Counterpunch.png
I Am Not Charlie
African Revolutionary Writers like Fanon and Cesaire can help us to
understand what is happening today
John Wight, Counterpunch, USA, 14 January 2015
The huge march and rally in Paris that took place in the wake of the
horrific events that took place in the French capital was a festival of
nauseating hypocrisy.
Watching the leaders of governments which, between them, have been
responsible for carnage and mayhem on a grand scale - the likes of Israeli
Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for example - leading a march against
terrorism and extremism qualified not so much as the theatre of the absurd
but as the theatre of the grotesque; impostors at an event that millions of
people allowed themselves to hope would mark a step-change in a world
scarred by war, barbarism, and injustice.
Sadly, they will be disappointed, as the circular relationship that exists
between Western extremism and Islamic extremism will not be broken anytime
soon. Indeed, if at all, it will be strengthened after the massacre in
Paris, as the congenital condition of Western exceptionalism reasserts
itself.
When Frantz Fanon wrote, "Violence is man re-creating himself," he could
have been describing the Kouachi brothers striding up and down the street
outside the offices of Charlie Hebdo, assault weapons in hand, prior to and
after murdering the French-Algerian police officer lying on the pavement
with the ease of men for whom all restraint had been abandoned.
The irony of men acting in the name of Islam callously taking the life of a
fellow Muslim should not have come as a surprise, however. The vast majority
of victims of Islamic extremism, after all, are Muslims, just as they
comprise the vast majority of victims of Western extremism. The point is
that at this point the Kouachis at that point appeared euphoric, filled with
a sense of their own power and strength, having broken through the final
barrier that exists between the agony of powerlessness and liberation from
it. They had been transformed by the 'deed'.
"What is good?" Nietzsche asks, before answering, "All that heightens the
feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man."
Behind them the brothers had left a scene of carnage. For us it was an act
of sheer evil, for them justice and power. Within them had taken root a more
powerful idea than the one they had been inculcated with growing up with in
the heart of Europe. It willed them to seek meaning not in life but in death
- that of others and their own.
When confronted by such total rejection of the moral foundations upon which
our cultural, social, and human consciousness rests, we dismiss it
automatically and unthinkingly, ascribing it to evil, madness, and insanity.
Our coping mechanism dare not deviate for a second in this regard. But what
if such deeds are acts of rebellion against the evil, madness, and insanity
of the status quo, matching evil with evil, madness with madness, and
insanity with insanity? What if that?
It is far too simplistic, if understandable, to dismiss such individuals as
evil. It allows us to negate their humanity and anything we may recognise in
ourselves. They aren't human beings, such people, they are monsters, beyond
the pale and therefore beyond any serious consideration. Ritual condemnation
and calumniation is all that society accepts when it comes to those who
perpetrate such horrific acts.
Yes, the act of mass murder carried by the Kouachis and Amedy Coulibaly in
Paris was monstrous. But was it any more monstrous than the carnage that has
been unleashed over many years by men who claim to act in our name? Wasn't
the brutality and barbarism we witnessed on our TV screens, crashing into
our collective consciousness, merely a microcosm of the brutality and
barbarism that goes by the name Western civilisation? For just as the
Enlightenment provided the basis for modern liberal democracy, producing
huge advances in science, medicine, and philosophy, it also provided
justification for centuries of slavery, colonialism, genocide, ethnic
cleansing, and super exploitation.
Je suis Charlie ('I am Charlie') describes the delimitation of our
solidarity with all victims of extremism and barbarism. It allows us to
avoid confronting the ugly truth of our culpability in the fate of those
victims. When Aime Cesaire warned that "a civilization which justifies
colonization-and therefore force-is already a sick civilization, a
civilization which is morally diseased, which irresistibly, progressing from
one consequence to another, one denial to another, calls for its Hitler, I
mean its punishment," he was talking to us.
The Kouachis and Coulibaly were not products of radical Islam. They, like
it, were the products of Western civilization. They were and are monsters of
our [i.e. "the West's"] own creation.
. John Wight is the author of a politically incorrect and irreverent
Hollywood memoir - Dreams That Die
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/184694712X/counterpunchmaga> -
published by Zero Books. He's also written five novels, which are available
as Kindle eBooks. You can follow him on Twitter at @JohnWight1
From: http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/01/14/i-am-not-charlie/
See also: http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/01/14/poroshenko-the-civilized/
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