On Nationalism, Sarkozysm, Zionism, Leftism, the European Memory of the Shoah, and the Legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish only state

French philosopher Alain Badiou gave this interview to Le Monde last week. The original title was about the crisis of the intellectual Left. While the first two questions focused on why the unreformed present day French Left is defending Sarkozysm (the latter being anti-left, combining the most brutal forms of neoliberalism and populism), most of the interview was about the particularisms lying at the foundations of Israel as a Jewish only state.

Le Monde: How do you interpret the recent political and electoral changes in France ?
Alain Badiou: We are witnessing the end of French Politics as it emerged from the second world war: a Left-Right, Gaullo-Communist system that endorsed a common assessment of the second world war; Pétainism (France's Pétain collaborated with the Nazis) on one hand, and resistance on the other. Chirac was the Brejnev of Gaullism, the guardian of a crumbling party, whose cautiousness dictated immobilism. The election of Sarkozy, and the fact that some from the left have joined his government, mark the end of the political system that was born after the war. Meanwhile, one can ask who is this new Right in France ? Not Gaullist but successful among the extreme Right voters. Let's say what is evidence by now: This new Right is a decomplexified Capitalism reinstating Nationalism in an artificial and agressive manner .

The 'reactions' we hear today about this new capitalism or Sarkozysm are taken from old adages like "It is perfectly O.K. to be rich" or "We want the poor to work more and to obey us". Any other content or positive significance in Sarkozysm are still uncertain while its negative content is certain and well known:
Persecution of foreigners, especially if they are workers and/or poor;
Special ministry "to deal with" these immigrant workers;
Repressive clamp down on lower classes' youth;
The real campaigning Sarkozy has done to woo France's voters wasn't through his election campaign but rather through his actions as interior minister. His law on immigrants which is criminal and little known to the public, his open support for a police control of the French society and his boasting about it, have officialised Lepénism (Le Pen is the leader of the extreme right party le Front National) as a policy for the state and buried the "French exception". Therefore we are witnessing the total collapse of the left, and the extreme left, who are still holding on to the old political scheme built in France after the second world war.

Le Monde: What are the consequences of these changes on intellectuals and their work ?
Alain Badiou: The rallying of some intellectuals to Sarkozy symbolises the possibility for these intellectuals and philosophers to become some sort of traditional reactionnaries "without hesitation nor complaint", as in military rule. With this rallying comes the mingling with the Rich and Powerful, the xenophobia against poor and ordinary people, and the adoration of US Politics. Being an intellectual from the Right used to bear some sort of embarrassment in France. Even Raymond Aron (a famous French political philosopher) was embarrassed to declare himself an intellectual from the political Right ! The after war context in France was tailored to intellectuals from the Left. We are going to witness- and I am awaiting this moment- the demise of the leftist intellectual who will go down with the whole Left, before coming back to life again from its ashes like the phoenix ! This renewal of the Left will be possible only as an opposition to the actual reactionnary rallying of the Left to Sarkozy or any other extreme Right political movement disguised as the new Right. There will not be a middle of the road option for the Left, it will have to choose between a new radicalism in Politic or a reactionnary rallying to the new Right.

On Israel, Zionism and the Memory of the Shoah

Le Monde: You are, since the publication of Circonstance 3, Portées du mot "Juif" (The Uses of the word "Jew"), at the heart of an intellectual controversy because of your position on Israel, a position some believe is favourable to the disappearance of Israel as a state. What is your opinion on this ?
Alain Badiou: I believe this controversy, if taken at its highest and most coherent level, is about the existence of universals. What is the relation between the word "Jew", in its entire extension, its historical and intellectual resonance, and the liberating and emancipating effect of Universalism (Badiou means by Universalism the universal truth) ? Universalism is attacked from the Right, which maintains that we should return to the values of Nations, Traditions, Religion, Family values, etc. Universalism is also under attack from the Left which maintains that abstract Universalism is a form of intellectual Imperialism or an abstraction of the global market (or global economy) against which sexual, racial, and communautarian identities should be defended. In this debate, I stand in the middle, even if I am considered as a radical. I oppose the traditionalist defence of moral, national, and religious identities, but I oppose the modernist position on this matter which pretends to defend identities by making them the center and the principal player in the political opposition to international Capitalism. It is in this context that I consider the word "Jew".

Le Monde: Why reduce the whole question to a word ? Isn't a reality ?
Alain Badiou: Certainly ! It is the same with the word "French"... However "being French" does not prevent me from being from a Moroccan origin, or a hereditary aristocrat, or half German, having this or this idea about my country, inheriting the French revolution or on the contrary a fetichistic vision of the land... Under a word, of variable value, we can find an infinite multiplicity. My problem is that I am against those who think that "Jew" is a name, and not a word, those who insist that this word forms a homogenous and unified assembly non reductible to something else. In my opinion, their position can only be tenable in the case of divine transcendance. In this case, and in this case alone, we can argue that "Jew" is a name and not a word, because it is bound to an elective space: "Jew" is the name of the alliance. I argue, as Lévinas did before me in a coherent way, that it is impossible to maintain this nominal exception without the support of religion.
My target in this critique is not Zionism, neither the existence of Israel, not even a certain type of relation between the identity and the state. My target is the ideological manipulation of the word "Jew" in the intellectual controversy you mentioned, especially in France where it serves some goals linked to the reactionary wave in which we have been immersed for about thirty years now.
It would be terrible for the Jews, this living multiplicity, to let the word that defines them - which has a close relationship, going on for so many years before, with the formidable question of the universals and the adventures of universalism - to become the symbol of modernised Capitalism, anti-Arab or anti-African xenophobia, and US wars. I notice, with a real sorrow, that many people to whom I was close, sometimes dear friends, who in the 70s used to gravitate around revolutionary Maoism (he is talking probably about André Glucksman, staunch supporter now of Sarkozy), have started slowly using the reference to the word "Jew" and to Israel as a support for something politically and intellectually more large, that can be identified as an attempt to reintegrate the West. By "West" I mean the group of developped and "democratic" countries, their power, their way of life, which are judged superior. The unprecedented trauma that was the extermination of Europe's Jews in the Nazis gaz chambers has rendered this manipulation powerful and fearsome because it strikes the thought and immobilises it in a conservative memory.

Le Monde: You are accused of attacking the memory of the Shoah, or at least its usage. Is it because it served the itinerary you just denounced ?
Alain Badiou: I think that the promotion of massacres and victims as the only interesting contents to History is linked to a profound process of depolitisation. To examine all historical situations exclusively through moral categories results in political impotence. On the other hand, I don't think memory is a good category if we want the non repetition of disasters, because the non repetition assumes a rational judgement about what happened. An emotional memory based on horror and its images is ambivalent. Discerning between what follows from a repulsive emotion and an emotion of fascination is very difficult. Yes, I mistrust memory, the memory of colonial atrocities, or the memory of Stalinism, as much as the memory of Nazism. Political and historical knowledge should universally become the alternatives for doubtful memory that is a designated prey for propaganda.

le Monde: Is it in this same vein that you suggest in Circonstances 3 that we forget the Holocaust ?
Alain Badiou: This sentence, which appeared in an interview I gave to Haaretz, was, as you may suspect, a carefully designed imprudence: it cannot be understood outside the context specific to the conditions of a possible dialogue between Palestinians and Israelis. My next sentence, that you don't cite here, made it clear that the forgetting is, in fact, impossible.

Le Monde: Isn't Israel's legitimacy, at least in the West, tied to the memory of the Shoah ?
Alain Badiou: Things must be clear. I never thought that the destiny of Israelis is to be pushed into the sea. Moreover, I don't think that the question of Israel's frontiers is at the heart of the problem. From the internal perspective of an assumed de facto situation, in other words, the settlement of hundred thousands of Jews in this place being irreversible, I still think that the regulating idea for a future for the region cannot be anything else than a common life and destiny for Palestinians and Jews on the same land. I always thought that the formula of a "Jewish state" is perilous. Today, the politic of emancipation dictate that national identities and states should not be defined exclusively in terms referring to identity and race. We should have a minimal requirement here, the land right against the blood right. Israel will have to deal with the prospect of universalism retaking the places where particularisms used to strive, if it has to deal with its own future.

Le Monde: Does this contribute to put into question the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state ?
Alain Badiou: You see, I have certainly written things against France which are more violent than things I have written against Israel! Zionism can be listed both in the colonialist and the revolutionary dimensions. It combines these two aspects and that what makes it a rare and singular phenomenon. That some people inside European communities who used to designate themselves as a particular minority with a national characteristic - the Jewish minority - wanted a place to achieve their identity, in a territorial way, under the form of a state, is a historic reality that, like any other reality of the sort, is neither legitimate nor illegitimate. But I believe it unreasonable to consider this adventure as an exception, somehow different from other nationalistic adventures.

Comment:
I personally agree with Badiou's assessment on the French Left but not necessarily with his suggestion for a 'radical' turn as a solution. We are witnessing a very radical Right emerge from the old Right, opposing a radical Left to this new Right is not a solution in my opinion because the international stage is set for this new Right which is not perceived as radical, and Badiou recognises this fact. As Politic is also about perceptions, I don't think the rebirth of the Left should be made with radical ideas set specifically against the political scene created by the new Right. On the contrary, it should be made with ideas that can assemble rather than confront to potentially help rebuild what the new Right is destroying and to emancipate from the framework set for the rest of the world by the new Right.

As for Israel, Badiou is stating the obvious and Israel must confront the obvious if it has to build a future for its citizens, unless international zionism (neoconism)continues to reshape reality to the extent every one of us will forget in the future what truth and facts mean.

P.S. Cross posted in a slightly different content at Sabbah's. Both posts at Sabbah's and Les Politiques can be linked to but not reproduced entirely without the permission of the author.

The ADQ: from 5 to 41 Seats in Parliament, thanks to the Veil and other identity threatening cultural items !

The ADQ, Action Démocratique du Québec, has nothing democratic about it, the more exact description is populist. It is a rural conservative nationalist party, far right on economic and social issues. Before today and yesterday's provincial elections in Québec, it wasn't even recognised as an official party in parliament. Mario Dumont, its leader, was able to get elected few elections ago in his Rivière Du Loup riding, some 500 Kms north east of Montréal on the south shore of the Saint Lawrence river, and get elected on a simple promise, by defining himself as a staunch nationalist but not a separatist, conforting those Quebecers who are nationalists but afraid to separate from Canada. I call them the wary nationalists, 'les nationalistes peureux'.

Québec's separatists are the second largest party in Quebec and were for sometimes the first in the polls, despite not succeeding in rallying a majority of Quebecers to the separatist project. They came close to winning a referendum on separation on two occasions. And on the second occasion, 1995, Jacques Parizeau, the party leader and then prime minister declared that the defeat in the referendum was made possible by 'L'argent et les Allophones' (The Money and the Allophones). Some have understood 'L'argent' as targeting the Jewish community who is, in a large majority, wealthy and against the separation of Quebec. Parizeau was shunned by his own party after his defeat and this declaration. The Parti Québécois, PQ, and its sister party at the federal level, Le Bloc Québécois, which enjoys a solid majority in Québec, have been making efforts to integrate Quebec's immigrants into the political landscape by offering them seats since they lost the 1995 referendum on sovereignty. Québec's immigrants, on the other side, those who stay in the province and don't migrate to other provinces, and who come in their majority from francophones countries, Haiti and north African and arab countries, were glad at the new opportunities. A synthesis was taking place between a very particular history, the history of Quebecers and their English rulers and tormentors, and the history of these new immigrants. Not only a synthesis, but a mutual empathy. This is when immigrants like me understood that Quebec's separatism has, in essence, nothing to do with Quebec's nationalism, although, at its origin separatism was founded by the most reactionnary and nationalist elements of the Quebec society. But that was when the English speaking community acted as colonisers toward the Québécois Francophones in their own country. Moreover, diffferent political tendencies existed inside the PQ; leftists, conservatives, moderates. Recently however, the PQ was mutating and experiencing internal divisions at the same time the synthesis between its separatist project and immigrants was being achieved. It was too much for a party who elected André Boisclair, an openly gay and ambitious young man who declared having consumed drugs when he was minister, as its leader, in a show of its determination to get rid of its own reactionary and conservative elements. It seems however that the choice of Boisclair didn't find an echo in the Quebec population. I know it didn't have the same negative impact among immigrants because in my riding* which votes against the PQ since the 1970s, no matter who is the opposite candidate, the PQ candidate, practically an unknown man from the immigrant population, fared well (but not enough to get elected) accordingly to the percentage of immigrants in the riding.

On the other hand, Jean Charest, who is an ex federal conservative, turned provincial liberal, was never able to convince true Quebec liberals of his conversion. Many of these true liberals divided their vote between, on one hand, the green party and the party of the left (Quebec solidaire) which together gathered 8% of the vote without succeeding in getting seats in parliament, and the PQ. The result of both processes, the lack of confidence in Charest from True liberals and the lack of confidence in Boisclair from 'wary nationalists' who used to vote PQ but NO for the separation referendum, and conservatives, is the weakening of the two major parties in favor of the ADQ.

Watching Quebec Politics, I realised that it is only in Quebec that nationalism and separatism are not synonymous and I would say, according to today's parliamentary election results, that nationalism is more pervasive outside the separatist party than inside. Yesterday's elections were called by the present prime minister, whose liberal party was elected three years earlier, on the premise that the PQ was having a hard time in the polls. The results have however brought a third party in the equation, the ADQ. The surge of the ADQ is due to two simple facts, the low popularity of the two main leaders inside their parties and the rise of the veil politics in Quebec.

Three months ago, Hérouxville's town council adopted a chart for its inhabitants forbidding the veil, the niqab, and the stoning of women, without the knowledge of its inhabitants, who were shocked at the discovery of the name of their towm in the newspapers as a racist town. Because of course, there were some false assumptions about Quebecers Muslims in this chart. The chart caused a controversy but it turned out that there was not one single Muslim living in this small town. Two years ago, some Orthodox Jews, who refuse to send their children to regular public schools were lobbying the liberal government for funding. The funding was allowed only to be retracted after an outcry from the Quebec population fiercely against such an approach despite the fact that Quebec's schools were still only four years ago funded by the government and recognised along religious lines (Catholic and Protestant). Last year, the ministry of education realised that some Jews actually homeschool their children without any official supervision (actually you can homeschool in Quebec but you have to report to the minstry of education, follow the guidelines, and so on...) The ministry stepped in seeing in this process a coercion on the child and was going to propose to these families some accomodations within the public school system. Last year, a Sikh boy went to the supreme court to force the Quebec school he goes to to accpet him with a dagger in his kippa and won. The accumulation of these cultural particularisms became a central debate in the Quebec society. Most Quebec citizens, who declare themselves at a rate of 60% as racists, were against accomodationg cultural and religious communities, not for the sake of secularism, mind you, but in the name of the Christian character of the Quebec society. The government created an official committee called 'Committee for reasonable accomodations'.

At a public meeting at my son's college early this year, one prominent member of this committee, Canadian political philosopher Charles Taylor, was speaking on the importance to bring people together and on the danger of adopting the theory of the 'Clash of civilisations' by stigmatisating a religion and a culture in a multicultural globalised world and society, I asked him if the solution to the 'Clash of civilisations' wasn't actually the reinforcement of muticulturalism and he agreed. I understood however, after the conference, why the philosopher of multiculturalism, Charles taylor, didn't bring the word once in his talk. I was assailed by two teachers of my son who told me that multiculturalism and its legal companion, the Canada charter of individual rights, were something the former liberal prime minister of Canada, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, invented and implemented against the Quebec society and when I asked why they think it was against them, they answered that they see themselves as a Christian only culture and that immigrants should abide by their culture and when I said that Quebec has abandoned religion in its definition as a nation in the sixties, they said that still, Christianism was part of their identity, of who they are and this is how they see themselves in the face of the immigrant population (more than 50%) in their province.

I was really stunned by the level of nationalism and the influence of religion in this society. The parti Québécois is ahead of its people and this is why even its sympathisers were not able to follow its transformation. There is one other premise in this, the failing of politics. If people are returning to the religious definitions of their identity, this means that politic has failed them. It means that Politic was not able to bring to them a satisfactory social project.

Mario Dumont, the leader of the PQ, is taking people as they are, he stepped in this hesitation. He jumped on the Hérouxville controversy affirming his support for the mayor(I still have to check how Hérouxville voted). He asked the director of Elections Quebec to make sure that Niqab was not allowed on voting day despite the fact that in the whole province there are only few niqabs, and not sure that these women have citizenship and vote rights, and despite the fact that there was never an incidence of the sort at election day before. The controversy took hold of the media for more than a week until the eve of election day. This is how Mario Dumont, a rural conservative whose party didn't take any seat within the city of Montreal, the largest city in Quebec, who is very close to Stephen Harpers ideals and to Bush's ideals on economic and social matters, won the second place in yesterday's elections, putting the PQ in third place. The three parties are however close, 32 % for the liberals, 30 % for the ADQ and 28 % for the PQ. We have a minority government with a minority opposition.

I am not proud of Quebec and I am not proud of our politicians. I voted for the PQ, even though I do not adhere to their separatist project. But I vowed to vote for them when they were, with Quebec Solidaire (a small leftist party), the only to march with Lebanese asking for a ceasefire in Lebanon during the Israeli agression on Lebanon last summer.
*My riding is composed of 15 % Anglophones, 55 % Francophones, and 30 % Allophones (based on the language spoken at home) of whom 4% are Arabs, probably 20% Jewish, and the other are Russians and Eastern Europeans. Jewsih and Anglo, as well as a sizeable part of the Francophones must have voted for the Liberals who had 46 % of the votes, compared to the PQ who had 23 % pof the votes, 10 % for the green party, 9 % for the left, and the rst for other two small parties.

Debunking Zionism as a Racist Colonialist Ideology

There are some great debunkers now on the blogosphere. I want to highlight the latest contributions of Behemoth (KampfeBlog) on the subject.

The sinister roots of Zionism, failed ideological construct part two - A

The sinister roots of Zionism, failed ideological construct part two - B

More confirmation on "modern" Zionism's colonial origins

Troubled times in Europe

My first week of vacation was spent among my In Laws who live in Belgium. My husband left Belgium to finish his medical studies in France where he became an expatriate acquiring the citizenship and moving later to Canada.
Although a visit to his parents does not leave us time to tour the country, he always likes to check what has changed in his native country since he left. Therefore, the picture of the cooked snails sold on the street in Bruxelles. This was just next to the most famous tourist attraction in Bruxelles: Mannekenpis.
During our stay and outside family conversations, two subjects of concern emerged: climate change and immigration, most specifically Muslim immigration but also Polish seasonal immigration to Belgium. One British blogger had a recent post on the subject. Reading his blog from Canada, these subjects seemed far to me. However they are palpable among ordinary people.
I have never known Belgium before under a constant sun in the summer during seven consecutive days with no rain and 30 degrees Celsius.
My husband's family used to shy away from immigration talk in my presence and I knew that this was an implicit understanding between us. I had arrived this time to Belgium with the magazine 'The Economist' bought at the airport with its cover on EuroIslam and when I left Bruxelles, their first national french newspaper was publishing on a remote page Tariq Ramadan's manifesto for a new Islam in Europe. Opinions diverged in my husband's family about Islam. His cousin and his wife expressed their fear while his brother who lives in the European quartier in Bruxelles told me that the problem with the talk about Islam in Europe was that ordinary people were hearing from the media more loudly about extremists than about moderates.

There was also a discussion between me and my mother in law on the subject of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I explained to her my point of view (which every regular reader f this blog knows well by now) and she explained to me hers which is representative of the seventies (my mother in law is 73) point of view of European leftists on Israel and Palestine: 'We are responsible to what happened to jews during the second world war and therefore Israel has the right to exist', typical zionist propaganda. After a 30 minutes conversation we agreed mtually to stop the discussion.

My husband's family is a typical socialist family, half Flemish on his father's side and half Francophone on his mother's side with a grand'mother, now deceased, who was among the rare people who had their Belgian communist party membership during the second WW and after. She was taken prisoner to Ravensbrück by Nazis for 4 years.
I liked the grand'mother. She was quite a character and probably the person in the family to whom I was most close. She died in 1995, after having seen the fall of the Soviet Union and the total demise of the ideals she and others fought, suffered and died for.

There was another problem I noticed in Belgium, the rise of the Facist racist Flemmish party, Vlaams Block, the second largest party in Flandres. In a trip to Bruges, we were greated on the road by a large picture of a smiling blonde on her bicycle. My husband explained to me that she was a Vlaams representative. The Vlaams party people are not only racists but also nationalists and separatists. There is talk in Belgium that if the Vlaams becomes the first party, they may vote separation from the rest of the country, like the people of Montenegro.
And so Nationalism is another problem on the rise in Europe.

This picture is taken from the Bruges beffroi and shows the Cathedral of Saint Sauveur. Another Bruges church hosts what is believed to be the blood of the Christ taken by Beligan crusaders from Jerusalem. I reminded my husband that this was a time when European christianity was even more belligerant than Islam. I remember, when we met, the first thing my husband told me jokingly was that one of his ancestors, Godefroy de Bouillon, had occupied my piece of country, northern Lebanon, and built a fortress that we can still visit to this day in Tripoli. Of course, this is a far away past, but a past that Europe still rely on and a past that is hindering, in my opinion, the understanding of Islam in Europe.
I know that these problems, climate change, immigration, racism, nationalism and Islam are not only specific to Belgium but exist also in other European countries. My feeling is that these are troubled times for Europe. I am writing this while listening to BBC world and the commemoration of the London bombing. My sympathies to the victims and to all random victims of terror. These are not only troubled times for states but also for citizens and ordinary people taken in the spirale of fanatisms and cynical politics.

P.S: I apologize if I will not be able to answer the comments soon but my access to an internet connection is limited.