LFI, in the minds of students from the middle and upper classes, it should not work. The leader in the black leather coat is dripping with demagoguery; the internal functioning of the party recalls the finest hours of Stalinism; the economic program floats above ground in almost every compartment of the game; the foreign examples cited as models are all enough to give goosebumps – Ah, Chavez and his Venezuela –; the proposed geopolitics is, by and large, conspiratorial when it is not frankly complacent with forces that cannot be approached; institutional ideas borrow from parliamentary history what is worst and most destructive; the historical-political imagination, not to say “moral”, is that of 1793… All this, taken as a whole, promises France a collective suicide which would only be happy in its speed of execution. Last but not least, there we practice the affixing of blinders with tremendous ardor. It takes a huge effort to transform these vital European elections into an anti-Israeli (if not anti-Semitic) referendum since they are faced with the rise of sovereignism and the need to prepare for the possibility of a real war here. All this is beyond comprehension.
And yet, it works, and not only at Sciences Po. Young people with a reputation for intellectuals overwhelmingly vote for Mélenchon, prepare in petto the great evening of the “people” and parades for Gaza with a keffiyeh on his head. You have to ask yourself why. The stupidity of age does not explain everything – I ask the reader to consider themselves blessed not to have known me at 20 –; neither does the North American contamination of minds: it would not take place if souls were really different from one side of the Atlantic to the other.
Let us therefore start from what is well established in the Islamo-leftist imagination. 1) The new wretched of the earth are the nationals of the “Global South” as defined by the colonial heritage. 2) The oppression to which they are subject is nourished by what sets them apart: skin color and religion. 3) It overdetermines their objective situation and the way they live here, including by not integrating. 4) The left which, by historical construction, sides with the oppressed, must therefore become conscious, outraged by this relegation, attentive to the sensitivity of those who suffer it, in the terms in which they suffer it. 5) His duty is to convert his indignation into anger against those who created and maintain apartheid, that is to say “society”, namely public institutions but also the powers of money since it It’s the collusion of the two that keeps things as they are. 6) The challenge that is required is only coherent and complete: a total system having produced total domination must be fought completely.
Overall process of victimization
The catechism was roughly the same forty or fifty years ago, except that it was about the proletarian and not the intersectional prey; of class struggle and not of hatred of Muslims. We also blind ourselves to the horror of the gulags, Russian or Chinese, with an energy comparable to that which we deploy in not looking radical Islam in the face. Nothing new there. What changes is the fuel of the machine. Its composition has always included an element of altruism and a good dose of well-understood self-interest, but the proportions have been reversed.
The petty bourgeois sixty-eighter looked after himself and not just the working class when he threw paving stones from the barricades. His guilt weighed less heavily on him that way. That of being too well born in his eyes, but also that of not being so well born. For many, the legacy was heavy to bear. The generation above had fought in the Algerian War. The previous one had not necessarily shone against Nazism. It was, as they say today, complicated to manage. In the same kind of torment, an additional level of intensity had thrown a number of Germans and Italians into terrorist action. At that time too, we settled scores with ourselves at the same time as we promoted the cause of the people.
The trend has worsened, however, under the pressure of the ambient process of victimization. As we know, nothing, absolutely nothing, is more profitable today than staging a victim position. The slightest piece of television entertainment shows it every time: we can no longer dance, sing, play sports or cook without confessing our intimate dramas – my illnesses, my bereavements, the ostracisms to which I have been the subject… ” I have prepared a bottarga sorbet for you in memory of my grandmother whom I loved so much. She has just died. She was from Martigues”… I am suffering, therefore I am worthy of esteem, forgivable, interesting.
The fact is, moreover, that this attraction of the compassionate gaze is created very well with the suffering of others. For our activist, it is entirely productive to march alongside Rima Hassan, with rage in his stomach, with gritted teeth. It places him in the camp of good, but it also has the virtue of situating him quite simply, on a broader and more distant picture where, in his imagination, he will be associated, identified perhaps, with those for whom he ” struggle”. And that’s how we meet a lot of borrowed Palestinians these days in universities. Besides, I say that without malice. Many of these young people are driven by real emotions and I don’t see them all consciously making cold calculations of self-centered profitability. Most of them let themselves be carried away by the spirit of the times, without seeing anything in it. This is even what puts them in great danger of ignorance, even monstrosity – the new anti-Semites on the left feed greedily on this conformism. Manipulation by the elders will do the rest. They won’t miss the opportunity. The Panurge mutineers, as Philippe Muray said, are not difficult to orientate.
Melenchonism is infantilism
And then, step by step, wokism. Great breeding ground for germinating the thickest self-obsession. Especially because of its Spanish inn appearance. In this philosophy, everything is in everything. The situation to which its followers claim to have “awakened” stems from colonial sin, but it is not limited to its racist consequences. It covers all the spaces of oppression that society imposes on each of its minorities, on all the “sections” of the people that it rejects to its margins: women, homosexuals, transgender people, queers, etc. Conceived in this way, the world is (re)divided into two spheres: that of the dominant and that of the dominated, that of the executioners and that of the victims; as homogeneous as each other.
Hence the interest in claiming to be in the second camp. Ultimately, in a mental universe where rights, advantages, consideration and even self-esteem are first obtained through the recognition of victim status, we necessarily benefit from believing and saying, with all the right sound and fury, that we belong body and soul to this indistinct family. And not to prioritize under any pretext the prejudices suffered by its members.
But what about, you ask me, the one who cannot claim any minority title? No worries. His youth was enough to constitute him a martyr. Isn’t the planet bequeathed to him destroyed? Won’t he have to live in a broken climate? Isn’t the fault the same oppressors: those who, for a long time, have enslaved bodies and despoiled resources for despicable reasons of profit? Obviously, the enthusiasm for the “convergence of struggles” is therefore not only tactical. It also has the advantage of broadening the feeling of belonging to the “good” group.
I once wrote that Melenchonism is infantilism. Let’s complete. In a large proportion of young students, it is also narcissism.
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