It is the media return of a symbol of the freedom to blaspheme. Four years ago, Mila was harassed, threatened with death and taken out of school for expressing her hatred of religion on Instagram and saying that “Islam is shit.” In recent days, the young woman has spoken out about violence in schools, from threats against the principal of the Maurice-Ravel high school to the attack on schoolgirl Samara. Mila spoke of “a real morality police” in educational establishments and declared that “secularism is dead”. On social networks, she assumes her proximity to the Némésis identity movement which claims to be feminist in the face of immigration and Islam, but positions itself, for example, against contraception.
For philosopher Raphaël Enthoven, it is important to defend Mila’s right to speak. “Mila’s opinions only bind Mila, but Mila’s freedom binds everyone,” he believes, while specifying that her “conversion to identitarianism is her sole decision,” and deploring that Today it seems to favor an ideology over republican secularism. Beyond the case of the young woman, the author of the recent Artificial mind (The Observatory) analyzes the “civilizational” temptation of some of the secularism activists from the left, and who have chosen to “defend the West before the universal”. Interview.
L’Express: Having become a symbol of the right to blasphemy, Mila appeared with activists from the Némésis identity association, including Alice Cordier. Eric Zemmour, Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella were also quick to salute his “courage”. However, you made it known that you had no regrets for having supported her, and that you would do it again if necessary. For what ?
Raphaël Enthoven: Because my principles are not retroactive. I do not suspend the defense of freedom on the use we make of it. My point was not to defend Mila’s opinions, but to defend Mila’s right to have the opinion of her choice. Whether I approve of his blasphemy or disapprove of his identitarianism is irrelevant. What is (and remains) at stake in Mila’s defense is freedom itself, and the way in which the freedom to say (even to think) is threatened by hordes, sheltered from the law and under the pretext of “tolerance”. In this, I have no regrets. It is not up to me to judge Mila’s speech, but to defend her right to speak, and to speak out, on this occasion, against the confusion of “blasphemy” and “racism” which has paved the way for hundreds of thousands of death threats. In the same way that being Charlie does not mean that one adheres to all the drawings of Charlie Hebdo (and that if no one is obliged to like what the newspaper shows, everyone must defend the freedom that this newspaper embodies) , Mila’s opinions only bind Mila, but Mila’s freedom binds everyone. This is the second one that I defend and that there should have been more of us defending.
Do you understand, due to her background and the numerous death threats she has suffered, the temptation of Mila’s radicalism, which she had already mentioned in 2021 about Eric Zemmour (“I am so terrified in my own country, that I tell myself that we no longer have any other choice but to go through this radicalization for at least a while, even though I don’t like it. To stay alive”)?
Of course I understand it. How can we not understand that a young woman who, in four years, has been taken out of school and placed under protection, violently threatened and weakly defended, gives in to the temptation of anger and radicalism? How can we not understand that, faced with the double punishment of seeing herself endangered by madmen and disowned by cowards, Mila is tempted by extremist speeches? Mila is a young woman whom thousands of virgins have threatened with death and rape (often in that order) with the tacit blessing of our official “feminists”, paralyzed by the fear of “Islamophobia”. How can we not understand that she is getting closer to the identity thieves who, at that time, loudly supported her?
Behind her, at her side, there were also people who thought, like me, that our freedoms were dying under the bite of “respect” and that we had to defend Mila because if she gave up, the Republic would all everyone let their guard down. But maybe we weren’t speaking loud enough. That said, even if we can understand, even if we can find a number of reasons for Mila’s identity shift, none of them exonerates her from her own responsibility in the choice she makes. To explain is not to excuse. However excellent the reasons she gives herself, Mila’s conversion to identitarianism is her decision alone. We can also perfectly imagine that another person, subjected to the same ordeal, continues to make the difference between Islam and Islamism. Not everyone who experienced Mila’s nightmare thinks like Mila. However determined she is to choose what she chooses, Mila remains the sole author of her choice.
So, one thing is to understand what determines it, quite another to justify it?
Exactly. By her own admission, Mila finally feels free since she espouses identity theses. We can rejoice that someone we wanted to restrain so much experiences the feeling of breaking his chains. The problem is that the feeling of one’s freedom coincides with the approval of a dogma. The problem is that she is mistaken in seeking in identity fixations the solution to the problems of which she is the victim, she goes astray by confusing those whose company she enjoys with those she would like to see in power, she errs by mixing anger and law, by confusing violence and force.
At the very moment when she thinks she is freeing herself, Mila falls into ideology. The feeling of his liberation is contemporary with his adherence to a ready-made speech. Mila went from practicing blasphemy to hating Islam with the feeling of seeing things clearly and becoming herself. Her opinions are the symptom of a renunciation of thought in the face of the adversary in whom she sees nothing more than an enemy. Mila entered politics through the back door of identitarianism. We understand it, we regret it. But again, what she thinks is her problem. Whether she can say it and think it is everyone’s problem.
“We rarely go back when we switch to the dark side, to the side of identity”
Wouldn’t the evolution of Mila, who says she does not have “confidence in this government”, be representative of a part of the secular movement tempted by the extreme right, after having been disappointed by other political groups? From the PS, the former president of the Republican Spring Amine El Khatmi defines himself for example today as “patriot” and was approached by the RN…
Before working for Valérie Pécresse! Which seems much less serious.
Let’s not give a name, because the evil comes from further than the 2022 elections. As early as 1989, in Creil, at the time of the first so-called “veil” affair, people who defended the ban on coming veiled to the school in the name of republican principles, were, to their great amazement, presented as “racists” in the Anglo-Saxon world. Some saw in it the outline of the battles to come and the first threats against the republican model, others have mourned universalism and replaced the French paradigm with the republican paradigm. The descendants of the latter are those who, today, in a profound break with the left, its good feelings and its decolonial errors, no longer think in terms of principle but in terms of civilization.
In truth, we should date in each person the moment when, under the influence of spite or a new conviction, he chose to defend the West before the universal. What happens in the head of the person who moves from a political fight to a civilizational fight? A good part of the French left has sacrificed secularism to a clientele it wants to attract, is this a reason to no longer be left? Whatever it is, it is a renunciation that involves the entire soul. We rarely go back when we switch to the dark side, to the side of identity, to the side of telluric certainties and traditions that we defend for their own sake. Two questions arise with these virulent apostates of the left: is it because the left is worthless that they have turned their backs on it? Or is it because they had not been left for a long time that they used its nullity as an excuse to leave?
Mila estimated that “secularism is dead” in French schools following recent violence in schools, including the attack in Samara. Do you share this pessimism?
No way. Not only is secularism alive and well, but it remains the mother of all battles. Secularism, this sublime French exception, is the best weapon in the world against fundamentalism and misogyny. We must tirelessly explain that blasphemy is not racism, that a law which prohibits the wearing of religious symbols does not attack belief, or that freedom of conscience requires the experience of neutrality. Every day, students bless the chance of being born under a secular sky, which offers them, during their studies, a haven of peace. Secularism is not dead. Far from it. She’s too nice for that. Everyone can easily measure the benefits. The more we attack it, the better it is defended.
But what does it mean, to return to Mila, to say that in her eyes “secularism is dead”? That the fight against Islamism in the name of republican principles must be replaced by the fight against Islam in the name of French principles. That those who defend the possibility of living together by relegating the religious question to the private sphere are idealists who facilitate the arrival of the worst by not giving themselves the means to fight against it. Mila’s dream is that Islam will be identified as the source of the problem, and that we will treat it differently from the rest of the religions. Let’s go into detail: is she in favor of banning the veil in public spaces? Would she like France to be the only country in the world to issue such a standard? If secularism is “dead”, does this mean that it calls for a return of religion? So many questions that we can now ask of the political activist that Mila has become, and to which we can fear that she does not have all the answers.
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