French Education Minister: “The Republic is under attack.” The reason? One French man was beheaded for his “freedom of expression.”
“At the very moment that, in the name of fighting terror, the French state is devastating Raqqa, arresting refugee activists, banning climate demonstrations, and giving police the power to conduct home-invasions without a warrant at any hour for three months, the political classes’ propagandists have rallied French society behind them under the banner of defence of Republican ‘values’ – liberty, equality, fraternity, democracy, civilization, human rights.
In this situation, the nature of Republicanism as the all-purpose ideology of the French ruling class emerges clearly. Republicanism can be harnessed to justify anything that aligns with the interests of French state power. In the name of Republican values, France can criminalize BDS, hold up racist caricature as an exemplary exercise of free speech, or seriously contemplate censorship of the media. The present wholesale and disproportionate extension of the state’s coercive powers, opposed even by the Human Rights League, can be justified as guaranteeing the ‘greatest human right’ – security.
Already numerous left climate activists have been placed under house arrest. It is no surprise that criticisms of these measures do not themselves typically mobilize Republican discourse: unsupported by the authority of the state, this kind of rhetorical gesture would ring hollow.”
—Nick Riemer, France and its “war on terror”, 2 December 2015
We should add the state attack on the burkini and the ban on headscarf, the dining and wining with the Egyptian dictatorship, the welcoming of a president of the Israeli terrorist state in Paris, sales of weapons to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia during their war on Yemen, and more of “French values.” We should also add the forming of the attacker, who is originally Chechen, and what Chechnya suffered under Russian barbarism.
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“More of a novelty is the patient construction of a domestic enemy of a new kind – the Muslim. Such an effort began in France in the 1980s, and has proceeded by way of various truly criminal laws, pushing ‘freedom of expression’ as far as the painstaking control of people’s clothes; new prohibitions concerning the historical narrative; and new cop series on TV. It has also advanced via a sort of ‘left-wing’ attempt to rival the irresistible rise of the Front National, which since the Algerian war practiced a frank and open colonial racism. Whatever the variety of causes we could discuss, the fact is that the Muslim – from Mohammed to our own time – became Charlie Hebdo’s ‘bad object of desire’. Mocking Muslims and making fun of their mannerisms became this declining ‘comedic’ magazine’s stock in trade, a bit like how a century ago Bécassine made fun of the poor (and at that time, Christian…) peasants who came from Brittany to wipe the arses of the children of the Parisian bourgeoisie.”
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