That reality is fading in favor of “alternative truths” is something we see every day, without however being able to refuse the game that has become perverse of discourse outside the facts. By us, I mean the citizens, stuck in bubbles of intimacy; by us, I mean the media, who let out enormities, for fear of offending or appearing partisan; by us, I mean the lazy people that we all seem to have become, letting out discourses that have become exclusively performative and that are detached from reality with a worrying lightness and as if in a cottony indifference. As if the alternative truths concerning “the other camp” were actually taking place in a parallel world with which we would no longer have any connection.
The Fête de l’Huma is always the occasion for a spectacular sleight of hand, where the gulag and the corpses, the purges and the hatred are erased in the aisles and the speeches in favor of the brighter tomorrows, without however a single voice being raised to denounce the inhumanist delirium of a “festival” that brings together the cream of the crop of sectarians and ideologues of destruction – capital, opponents, fascists, Jews, others. Inevitably, magical thinking holding hands with ideological obstinacy, we witness delirious sequences: François Ruffin booed, Dominique de Villepin acclaimed. And not booed just anyhow: with antifascist chants against a backdrop of “You have betrayed, comrade! and you deserve nothing but feathers and tar!”
The problem is not this falsely festive gathering of radicals disconnected from reality who see the Waffen SS coming on the horizon, nor even what is said, I am for total freedom of expression: that even what horrifies me is expressed to give me the opportunity to contradict, to counter-argue. No, the problem is the inertia in front, which sounds like a collective abandonment: each in his camp.
As long as there are ideologues…
As long as there is a cause. A cause that LFI MP Antoine Léaument embraces to such an extent, who is so keen to make people forget his appearance that he goes to confession and says that when he arrived in Paris for his studies and lived in a working-class neighborhood, he felt unsafe, “I swear it’s true. And yet I was already a left-wing activist.” Seriously? That insecurity concerns and dismays the working classes above all, that this insecurity feeds the extreme right all over Europe, no, move on because: “The feeling of insecurity is a matter of racism because it is socially constructed and is not rational. Systemic racism is not only a matter of violent acts or remarks committed by actively racist people.” All racists and that’s it! It’s so much simpler than not letting victims of daily violence from immigrant backgrounds rot, because their attackers are also from immigrant backgrounds. And yet, I am from immigrant backgrounds, I swear!
And then there is the Israel-Hamas conflict. There, reality painfully fights against the elements of language, the narratives collide in a hubbub where everyone only hears what corresponds to their ideological, political, and more rarely humanist choice. Any form of moderation is mocked and debate becomes impossible except to… keep quiet. The explosions of pagers and then walkie-talkies of Hezbollah terrorists are a new example of this war of narratives that do not pass the wall of debate. Only the executives or “fighters” of a terrorist group – manufactured and financed by the Islamic Republic of Iran – were targeted and affected.
If we can and must deplore the deaths of civilians in the vicinity of these wounded or killed terrorists, there is no possible parallel with the pogroms of October 7 in Israel. And yet. We have seen and heard, from the very beginning, “historians” like Vincent Lemire, who had already inflicted on us the unreal concept of good and bad anti-Semitism, draw an odious parallel between a massacre of civilians and an attack against terrorists who are a poison for their own population that they have been robbing, starving and holding hostage since 1982. As long as there are ideologues, there will be no common truth.
Abnousse Shalmani, committed to fighting against identity obsession, is a writer and journalist
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