Guest Blog: France's Anti-Idiotarians

by 'Gabriel Gonzalez' at September 16, 2003 4:34 AM

JK: After his brilliant semi-satire False Consciousness on the Left, what's a guest blogger to do for an encore? If you're Gabriel Gonzalez of Paris, France, you write about some French intellectuals making strong, beautifully-argued cases against the growing tide of hatred and idiotarianism there.

This post is especially timely in the wake of P.'s exchange with Norwegian Blogger about the EU and the future of Europe, and chilling pieces from Israeli writers like Hillel Halkin who openly wonders "Will Jews have a place in the new Europe?" Thankfully, Sabine Herold isn't the only brave voice in France these days. But will it be enough?

Finkielkraut et. al. - The Coming Anti-Semitism
by Gabriel Gonzalez

The right-leaning French newspaper Le Figaro published an interview last week with leading French intellectual Alain Finkielkraut entitled "The Coming Anti-Semitism." The article (English translation here), as its title suggests, focuses on anti-Semitism, but deals more generally with the radicalization of the French Left around an extremist and simplistic Anti-Americanism which has been fused with Anti-Semitism. A few passages:

"After a brief interlude, the grand simplifiers are back. We have seen, since the end of Communism, a stupefying re-Stalinization of part of the intelligentsia and the progressive movement… [The] image of an all-powerful America breathes new life into the pernicious notion that politics is responsible for everything: all disasters are perceived as crimes; the objective universe appears to be made up of subjective wills, those that fight against evil and those that foment it. Thus conspiracy thinking is again taking over simple minds, and conspiracy leads sooner or later to the Elders of Zion."

"People would like to believe that America today is exactly the same as the America [of the Vietnam era]. But let's open our eyes: Milosevic, the Taliban, Saddam Hussein… The Americans are now overthrowing dictatorships… [Accused of being] too realist in the past, perhaps they are not sufficiently Kissingerian today … But Europe is certainly wrong to believe that a multipolar world can itself act as a global democracy."

"In the Sixties, leftists read Marx, Trotsky or Lenin. These days, everyone is encouraged to read Noam Chomsky. I thought that this thinker had been discredited, by his preface to [the work of the far right holocaust denier] Faurisson and his ardent denial of the Cambodian genocide. I was wrong. The most prestigious publishing houses compete for the political works of a man who considers as non-existent any crime or abomination for which the American-Zionist entity cannot be held responsible."

"The racist period of anti-Semitism is over, hatred of Jews is now expressed exclusively in the language of anti-racism… That's how we end up placing a swastika on the breast of those on whom we used to pin a yellow star."

The phenomenon of the French "anti-anti-Americanists" is fairly well known in France, somewhat less so in the U.S. and Canada. The New Yorker published an article by Adam Gopnik in its September 1 issue entitled "The Anti-Anti-Americans", which gives interesting background on the phenomenon in France. Gopnik's article deals more explicitly with the recent works of Jean-François Revel ("L'obsession anti-américaine") and Philippe Roger ("L'ennemi américain"). Revel's work is a socio-political analysis of Anti-Americanism as a substitute for policy. Roger's work tackles the same subject more from a historical perspective.

Revel and Roger are political scientists/historians who have made their careers and reputations on the specific phenomenon of Anti-Americanism. Their thinking, however, is not well represented in the political parties (the center-right Alain Madelin being the best known dissenting French politician, along with the Socialist Bernard Kouchner and Ecologist Brice Lalonde, all of whom supported the liberation of Iraq), where dissenters risk isolation. Nor is it reflected in the French media.

However, anti-anti-Americanism is far more widespread among France's leading intellectuals, on the right and more particularly on the left: Pascal Bruckner, Bernard Henri-Lévy, André Glucksman, Bernard Kouchner, mentioned above (a former Socialist Party Minister, former U.N. Special Representative to Kosovo and founder of Doctors without Borders), and the list goes on.

Rather than anti-anti-American, it is probably more accurate to call these figures anti-Idiotarians, which in the current French political and intellectual climate necessarily makes them anti-anti-Americans.

Pascal Bruckner perhaps summed up the unifying theme of this varied group of thinkers in comments in an article published in the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur last February:

"The pacifists missed a great opportunity to take an interest in the Iraqi people, in what they suffer, in what the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would bring them… I see today in France a kind of destructive delusional sanctimoniousness ("angélisme"). Some Europeans think they can escape the harshness of History by putting on display their good intentions or they reconstruct a progressive ideology though the demonization of the United States. Bush is compared to Hitler and we cozy up to the Islamists? We have not made much intellectual progress since the fall of Communism. Actually, we've even regressed."

It is safe to say that half of France's best known intellectuals (though certainly not the intelligentsia as a whole) have abandoned the reigning French political ideologies, left, right and center, less on the issue of Anti-Americanism or Atlanticism per se than on the more general question of the delusional radicalization of French politics. It is reassuring to know that this movement exists, even if, in my view, it has no chance of becoming a major force in French politics.

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