“A desire for Hitler floats on the ruins of the 21st century”, by Marc Weitzmann – L’Express

He is not the last either, moreover, judging by the update press release published on November 1 by the host of the show where Meurice officiates, Charline Vanhoenacker. Excerpt: “If you felt hurt, I am deeply sorry. I understand that the reception of the message may seem violent, because when the satire evokes a war, the magnifying reflection of the caricature is a catharsis. Any interpretation broadened to the Jewish community in general is a matter of interpretation.” Anyone who writes this way should have the modesty, if not the lucidity, to refrain from any public opinion about anything. Stupidity, therefore – generic, collective stupidity, stupidity which says everything about the provincialism in which people flounder for whom being “left” serves as a pretext for existing in a world that they no longer understand. So much for the lenient hypothesis. It’s not mine.

It’s not mine because, first of all, Guillaume Meurice has support. Indirect support with Tariq Ramadan, who in a recent video also established a parallel between Hitler and Netanyahu; much more direct support, especially with Equality and Reconciliation. “Big up and courage to Meurice, the leftist who wears his balls, not like the terrorized lackeys of the French extreme right,” said thus written on November 1st the site of the self-proclaimed national socialist Alain Soral, in a style reminiscent of that of Rivarol praising Jean-Luc Mélenchon a few weeks ago.

At the end of August, the same Rivarol gave its support to Médine – the rapper adored by EELV and LFI – for his fight against anti-Semitism consisting of applauding Robert Faurisson –, and on October 24, Egalité et Réconciliation presented Mathilde Panot with a laurel wreath under the following title: ” Israel/Palestine Mathilde Panot saves the honor of France. “Panot, the article continued, it is France which opens its mouth, which defends the weak against the strong, which does not fold before visible or occult powers, in short, which makes us proud again to be French. ” Rivarol is certainly a fool without a large audience, but with 2.36 million visits per month on average according to Similarweb, Egalité et Réconciliation is today No. 2 among far-right conspiracy sites in France, behind France-Soir at 2.8 million (Fdesouche is far above with 3.5 million).

Mathilde Panot and our “comedians” – the quotation marks for “terrorist” to designate Hamas are perhaps more appropriate here – are they therefore far-right? No, of course. In the confusion of this 21st century, in any case, this label no longer makes sense. On the other hand, when Meurice, the joker on duty, turns the accusation of Nazism against the Jews and is applauded, he knows exactly what he is doing: gaining an audience at little cost. Voluntarily, without risk, he sides with the crowd. The uninformed crowd and which he certainly does not seek to inform, the one who rather than wondering about what happened on October 7, about the nature of Hamas, or about the meaning of the words “Nazi” and “Hitler”, laughs with him as young people laughed singing “fuck the Jews and the grandmothers, we are Nazis we are proud” on line 3 of the Paris metro on the evening of October 31.

And that’s the mystery. How can the same laughter unite, around the same apparent cause (“Palestine”), those who call themselves Nazis and those who believe themselves to be anti-fascist? How do the very people who demonstrated the day after the carnage shouting “fuck the Jews” in Sydney, “fuck the Jews” in London and on American campuses, and displayed a Nazi flag in support of the Palestinians in Times Square, do a Nazi salute at Place de la République, and demanded that Hitler “finish the job” on X (formerly Twitter), how can they at the same time accuse Israel of behaving like the Third Reich?

Answering this question means understanding what has been happening since the massacres of Jews on October 7 in Western opinions.

To risk it, we must start by remembering that Hitler is a pop icon comparable to no other: the only historical figure of the 20th century spontaneously identifiable by anyone on the planet, from Seoul to Yaoundé, from Los Angeles to Beijing and from Lima to Greenland. Hitler: his face and his name haunt this fractured but global world of ours where History is no longer even a memory, while “snuff videos” of torture and murder can land live at any time on your Instagram account. It is this paradox that we must explore if we want to grasp something of the contradictory uses of the signifiers “Nazism” and “Hitler” in the trans-ideological and transnational narrative which has been taking place for three weeks with disconcerting speed.

It is in Ukraine from February 2022 that a policy of terror based on massacres, torture and massive rape of civilian populations, in Boutcha and elsewhere, has been established as a strategic goal. Put into practice by the Wagner militia co-founded by a real Nazi nostalgic for the Third Reich, Dmitri Outkin, it was nevertheless part of a war presented by Vladimir Putin to his population as a “denazification” operation. This reversal, making the Nazis the victims, and the Nazis the heroes, was based on a mythology of martyrdom established by Stalin during the Second World War.

The same arguments are being put forward today by the Hamas leadership. Thus Ghazi Hamad, spokesperson for the movement, on October 24 on the Memri TV channel: “We are proud to sacrifice martyrs. We need the blood of the children of Palestinian women and old men.” Twelve days earlier, Jordanian-Palestinian politician Tala Abu Gazaleh, a Hamas supporter, told the same channel: “The Russians sacrificed 27 million of their fellow citizens fighting against Hitler. How many Palestinians died in comparison? Only a few thousand” – before continuing, and the contradiction is only apparent: “Hitler let a certain number of Jews live so that we could understand why he wanted to kill them and so that we could continue his fight.” And the Hamas charter, let us remember, is based on THE Protocols of the Elders of Zionan anti-Semitic classic distributed to the Einsatzgruppen during the Holocaust by bullet to motivate them.

But in the end, apart from allowing the multi-billionaires of Hamas to liquidate Gaza now that Qatar has stopped financing them, what purpose will all this bloodshed have been for? What was the purpose of the giant pogrom of October 7?

No: Nazism will not return. No third world war on the horizon and probably not even a real regional war. Ultimately, the massacres will have had no other purpose than themselves – and the dissemination of their images no other message than their obscene existence. But the tinsel of Stalinist propaganda, which structured anti-colonialism during the Cold War, mixes with an authentic Nazi heritage to trigger laughter and the exaltation of global anti-Semitic demonstrations without equivalent in History, and that says something our time. From images of September 11 to those of Gaza and from images of Boutcha to videos of southern Israel, a desire for Hitler floats over the ruins of the 21st century.

*Marc Weitzmann is a writer and producer on the show France Culture Signs of the times.