“What is essential is that the union was able to take place. To prevent the extreme right from coming to power, there is a moment when we must go beyond our differences,” declared François Hollande June 13 on TF1. If public opinion is not sufficiently disgusted with the shenanigans, denials and deviousness of political politics, with these kinds of sentences, the former president puts the last nail in the coffin.
Cynicism as a principle of discourse is still a somewhat sordid choice. Because what is the point of “preventing the extreme right from coming to power” if it is to convey the uninhibited anti-Semitism of one’s own camp? Indeed, it would be difficult to understand what is “left-wing” in the excesses of the LFI or the NPA, their anti-Israeli obsession, their connections with the Islamists of the Collective against Islamophobia in France (CCIF ) with whom they marched on November 10, 2019, their hypocrisy on the question of secularism.
François Hollande’s sentence reveals the moral impudence of a political camp devoid of scruples. Rhetorically, we notice the dynamic of attenuation (“divergences”) and valorization (“union”): this well-tested technique consisting of minimizing the negative and promoting the positive, thus makes it possible to construct an alternative reality. This is the meaning of lexical marketing using “union”, “Popular Front”, “dam”, terms which serve to hyperbolize the adversary as a danger while keeping silent about his own turpitudes.
Mitterrandian technique
We are thus proposing an alliance presented as balanced, despite the observable reality, with a political staff many of whose members flirt with the apology of terrorism, with the defense of sharia and the call for action against Israel – until ‘to the deputy Thomas Portes who had denounced a French Jew as an IDF soldier, which he was not even, disclosing his identity and his address, which earned him a complaint for “public incitement to hatred or violence due to religion. This same MP went, just before October 7, to meet Abu Amir Mutasen Eleiwa, one of the leaders of Humani’Terre, an association banned in the United States because it raises funds suspected of financing actions of Hamas. LFI welcomes the terrorist Salah Hamouri, campaigns for the terrorist Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, treats a Jewish deputy as a pig and these “details” are only discrepancies?
And despite this duplicity, these political leaders who applied the Mitterrandian technique consisting of making the FN rise to weaken the right, replay for us the discourse of moral intimidation, with their hand on their heart, their finger on the seam of their pants and the gaze fixed on the blue line of the ballot boxes. Mitterrand, a former Pétainist, who had never bothered his camp, knew how to play on the exacerbation of the fascist danger: voters are asked, under penalty of being bad people, to give their votes to the left, which can supporting suburban riots, radical Islam and the spread of the Islamic veil. Seeing LFI deputies dancing and screaming with S-registered activists in meetings is supposed to reassure in the face of “fascist” danger… The monopoly of the heart has never been as poorly served as by deputies wearing the keffiyeh of terrorists.
The argument of François Hollande and the left is based on extremization as a technique of demonization, well studied by Pierre-André Taguieff in Who is the extremist? (Intervals, 2022). In polemical discourse, it is a process which serves to delegitimize. However, the notion of extreme, if we want to correctly apply it to the political field, must regain its descriptive rationality. What is “extreme” is what is outside of political normality. This normality is not defined subjectively, but by adherence to common principles belonging to democratic political culture: respect for the law, refusal of violence, respect for diversity of opinions, secularism, etc. However, the left embodied by LFI and Nupes has been characterized by support for violence, that of riots and that of Hamas (considered as “resistance” and not as aggression), by the denigration of the State and the forces of order, by the exasperation of socio-cultural and ethno-religious divisions, by the questioning of secular principles. To present as reasonable an alliance with the objective extremism of the most virulent factions of the political landscape is a pure and simple lie.
Strategy against the West
However, the time has come for a new vocabulary that masks this extremism: “arrangements”, “guarantees”, “compromise”, “conditions” have replaced calls to demonstrate for Palestine in recent days. But we must understand the current dynamics of left-wing movements in an international framework. The Iranian strategist Ali Reza PanahianHodjatoleslam and advisor to Ayatollah Khamenei, has explained his strategy against the West: “The Zionists were a scattered nation. It is written in the preface of Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a book that must be studied carefully today. What to do with international Zionism once the Zionists in our region have been destroyed? Everyone knows that they have their homes and money in rich countries around the world. With Hassan Nasrallah and our guide [Khamenei], we are waging a war of attrition to destroy the roots of Western civilization through a war of attrition in our region. Hamas does the same thing. […] Today we can spark protests across the world against Zionism in our region. We must prepare ourselves for the world after Israel. The same demonstrations will take place but against the Zionist lobby of political parties in countries like Germany, the United States, London and elsewhere. This is what we must do in the future.”
This program of internationalization of demonstrations against Zionism with the aim of destroying the West has been constantly applied for years. Today it takes on particular relevance and relevance. The “for Gaza” demonstrations, apart from the fact that they will not disappear with a venal agreement to win deputy seats, are not anecdotal. They reveal that the left is infiltrated by a doctrine which makes it the vassal of Iran. On October 8, the NPA supported the pogrom in Israel, which it called the “Gaza offensive.” LFI seems ready to remain silent for a few weeks on the subject which carried its European campaign with the figure of Rima Hassan. But do voters have such short memories? They know well that with this left, there will be anti-Western demonstrations, whatever happens. And in a few weeks, will the “left” leaders still replay the comedy of anti-fascism for us with their Islamist allies in the streets?
*Jean Szlamowicz is a linguist, professor at the University of Burgundy, specialist in discourse analysis. He is the author of The sheep of thought. New ideological conformisms (2022, Cerf) and Think again ! The strange indignations of Stéphane Hessel deciphered (Intervals, 2012). His latest work focuses on the semantics of wine (Know how to talk about wine2023, Deer).
.