On December 15, a conference by Céline Masson and Caroline Eliacheff at the Café Laïque in Brussels was first disrupted, then prevented by a group of young hooded activists, who forced their way into the room, jostling the organizers.
Outside, the walls of the Café Laïque were defaced with inscriptions “Café transphobe racist” and inside… inside was the ultimate argument of trans activists: shit. And this is not a metaphor, excrement from cats and other animals was thrown inside the café. The following day, the two co-founders of the place found themselves having to clean the premises.
The Café Laïque, created by the anthropologist and specialist in Islam, Florence Bergeaud-Blackler and by Fadila Maaroufi, is a space for free speech, uncensored by the media or by various institutions, where one meets intellectuals , media players and associations, concerned about the rise of Islamism and the excesses of contemporary ideologies.
Let’s make things clear: what happened at the Café Laïque in Brussels is not a demonstration of young people in search of social justice, it is not only the umpteenth demonstration of “cancel culture” to which the public university is beginning to get used to it, these are not the tribulations of young protesters either, bamboozled by the more or less crude propaganda of the transactivist agit-prop. No: these are operating methods bordering on fascism, which no longer hides, and whose operation is part of classic fascist ideology. We do not use these terms lightly, as is often the case in today’s public debate, when it is meant that the other, the one who does not share our views, is a bastard. The fascism we are talking about is a set of political doctrines that rejects liberalism and the guarantee of individual rights by resorting, to impose a conception of the world, to violence, considered as a means of legitimate political action. Furthermore, these doctrines want to form the youth according to their doctrinal principles.
These new fascistic forms seem to be taking hold in contemporary society, without the institutions finding anything wrong with them. This silence is to be interpreted either as blindness to a very worrying social development, or as complicity with the actors of these demonstrations, or even as submission to threats of violence.
Fadila Maaroufi, co-founder of this place, has been repeatedly threatened with death and not only verbally. Islamist fascists tried to burn her alive by accusing her of betraying the Umma. The Belgian government did not move a finger to protect her, the Belgian media did not say a word. However, we are not here in simple anonymous insults on Twitter, but in a reality that some refuse to see and understand. By ransacking the Café Laïque, by preventing Caroline Eliacheff and Céline Masson from speaking, while they warn of the dangers presented by sex change for minors and adolescents, the transactivist fascists only reinforce through their actions those of the Islamist fascists.
Absolute dehumanization
The meaning of the gesture is heavy with meaning. Shit is the symbol of the total lowering of the human being, it is a symbol of his absolute dehumanization. The common language is the proof: “to be shit” is to be below what the human being is, it is his very negation.
In Ludo van Eck’s book Zo was het in Dachau (It was in Dachau), the author describes how the Nazis had fun forcing prisoners to clean up excrement. This method was also used in communist prisons to humiliate prisoners. Also in Brussels, in 2006, in Anderlecht, the Memorial of the deportation of the Jews of Belgium was desecrated and excrement was deposited there, as a sign of what the Islamist fascists would like to see the Jews reduced to. To worse than nothing. In Salò or the 120 days of Sodom, Pier Paolo Pasolini has shown, better than anyone, the mechanics of violence, the nature of barbarism, the reduction of being to nothingness, the objectification of being and of the other, especially the other who does not don’t agree. The aggressive, militant, now coprophilic transactivist ideology, which violently contests all restraint and all caution with regard to decisions to intervene on the bodies of young people in full psychic construction, is a true totalitarian ideology, which defends experimentation on the human, and worse, on the child.
That an adult, in full possession of his mental and psychic faculties, engages in the change of body, that concerns only him, his close relations and the doctors. But that militant transactivists incite children and adolescents to take action by being mutilated, and what is more, present the thing as progress for humanity, this is the hallmark of totalitarian systems which have always started by taking hold of the youth, to mold their consciences on the dominant ideology. And when dissonant voices are heard, it is unbearable to ideologues who do not hesitate in the face of real violence.
The European institutions must stop showing themselves to be blind and cowardly, and be more vigilant as to the danger represented by the hooded fascists who organize themselves on social networks to go and break the opponent, and who are not sanctioned for vandalism, the attack on the freedom of others, the attempt to silence the adversaries by a violence which is not only symbolic.
We express our solidarity with the Café Laïque and the Little Mermaid Observatory, we express our unconditional support for Fadila Maaroufi, Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, Caroline Eliacheff and Céline Masson and call on European States not to allow terror to take hold in our societies. Because if the State proves to be failing in the protection of individual freedoms, it is because the totalitarianism of aggressive minorities is already there, in place of democracy.
Signatories:
Yana Grinshpun (linguist), Pierre-André Taguieff (philosopher, historian of ideas), Liliane Messika (writer, essayist), Noémie Halioua (journalist, essayist), Daniel Sibony (philosopher, psychoanalyst), Georges Bensoussan (historian), Caroline Valentin (lawyer, essayist), Mohamed Luizi (engineer, essayist), Nathalie Heinich (sociologist), Hubert Heckmann (lecturer, author of “Cancel!”), Bruno Moysan (musicologist), Jean-Pierre Winter (psychoanalyst), Jean Szlamowicz (linguist, translator), Guillaume Pronesti (journalist), Michel Gad Wolkowicz (psychoanalyst), Jean-Eric Schoettl (honorary State adviser), Monette Vacquin (psychoanalyst), Jean-François Braunstein (philosopher), Catherine Kintzler (philosopher ), Gérard Rabinovitch (psychoanalyst, philosopher), Renée Fregosi (political scientist, philosopher), François Rastier (linguist), Liliane Kandel (sociologist), Céline Pina (essayist, editorial writer), Xavier-Laurent Salvador (lecturer, co-founder of the o observatory of decolonialism), Pierre-Henri Tavoillot (philosopher), Albert Doja (anthropologist), Bruno Sire (university professor in management sciences), Frank Muller (professor emeritus), François Vazeille (physicist), Philippe de Lara (master of honorary conferences), Jean-Baptiste Chikhi-Boudjea (doctoral student in history), François Roudot (academic), Florent Poupart (clinical psychologist), Frédérique de la Morena (lecturer in public law), Guylain Chevrier (teacher and trainer), Joseph Ciccolini (professor of pharmacology), Nicolas Weill-Parot (director of studies at the EPHE), Isabelle de Mecquenem (philosopher), Anne-Marie Le Pourhiet (professor of public law), Pierre Vermeren (historian), Gilbert Abergel (Comité Laïcité République), Philippe Reynaud (professor of political science), Thibaut Tellier (historian), Françoise Nore (linguist), Leonardo Orlando (political scientist), Violaine Géraud (linguist), Jean-Paul Sermain (professor emeritus), Monique Goss elin-Noat (professor emeritus), Anne-Sophie Nogaret (author).