21 January
2014. A World to Win News Service. By a
reader in France.
The
situation surrounding France's recent banning of a performance by comedian
Dieudonné M'Bala M'Bala is complex and ugly on all sides.
The worst thing about it is that so many people who have suffered
oppression themselves are being drawn to a violently anti-Jewish,
anti-homosexual and anti-woman bigot. While Dieudonné's supporters are a fan
base and not a political movement, the content of his so-called humour, his
understanding of "the system" and what he opposes about it, coincides with core
points of France's rejuvenated fascist currents and organizations for whom
immigrants and homosexuals are a target.
Dieudonné's chief stock in trade is to expose the legal and moral
double standards that prevail in France. Many people will tell you that it's a
humour based on the discomfort of the truth and the pleasure of breaking of
taboos against telling it. He argues: Why is it a scandal if I make fun of "your
grandmother who died at Auschwitz" – and he does that and worse, all but openly
praising the genocide of the European Jews – while when it comes to "my
grandmother who died under the boots of the French colonialists in Cameroon,"
"you" don't see it in the same light? Why is it illegal to defend or joke about
the "crimes against humanity" that took place between 1942-1944 (the genocide of
the European Jews) but that label is not applied to the genocide of the Native
Americans and slavery? We could add what he doesn't: Why is it illegal in France
to call the gas chambers "controversial", because that amounts to an implicit
denial that they really existed, but when a government minister lectures about
"the benefits of colonialism", that's considered a legitimate issue for debate?
The political establishment – almost the entire spectrum of what
the French call "the political class" of past, present and possible future
ministers and high officials – rained down scorn on Dieudonné's head until a
court ruled that his anti-Semitic show was a "threat to public order" and riot
police were sent to bar the doors of his theatre. (Since then, he has been
allowed to perform a rewritten, less provocative show.) For Dieudonné fans old
and new, this extraordinary and perhaps unprecedented legal move only confirmed
what he was saying: "public order" means silencing rage against their oppression
in the name of respect for Jewish oppression.
The first thing that has to be said is that the French state has no
moral right to criticize Dieudonné for anything, including anti-Semitism. The
laws against incitement to religious and ethnic hatred, and Holocaust denial
(the idea that the genocide of the Jews is a myth mendaciously invented by the
Jews themselves), represent hypocrisy in the service of oppression and the rule
of the French capitalist class. Today's rulers obscure the degree of continuity
between the French state at the time of the Jewish genocide and now.
After Germany defeated France in 1940, the French parliament called
on former army head Philippe Pétain to become prime minister. Later he became
head of the French state headquartered in the city of Vichy, which exercised
political power in the southern part of France not occupied or administered by
Germany. Pétain's ideology linked the honour of the French fatherland with the
traditional family and the Church. His regime enthusiastically, and on its own
initiative, rounded up tens of thousands of Jews in unoccupied France, turned
over national census lists of Jews to the Germans and zealously helped search
out Jews in Paris and other occupied areas. A total of about 75,000 Jews were
deported from France to Nazi death camps, along with homosexuals and Gypsies.
The end of the war saw the fall of the Vichy regime, but some of
its officials remained in government service. The new regime needed them to
implement its own crimes against humanity. French carried out a far more brutal
war against the Algerian independence movement than Germany had waged against
France. The restored French Republic sent Maurice Papon, a notorious Vichy
butcher, to help administer its Algerian colony, and then had him lead a
Nazi-like police pogrom against Algerians in Paris.
As for anti-Semitism, it was not Muslim immigrants, as is so often
implied, who introduced and nurtured it in France but the Catholic Church. The
Church called for crusades and genocide against Muslims, Jews and other
"infidels" long before France had an "immigration problem". The influence of
anti-Semitism is so persistent in some French Catholic circles that until 1989
leading clergy sheltered a notorious Vichy official responsible for genocide.
Further on the question of the French ruling class's moral right to
criticize Dieudonné, without going into detail about the lives of Arabs and
Africans in France today, we could cite Dieudonné himself. In a sketch about
Dominique Strauss-Khan, the head of the IMF and leading French presidential
contender who was accused of raping an African maid in his Manhattan hotel room,
he quotes the head of Strauss-Khan's Socialist Party who complained about the
undignified conditions of DSK's arrest (handcuffs, perp walk before the press),
saying that DSK had "a right to the presumption of
innocence."
Dieudonné simply repeats those words again and again as he makes
eye contact with audience members until everyone breaks up. Most are young. Many
have parents who suffered the "benefits of colonialism" and then were brought to
break their backs in French mines, factories and construction sites. Today they
and other youth are confined in public housing waiting for a future. (In fact,
going to a Dieudonné show in central Paris is a big deal, an act of defiance for
kids from the banlieue, the broken-down and distant suburbs.) His point
is all the more powerful because it doesn't have to be said. All their lives
these youth have been taught by the police and the establishment that they are
presumed guilty.
The problem is that after such moments this comic immediately
launches into a tirade about how the Jews run France, implying that Strauss-Khan
was saved from ignominy by an international conspiracy of
prominent Jews (Dieudonné rattles off a half dozen names) accused of rape, child
molestation and financial swindling who supposedly protect each other. He rants
about why it was considered respectable in political and media circles to argue
that Strauss-Khan was the victim of an anti-Socialist plot, while no mercy is
shown for people who argue that September 11 was a Jewish conspiracy. This is
standard Dieudonné procedure. Instead of arguing that "the Jews" were behind the
attack on the World Trade Centre, he simply says that such theories should be
considered legitimate – and if this claim can't be proven, it's because the Jews
won't allow it. In this way he gets to proclaim that the Jews run France and the
world without having to present any evidence – because there isn't any.
The importance of Israel in Dieudonné's rise cannot be
overestimated. French politicians, especially the Socialists, do seek support
from Jewish voters, but that's a very minor factor. If many French youth are
unable to distinguish between Zionism and Jews in general, that's mainly because
they have always been taught that respect for Jews means respect for Israel, in
school, by the media and by the political class. Further, Israeli officials and
Zionist organizations in France constantly attack even the slightest criticism
of Israel as anti-Semitism. While French official circles don't always like that
(the French and other European governments are sometimes the object of Zionist
slanders), all this is considered part of legitimate social discourse.
When Arab and other children in France watch television and see
Israeli soldiers shooting stun grenades at Palestinian demonstrators and beating
even children, and they are taught this may be controversial but after all
Israel must remain a Jewish state, the conclusions they draw aren't surprising.
Without Israel, anti-Semitism probably would have remained mainly a problem
among white people of French ancestry. Dieudonné has chosen his enemies
carefully with his claim that what's wrong with France is not its capitalist
economic and social system, but that its government is a front for Jewish rule.
Never is he more anti-Semitic than when he pretends to claim
otherwise: "I'm not anti-Semitic – not yet," referring to what he says are
Jewish attempts to crush him. Or, defending himself from the charge of
supporting the Jewish genocide, he says, "When it comes to the conflict between
the SS and the Jews I'm neutral. I don't know who provoked whom." It's telling
that when talking about homosexuals he drops even the pretence of "neutrality",
openly declaring that he wants to make his audience "go out and eat queers".
This supposedly "cute" additional reference to anti-Black slanders (Africans are
cannibals) is used to justify an intolerance so openly violent that merely
calling it homophobic doesn't get it.
In fact, he almost always portrays Jews as effeminate, with high
little voices and in a constant state of the kind of hysteria his sketches
attribute to women. His trademark "quenelle" gesture, an inverted Nazi salute,
ties the whole package together, using a "playful" (that is, plausibly deniable)
neo-Nazis gesture to throw together Jews, homosexuals and women as lesser beings
who deserve to be penetrated and thus dominated by real men.
Dieudonné may have many followers in public housing, but he
promotes and takes lessons from some of the main ideologues of France's
"Catho-fascho" movements from the better-off Western side of Paris. These people
long for what they imagine was "traditional" France and hate the idea of a
multi-ethnic society. Dieudonné shares with them a reverence for Pétain. When
asked his favourite French president, Dieudonné, in his usual sarcastic style,
deliberately ambiguous but not really ambiguous at all, said "Pétain, because he
had a nice moustache." He added that Pétain would have known what to do about
the problems France faces today.
Anyone who looks at Dieudonné and sees only the class and colour of
the people who laugh at his jokes, or that he supposedly singles out rich
people, should consider that Pétain, too, had a populist dimension. The question
of goals and ideology matter. Pétain's regime recruited ordinary French youth –
shopkeepers' sons, factory workers and unemployed – into a "revolutionary"
militia whose members were allowed to bully better-off Jews and other people who
might have once looked down on them.
Where does the "anti-system" Dieudonné stand when it comes to by
far the most oppressed ethnicity in France, the country's official outcasts and
scapegoats, the Roma (as Eastern European Gypsies prefer to be called)? His
silence on this is striking because Manuel Valls, the Interior Minister who led
the attack on Dieudonné, is also France's chief anti-Roma scourge.
Last year Valls gave a speech about the Roma emphasizing that they
cannot expect to be treated like other immigrants because it is "impossible" for
them to become integrated into French society. (The truth is that even Gypsies
whose families have lived in France for hundreds of years face legal
discrimination designed to exclude them.) In fact, Valls' speech was so
vitriolic and racist that if the word Roma were replaced with the word Jew,
France's top cop would be legally obligated to have himself arrested. But
Dieudonné gave his most powerful critic a free pass on this particular example
of a double standard.
Who are the real rebels against the system when it comes to the
Roma? Who is defying the official consensus that some people's existence is a
"threat to public safety"? The Socialist government of François Hollande brags
that it has deported twice as many as its rightist predecessor. The strategy is
to send armed riot police and bulldozers to smash their squatters camps time and
again until the victims agree to "voluntary" deportation. Last summer, police
stopped a school bus carrying a 15-year-old girl named Leonarda Dibrani, whose
family had registered with the authorities and requested political asylum on the
basis of the atrocities inflicted on Roma in Albania. She was taken away in
front of her classmates and shipped out of the country immediately so that no
legal move could be made to save her.
Tens of thousands of young teenagers walked out of middle school
and marched in the streets in support of Leonarda for several days. Indignant
and fighting mad, the children and grandchildren of Arab and African as well as
French parents, they were very possibly the younger sisters and brothers of
people now lined up to see Dieudonné. Similarly, some of those now in that line
were probably fighting in the streets during the banlieue revolt and the
wild secondary school student protests of the mid-2000s.
Here we come to the heart of the problem. It is truly terrible and
tragic that someone like Dieudonné has become an outlet for their rage – any of
it. This situation was not inevitable and must be changed. What his "act" is
working against, and what makes it beneficial to the system, is an understanding
of who are the friends and enemies of the oppressed.
For contradictory reasons, a large percentage of French people have
come to despise the left and right parties that have alternated in government
with increasingly converging political, social and economic programmes. What
remains of the "left" – whose strategy, if not actually in the Socialist Party,
was to push the Socialists to the "left" – is self-discredited, usually
discouraged and in increasing disarray. The mainstream right complains that the
Socialists have stolen their program, while the far right proclaims that it
represents radical change. The "left", and even the so-called far left, can do
nothing but defend the status quo that millions find unacceptable. Dieudonné may
have half a million multinational followers on YouTube, but the groups and
movements most militantly opposing the ruling class consensus are unabashedly
from the far right – and militantly white.
Dieudonné represents a complex symbiosis between different brands
and strands of reaction. A man who understands his times, his cynical "jokes"
have a powerful resonance among many of those who can't stand the hypocrisy and
moral incoherence of today's social order. But instead of
advocating global emancipation from "crimes against humanity" and the oppressive
system of capitalism, he wants to get rid of the people he considers in his way.
How this could liberate his fan base or even save it from disastrous
manipulation is not a question he feels a comedian has to
answer.
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