Ce Ne Sont Pas Des Subterfuges Pour Éviter De Regarder La Mort En Face Qui La Détourneront
CHICO MARXISM
Theo Hakola
“Ce ne sont pas des subterfuges pour éviter de regarder la Mort en face qui la détourneront de nous” – Olivier Rolin, Le Monde,19 November 2015
I
A specter is haunting the West – the specter of Chico Marxism... “But I saw you with my own eyes!” exclaims Margaret Dumont’s character inDuck Soup. “Well, who you gonna believe,” challenges Chico Marx, “me or your own eyes?”
For the left, it’s an affliction that comes and goes like herpes and, like herpes, it both cannot be made to go away for good and tends to flare up at the worst possible moments. (At least that’s what they tell me). During the last century, Stalin’s comradicidal purges, pogroms and massacres of millions were long given a criminally complicit pass by true believers as Chico Marxism infected whole legions of militants and made lepers of the Orwells and Koestlers who dared share what their eyes were telling them: not only was the emperor running around naked, but he was also a mass-murderer. When finally accepted, the ghastly truth of Soviet monstrosities would not be enough to ward off another outbreak of Chico Marxism in the late 70s as word of a bloodbath in Cambodia began to leak out and, among others, Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Hermann scoffed a most righteous scoff at the imperialist lackeys falling for the anti-Khmer Rouge propaganda.
In the 90s, this fact-adverse activism was echoed in the assorted idiocies intellectuals of the regressive left came up with to justify and/or explain away Greater Serbian aggression, with Mr. Hermann callingthe brouhaha about the “Srebrenica massacre” – quotes his of course – the “greatest triumph of propaganda to emerge from the Balkan wars.” In the French daily Liberation, the renowned philosopher Jean Baudrillard posited that the US had begun the 1999 war to rid Europe of its Muslims. The NATO bombs, he informed the reader, were nothing but a prod to get Slobodan Milošević to do the dirty work for them, to hurry up and complete in Kosovo the ethnic cleansing he’d begun in Bosnia (where 3,515 NATO sorties flown against 338 targets – Baudrillard may not have heard about this – helped roll back Serb gains in 1995 and bring that war to an end), while the director of Paris’s Picasso Museum, Jean Clair, likened our 1999 bombing campaign to the1937 destruction of Guernica by the Nazis and playwrights Peter Handke and Harold Pinter noisily campaigned for their favorite despot all the way to his death in The Hague and, for Handke, famously,to his graveside in Požarevac.
It would seem that the plague of fact-adverse “reasoning,” while integral to the history of humankind, may well be the most serious challenge to democracy in Americaof my lifetime. The Communist threat never amounted to much in the US, having at its Stalinist peak simply wasted a lot of energy and goodness in the pursuit of the unattainable goal a sham emancipator and his agents cynically dangled before devotees of the final conflict. Then, with the anti-communist backlash and closet Bund law-makers dominating the news, not to mention the excruciating difficulty we had closing out a vital chapter in the long march to equal citizenship for the descendants of slaves, things were not exactly looking up for the nation, and Vietnam, Watergate and the Reagan years were yet to come. Still, we made it to a new century in one piece and even managed to elect a remarkably gifted man of color president. The nation had endured, but now it seems that the same new communications technology that helped put Obama in the White House – a miracle by any measure – is getting in the way.
Factphobiahas always been there. My beloved great aunt Olive in Idaho claimed that Roosevelt “let the Japs to attack Pearl Harbor on purpose,” and I remember an elderly babysitter telling us kids that all four of the Beatles wore wigs because “their wives wouldn’t let them in the house with that long hair.” In church, everything seemed factphobic, but I eventually gathered that the (mainstream) Lutheran line of my youth was actually analogous, even nicely poetic on occasion. We didn’t really believe the world was created in six days, we left that to the fundamentalists. Now I’m wondering if the crisis of truth in America owes something to the evangelical grooming that has softened so many American minds and prepared them to accept the increasingly preposterous. An encounter with the wife of one of my cousins was a wake-up call. This former high school Spanish teacher from Minnesota calmly informed me that Obama was elected in 2008 thanks to financial backing from Hamas. If that be so, if the man really owed his election to Islamic extremists, I asked, how was it that he then went on to kill Bin Laden? The answer was on her lips before I’d hardly finished my question: When Obama met with Bush to iron out details of the transition, the outgoing President managed “to change his heart.” Ah...
The alarm went off, sure, but I hit the snooze button and extended my respite until I reconnected with a friend from L.A., a former party girl/hairdresser with whom drunken dialing at three in the morning (here) to a place in the sun before dinnertime (there) was permitted. Said friend explained to me that 9/11 was an inside job, that that fourth plane never actually went down in Pennsylvania and that it’s occupants were abducted and... Goddamn Internet! By the time that revelatory conversation had ended, I think I remember, despite the despairing fog that had cloaked my senses, her saying that she had nothing against Jews as such but that the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” had some good points to make. And boom, it’s 2016 andthe absolute master of the handy lie – the affirmation of “facts” that almost anyone with eyes could see to be flagrant falsehoods – runs roughshod over every other candidate for the GOP nomination as a significant portion of the electorate would seem to be admitting that, while they know that Trump, from theinsane birther claims that helped put him on the political map tohis Palinesque command of American history and relevant details such asunemployment statistics – “it could be 42% now” – is just making stuff up, theysupport him all the same because he’s making up stuff they want to believe.
But backto the Left where the latest eruption of Chico Marxism featuresanother troop of intellectuels engagéswho have trouble believing their own eyes. Back to my side where, once again, some seem to be copping a clue from the GOP andgoing with stuff simply because it’s what they’d like to be true, and it’s sometimes impossible to admit that carnage committed in the name of Islam – a daily occurrence at present – isactually notall our fault. My side of the political divide where the red flags raised twenty-five years ago by the reaction – hysterical, global, murderous – to something Salman Rushdiewrote in a novelhave evolved into the endlessly flashing strobe lights of the jihadi disco death extravaganza as one brain-washed murdererafter another is spewed up from the ever fecund Islamo-fascist gutter and anyone drawing a link between these religious fanatics and their religion is branded “Islamophobic” just as certain truth seekers and tellers of the past were labeled “anti-Soviet”to shut them up.
This may, however, be about more than Chico Marxism.There may also be a strain of Clélia Conti-ism at play here: like Stendhal’s ecstatic heroine, people choose to stay in the dark in order to stay in the church (while still having sex with Fabrice del Dongo after having vowed to the Virgin to never again lay eyes on him). A friend of mine, a sharp cookie by any measure with the highest of higher educations was clearly torn to pieces by the Charlie Hebdo massacre last year – she even knew one of the victims – but this is what she wrote of the situation that day in ansms: France caught in the jaws of fascism and racism. And as regards the God-mad killers who’d shouted something about “avenging the Prophet”?Nada. Unless she was fitting them into the “fascism” category.It seemed like my friend was attributing the January 7thmurders to the enemies she felt free to hate – because a bit of hate did seem to be in order after all – without losing her pew in the church, enemies that, in fact, hadnext to nothing to do with thiscrime.
And while a worrisome number of children and grandchildren of immigrantssaw“the so-called Charlie Hebdo massacre”as a “plot to discredit Islam in France,” better educated Muslim leaders, like certain left-leaning intellectuals, while quick to condemn the murders, were equally quick to tack on the old butever dear to the “But Brigade” of which Salman Rushdie has spoken: “Yes, yes, it’s horrible, BUT those people were disrespecting Islam...” And while 100,000 British Muslims signed a petition demanding that Charlie Hebdo lay off the Prophetafter the January 7thattack, the prime concern of an important element of the left was that we notassociate what these killers had done in the name of their religion with...their religion. Just as Stalin, Pol Pot and Maohad nothing to do with Marxist-Leninism... Right? Well, not the right kind of Marxist-Leninism... Right? Denying that Islam has anything to do with Islamo-fascists is like denying that Christian fundamentalism has nothing to do with the mass of Republicans who deny climate change, want to close down Planned Parenthood and oppose the teaching of evolution and other “lies from the pit of hell” in public schools, for example, because “the Bible told them so.”
A word about my choice of words... Some, like history professor Enzo Traverso, would argue, not unconvincingly, that I’m missing the mark here. “Having recourse to the notion of Islamo-fascism,” he wrote in La Revue du Crieur, “thus positing the concept of a fascism whose roots, in the final analysis, are to be found in Islam itself – in the transformation of its canons into political ideology – would seem to be more exorcism than an attempt at analytical lucidity.” Maybe so, and maybe the Franco regime was more a Catholic-nationalist-autocracy than preciselyfascist in the end, but we went with fascist all the same and no one besides Franco’s partisans lost much sleep over it.And there’s an element of insult in that word; that’s why we used it then and why we use it now, but the British humorist John Olivermay have come up with a different expression for Islamist kamikazes that is even more to the point:Gigantic fucking assholes.“As of now,” he said on his HBO program shortly after the November 13th massacres in Paris, “we know that this attack was carried out by gigantic fucking assholes...possibly working with other fucking assholes, definitely working in the service of an ideology of pure assholery.” Not, perhaps, the most analytically lucid formulation, but surely as on-target as anything else.
“I don’t want to see anti-Muslim demonstrations on the streets,” wrote the British novelist Howard Jacobsen in The Independent. “I no more want to see Muslims homogenized and traduced than Jews. But must that mean I cannot ask where the single story beloved of the fanatic is engendered, and if it should turn out that the most moderate Muslim unthinkingly propounds a narrative that fuels the fanatic mind – an anti-Western, anti-Semitic, victim-driven narrative – can I not plead with him to shade it a little?”
In the same vein, the French author Olivier Rolinfound the outrage over Muslims being asked to condemn jihadist barbarity perplexing. “We demonstrate against that to which we are opposed,” he wrote in Le Monde.“French citizens who once demonstrated against the war in Algeria were not responsible for that war, but it was still being waged in their name and that’s precisely why they felt they had to stand up and publicly express their opposition.”
People from a Muslim background, in France at least,arelikely more inclined to demonstrate against Israel and, during the summer of the 2014 Gaza war, they certainly did so. Loudly. Angrily. Sometimes violently. I thought of thatsummer when I joined a demonstrationlast November 1stin solidarity with the Kurds then fightingdesperatelyto take Kobane back from the Islamic State. Looking around me at the Place de la République, it seemed almost everyone there was Kurdish. If only their compatriots in Syriawere being attacked by Jewsinstead of other Muslims, I thought,it would have been a much bigger demonstration.
Someone would likely have to go beyond Chico Marx and Clélia Conti – perhaps toFreud– in order to comprehend thecontributions to this discussion of the former director of Le Monde andone-time Trotskyist militantEdwy Plenel,or that of the sociologist Emmanuel Todd. Plenel is more or less predictable,albeit remarkably worked up in his pamphletPour les musulmansas he assumes the mantle of a modern day Zola out to stem the tide of “Islamophobia” which he and some other figures of the left much appreciated by Islamist activists in Francecast as both a veritable plague hereand the equivalent of old-time anti-Semitism – the latter a recurrent sophism expressed, for reasons I don’t fully understand, on a number of different platforms.
Meanwhile, statisticsindicate that anti-Semitism is alive and well here where, even after recorded anti-Muslim acts and threatstripled in the wake of 2015’s horrors, they were still around half of anti-Semitic acts and threats and this, in a land where Jews comprise less than one percent of the population according to the Délégation interministérielle à la lutte contre le racisme et l'antisémitisme. Yes, anti-Muslim hate crime went up and of course that is abhorrent, but no, Islamophobia is not “the new anti-Semitism” – anti-Semitism, eternal anti-Semitismis the new anti-Semitism.
As for Emmanuel Todd, he was so infuriated by four million stoogeshitting the streets on January 11thto express theirsolidarity with those cut down by God-mad whack-jobs the previous weekwhile supposedly affirming adherence to the basic values of la République, that he had to get up at three in the morning for thirty days straight in order knock out Who is Charlie?,to vent about the “fraud,” “the self-glorification of the French middle class” that those demonstrations represented as they, like Charlie Hebdo, were really about said middle class stomping on the disadvantaged.The right to blaspheme, give me a break! Todd fulminates,and he’s helped define a new nastiness against which to rail: secular fundamentalism. The notion brings to mind the premature anti-fascism of whichAmerican International Brigade volunteers returningfrom the Spanish Civil War were accused, not in fact the worst of sins. Following the November 13th massacres, Stuart Jeffries wrote in The Guardian: “The French notion of laïcité(secularism), in particular, now seems part of that obscenely misguided spirit of correction.” Really? Seems that way to whom? Not to anyone living here without blinderswho prefers France to be a place free of silly superstitions and strictures. I'm OK with the fact that the three butchers closest to my place in Paris are now halal; but what the hell is obscenely misguided about trying to stem the undeniable Islamisation of a part of French society? What is wrong with wanting less as opposed to more religion here?
Emmanuel Todd, on French national radio,had to listen to some rather ungrateful feedback from one of the French Muslims he’d meant to defend when he was skewered by the humoristSophia Aram. “You wrote,” she told him,“that you were ashamed to be French on January 11th. What would you have preferred, that we’d marched to ask Charlie Hebdo cartoonists to stop being so mean to the oppressed? Or that the clients of the Hyper Cacher store apologize for being Jewish?”I’ve referred to Aram as “Muslim” because that’s the dominant religion of the land of her roots, butI have no ideaif she’s actually Muslim or not.“French with a Moroccan background”would be more apt, but that’s not how it works today. We used to speak of Arabs, or Algerians or Pakistanis and rarely defined a person by the dominant religion of theregion from which they or their family hailed. Not anymore.After finally pulling out of the obscurantist darkness, France is presently backsliding. We non-Muslims have the luxury of shuffling off the religion of our parents; as an adult, I have never been called a Christian, thank God, even though I was raised one. It would be nice if people from Muslim cultureswere accorded the same right. That’s the way it was in France when I got here in the late 70sand found a country pleasantly free of the faith-basedclaptrap that continues to harry my homeland’s better angels.
Back in my homelandor wherever he found himself during those dark days post-Charlie (and pre-Bataclan), Glenn Greenwaldwas not long in bringing his single-issueinquisitorial idiocy to the discussion. Snowden’s champion’s prime post-Charlie target was, of course, France and all its Republican excess. Mais oui, mon cher, blâmez la victime!And why not, for heaven’s sake? The Frogs were goingafter that “comedian” Dieudonné again!And to think, as the regressive left’s most unhappycamper so cleverly pointed out, they said they were demonstrating for freedom of speech on January 11th, ha! Greenwald didn’t get why Holocaust denial and such – Dieudonné’s bread and butter – was a crime in France and other parts of Europe. Greenwald saw no difference between cartoons mocking religious figures who may or may not have said and done this or that a very long time ago and – Dieudonné’s shtick – direct attacks on today’s Jews coupled with the contention that 6 million of them were not actually murdered by the Nazis. To make his point,Greenwald treated us to a series of anti-Semitic cartoons inThe Intercept that were just that – anti-Semitic as opposed to blasphemous – and he really doesn't see the difference? A true believer he is, and so desperate to cut off his nose to spite his face that he happily brings succor to the enemies of reason and progress. Oh, they’re crazy about him over at the white supremacistOccidental Dissident website as well they should be: “Glenn Greenwald might be a homosexual Jew, but I love the guy.” Of course you do, Bubba – that homosexual Jew is fighting your fight.