Reason, morality or even the truth are of little importance when it comes to standing up, ideology slung over your shoulder and gaze fixed on the singing tomorrows – what does the corpses sown along the way matter, what does collateral damage. Sabina, a Czech exiled in Paris, a magnificent metic character in The Unbearable Lightness of Being of Milan Kundera, does not support the demonstrations of support for the Czech political opponents: she does not succeed in differentiating them from the Stalinist demonstrations of May Day in Prague. The mass of undifferentiated faces straining towards the same goal, fists raised with the same conviction, disgust her with the same force. Sabina would have hated both neo-feminists and left-wing radicals. She would have laughed with Frédéric Beigbeder and made big round eyes in front of Jean-Marc Rouillan (the co-founder of Direct Action), before turning her back on him in dismay. These are the two characters in my column.
Frédéric Beigbeder has a sense of humor. Worse: he exercises his humor despite the times. By committing a new book, Confession of a Slightly Overwhelmed Heterosexual, he dared, the sagouin, to have fun with the demonetization of the heterosexual white man in the name of his many victims – women, all women, the colonized man, the climate, nature and goldfish… – returning the attack: “I did not choose to be a man, nor to be white, nor to desire women, nor to be born in 1965. Criticizing the straight white male over 50, it is to be racist four times over. I’m fed up that the heterosexual is everywhere treated as an asshole, a redneck, a pig, a nag.” Amen. But beware, the Beigbeder is not crazy: he has taken all the usual precautions by lining up like a good student all the figures that say violence against women, etc., which he repeats ad nauseam during interviews thinking to guard against the accusations of neo-feminists… Do you think!
Worthy heirs to the morality mothers of the 19th century, they raise their eyes to the sky and explain to him like a child that, despite these pledges, these figures and these declarations, he cannot help being the patriarchal asshole he is in the background. Maybe Frédéric Beigbeder is an asshole, maybe he’s not even sympathetic, but he doesn’t glorify rape, he doesn’t deny women their rights, any more than he wants establish an unequal society where heterosexuals dominate others through laws or scaffolds. This is why it is crazy that he had to go under police protection, on April 21, to a meeting at the Mollat bookstore in Bordeaux, after the storefront of the bookstore was smeared with outrageous and even threatening insults (” be afraid of our murderous urges”), and that he had to sneak out to avoid the incident. I was hoping, after the uprising of the Iranians against a patriarchal state for real or before the demonstration of the abject patriarchy in Afghanistan, a readjustment of the discourse of our neo-feminists, who benefit from the full extent of the rule of law , choose their life and their job without risking anything. These excesses of spoiled (and often: bourgeois) children have always left me speechless.
On the other hand, no attack, no demonstration, no insulting inscription came to taint the conference that Jean-Marc Rouillan gave at the University of Bordeaux less than a month before (March 28). Figure of the terrorist group Direct Action, sentenced to life imprisonment for the murders of René Audran and Georges Besse, Rouillan even offered himself the luxury of showing no regrets, and pursued the Republic and peace with his rage – evidenced by his defense of Islamist terrorists: “I found them very brave, they fought bravely, they fight in the streets of Paris, they know that there are two or three thousand cops around them. […] The Kouachi brothers, when they were in the printing press, they fought until their last bullet.” Find courage in killers who shoot an unarmed crowd on the terrace, in a concert hall, a supermarket or the editorial office of a newspaper, demonstrates to what extent Rouillan deserves a place in prison. But the Bordeaux students preferred to applaud him by inviting him to express himself on the dictatorship of the State in France and other rantings that only a true democracy can support.
Abnousse Shalmani writer and journalist engaged against the obsession with identity.