“To death, Louis cross-v-stick!” Older people may remember the sketch from Les Inconnus, featuring a history-geography teacher struggling with young students whom he tries to direct in a show about the French Revolution. Brandishing a sign demanding the death of Louis XVI, one of these sans-culottes in short pants shouts at the top of his lungs: “Death, Louis cross-v-stick!”
Ron Hassner, professor of political science at the prestigious University of California at Berkeley, has surely never heard of The Unknowns. But, intrigued by the success of the slogan “From the river to the sea” (“from the river to the sea”) on American campuses, he commissioned a polling institute to ask a sample of students spread across the country which river and which sea it was… Among of the young people questioned, 33% said they were “very in favor” of this song and 53%, “rather in favor”. But only 47% of these supporters could name the river and the sea in question (some evoking the Nile, others the Euphrates, some again the Caribbean Sea or the Atlantic Ocean).
After seeing a map – showing that a Palestine stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean would amount to removing Israel from the region – and after learning some basic facts – about the Oslo Accords, in particular, of which more than a quarter of those questioned were unaware of its existence – nearly 70% of supporters of the slogan said they no longer endorsed it… Because many were in reality for “a two-state solution”.
The fable could almost be reassuring. We could say that after all, if people “knew better”, they would be more moderate, more humble in the face of the complexity of the problems and the scale of the tragedies, particularly that which is plaguing the Middle East. Except that the level of ignorance is becoming worrying. And that ignorance breeds disaster. It is not just a veil that caricatures public debate. It produces its own catastrophe. Because it is the mother of obscurantism.
In this regard, another study published on December 7 by The Economist is extremely worrying. It shows that 20% of Americans aged 18 to 29 believe that the Holocaust is a myth. A staggering proportion, to which must be added the 22% (in the same age group) who think that the Holocaust has been greatly exaggerated. “Seriously ?” headlines the British weekly at the top of the graph summarizing the results. As pointed out The Economist, one of the problems comes from the fact that new generations are drinking more and more from the source of social networks. In fact, 32% of Americans aged 18-29 say they get their news… via TikTok. We think with a shudder of Marx’s famous aphorism: “He who does not know History is condemned to relive it”… But what does Marx weigh in the face of TikTok?