Biehl: Ecofascism

De Maistre, Burke, Hamann, Herder, Fichte; Walter Darre, Mircea Eliade, Rudolf Gorsleben, Franz Hartmann, Karl Haushofer, Martin Heidegger, CJ Jung, Georg Lanz von Liebnfels, Guido von List, Rudolf von Sebottendorff, Wolfram Sievers, Hermann Wirth; Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard: These are names mostly unknown, some others known but unread; and they are the masters of our intellectual time, the movers and shakers of our thoughts on the nature of things in our time, the makers of our public opinions. They are some of the public intellectuals from whom we derive the concepts we have of identity, multi-culturalism, and ecology. Who'd have guessed? Most if not all are Nazis, and some are simply fascists. What does it say about us? How is it that we follow the very ideas of an ideology we hate violently and waged war to annihilate, and yet we hold dear many of the ideas they formulated? How can this be possible? How is it possible that 18th century reactionaries and 20th century Nazis have morphed into those who now foist upon the world the culture of philobarbarism and multi-cultural moral relativism? We'll look below at some of the recent origins of what's come about and why. Why, for example, the picture above turns us all into dewy-eyed sentimentalists cooing over the inclusive post-modernist beauty of our times even as we sink into a mire of suicidal cultural dhimmitude and generalized social self-hatred.
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Ecofascism: Lessons from the German experience

'Ecology' and the Modernization of Fascism in the German Ultra-right

Janet Biehl

It is an incontestable fact that the ecology crisis today is real. In a vast number of ways and places, the biosphere of this planet is undergoing a great deal of damage. Parts of the environment have already been rendered uninhabitable through toxic wastes and nuclear power plant disasters, while systemic pollution, ozone holes, global warming, and other disasters are increasingly tearing the fabric on which all life depends. That such damage is wrought overwhelmingly by corporations in a competitive international market economy has never been clearer, while the need to replace the existing society with one such as social ecology advances has never been more urgent.

At a time when worsening economic conditions and strong political disaffection occur along with ecological dislocations, however, nationalist and even fascist ideas are gaining an increasingly high profile in Europe, particularly, but not only, in the Federal Republic of Germany. With social tensions exacerbated, neofascist groups of various kinds are winning electoral representation, even as their loosely linked cohorts commit acts of violence against foreigners. Such groups, both skinhead and 'intellectual,' are part of a 'New' Right that explicitly draws its ideas from classical fascism. They are updating the old nationalist, mystical, and misanthropic themes of the 'Old' Right, writes Jutta Ditfurth, in a "modernization of fascism." Among other things, they are using a right-wing interpretation of ecology "as an ideological 'hinge' for organizing the extreme-right and neofascist scene." 2

Today's fascists have a distinct ideological legacy from their fascist forebears upon which to draw. Indeed, 'ecology' and a mystical reverence for the natural world are hardly new to German nationalism. At the end of the nineteenth century, a cultural revolt against positivism swept much of Europe, as George L. Mosse writes, and in Germany it became infused with both nature-mysticism and racial nationalism. This revolt became intimately bound up with a belief in nature's cosmic life force, a dark force whose mysteries could be understood, not through science, but through the occult. An ideology based upon such premises was fused with the glories of an Aryan past, and in turn, that past received a thoroughly romantic and mystical interpretation. 3

Culminating in the 1920s, an assortment of occult and pseudo-scientific ideas coalesced around the idea of a German Volk into a romantic nationalism, romantic racism, and a mystical nature-worshipping faith. Indeed, as Mosse observes, the German word Volk is a much more comprehensive term than "people," for to German thinkers ever since the birth of German romanticism in the late eighteenth century "Volk" signified the union of a group of people with a transcendental "essence." This "essence" might be called "nature" or "cosmos" or "mythos," but in each instance it was fused to man's innermost nature, and represented the source of his creativity, his depth of feeling, his individuality, and his unity with other members of the Volk. 4

The völkisch movement of the 1920s regarded modern materialism, urbanism, rationalism, and science as artificial and evil, alien to this 'essence.'5 In a time of bitter social dislocation, it saw Weimar democracy as the product of Western democratic and liberal ideals and, further, as a puppet regime controlled by people who did not represent German 'essence.' Many alleged that a Jewish world conspiracy lay behind the discontents of modernism, including materialistic consumerism, soulless industrialism, a homogenized commercial culture, and excessive modern technology, all of which were said to be systematically destroying traditional German values. Only true patriots could save Germans from ruin, thought the extreme right -- themselves.

This movement sought to assert a truly Germanic alternative -- one as racialist as it was nationalist in nature. The popular writings of Paul Lagarde and Julius Langbehn favored an aristocratic social order in which Germans would rule the world. It invoked a nature-romanticism in which a closeness to the natural landscape was to give people a heightened sense of aliveness and 'authenticity.' It advanced a new cosmic faith, embodied in 'Aryan' blood, that was to be grasped through intuition rather than science in a plethora of occult and esoteric spiritualistic faiths that abounded in Germany in the 1920s. Mystical belief-systems like Theosophy, Anthroposophy, and Ariosophy (a mystical Aryanism) abounded and were rife with Germanic nationalist components, such that they could be used to mystify an 'ecological' nationalism. However inadvertently, the romantic nationalists of the völkisch movement became an important source for National Socialist ideology, which ironically drew on its antimodern sentiments even as it built a technologically modern and virulently nationalistic and genocidal totalitarian state. Demagogically appealing to a very real sense of alienation, the Nazis stage-managed indoctrination extravaganzas that promised 'authenticity' in a mystical, romantic nationalism that was 'closer to nature,' even as they engaged in mass murder. Stressing the need to return to simpler, healthier, and more 'natural' lifeways, they advanced the idea and practice of a 'Nordic peasantry' tied organically to the soil -- even as they constructed a society that was industrially more modernized and rationalized than any German society had seen to that time.

The so-called 'New' Right today appeals to themes reminiscent of the völkisch movement in pre-Nazi Germany. It, too, presents itself as offering an 'ecological' alternative to modern society. In the view of the 'New' Right today, the destruction of the environment and the repression of nationalities have a common root in 'Semitic' monotheism and universalism. In its later form, Christianity, and in its subsequent secularized forms, liberalism and Marxism, this dualistic, homogenizing universalism is alleged to have brought on both the ecological crisis and the suppression of national identity. Just as Judeo-Christian universalism was destructive of authentic cultures when Christian missionaries went out into the world, so too is modernity eliminating ethnic and national cultures. Moreover, through the unbridled technology to which it gave rise, this modern universalism is said to have perpetrated not only the destruction of nature but an annihilation of the spirit; the destruction of nature, it is said, is life-threatening in the spiritual sense as well as the physical, since when people deny pristine nature, their access to their 'authentic' self is blocked.

The dualistic yet universalistic 'Semitic' legacy is borne today most egregiously, in 'New' Right ideology, by the United States, in whose 'mongrel' culture -- egalitarian democracy -- all cultures and races are mixed together, forming a crass, soulless society. American cultural imperialism is genocidal of other cultures around the world, and its technological imperialism is destroying the global environment. The fascist quest for 'national identity' and ecological salvation seeks to counter 'Western civilization' -- that is, the United States, as opposed to 'European civilization' -- by advancing a notion of 'ethnopluralism' that seeks for all cultures to have sovereignty over themselves and their environment. Europe should become, instead of a modernized monoculture, a 'Europe of fatherlands,' with autonomy for all its peoples. Just as Turks should live in Turkey and Senegalese in Senegal, Germans should have Germany for themselves, 'New' Right ideologues argue.

Ecology can easily be perverted to justify this 'ethnopluralism' -- that is, nationalism. Conceptions of one's region as one's 'homeland,' or Heimat, can be perverted into a nationalistic regionalism when a region's traditions and language are mystically tied to an 'ancestral' landscape. (The word Heimat connotes as well a turn toward the past, an anti-urban mood, a familiar community, and proximity to nature. For several decades the concept was looked upon with disfavor because the Nazis had used it, but intellectuals rediscovered it in the 1970s, after further decades of capitalist industrialization.) For a people seeking to assert themselves against an outside intruder, an 'ecologized' Heimat in which they are biologically embedded can become a useful tool not only against imperialism but against immigration, foreigners, and 'overpopulation.' Elaborate justifications for opposing Third World immigration are disguised as diversity, drawing on 'ecological' arguments against 'overpopulation.' Today it is not only fascists who invoke Heimat; in September 1989, for example, the head of the respectable League for the Protection of the Environment and Nature (Bund für Umwelt- und Naturschutz, or BUND), environmentalist Hubert Weinzierl, remarked that:

only when humanity's main concern, the diminution of the stream of overpopulation, has been accomplished, will there be any meaning or any prospect of building an environment that is capable of improvement, of configuring the landscape of our civilization in such a way that it remains worthy of being called Heimat. 6

An ecology that is mystical, in turn, may become a justification for a nationalism that is mystical. In the New Age milieu of today, with its affinities for ecology, the ultra-right may well find the mystical component it needs to make a truly updated, modernized authoritarian nationalism. As in Germany between the two world wars, antirational cults of the New Age -- primitivistic, esoteric -- abound in both the Federal Republic and the Anglo-American world. Such antirationalism and mysticism are appealed to by the 'New' Right; as anarchist publisher Wolfgang Haug observes, "The New Right, in effect, wants above all to redefine social norms so that rational doubt is regarded as decadent and eliminated, and new 'natural' norms are established." 7
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To be continued.
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As the long-term reader of this blog will have seen there is a central thesis here, and the course of this blog is to examine in some detail the Romance and Counter-Enlightenment origins of Left dhimmi fascsim. We do not use the terms carelessly. Our look above into ecology is yet another contribution to this thesis, and it will continue for the next few installments to show in detail the nature of fascism in our time. Please feel free to contribute or to criticise at will. These are working notes, and any assistence in the effort is greatly appreciated.

The Moral and the Grip of Conformity

When hatred of culture becomes itself a part of culture, the life of the mind loses all meaning.
—Alain Finkielkraut, The Undoing of Thought

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Contingent morality is ethics at best. Ethics depend on the person, on the time, on the situation, perhaps; but ethics can change, adapt, revise. Morality cannot change. Cut off my head if I'm wrong, but I state clearly that morals are absolute, universal, and unchangeable. Do not mistake me then for a moral person, only as one who has some grasp of the language we use. Simple linear informal logic shows that morality cannot change. We can argue about morality itself but not about its unchangeablity.

That which changes is opinion, not truth. Facts do not change, they're simply replaced. Truth, if it is true then is true of then, but it is not false later: If it's true that it is now raining, and it is true that it is not raining later, it remains true that it was raining then. But morality doesn't change with the weather. If it was moral then, it is moral now or it wasn't moral then at all. We can argue what is and is not moral. We can argue whether there is morality. We cannot logically and coherently argue that there is a changing morality. To do that is to be what I am pleased to call "stupid." I argue here that we in the West are in the course of history that is at heart a time of moral stupidity. Ours is a time of pseudo-morality, a time of stupid ethics, a course of idiot ethical incoherence. Morality is laid aside, and we are in the grip of ethical opinion rather than a time of morality. I'm a rightwing religious bigot, worse than bin Laden, as one of our commentators wrote recently. My points are opinion, not morality itself. I might not even rise to ethical behaviour here. So sue me. Or better yet, sue someone who has some money and status.

Below we have more inquiry into the affair of Alain Finkielkraut. This is a matter of public opinion. In the West we have struck a pose of ethics rather than morality, and that ethical pose requires that we, as a general culture, (debatable as that might be to many,) lay in a Procrustean Bed to be chopped and stretched till we fit the ruling ethos of our time, changing daily as it does. Contingent ethics, as we'll see below, shifgt with the currents of opinion, and lately Finkielkraut is caught out, now made to suffer till he is made to fit the conformity of today's ethical pose. There is no moral argument at stake here for thsoe who would destroy the man, only the demand that he conform to the right pose. That is the opinion of publicity. Tomorrow he may be lauded as a revolutionary thinker. Not today. But that could change if the winds of publicity change the nature of the pose required. This is, according to us here, a false ethics, one not wothy of concern except when it threatens our very lives, as it unfortunately does today. When we abandon morality in favor of publicity and opinion we abandon all right to protection of the universality of the moral. We give up and die. We become less than cowards, we become morally stupid, culturally insane, and dead-- physically.

Below we see an aggressive act of contingent public opinion committed against a man who might well be moral. Today's pseudo-ethic is directed against a man who speaks morality.

Alain Finkielkraut is in trouble with the Left dhimmi fascists we go on about here on a daily basis. Finkielkraut spoke to interviewers in French that was translated into Hebrew for Haaretz, and from there his words were retranslated into French for French journalists to spread across French newspapers, Le Monde, for example. One might expect that the result would cause Finkielkraut some trouble. Finkielkraut himself claims that he doesn't recognize the character protrayed in the French papers. We would call that doing a hachet job on him. Finkielkraut said in the interview that people should take responsibility for their own lives and the actions thereof. Big sin in the socialist nighmare of the nanny state where personal responsibility is not allowed, where the state is responsible for personal lives, not the individual. And, being Jewish, Finkielkraut is also to be hated for claiming rightly that the rioters are Muslims who hate France as a culture. Below we get a glimpse of that trouble as reported in a New York City paper:

Mr. Finkielkraut then chose to defend himself in two more interviews, one to Radio Europe and one to Le Monde, in which he accused the November 23 article of selectively distorting his views. As he put it to Le Monde:

"The person portrayed by the [Le Monde] article would cause me to feel disdain and even disgust for him ....To my stupefaction, however, ever since [the article's publication] there are now two of us with the same name."

Although Mr. Finkielkraut did not recant his opinions - on the contrary, he made it clear that he stood behind what he had said in Haaretz - these remarks were taken by MRAP as an apology and the threatened lawsuit was dropped. At which point, Haaretz decided to get back into the act. On November 27, it ran a front-page article with the headline, "After Threats, The Philosopher Finkielkraut Apologizes." There followed a news story explaining that, faced with a lawsuit and vociferous criticism, Mr. Finkielkraut had expressed "disdain and disgust," not for Le Monde's distortion of his views, but for those views themselves. The clear - and false - implication was that he had buckled ignominiously under pressure.

[....]Both newspapers, each generally considered the best in its country, illustrate a truth that anyone who has frequent dealings with journalists and the media knows well: They are often not to be trusted - not only to get the facts straight, but even to want to.

[l']affaire Finkielkraut is a sad illustration of how the culture of political correctness, as stultifying as it is in the United States, is even more so in Europe and especially in France. Whether or not one agrees with Mr. Finkielkraut's analysis of the French riots, they are racist only if it is racism to look the facts in the face. As a French friend of mine, who knows the immigrant suburbs of Paris well, put it in a conversation with me: "I could never get away with publicly saying this in France, but it can't be an accident that the rioters were all Arabs and African Muslims. There are plenty of other poor immigrant groups in France, including many African Christians, but none of them were out there torching schools and their neighbors' cars."
http://www.nysun.com/article/23689?page_no=2
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The interview below follows that from Haaretz. Here Finkielkraut tries to be reasonable with an idiot. The beginning is commentary from a web mag:

Alain Finkielkraut's interview on Europe 1

A reader has generously given her time to translate for VFR the entire Alain Finkielkraut interview on Europe 1 television with host Jean-Pierre Elkabach that was broadcast on November 25. Though there are many factual contradictions to be resolved in what some are calling L'Affaire Finkielkraut, in this interview (which I haven't had time to read carefully yet) Finkielkraut apparently underwent something like a Stalinist renunciation of his previous statements in order to fend off a suit against himself for "incitement to racial hatred" as well as to protect himself and his family from threats on his life. [That is a misreading of the facts, in that Finkielkraut claims there are two men, one himself, the other a made-up caricature of him. (ed. Dag.)] At the same time he resists the interviewer's politically correct attacks on him and continues to protest the silencing of criticism by means of the racism charge. Yet, just as the conventional left sees the Muslim rioters as victims of discrimination, Finkielkraut, much in the manner of mainstream American conservatives, sees the Muslims as victims of the dominant leftism which prevents them from assimilating, thus subscribing to the illusion that the assimilation of millions of Muslims in Europe (that is, a true assimilation that does not change Europe into something else) is a practical possibility. He ends the interview by saying:

I offer my apologies to those who have been offended by that person who is not me; I do not have within me any feeling of scorn or hatred towards any group whatsoever and I feel, by mission, in solidarity with new immigrants in France, notably those of the second and third generation.

Let us remember that this whole controversy was set off by an earlier interview in Ha'aretz in which Finkielkraut made comments that in America would be seen as little more than standard conservative criticisms of affirmative action, the racial double standard, failure of immigrants to assimilate, and so on.

Our translator says:

Some parts aren't clear to me and a few omissions are indicated with (...). It's an interesting document—a man's desperate attempt to tell the truth without telling the truth, the mocking tone of Elkabach, etc.

I do not know who July is, and I do not understand the notion of having given a "gift" to Dieudonné. Dieudonné, if you don't know, is a vile celebrity—a mix of Farrahkan, Spike Lee and Eldridge Cleaver. His mother is Breton, his father is from Cameroun. It was rumored that Chirac will give him the Légion d'Honneur medal.

We are indebted to the reader, whose skill in French translation is evident in this and other translations she has done recently for VFR.

Here is the interview:

Jean-Pierre Elkabach - When a society is in crisis, an intellectual, especially one who is well-known and influential such as yourself, Alain Finkielkraut, is supposed to take the high ground and calm people's minds. Your recent statements to foreign newspapers have been judged unacceptable and are creating and will continue to create a scandal. Alain Finkielkraut, greetings.

Alain Finkielkraut - Greetings

Elkabach - What got into you?

Finkielkraut - Uh, Jean-Pierre Elkabach, I seek truth, that is how I perceive my work and sometimes to find the truth I attempt, I rip apart, I feel it is my duty to rip apart the curtain of conventional discourse. I do it at the risk of being wrong, and of arousing unquenchable hatred over the small amount of truth that I uncover. But, that is something entirely different. From the puzzle of quotations in "Le Monde," there emerges an odious person, unlikable, twisted, whose hand I would not want to shake. They tell me—and here the nightmare begins—that that person is me, I am being told that I inhabit that fictional body, and that I must answer for it before the court of public opinion. So, I want to defend myself. I want to defend myself, but also, sometimes when things like that happen, you want to die.

Elkabach - Don't exaggerate, you are not naive, you know that you have unleashed a torrent of destruction that is just beginning. What did you say? We're going to take a few statements, at any rate some quotations and you will comment on them yourself. You said, " People would like to reduce the riots...to a social dimension, but most of the rioters are blacks or Arabs with a Muslim identity. It was a revolt of an ethnic and religious nature." Ethnic—that means racial?

Finkielkraut - Listen

Elkabach - You said it.

Finkielkraut - I said it but, Jean-Pierre Elkabach, everybody thinks it's so because to talk about the ethnicity of the rioters is considered a racist attitude. On the other side of the issue, the unanimous reaction to the riots is the denunciation of discrimination against visible minorities. If it were only about a social uprising in one neighborhood, people would have spoken about unemployment ...or the need to modernize the suburbs. They would not have spoken of the struggle against discrimination in hiring or employment. But I do add in the course of the article that one must not make generalizations. If I recognize, like everybody else, the ethnic nature of these revolts, far be it for me to lump together in one shameful category all Frenchmen of African or North African descent; and furthermore let me add that I pity rather than accuse the perpetrators of this great pillage.

Elkabach - Yes. In the riots, what is the role of a certain Islam or of religion since you speak of the "ethnic and religious nature"?

Finkielkraut - OK. On that point no, it is not fair, it is just a vague identity reference. Religion as such is not part of it. It happens that some people in France, especially the young, when speaking of the French, call them "the French," all the while donning a Muslim identity. They are not the only ones who do it. One of the tragedies of our time is the great national disaffiliation. And in the article I say that some Jews can be tempted to do the same thing: France is useful, but Jewishness is their identity. I reproach those Jews for their lack of consideration and I say to them "no," and I say to them, in the interview, be consistent in your logic. If France is simply an insurance company and if your identity is elsewhere...

Elkabach - Yes, but since you said that to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, that part was censored. Alain Finkielkraut, you say that there are in France those who hate the Republic, that there is an anti-republican pogrom.

Finkielkraut - Yes. In order to remove any Jewish connotation stemming from the word "pogrom," I will say rather that there was a great anti-republican pillage. And I say that our compassionate society suffers from a veritable moral apathy in so far as it cannot perceive the stoning of firemen and the arson of schools as a sacrilegious act. What is our relationship with ourselves and with our schools for us to see that simply as a symptom and to treat the perpetrators as victims?

Elkabach - Who influences these perpetrators?

Finkielkraut - Right, well, I'm going to tell you. It is not a reaction to Sarkozy, it is not political, it is a social climate...

Elkabach - But who?

Finkielkraut - Well, the spiritual void in our society that practices...

Elkabach - Who? The schools?

Finkielkraut - No.

Elkabach - The high schools? You said it.

Finkielkraut - Yes.

Elkabach - The videos, the music...

Finkielkraut - The culture of "now," which has gotten the upper hand over study, over schools where patience and extended efforts are cultivated. Obviously, in a society where everything is based either on utility or instant gratification and consumerism, we create frustrated people who want to grab everything, all at once.

Elkabach - Alain Finkielkraut, agreed. Today, we are trying to understand what you said...

Finkielkraut - Sure...

Elkabach - ...what motivates you. You speak of blacks and Arabs.

Finkielkraut - No.

Elkabach - Yes, yes in the interview, such as it was published in France. They are Frenchmen and you know it. Are we to kick them out, even though they are at home here?

Finkielkraut - No.

Elkabach - When Jacques Chirac calls them sons and daughters of the Republic, is he right or wrong?

Finkielkraut - No. He's right, he's right. But one must make careful note of such extremely violent hatred and not respond to this hatred by saying that we are hateful people...the great difficulty today is to integrate people who do not like France into a France that does not like herself. But integration of course must be our goal and we missed...

Elkabach - All right, but you the philosopher, as July said, you the intellectual, must you respond to hatred with hatred?

Finkielkraut - No. And I do not respond with hatred, I'm just saying that we missed out on an real opportunity to extend our hand to them. It's clear that the perpetrators of this pillage are unstructured individuals. What do I mean by unstructured? That means the loss of points of reference, they don't know good from evil, licit from illicit. We have to establish these points, and affirm them. That would help them.

Elkabach - OK. Let's proceed in trying to understand what you said because your remarks will come back to you. You lash out at Dieudonné. You call him "the spokesman of the theology of hatred, etc..." He is, you say, "the true patron of anti-Semitism." Can you confirm that?

Finkielkraut - What I'm now confirming is that the duty to memory, which everybody talks about, is formed as a result of recriminations such as those of Dieudonné.

Elkabach - But why, why can't you forget about it?

Finkielkraut - Because...

Elkabach - Is that any reason to imitate him and to cultivate—if indeed he cultivates hatred—to cultivate...

Finkielkraut - Jean-Pierre Elkabach, I cultivate no hatred. I repeat that I have no connection to this personage in the puzzle. I, like everybody else, hate that personage.

Elkabach - Which personage? Dieudonné or Finkielkraut?

Finkielkraut - Me!

Elkabach - Finkielkraut.

Finkielkraut - Not Finkielkraut! This fictional person in which ... This tunic of Nessus that I'm forced to inhabit. I'm simply saying that today (...) they say we must heal the identity wounds of Africans and those of African descent.

Elkabach - Rightly or wrongly?

Finkielkraut - Yes. But they are stating it improperly, since they say that to treat these identity wounds is to snatch from the Jews some monopoly or other on misfortune. So, we are forced to discuss colonization (...) and slavery using the Shoah as a model. We do this by sacrificing the truth, and thus we cultivate hatred. A so-called competition of victims...Jean-Pierre Elkabach, I am not a victim, I honor the memory of the victims, I wrote "The Imaginary Jew" to protest all identification with the victims. It's not about...

(Please note—the following paragraph is not clear to me. I just translated the words.)

Elkabach - OK, but today what people read about this personage, don't get upset over the personage that emerges, who is probably not you but who people think is you since you are not naive, you have no need for Jean-Marie Le Pen to be silent since you are doing the work, and furthermore you gave a gift to Dieudonné and all that he represents, in the form of provocative statements...

Finkielkraut - The gift to Dieudonné is precisely to respond to his reproaches and to examine colonization and slavery as he asks us to, and in this way one cannot speak of Black slave trade except for the Atlantic slave trade, one cannot speak of a specific Western presence in the matter of abolitionism. When someone does speak of it, like Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, he is in the same boat as I am. But I'm being accused of something else and I would like to respond. I have spoken, or so people think who read that puzzle about a man who is not me, wantonly and disdainfully about a France that is Black-White-Arab. No! I said that the Marseillaise had been hissed at while France was displaying this fine and great face of a multi-ethnic society. That means that a multi-racial society can also be a multi-racist society. I must add that now France has become Black-Black-Black and that it is the laughing stock of Europe. On that point I want to elaborate.

Elkabach - Yes, yes but you take soccer as an example. I quote, "People keep telling us that the French team is admired because it is Black-White-Arab, but today it is Black-Black-Black which is making all of Europe laugh. It's true that you have only to apply a little affirmative action in the Blue team for the whites to play better, better, or as well as the blacks."

Finkielkraut - They would play less well.

Elkabach - All right, go on.

Finkielkraut - I'm getting to it, I'm getting to it. I merely said, what is this, why this French peculiarity, it's a consequence of colonialism, it's a post-colonial privilege and the laughter I spoke of, I'll tell you what it is. I spoke fearlessly, I thought about my father. My father introduced me to soccer in the fifties, he was born in Poland, he was deported from France, he was an immigrant and I am a second-generation immigrant...

Elkabach - Yes, yes, yes, wait a minute, you often say I was born a Pole in France, a second-generation immigrant. Don't you have a duty, Finkielkraut, to extend your hand and to speak differently!

Finkielkraut - I'm extending my hand to them, I'm extending my hand to them. I'm extending my hand, but first I want to explain. My father saw that the French team was composed of Kissovski, Copa, that is Copachevski, Pieantoni and he use to enjoy saying, "but are there any Frenchmen on this team?" He meant true ethnic Frenchmen, it was an innocent laughter, without meanness that I was trying to echo in this text. I was wrong, I am now stigmatized by this joke. (...) Of course, one must reach out and of course I think of myself as an immigrant also, and what benefits did I have? A tough school that taught me to speak French properly. Today, schools don't do that.

Elkabach - Alain Finkielkraut, Alain Finkielkraut, if next May 10 becomes a day for remembering slavery, will that shock you?

Finkielkraut - No.

Elkabach - Can we say that Africans fought with the French in two world wars and against Nazism: did they not love France? Don't the Africans who defend the French language love France? And would not the young French of African or Mahgrebin descent love France even more if we choose a day to honor their grand-parents?

Finkielkraut - Oh of course! But if it is just a pretext for identifying with the victims in order to evade all responsibility or to become an embittered entitlement-seeker, then no. But I think that France is not loved by anyone in France and that is also a big problem.

Elkabach - Let us not cultivate hatred. This morning, Alain Finkielkraut, what do you say to those Frenchmen of African and Mahgrebin descent who have been wounded and insulted by your remarks?

Finkielkraut - I say that I hate the personage created by this puzzle as much as they and that I would not shake his hand. I tell them that I do not think as he does.

Elkabach - But, they don't give a damn. Now, what do you say to them?

Finkielkraut - I say...

Elkabach - Do you say, " I withdraw a part of my remarks, if not my analysis...

Finkielkraut - Jean-Pierre Elkabach, I cannot do self-criticism of a construction in which I do not recognize myself. What I merely said was that when I speak of colonialism and of the desire of enlightened philosophers to educate the savages, I am not accountable for the term "savage." It is completely alien to me.

Elkabach - But Haaretz said it.

Finkielkraut - Yes...

Elkabach - Can I ask a question that is on everybody's mind? All of these unbelievable remarks, you made them to a foreign newspaper. You say that it is impossible—and I read it in English and in French, not in Hebrew—to speak freely in France, such is the rule of demagoguery. How can you say such a lie?

Finkielkraut - I did not say that one cannot express oneself in France.

Elkabach - It's not just that you are doing it now, but you are on all the TV shows, you write for The Figaro, in...

Finkielkraut - Look at what happens when keeping in mind the dangers of racist generalizations and proclaiming hatred for those who cultivate a French nationalistic point of view, look at what happens. I'm the victim of a lynching anyway.

Elkabach - Let's not over-state things...

Finkielkraut - I'm not sure I'm wrong

Elkabach - But who is responsible if you are first...Let's not over-state this lynching.

Finkielkraut - But you yourself brought it up

Elkabach - No, no, no. Who is responsible? Why did you repeat it a second time since your remarks shocked even those closest to you, and you know it.

Finkielkraut - My remarks only shocked those of my friends who read the puzzle; even if they did not agree those friends who read the article were not shocked. And I beg you to try and understand that I am, despite everything, the victim of a huge misunderstanding, but I must add that the problem in France today concerns a general spiritual void. And the best way to reach out to the rioters is to confront them with their responsibility for these acts; and to consecrate once again, before their eyes, the places of study that they pillaged; to do so for them because the language of the suburbs that they speak with such spitefulness is their worst handicap. We must win back these territories that belong to the Republic and the French language must win out over this other speech, otherwise they will never break out of the suburbs. And I believe that they must break out.

Elkabach - What will you do with regard to Haaretz and the remarks that you do not recognize and which have created this personage of whom you speak. Will you accuse them...

Finkielkraut - No.

Elkabach - ...Since you're going to have MRAP. who's already voicing disapproval, different associations and organizations, perhaps some lawsuits and uh, have you received any threats?

Finkielkraut - Listen, we shall see, they're already asking that I be excluded from France-Culture, see what's happening.

Elkabach - What is the moral and political lesson for Finkielkraut since you have an on-going agenda...

Finkielkraut - The political lesson is that I really must not grant any interviews, especially to newspapers that I do not control, whose translations of my writings I cannot control. The moral lesson is that one must continue, against all obstacles, to face reality because it is an outrageous consolation to take refuge in a compassionate attitude that closely resembles abandoning a person in danger.

Elkabach - OK, that's fine, but you have said no generalizations and yet in a way you are apologizing to those whom you have offended, yes or no?

Finkielkraut - I offer my apologies to those who have been offended by that person who is not me; I do not have within me any feeling of scorn or hatred towards any group whatsoever and I feel, by mission, in solidarity with new immigrants in France, notably those of the second and third generation.

Elkabach - Thank you, Alain Finkielkraut, the real one, heh, for having chosen Europe 1 to explain yourself.
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/004639.html

***

That is the brief review of the affair to date. Further we have a review from New Criterion, the second half of a work we published here Julien Benda. Before Finkielkraut became a celebrity in the press he was known as a thinker. Today he's a lightening rod.
***

In 1988, the young French philosopher and cultural critic Alain Finkielkraut took up where Benda left off, producing a brief but searching inventory of our contemporary cataclysms. Entitled La Défaite de la pensée [2] ("The 'Defeat' or 'Undoing' of Thought"), his essay is in part an updated taxonomy of intellectual betrayals. In this sense, the book is a trahison des clercs for the post-Communist world, a world dominated as much by the leveling imperatives of pop culture as by resurgent nationalism and ethnic separatism. Beginning with Benda, Finkielkraut catalogues several prominent strategies that contemporary intellectuals have employed to retreat from the universal. A frequent point of reference is the eighteenth-century German Romantic philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder. "From the beginning, or to be more precise, from the time of Plato until that of Voltaire," he writes, "human diversity had come before the tribunal of universal values; with Herder the eternal values were condemned by the court of diversity."

Finkielkraut focuses especially on Herder's definitively anti-Enlightenment idea of the Volksgeist or "national spirit." Quoting the French historian Ernest Renan, he describes the idea as "the most dangerous explosive of modern times." "Nothing," he writes, "can stop a state that has become prey to the Volksgeist." It is one of Finkielkraut's leitmotifs that today's multiculturalists are in many respects Herder's (generally unwitting) heirs. True, Herder's emphasis on history and language did much to temper the tendency to abstraction that one finds in some expressions of the Enlightenment. In his classic book on the philosophy of the Enlightenment, Ernst Cassirer even remarked that "Herder's achievement is one of the greatest intellectual triumphs of the philosophy of the Enlightenment." Nevertheless, the multiculturalists' obsession with "diversity" and ethnic origins is in many ways a contemporary redaction of Herder's elevation of racial particularism over the universalizing mandate of reason. Finkielkraut opposes this just as the mature Goethe once took issue with Herder's adoration of the Volksgeist. Finkielkraut concedes that we all "relate to a particular tradition" and are "shaped by our national identity." But, unlike the multiculturalists, he soberly insists that "this reality merit[s] some recognition, not idolatry." In Goethe's words, "A generalized tolerance will be best achieved if we leave undisturbed whatever it is which constitutes the special character of particular individuals and peoples, whilst at the same time we retain the conviction that the distinctive worth of anything with true merit lies in its belonging to all humanity."

The Undoing of Thought resembles The Treason of the Intellectuals stylistically as well as thematically. Both books are sometimes breathless congeries of sources and aperçus. And Finkielkraut, like Benda, tends to proceed more by collage than by demonstration. But he does not simply recapitulate Benda's argument. The geography of intellectual betrayal has changed dramatically in the last sixty-odd years. In 1927, intellectuals still had something definite to betray. In today's "postmodernist" world, the terrain is far mushier: the claims of tradition are much attenuated and betrayal is often only a matter of acquiescence. Finkielkraut's distinctive contribution is to have taken the measure of the cultural swamp that surrounds us, to have delineated the links joining the politicization of the intellect and its current forms of debasement.

In the broadest terms, The Undoing of Thought is a brief for the principles of the Enlightenment. Among other things, this means that it is a brief for the idea that mankind is united by a common humanity that transcends ethnic, racial, and sexual divisions. The humanizing "reason" that Enlightenment champions is a universal reason, sharable, in principle, by all. Such ideals have not fared well in the twentieth century: Herder's progeny have labored hard to discredit them. Granted, the belief that there is "Jewish thinking" or "Soviet science" or "Aryan art" is no longer as widespread as it once was. But the dispersal of these particular chimeras has provided no inoculation against kindred fabrications: "African knowledge," "female language," "Eurocentric science": these are among today's talismanic fetishes.

Then, too, one finds a stunning array of anti-Enlightenment phantasmagoria congregated under the banner of "anti-positivism." The idea that history is a "myth," that the truths of science are merely "fictions" dressed up in forbidding clothes, that reason and language are powerless to discover the truth—more, that truth itself is a deceitful ideological construct: these and other absurdities are now part of the standard intellectual diet of Western intellectuals. The Frankfurt School Marxists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno gave an exemplary but by no means uncharacteristic demonstration of one strain of this brand of anti-rational animus in the mid-1940s. Safely ensconced in Los Angeles, these refugees from Hitler's Reich published an influential essay on the concept of Enlightenment. Among much else, they assured readers that "Enlightenment is totalitarian." Never mind that at that very moment the Nazi war machine— representing what one might be forgiven for calling real totalitarianism —was busy liquidating millions of people in order to fulfill another set of anti-Enlightenment fantasies inspired by devotion to the Volksgeist.

The diatribe that Horkheimer and Adorno mounted against the concept of Enlightenment reminds us of an important peculiarity about the history of Enlightenment: namely, that it is a movement of thought that began as a reaction against tradition and has now emerged as one of tradition's most important safeguards. Historically, the Enlightenment arose as a deeply anti-clerical and, perforce, anti-traditional movement. Its goal, in Kant's famous phrase, was to release man from his "self-imposed immaturity." The chief enemy of Enlightenment was "superstition," an omnibus term that included all manner of religious, philosophical, and moral ideas. But as the sociologist Edward Shils has noted, although the Enlightenment was in important respects "antithetical to tradition" in its origins, its success was due in large part "to the fact that it was promulgated and pursued in a society in which substantive traditions were rather strong." "It was successful against its enemies," Shils notes in his book Tradition (1981),

because the enemies were strong enough to resist its complete victory over them. Living on a soil of substantive traditionality, the ideas of the Enlightenment advanced without undoing themselves. As long as respect for authority on the one side and self-confidence in those exercising authority on the other persisted, the Enlightenment's ideal of emancipation through the exercise of reason went forward. It did not ravage society as it would have done had society lost all legitimacy.

It is this mature form of Enlightenment, championing reason but respectful of tradition, that Finkielkraut holds up as an ideal.

What Finkielkraut calls "the undoing of thought" flows from the widespread disintegration of a faith. At the center of that faith is the assumption that the life of thought is "the higher life" and that culture—what the Germans call Bildung—is its end or goal. The process of disintegration has lately become an explicit attack on culture. This is not simply to say that there are many anti-intellectual elements in society: that has always been the case. "Non-thought," in Finkielkraut's phrase, has always co-existed with the life of the mind. The innovation of contemporary culture is to have obliterated the distinction between the two. "It is," he writes, "the first time in European history that non-thought has donned the same label and enjoyed the same status as thought itself, and the first time that those who, in the name of 'high culture,' dare to call this non-thought by its name, are dismissed as racists and reactionaries." The attack is perpetrated not from outside, by uncomprehending barbarians, but chiefly from inside, by a new class of barbarians, the self-made barbarians of the intelligentsia. This is the undoing of thought. This is the new "treason of the intellectuals."

There are many sides to this phenomenon. What Finkielkraut has given us is not a systematic dissection but a kind of pathologist's scrapbook. He reminds us, for example, that the multiculturalists' demand for "diversity" requires the eclipse of the individual in favor of the group. "Their most extraordinary feat," he observes, "is to have put forward as the ultimate individual liberty the unconditional primacy of the collective." Western rationalism and individualism are rejected in the name of a more "authentic" cult.

One example: Finkielkraut quotes a champion of multiculturalism who maintains that "to help immigrants means first of all respecting them for what they are, respecting whatever they aspire to in their national life, in their distinctive culture and in their attachment to their spiritual and religious roots." Would this, Finkielkraut asks, include "respecting" those religious codes which demanded that the barren woman be cast out and the adultress be punished with death? What about those cultures in which the testimony of one man counts for that of two women? In which female circumcision is practiced? In which slavery flourishes? In which mixed marriages are forbidden and polygamy encouraged? Multiculturalism, as Finkielkraut points out, requires that we respect such practices. To criticize them is to be dismissed as "racist" and "ethnocentric." In this secular age, "cultural identity" steps in where the transcendent once was: "Fanaticism is indefensible when it appeals to heaven, but beyond reproach when it is grounded in antiquity and cultural distinctiveness."

To a large extent, the abdication of reason demanded by multiculturalism has been the result of what we might call the subjection of culture to anthropology. Finkielkraut speaks in this context of a "cheerful confusion which raises everyday anthropological practices to the pinnacle of the human race's greatest achievements." This process began in the nineteenth century, but it has been greatly accelerated in our own age. One thinks, for example, of the tireless campaigning of that great anthropological leveler, Claude Lévi-Strauss. Lévi Strauss is assuredly a brilliant writer; but he has also been an extraordinarily baneful influence. Already in the early 1950s, when he was pontificating for UNESCO, he was urging all and sundry to "fight against ranking cultural differences hierarchically." In La Pensée sauvage (1961), he warned against the "false antinomy between logical and prelogical mentality" and was careful in his descriptions of natives to refer to "so-called primitive thought." "So-called" indeed.

In a famous article on race and history, Lévi Strauss maintained that the barbarian was not the opposite of the civilized man but "first of all the man who believes there is such a thing as barbarism." That of course is good to know. It helps one to appreciate Lévi Strauss's claim, in Tristes Tropiques (1955), that the "true purpose of civilization" is to produce "inertia." As one ruminates on the proposition that cultures should not be ranked hierarchically, it is also well to consider what Lévi Strauss coyly refers to as "the positive forms of cannibalism." For Lévi Strauss, cannibalism has been unfairly stigmatized in the "so-called" civilized West. In fact, he explains, cannibalism was "often observed with great discretion, the vital mouthful being made up of a small quantity of organic matter mixed, on occasion, with other forms of food." What, merely a "vital mouthful"? Not to worry! Only an ignoramus who believed that there were important distinctions, qualitative distinctions, between the barbarian and the civilized man could possibly think of objecting.

Of course, the attack on distinctions that Finkielkraut castigates takes place not only among cultures but also within a given culture. Here again, the anthropological imperative has played a major role. "Under the equalizing eye of social science," he writes,

hierarchies are abolished, and all the criteria of taste are exposed as arbitrary. From now on no rigid division separates masterpieces from run-of-the-mill works. The same fundamental structure, the same general and elemental traits are common to the "great" novels (whose excellence will henceforth be demystified by the accompanying quotation marks) and plebian types of narrative activity.

For confirmation of this, one need only glance at the pronouncements of our critics. Whether working in the academy or other cultural institutions, they bring us the same news: there is "no such thing" as intrinsic merit; "quality" is only an ideological construction; aesthetic value is a distillation of social power; etc., etc.

In describing this process of leveling, Finkielkraut distinguishes between those who wish to obliterate distinctions in the name of politics and those who do so out of a kind of narcissism. The multiculturalists wave the standard of radical politics and say (in the words of a nineteenth-century Russian populist slogan that Finkielkraut quotes): "A pair of boots is worth more than Shakespeare." Those whom Finkielkraut calls "postmodernists," waving the standard of radical chic, declare that Shakespeare is no better than the latest fashion—no better, say, than the newest item offered by Calvin Klein. The litany that Finkielkraut recites is familiar:

A comic which combines exciting intrigue and some pretty pictures is just as good as a Nabokov novel. What little Lolitas read is as good as Lolita. An effective publicity slogan counts for as much as a poem by Apollinaire or Francis Ponge. … The footballer and the choreographer, the painter and the couturier, the writer and the ad-man, the musician and the rock-and-roller, are all the same: creators. We must scrap the prejudice which restricts that title to certain people and regards others as sub-cultural.

The upshot is not only that Shakespeare is downgraded, but also that the bootmaker is elevated. "It is not just that high culture must be demystified; sport, fashion and leisure now lay claim to high cultural status." A grotesque fantasy? Anyone who thinks so should take a moment to recall the major exhibition called "High & Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture" that the Museum of Modern Art mounted a few years ago: it might have been called "Krazy Kat Meets Picasso." Few events can have so consummately summed up the corrosive trivialization of culture now perpetrated by those entrusted with preserving it. Among other things, that exhibition demonstrated the extent to which the apotheosis of popular culture undermines the very possibility of appreciating high art on its own terms. When the distinction between culture and entertainment is obliterated, high art is orphaned, exiled from the only context in which its distinctive meaning can manifest itself: Picasso becomes a kind of cartoon. This, more than any elitism or obscurity, is the real threat to culture today. As Hannah Arendt once observed, "there are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say."

And this brings us to the question of freedom. Finkielkraut notes that the rhetoric of postmodernism is in some ways similar to the rhetoric of Enlightenment. Both look forward to releasing man from his "self-imposed immaturity." But there is this difference: Enlightenment looks to culture as a repository of values that transcend the self, postmodernism looks to the fleeting desires of the isolated self as the only legitimate source of value. Questions of "lifestyle" (ominous neologism!) come to occupy the place once inhabited by moral convictions and intellectual principles. For the postmodernist, then, "culture is no longer seen as a means of emancipation, but as one of the élitist obstacles to this." The postmodernist regards the products of culture as valuable only to the extent that they are sources of amusement or distraction. In order to realize the freedom that postmodernism promises—freedom understood as the emancipation from values that transcend the self—culture must be transformed into a field of arbitrary "options." "The post-modern individual," Finkielkraut writes, "is a free and easy bundle of fleeting and contingent appetites. He has forgotten that liberty involves more than the ability to change one's chains, and that culture itself is more than a satiated whim."

What Finkielkraut has understood with admirable clarity is that modern attacks on elitism represent not the extension but the destruction of culture. "Democracy," he writes, "once implied access to culture for everybody. From now on it is going to mean everyone's right to the culture of his choice." This may sound marvelous—it is after all the slogan one hears shouted in academic and cultural institutions across the country—but the result is precisely the opposite of what was intended. "'All cultures are equally legitimate and everything is cultural,' is the common cry of affluent society's spoiled children and of the detractors of the West." The irony, alas, is that by removing standards and declaring that "anything goes," one does not get more culture, one gets more and more debased imitations of culture. This fraud is the dirty secret that our cultural commissars refuse to acknowledge.

There is another, perhaps even darker, result of the undoing of thought. The disintegration of faith in reason and common humanity leads not only to a destruction of standards, but also involves a crisis of courage. "A careless indifference to grand causes," Finkielkraut warns, "has its counterpart in abdication in the face of force." As the impassioned proponents of "diversity" meet the postmodern apostles of acquiescence, fanaticism mixes with apathy to challenge the commitment required to preserve freedom. Communism may have been effectively discredited. But "what is dying along with it … is not the totalitarian cast of mind, but the idea of a world common to all men." Julien Benda took his epigraph for La Trahison des clercs from the nineteenth-century French philosopher Charles Renouvier: Le monde souffre du manque de foi en une vérité transcendante: "The world suffers from lack of faith in a transcendent truth." Without some such faith, we are powerless against the depredations of intellectuals who have embraced the nihilism of Callicles as their truth.
http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/11/dec92/treason.htm
***

The reference to Callicles shows that this problem of moral relativism isn't new: it goes back to Plato's time and beyond. The question is what is to be done in the West today? How are we to combat this evil of moralism-without-morality? If philosophers are silenced by the Left dhimmi fascsits and the Muslims are raised to ruin, then what is left for us?

People are social animals, and they do as others do, right or wrong, for the sake of social peace and good security, even when such security is fatal. Yes, the majority of concentration camp inmates from Poland to Siberia simply conformed to their own impending extermination, what Primo Levi calls the drowning. Peasants in Rwanda died passively at the hands of their fellows. Most people are content to die rather than make a scene. And when the public intellectuals, those who set the agenda of public opinion, are monsters, such as most of ours are today, then we see the crimes of Auschwitz and Rwanda and we shrug. We look at these crimes as ethical connundrums, disturbing but separate from our lives, perhaps meaningful in another's world-view, even understandable if we knew the subtext of the culture. We go along with evil because we are social animals. We believe what people believe. We believe what most people believe publically. We accept public opinion. When public opinion changes, we follow it and believe the next thing, changing our public pose to conform to its requirements. Our opinions come from our public intellectuals. Today, those people are moral idiots. We are a morally stupid culture. This is not new. This will remain with us likely for the duration. We must fight it regardless. We must change the mood of the public till it demands not ethics but morality.

There is no coherent question in "Yes, but what is morality, yours being somehow better than mine?" There is universal morality, not mine or yours, and it is the opinion that there is such that is the battle we must win, not the definition of morality as such. Finkielkraut the man as he is is one man. Finkielkraut the imaginary whipping boy of public opion is something else altogether. We must relearn the difference as a public. For those who cannot they must be postioned in such a way that they will simply strike a moral pose from passivity and conformity. Too bad for the ethicists. We win or we lose. Some things do not change.

Bobos and Black, Arab, Muslim Scum

The West, particularly France, is in a state of self-induced nausea in the Sartrean sense. Between the sentimentalising of culture at its lowest possible levels and the corruption of intellectual standards at the highest and with a sludge-making of the middle the European populations and many of the West generally are sick of themselves and of Modernity. Scum people rise to the top of the social pond by virtue of the mass of middle-class people foolishly and outrageously promoting the interests of those who would harm all. This incredible stupidity on the part of the Western masses destroys those it's perhaps meant to help, i.e. the scum people, and then destroys the rest of society by letting the scum seep into the fabric of life over-all.

We can go on, but let's not.

The following pieces give weight and definition to the term philobarbarism, and Left dhimmi fascism, as if anything further were needed.


Alain Finkielkraut. "When an Arab torches a school, it's rebellion. When a white guy does it, it's fascism. I'm 'color blind.' Evil is evil, no matter what color it is. And this evil, for the Jew that I am, is completely intolerable." (Hannah/Opale)

What sort of Frenchmen are they?

By Dror Mishani and Aurelia Smotriez

PARIS - The first thing the French-Jewish philosopher Alain Finkielkraut said to us when we met one evening at Paris' elegant Le Rostand cafe, where the interior is decorated with Oriental-style pictures and the terrace faces the Luxembourg Gardens, was "I heard that even Haaretz published an article identifying with the riots."

This remark, uttered with some vehemence, pretty much sums up the feelings of Finkielkraut - one of the most prominent philosophers in France in the past 30 years - ever since the violent riots began on October 27 in the impoverished neighborhoods that surround Paris and spread with surprising speed to similar suburbs throughout the country. He has been following the events through the media, keeping up with all the news reports and commentary, and has been appalled at every article that shows understanding for or identification with "the rebels" (and in the French press, there are plenty). He has a lot to say, but it appears that France isn't ready to listen - that his France has already surrendered to a blinding, "false discourse" that conceals the stark truth of its situation. The things he is saying to us in the course of our conversation, he repeatedly emphasizes, are not things he can say in France anymore. It's impossible, perhaps even dangerous, to say these things in France now.

Indeed, in the lively intellectual debate that has been taking place on the pages of the French newspapers ever since the rioting started, a debate in which France's most illustrious minds are taking part, Finkielkraut's is a deviant, even very deviant, voice. Primarily because it is not emanating from the throat of a member of Jean Marie Le Pen's National Front, but from that of a philosopher formerly considered to be one of the most eminent spokesmen of the French left - one of the generation of philosophers who emerged at the time of the May 1968 student revolt.

In the French press, the riots in the suburbs are perceived mainly as an economic problem, as a violent reaction to severe economic hardship and discrimination. In Israel, by comparison, there is sometimes a tendency to view them as violence whose origins are religious or at least ethnic - that is, to see them as part of an Islamic struggle. Where would you situate yourself in respect to these positions?

Finkielkraut: "In France, they would like very much to reduce these riots to their social dimension, to see them as a revolt of youths from the suburbs against their situation, against the discriminationunemployment. The problem is that most of these youths are blacks or Arabs, with a Muslim identity. Look, in France there are also other immigrants whose situation is difficult - Chinese, Vietnamese, Portuguese - and they're not taking part in the riots. Therefore, it is clear that this is a revolt with an ethno-religious character. they suffer from, against the

"What is its origin? Is this the response of the Arabs and blacks to the racism of which they are victims? I don't believe so, because this violence had very troubling precursors, which cannot be reduced to an unalloyed reaction to French racism.

"Let's take, for example, the incidents at the soccer match between France and Algeria that was held a few years ago. The match took place in Paris, at the Stade de France. People say the French national team is admired by all because it is black-blanc-beur ["black-white-Arab" - a reference to the colors on France's tricolor flag and a symbol of the multiculturalism of French society - D.M.]. Actually, the national team today is black-black-black, which arouses ridicule throughout Europe. If you point this out in France, they'll put you in jail, but it's interesting nevertheless that the French national soccer team is composed almost exclusively of black players.

"Anyway, this team is perceived as a symbol of an open, multiethnic society and so on. The crowd in the stadium, young people of Algerian descent, booed this team throughout the whole game! They also booed during the playing of the national anthem, the `Marseillaise,' and the match was halted when the youths broke onto the field with Algerian flags.

"And then there are the lyrics of the rap songs. Very troubling lyrics. A real call to revolt. There's one called Dr. R., I think, who sings: `I piss on France, I piss on De Gaulle' and so on. These are very violent declarations of hatred for France. All of this hatred and violence is now coming out in the riots. To see them as a response to French racism is to be blind to a broader hatred: the hatred for the West, which is deemed guilty of all crimes. France is being exposed to this now."

In other words, as you see it, the riots aren't directed at France, but at the entire West?

"No, they are directed against France as a former colonial power, against France as a European country. Against France, with its Christian or Judeo-Christian tradition."

`Anti-republican pogrom'

Alain Finkielkraut, 56, has come a long way from the events of May 1968 to the riots of October 2005. A graduate of one of the chief breeding grounds for French intellectuals, the Ecole Normal Superieure, in the early 1970s, Finkielkraut was identified with a group known as "the new philosophers" (Bernard Henri-Levy, Andre Glucksman, Pascal Bruckner and others) - young philosophers, many of them Jewish, who made a critical break with the Marxist ideology of May 1968 and with the French Communist Party, and denounced its impact on French culture and society.

In 1987, he published his book "The Defeat of the Mind," in which he outlined his opposition to post- modernist philosophy, with its erasure of the boundaries between high and low culture and its cultural relativism. And thus he began to earn a name as a "conservative" philosopher and scathing critic of the multicultural and post-colonial intellectual currents, as someone who preached a return to France's republican values. Finkielkraut was one of the staunchest defenders of the controversial law prohibiting head-coverings in schools, which has roiled France in recent years.

Over time, he also became a symbol of the "involved intellectual," as exemplified by the postwar Jean-Paul Sartre - a philosopher who doesn't abstain from participation in political life, but instead writes in the newspapers, gives interviews and devotes himself to humanitarian causes such as halting the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia or the slaughter in Rwanda. The danger he wishes to stand up to today, in light of the riots, is the growing hatred for the West and its penetration into the French education system.

Do you think that the source of the hatred for the West among the French who are taking part in the riots lies in religion, in Islam?

"We need to be clear on this. This is a very difficult question and we must strive to maintain the language of truth. We tend to fear the language of truth, for `noble' reasons. We prefer to say the `youths' instead of `blacks' or `Arabs.' But the truth cannot be sacrificed, no matter how noble the reasons. And, of course, we also must avoid generalizations: This isn't about blacks and Arabs as a whole, but about some blacks and Arabs. And, of course, religion - not as religion, but as an anchor of identity, if you will - plays a part. Religion as it appears on the Internet, on the Arab television stations, serves as an anchor of identity for some of these youths.

"Unlike others, I have not spoken about an `intifada' of the suburbs, and I don't think this lexicon ought to be used. But I have found that they are also sending the youngest people to the front lines of the struggle. You've seen this in Israel - they send the youngest ones to the front because it's impossible to put them in jail when they're arrested. But still, here there are no bombings and we're in a different stage: I think it's the stage of the anti-republican pogrom. There are people in France who hate France as a republic."

But why? For what reason?

"Why have parts of the Muslim-Arab world declared war on the West? The republic is the French version of Europe. They, and those who justify them, say that it derives from the colonial breakdown. Okay, but one mustn't forget that the integration of the Arab workers in France during the time of colonial rule was much easier. In other words, this is belated hatred. Retrospective hatred.

"We are witness to an Islamic radicalization that must be explained in its entirety before we get to the French case, to a culture that, instead of dealing with its problems, searches for an external guilty party. It's easier to find an external guilty party. It's tempting to tell yourself that in France you're neglected, and to say, `Gimme, gimme.' It hasn't worked like that for anyone. It can't work."

Post-colonial mindset

But what appears to disturb Finkielkraut even more than this "hatred for the West," is what he sees as its internalization in the French education system, and the identification with it by French intellectuals. In his view, this identification and internalization - which are expressed in shows of understanding for the sources of the violence and in the post-colonial mindset that is permeating the education system - are threatening not only France as a whole, but the country's Jews, too, because they are creating an infrastructure for the new anti-Semitism.

"In the United States, too, we're witnessing an Islamization of the blacks. It was Louis Farrakhan, in America, who asserted for the first time that the Jews played a central role in creating slavery. And the main spokesman for this theology in France today is Dieudonne [a black stand-up artist, who caused an uproar with his anti-Semitic statements - D.M.]. Today he is the true patron of anti-Semitism in France, and not Le Pen's National Front.

"But in France, instead of fighting his kind of talk, they're actually doing what he asks: changing the teaching of colonial history and the history of slavery in the schools. Now they teach colonial history as an exclusively negative history. We don't teach anymore that the colonial project also sought to educate, to bring civilization to the savages. They only talk about it as an attempt at exploitation, domination and plunder.

"But what does Dieudonne really want? He wants a `Holocaust' for Arabs and blacks, too. But if you want to put the Holocaust and slavery on the same plane, then you have to lie. Because [slavery] wasn't a Holocaust. And [the Holocaust] wasn't `a crime against humanity,' because it wasn't just a crime. It was something ambivalent. The same is true of slavery. It began long before the West. In fact, what sets the West apart when it comes to slavery is that it was the one to eliminate it. The elimination of slavery is a European and American thing. But this truth about slavery cannot be taught in schools.

"That's why these events sadden me so greatly; not so much because they happened. After all, you'd have to be deaf and blind not to see that they would happen. But because of the interpretations that have accompanied them. These dealt a decisive blow to the France I loved. And I've always said that life will become impossible for Jews in France when Francophobia triumphs. And that's what will happen. The Jews understand what I've said just now. Suddenly, they look around, and they see all the `bobo' (French slang for bourgeois-bohemians) singing songs of praise to the new `wretched of the earth' [Finkielkraut is alluding here to the book by the Martinique-born, anti-colonialist philosopher Franz Fanon - D.M.] and asking themselves: What is this country? What's happened to it?"

Since you view this as an Islamic assault, how do you explain the fact that Jews have not been attacked in the recent events?

"First of all, they say that one synagogue has been attacked. But I think that what we've experienced is an anti-republican pogrom. They tell us that these neighborhoods are neglected and the people are in distress. What connection is there between poverty and despair, and wreaking destruction and setting fire to schools? I don't think any Jew would ever do a thing like this."

Horrifying acts

Finkielkraut continues: "What unites the Jews - the secular, the religious, the Peace Now crowd, the Greater Land of Israel crowd - is one word: shul (synagogue; used here as religious study hall). That's what holds us all together as Jews. And I have been just horrified by these acts, which kept repeating themselves, and horrified even more by the understanding with which they were received in France. These people were treated like rebels, like revolutionaries. This is the worst thing that could happen to my country. And I'm very miserable because of it. Why? Because the only way to overcome it is to make them feel ashamed. Shame is the starting point of ethics. But instead of making them feel ashamed, we gave them legitimacy. They're `interesting.' They're `the wretched of the earth.'

"Imagine for a moment that they were whites, like in Rostock in Germany. Right away, everyone would have said: `Fascism won't be tolerated.' When an Arab torches a school, it's rebellion. When a white guy does it, it's fascism. I'm `color blind.' Evil is evil, no matter what color it is. And this evil, for the Jew that I am, is completely intolerable.

"Moreover, there's a contradiction here. Because if these suburbs were truly in a state of total neglect, there wouldn't be any gymnasiums to torch, there wouldn't be schools and buses. If there are gymnasiums and schools and buses, it's because someone made an effort. Maybe not enough of one, but an effort."

Still, the unemployment rate in the suburbs is very extreme: Almost 40 percent of young people aged 15-25 have no chance of finding a job.

"Let's return to the shul for a moment. When parents send you to school, is it in order for you to find a job? I was sent to school in order to learn. Culture and education have a justification per se. You go to school to learn. That is the purpose of school. And these people who are destroying schools - what are they really saying? Their message is not a cry for help or a demand for more schools or better schools. It's a desire to eliminate the intermediaries that stand between them and their objects of desire. And what are their objects of desire? Simple: money, designer labels, sometimes girls. And this is something for which our society surely bears responsibility. Because they want everything immediately, and what they want is only the consumer-society ideal. It's what they see on television."

Declaration of war

Finkielkraut, as his name indicates, is himself the child of an immigrant family: His parents came to France from Poland; their parents perished at Auschwitz. In recent years, his Judaism has become a central theme in his writing, too, especially since the start of the second intifada and the rise in anti-Semitism in France. He is one of the leaders of the struggle against anti-Semitism in France, and also one of the most prominent supporters of Israel and its policies, in the face of Israel's many critics in France.

His standing as a key spokesperson within the Jewish community in France has grown, particularly since he began hosting a weekly talk show on the JCR Jewish radio station, one of four Jewish stations in the country. On this program, Finkielkraut discusses current events; for the past two weeks, the riots in the suburbs were naturally the main topic. Because of his standing as one of the most widely heard Jewish intellectuals within France's Jewish community, his perspective on the events will certainly have an influence on the way in which they are perceived and understood among French Jewry - and perhaps also on the future of the relationship between the Jewish and Muslim communities. But this Jewish philosopher and tenacious fighter of anti-Semitism is using these latest events to declare war - on the "war on racism."

"I was born in Paris, but I'm the son of Polish immigrants. My father was deported from France. His parents were deported and murdered in Auschwitz. My father returned from Auschwitz to France. This country deserves our hatred: What it did to my parents was much more violent than what it did to Africans. What did it do to Africans? It did only good. It put my father in hell for five years. And I was never brought up to hate. And today, this hatred that the blacks have is even greater than that of the Arabs."

But do you, of all people, who fight against anti-Jewish racism, maintain that the discrimination and racism these youths are talking about doesn't actually exist?

"Of course discrimination exists. And certainly there are French racists. French people who don't like Arabs and blacks. And they'll like them even less now, when they know how much they're hated by them. So this discrimination will only increase, in terms of housing and work, too.

"But imagine that you're running a restaurant, and you're anti-racist, and you think that all people are equal, and you're also Jewish. In other words, talking about inequality between the races is a problem for you. And let's say that a young man from the suburbs comes in who wants to be a waiter. He talks the talk of the suburbs. You won't hire him for the job. It's very simple. You won't hire him because it's impossible. He has to represent you and that requires discipline and manners, and a certain way of speaking. And I can tell you that French whites who are imitating the code of behavior of the suburbs - and there is such a thing - will run into the same exact problem. The only way to fight discrimination is to restore the requirements, the educational seriousness. This is the only way. But you're not allowed to say that, either. I can't. It's common sense, but they prefer to propound the myth of `French racism.' It's not right.

"We live today in an environment of a `perpetual war on racism' and the nature of this anti-racism also needs to be examined. Earlier, I heard someone on the radio who was opposed to Interior Minister Sarkozy's decision to expel anyone who doesn't have French citizenship and takes part in the riots and is arrested. And what did he say? That this was `ethnic cleansing.' During the war in Yugoslavia I fought against the ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Bosnia. Not a single French Muslim organization stood by our side. They bestirred themselves solely to support the Palestinians. And to talk about `ethnic cleansing' now? There was a single person killed in the riots. Actually, there were two [more], but it was an accident. They weren't being chased, but they fled to an electrical transformer even though the warning signs on it were huge.

"But I think that the lofty idea of `the war on racism' is gradually turning into a hideously false ideology. And this anti-racism will be for the 21st century what communism was for the 20th century. A source of violence. Today, Jews are attacked in the name of anti-racist discourse: the separation fence, `Zionism is racism.'

"It's the same thing in France. One must be wary of the `anti-racist' ideology. Of course, there is a problem of discrimination. There's a xenophobic reflex, that's true, but the portrayal of events as a response to French racism is totally false. Totally false."

And what do you think about the steps the French government has taken to quell the violence? The state of emergency, the curfew?

"This is so normal. What we have experienced is terrible. You have to understand that the ones who have the least power in a society are the authorities, the rulers. Yes, they are responsible for maintaining order. And this is important because without them, some sort of self-defense would be organized and people would shoot. So they're maintaining order, and doing it with extraordinary caution. They should be saluted.

"In May 1968 there was a totally innocent movement compared to the one we're seeing now, and there was violence on the part of the police. Here they're tossing Molotov cocktails, firing live bullets. And there hasn't been a single incident of police violence. [Since this interview, several police officers have been arrested on suspicion of using violence - D.M.] There's no precedent for this. How to impose order? By using `common sense' methods, which by the way, according to a poll by La Parisienne newspaper, 73 percent of the French support.

"But apparently it's already too late to make them feel ashamed, since on the radio, on television and in the newspapers, or in most of them, they're holding a prettifying mirror up to the rioters. They're `interesting' people, they're nurturing their suffering and they understand their despair. In addition, there's the great perversion of the spectacle: They're burning cars in order to see it on television. It makes them feel `important' - that they live in an `important neighborhood.' The pursuit of this spectacle ought to be analyzed. It's creating totally perverted effects. And the perversion of the spectacle is accompanied by totally perverted analyses."

Failed models

Since the start of the riots in the suburbs, the press throughout Europe has been addressing the issue of multiculturalism, its possibilities and its costs. Finkielkraut expressed his opinion on this question, which is also occupying the minds of many writers in Israel, many years ago when he came to the defense of the republican model and its symbol, the republican school, against the intellectual currents that sought to open French society and its education system to the cultural variety brought in by the immigrants. While many intellectuals perceive the latest events as deriving from insufficient openness to the "other," Finkielkraut actually sees them as proof that cultural openness is doomed to end in disaster.

"They're saying that the republican model has collapsed in these riots. But the multicultural model isn't in any better shape. Not in Holland or in England. In Bradford and Birmingham there were riots with an ethnic background, too. And, secondly, the republican school, the symbol of the republican model, hasn't existed for a long time already. I know the republican school; I studied in it. It was an institution with strict demands, a bleak, unpleasant place that built high walls to keep out the noise from outside. Thirty years of foolish reforms have altered our landscape. The republican school has been replaced by an `educational community' that is horizontal rather than vertical. The curricula have been made easier, the noise from outside has come in, society has come inside the school.

"This means that what we're seeing today is actually the failure of the `nice' post-republican model. But the problem with this model is that it is fueled by its own failures: Every fiasco is a reason to become even more extreme. The school will become even `nicer.' When really, given what we're seeing, greater strictness and more exacting standards are the minimum that we need to ask for. If not, before long we'll have `courses in crime.'

"This is an evolution that characterizes democracy. Democracy, as a process, and Tocqueville showed this, does not abide selfishness. Within democracy, it's hard to tolerate non-democratic spaces. Everything has to be done democratically in a democracy, but school cannot be this way. It just can't. The asymmetry is glaring: between he who knows and he who doesn't know, between he who brings a world with him and he who is new in this world.

"The democratic process delegitimizes this asymmetry. It's a general process in the Western world, but in France it takes a more pathetic form, because one of the things that characterizes France is its strict education. France was built around its schools."

Many of the youths say the problem is that they don't feel French, that France doesn't really regard them as French.

"The problem is that they need to regard themselves as French. If the immigrants say `the French' when they're referring to the whites, then we're lost. If their identity is located somewhere else and they're only in France for utilitarian reasons, then we're lost. I have to admit that the Jews are also starting to use this phrase. I hear them saying `the French' and I can't stand it. I say to them, `If for you France is a utilitarian matter, but your identity is Judaism, then be honest with yourselves: You have Israel.' This is really a bigger problem: We're living in a post-national society in which for everyone the state is just utilitarian, a big insurance company. This is an extremely serious development.

"But if they have a French identity card, then they're French. And if not, they have the right to go. They say, `I'm not French. I live in France and I'm also in a bad economic state.' No one's holding them here. And this is precisely where the lie begins. Because if it were the neglect and poverty, then they would go somewhere else. But they know very well that anywhere else, and especially in the countries from whence they came, their situation would be worse, as far as rights and opportunities go."

But the problem today is the integration into French society of young men and women who are from the third generation. This isn't a wave of new immigrants. They were born in France. They have nowhere to go.

"This feeling, that they are not French, isn't something they get from school. In France, as you perhaps know, even children who are in the country illegally are still registered for school. There's something surprising, something paradoxical, here: The school could call the police, since the child is in France illegally. Yet the illegality isn't taken into account by the school. So there are schools and computers everywhere, too. But then the moment comes when an effort must be made. And the people that are fomenting the riots aren't prepared to make this effort. Ever.

"Take the language, for example. You say they are third generation. So why do they speak French the way they do? It's butchered French - the accent, the words, the syntax. Is it the school's fault? The teachers' fault?"

Since the Arabs and blacks apparently have no intention of leaving France, how do you suggest that the problem be dealt with?

"This problem is the problem of all the countries of Europe. In Holland, they've been confronting it since the murder of Theo van Gogh. The question isn't what is the best model of integration, but just what sort of integration can be achieved with people who hate you."

And what will happen in France?

"I don't know. I'm despairing. Because of the riots and because of their accompaniment by the media. The riots will subside, but what does this mean? There won't be a return to quiet. It will be a return to regular violence. So they'll stop because there is a curfew now, and the foreigners are afraid and the drug dealers also want the usual order restored. But they'll gain support and encouragement for their anti-republican violence from the repulsive discourse of self-criticism over their slavery and colonization. So that's it: There won't be a return to quiet, but a return to routine violence."

So your worldview doesn't stand a chance anymore?

"No, I've lost. As far as anything relating to the struggle over school is concerned, I've lost. It's interesting, because when I speak the way I'm speaking now, a lot of people agree with me. Very many. But there's something in France - a kind of denial whose origin lies in the bobo, in the sociologists and social workers - and no one dares say anything else. This struggle is lost. I've been left behind."
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/646938.html
***


That interview is causing trouble. Please continue:


Sarkozy backs Finkielkraut over Muslim riot comments

By Daniel Ben Simon

The storm aroused by French-Jewish philosopher Alain Finkielkraut refuses to subside. On Sunday, French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy threw his full weight behind the beleaguered philosopher, who has been forced to remain cloistered at home
following the sharp reactions to an interview he gave to Haaretz.


Speaking to reporters on Sunday, Sarkozy said: "Monsieur Finkielkraut is an intellectual who brings honor and pride to French wisdom ... If there is so much criticism of him, it might be because he says things that are correct."

The minister was asked about Finkielkraut because several reporters saw similarities between the conservative views the philosopher expressed about the recent riots in France and the tough stance the minister took in dealing with the agitators who took to the street night after night.

The liberal weekly Nouvel Observateur devoted its cover story to what it called "the new neo-reactionaries." Alongside Finkielkraut's picture on the cover was a title stating that Finkielkraut and his colleagues had worsened the social chasms in the country.

Others mentioned as supporters of similar ideas were Sarkozy, philosopher Andre Gluksman and historian Pierre-Andre Taguieff (who coined the phrase Judeophobia). They are described as belonging to a right-wing wave that is now prominent in France.
Sarkozy appeared ready to take on the media. He had been following the attacks on Finkielkraut for two weeks and was waiting for a suitable opportunity.

"What do you want of him?" he asked the media representatives. "M. Finkielkraut does not consider himself obliged to follow the monolithic thinking of many intellectuals, which led to Le Pen winning 24 percent in the elections. The philosophers who frequent the salons and live between Cafe de Flor and Boulevard St. Germain suddenly find that France no longer bears a resemblance to them."

This is an unprecedented attack on the left wing by the very person [Sarkosy] who is seen by many French as being the only one capable of preventing the disintegration of the republic.

The cafes and bistros of Boulevard St. Germain and the narrow alleyways of St. Germain-des-Pres were traditionally frequented by members of the left, led by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who would take their morning coffee and read the newspapers there. When the socialists came to power under Francois Mitterand in 1981, the celebrations there were legendary. But of late, the area has lost some of its left-wing color.


While Sarkozy has won popular support for his stronghanded policies, he has been criticized in the media for his autocratic manner and his lack of sympathy for the social causes behind the rioters' behavior. Finkielkraut appeared to be mouthing his words.

Finkielkraut's apologies printed in Le Monde, a few days after the Haaretz interview , disappointed many. His supporters felt he had retracted his words for fear of a media boycott, as had happened to others. As a result of his apologies, Finkielkraut was able to maintain his radio programs on the prestigious France Culture channel and the Jewish radio channel and even increased his audience.

The weekly Le Point also devoted a four-page report to the Finkielkraut affair this week. While the interviewees stressed his intellectual acumen, they almost all felt Finkielkraut had slipped up by mentioning the ethnic identity of the rioters - he had described them as blacks, Arabs and Muslims.

Nevertheless, to date, all the organizations and bodies that threatened to sue him for racism have changed their minds.

The trials of the rioters, however, will begin shortly. There are 785 detainees, of whom 83 are illegal residents. Seven will be deported in the next few days.

"They are on their way out," Sarkozy told the reporters. http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/654370.html