calling into question the rule of law. Ultra-legalism is a danger just as formidable as contempt for the law.

But Europe will not do all this while turning a blind eye to those who directly attack this model.

Nor by turning a blind eye to the formidable convergence between part of the radical left, the extreme left and Islamism. However, it is documented, notably in the infiltration of the pro-Gaza movement into Western universities. Iran’s hand and money were also detected there by various intelligence services. Jean-Luc Mélenchon recently posed for a photo with Samy Debbah, founding president of the CCIF at an LFI meeting in Garges les Gonesse on June 2. A Committee against Islamophobia in France dissolved by the Ministry of the Interior and of which the Council of State then noted in support of the government’s decision that it “has for several years made unqualified remarks aimed at accrediting the idea that the French public authorities would lead, particularly in the context of the fight against terrorism, a fight against the Muslim religion and its practitioners and that, more generally, France would be a country hostile to Muslims”. Adding that the CCIF maintained “close links with supporters of radical Islamism inviting people to evade certain laws of the Republic”.

However, the very history of the world should encourage a certain step back. Have we forgotten that Jean Lacouture had welcomed in the columns of the daily the entry of the Khmer Rouge into Phnom Penh in 1975, accompanied by Jacques Decornoy who then headed the Asia desk and Patrice de Beer corresponding to Cambodia? Forgotten the mistakes of its coverage of the beginnings of the Islamic Republic in Iran?

The fatal blindness of Europe therefore exists but it is far from being limited to that denounced by the director of Le Monde. It is that of hemiplegia in the perception of threats.