Both Sides, Now.

Fighting the Un-Person.

These essays will always be free, but you can continue to support my work by liking and commenting, and most of all by passing the essays on to others, and passing the links to other sites that you frequent. If you would like to take out a paid subscription, then of course I won’t stand in your way, (I’d be very honoured in fact) but I can’t promise you anything in return except a warm feeling of virtue.

I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here.☕️ Thanks to all of those who have recently contributed.

And as always, thanks to others who tirelessly supply translation in their languages. Maria José Tormo is posting Spanish translations on her site here, and Marco Zeloni is also posting Italian translations on a site here, and Italia e il Mondo is posting them here. I am always grateful to those who post occasional translations and summaries into other languages just as long as you credit the original and let me know. And now:

****************************************

Unless you follow French politics closely, the name of Quentin Deranque won’t mean anything to you. And oddly enough, whilst his recent murder has stirred up a lot of controversy, and he has become a martyr to some, most people here would have to think for second before recalling his name. This in itself is strange, but I will argue that it’s actually a symptom, and a worrying one, of a new trend of violent and even exterminatory “anti-fascism,” aimed at amorphous and ill-defined targets, that has taken over the political space once occupied by the Left, not just in France but elsewhere as well. Now, that’s a big assertion, and I want to trace its roots back fifty years, so I’d better get on with it. What follows first, is a very brief summary of a complex event.

Quentin Deranque was a 23-year old student in Lyon who was killed on 14 February. That day, the controversial and inflammatory Rima Hassan, a member of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s LFI, gave a speech at the Sciences Po campus there. (It had originally been planned for the Paris campus but the venue was switched for fear of disturbances.) Hassan, who was not involved in any of these events herself, is a European Deputy, a traditional home for those who can’t get elected in France, but she spends little time either Brussels or in France, and is usually to be found campaigning on the occupied West Bank. The speech itself passed off peacefully, but there were a small group of feminist demonstrators outside, carrying a banner objecting to what they say is sexual violence against women by immigrants and within the immigrant community. (They are therefore coded “extreme Right” by the media.) The group was attacked by another group of students and the banner thrown to the ground.

Among the group who had turned up in support of the feminists was Quentin Deranque, although there’s no evidence he was involved in any violence. Subsequently, as he and two other students were walking away, film shows them being attacked by about a dozen masked individuals. They were all knocked to the ground. Two were able to escape, but Deranque was kicked and punched to death. He died the next day from massive trauma to the head. It emerged subsequently that the individuals suspected of the murder (a number have now been charged) were associated with an organisation known as the Young Guard, founded by Raphaël Arnault, now an LFI Deputy, “known to the security services,” who was given a suspended prison sentence for violence last year, and whose organisation was proscribed. (This happens fairly often in France to all sorts of political organisations.) As of now, of the seven men charged with murder or related crimes, two have worked for Arnault in recent years. There’s a lot more than that, but that’s the basic picture.

However, what was interesting was the reaction. Under normal circumstances, the media descend on the family and friends and generally martyrise the individual, with calls for flowers and reconciliation. This time, much of the Establishment media didn’t even give the victim’s name, dismissing him as an “extreme right-wing militant,” with the not-very-subtle implication that his death was his own fault for having the wrong opinions. When asked about the murder at a friendly press conference, Mélenchon affected not to know who the journalist was talking about, and she was obliged to clarify that it was that “extreme Right militant.” (“Oh, him,” said Mélenchon sniffily.) And the Establishment version of the killing, which you may have come across reflected in English-language sources like the Grauniad and Jacobin is that it was all very regrettable, a punch-up that got out of hand and someone unfortunately died, but really he only had himself to blame. Various Influencers of the self-styled “Left” went as far as laughing about the episode on YouTube. Unfortunately, there’s enough images available on social media that that won’t wash, and lot of middle-class parents have been expressing fears in the media that their own children might be targeted next. After all, Arnault and his band have a long history of threatening violence against those they disagree with.

It should be said that some of the whataboutism that has been flooding the airwaves is entirely understandable. Extreme right-wing groups are more numerous and have been responsible for more acts of violence than those of the Left, for example. But in many ways, that’s the point. Right-wing violence is, unfortunately, something you expect, and the inflammatory rhetoric of such groups is often converted into actual violent behaviour. But we expect better from what we still think of as the “Left,” even if these groups themselves no longer use that label. In Europe, moreover, it’s common for political parties and trades unions to have their own stewards and security details, often sporty individuals with paramilitary training, to control demonstrations and stop things getting out of hand. Sometimes they’ve been involved in violent clashes with the police or other groups. But this kind of deliberate targeting and killing of ideological opponents is new

As a result, the episode will have major political repercussions in France, and may finally finish off Mélenchon as a serious politician. We’ll see. But I want to move on to its wider significance, in Europe at least, because that is more worrying. The Young Guard is one of a number of small paramilitary groups of the “Left,” found in many European countries, whose ideology is quite unrelated to that of traditional leftwing parties. It is, in fact, an entirely negative “anti-fascist” ideology, and it expresses itself not as the Left used to do, by supporting causes, but rather by attacking anyone who has the wrong opinions. The Ideology (I don’t want to sully the term “Left”) effectively involves identification, denunciation and verbal and sometimes physical attacks on people believed to hold the wrong opinions, or to have said the wrong things. All of these people are charcterised interchangeably as of the “extreme Right,” “the extreme radical Right,” or even just “Fascists,” and so by definition deserve whatever they get.

Traditionally, the Left in Europe was universalist and humanist. It wanted rights and protections for everybody, equally. Through a process I’ll describe briefly in a moment, it has splintered into mutually-competitive grouplets, each representing a lobby-group, each demanding preference. And of course preference, or special “rights” for one group, means fewer rights for others. But if you don’t put the interests of my group first, you’re a Fascist. Now, from its beginnings up until the 1980s, it was fair to say that the Left wanted to achieve things, because it believed in a better world, and hoped to create it. This wasn’t, in spite of some right-wing propaganda at the time, an attempt to create heaven on earth, but rather to ensure that children did not go to bed hungry, that jobs were available for all and that families had decent homes to live in. How quaint that seems now. The Ideology which has replaced that of the Left is by contrast entirely negative. It no longer seeks to make things better, but to destroy those whom it nominates as enemies. Thus, whilst in the 1960s and 1970s, governments of the Left introduced laws forbidding discrimination on the grounds of gender or race and legalised homosexuality, these days, the parties of the Ideology simply attack, sometimes physically, those who they think hold the wrong views on such issues.

There is, you may be surprised to hear, an actual theory behind all this, and it has its origins in intellectual movements of the 1950s and 1960s. Briefly, the argument is that in many western countries, we are living in a Fascist State now. The government is fascist, the state is fascist, the police are fascist, the media are fascist-controlled, the education system is fascist-controlled, and so on. Thus, violent resistance to the State and any of its instances is not only permitted, it is compulsory, as it would have been in German or Italy in 1936, or indeed subsequently in occupied France. (It’s surprising how many commenters on Establishment media sites in France seem to share this view.) This is not entirely new, as we’ll see, but what has changed is the argument that therefore attacks including violent attacks on opponents are justified, because, after all, there is a state of exception today. Thus, anyone who diagrees with you becomes a member of an amorphous enemy category without rights: an Other who can be attacked and killed with impunity. When the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben wrote about this tendency twenty years ago, he equated this kind of overreach with the State: he could not have foreseen that some of the readers of his book would in time turn the same ideas against you and me.

As I say, the idea that we live in a (Fascist) State of Exception where the ordinary rules of politics are suspended is not entirely new. Both it, and more widely the Negative Turn in the politics of the Left can be traced back to the Vietnam War and its associated ideological turmoil. Now what was striking about the Vietnam activism in Europe, which I saw first hand, was how pointless it was. Massive demonstrations in European cities obviously could have no effect on events in Vietnam, or even in Washington. But participants I knew spoke as if “The War” could somehow be shamed into stopping itself by the moral force of demonstrations, just as, a decade or more later, the AIDS virus would shamefacedly sneak away in the face of all the popular mobilisation against it. Vietnam established a model of purely performative, entirely negative mobilisation that by definition could achieve nothing, but made you feel good, and gave you an enemy to hate. In this case the enemy was the United States,

So the US was conceived as a new incarnation of Nazi Germany, and polemicists of the day would often adopt the German spelling “Amerika” to underline the point. Popular culture icons such as the Jefferson Airplane, at moments when they were capable of giving interviews, would describe the fascist state they lived in and their heroic resistance against it. “We are all outlaws in the eyes of Amerika” they sang, and inevitably “we are very proud of ourselves.” And indeed, for a generation too young for World War 2, singing songs with daring lyrics and injecting yourselves with heroin was probably the most heroic thing you could find to do. Not to be outdone, Tony Bunyan’s 1977 diatribe, The Political Police in Britain argued that Britain was already becoming a police state. It was fundamentally this way of thinking that was seized upon by the various armed leftist groups of the 1960s and 1970s, from the Weathermen, whose modest aim was to end the Vietnam War by force and to overthrow the government of the United States, to the various armed groups in Europe like the Angry Brigade in the UK, Action Directe in France and the Red Brigades in Italy. Yet at this point, such groups concentrated their activities largely on symbols of the State itself and of the economic system they despised: some, at least, went out of their way to avoid causing unnecessary harm.

Meanwhile, by the 1980s, the transformation of traditional parties of the Left from activist organisations interested in the future to passive-aggressive organisations engaging in negative performative politics was well under way. The 1984 Miners’ Strike in Britain was probably the last case in Europe where even factions of parties of the Left actually involved themselves in any practical struggle. By contrast, the popular riots in 1990 against the Poll Tax (a flat-rate local tax independent of income or property value) which led as much as anything to the downfall of Mrs Thatcher, were locally organised and essentially spontaneous. And it’s worth pointing out that even these vestiges of popular militancy were essentially negative in their orientation.

Why this passivity? Well, the generation that started to take power in the 1980s had not known unemployment or poverty. Many (like me) were the first members of their families ever to go anywhere near a university. They went into white-collar jobs, married people who had been through similar transitions, and identified less and less with the communities they had been born into and their interests. In addition, much of the late 70s and 80s was an exceptionally discouraging time for anyone of genuinely Leftist sympathies. In Britain, it wasn’t so much the General Election defeat of 1979 than did the damage, rather it was the splitting of the Labour Party into two, the rise of the Trotskyist Militant Tendency and the resulting catastrophic defeats in 1983 and 1987, which were elections that a united and disciplined Labour Party would have won. Together with Reagan’s victories in 1980 and 1984, and the disappointments of Mitterrand’s France, this produced a feeling of helpless defeat, as though the forces of reaction would be in power forever. The traditional progressive agenda of the Left was clearly no longer viable, and all that remained was to scratch the traditional itch of competitive blame-shifting for successive defeats, in the knowledge that parties of the Right would be in power effectively for ever, and that the best that parties of the Left could do was to adopt their ideas.

This—wholly misguided—analysis was underpinned by fashionable developments in thinking arriving from the Continent, and building on the gloomy analyses of Marcuse and Adorno, which had always been popular in certain corners of the Left. “French Theory” (a misnomer, and never regarded as a school of thought in France) provided the perfect alibi. Everything was Power and always would be. Every victory for the Left was just a disguised defeat, every apparent defeat of the Power structure just resulted in Power being exercised more subtly. Nothing ever really changed, repression would always continue in ever more subtle forms. And so on, although not necessarily consistent with what the authors whose names were tossed around had actually written.

One result was that genuine positive action became pointless. Power would adapt to make sure that nothing changed. As a result, the Left, inasmuch as it still existed, was faced not with challenges from real people and organisations (who might themselves after all be unknowing or unwilling agents manipulated by Power) but by abstractions. In the 60s, radicalism meant taking actual risks, and confronting actual people who might want to hurt you. A generation later, symbolism had essentially replaced action. You could agitate, for example, for better pay and working conditions for ordinary people, and go and stand on picket lines. Or maybe not; you could Fight Capitalism instead. You could help racial minorities to register for the vote. Or maybe not; you could Fight Racism instead. So the 70s saw a massive growth in organisations which were simply against something, usually an abstraction. Anyone around then will recall the Anti-Nazi League, Rock Against Racism, SOS Racisme and many others. The problem of course was not just that the giants of Racism, Sexism etc. were according to your own theories invulnerable and eternal, so you could never win, but more importantly that fighting abstractions is by its very nature difficult to conceptualise and even more difficult to actually do.

So in practice, this process of fighting different “isms” degenerated into just the usual bureaucracy of symbolic protests, petitions, marches, more marches, teach-ins and consciousness-raising sessions. And then? Well, fighting abstractions, as I’ve suggested, is difficult, but it’s also unsatisfying. As I remember pointing out many times after 2001, you can no more have a War on Terrorism than you can have a War on Sarcasm, and essentially the same is true of any other abstraction, since by definition none of them have any tangible objective existence. Fortunately, the Left had its traditional hooligan tendency and its own cannibalistic internecine traditions to fall back upon. The logic which began with rallies against abstractions soon developed into protests, sometimes violent, against individuals who were believed to hold ideas that were disapproved of, and of course also into loyalty oaths and purges of those who were insufficiently militant, and did not scream loudly enough when told to.

And from attacking lecturers whose books or lectures could be interpreted as “racist” according to a definition and an accusatory process that you controlled, the next logical step was to persecute those who did or said things which, in your estimation, and again according to definitions and processes you controlled, might “play into the hands of the extreme Right.” It was not necessary to demonstrate that this had actually happened, or even that it was reasonably likely, because it’s abstractions all the way down here. Only ideas and those who (might) hold them have any importance: actions were irrelevant because they were facts, and facts, Althusser had shown, are only concepts of an ideological nature. And if you change the words that people use, and the thoughts that they have, then you change reality itself. So you won’t be surprised to hear that much of the French media thinks the real problem is that Quentin’s death will be “instrumentalised by the extreme Right.” (It might reasonably be argued that it would have been better had he not been murdered in the first place, but that argument is illegitimate because it will “strengthen the extreme Right.”)

As I’ve mentioned, one feature of what I’m calling the Ideology is that it is relentlessly negative in its language and its assumptions, and has been largely so since the beginning. Its recent and current incarnations in unreadable books and blog posts are quite close to incitements to the nihilistic despair and violence which, as I’ve argued, is anyway the dominant political ideology of our time. Everything, one gathers, is polluted and corrupted. Only the most cynical motives are accepted as explanations of past and present events: courage, heroism, compassion, generosity, duty, altruism and such are only cynical masks behind which lies the exercise of Power itself. Great figures of history have feet of clay, allegedly important events never actually happened, famous reforms were really cynical ploys to retain power, and no-one in history has ever operated from anything except the basest of motives, or does today. We have no heroes to emulate, but only villains to execrate, no good examples to follow, but only bad ones to condemn. After all, there wasn’t really any moral difference between the Nazis and the Western Allies, was there? It didn’t really matter who won. Moral differences are so bourgeois. And so, every national myth and collective cultural artefact must be torn to pieces and trampled underfoot. And in the end, of course, as has often been remarked, this nihilism winds up devouring itself.

In the circumstances, since there are no final judgements about ethical standards, and since everyone and everything is rotten, why not tear everything down? And why not tear people down while you are at it? After all, between banning the books of an author, tearing down a statute of that author, and killing someone who defends that author’s reputation, it’s only a matter of degree, isn’t it? It’s not as if there are moral standards that might lead us to differentiate between those acts: they have all been carefully deconstructed, and we’ve got a long way past such simplistic thinking, anyway. If you think this is an exaggeration, consider some examples from recent history. Much of the self-styled human rights lobby turned to slavering bloodlust during the crisis in the Former Yugoslavia. Abstractions such as “the Serbs” came to be a target for destruction, and by the time of the Kosovo crisis human rights groups and the media had turned into a bloodthirsty lynch mob. (I remember one journalist asking “why should Milosevic have a fair trial when his victims didn’t?”) Put a gun in their hands and the result could have been horrific. As it happens I recall watching live TV coverage of the crowd awaiting Milosevic’s arrival at the detention facility in The Hague in 2000, and reflecting that, had he been there (the plane was still in the air) the crowd would no doubt have tried to tear him limb from limb.

This is where abstractions finish up: in reification, usually around some conventionally designated hate-figure about whom little is known but upon whom the collective wrath descends. It’s a short distance, therefore, from “someone ought to do something,” to “this person deserves to die.” The unedifying story of the willingness of alleged Liberals and humanitarians to see countries invaded and innocent lives lost all over the world has been well covered elsewhere, and I won’t dwell further on it here. But if you live in a world made up of abstractions and ideas, then individuals holding or expressing conflicting ideas to yours are not seen as fully human: they are themselves just abstractions, and Others, to whom the ordinary protections of law and ethics do not need to be extended. They are outlaws, not in the Jefferson Airplane sense, but in the original sense of those who not deserve the protection of the law. Their misfortunes and even deaths can be celebrated with a light heart, because they are, after all, only representatives of ideas, rather than being fully human. A small vignette: at last weeks César awards (the French Oscars) a tribute to Bridget Bardot was booed and heckled by the audience. After all, Bardot was not really a great actress and feminine symbol, she was just someone who espoused a few unpopular ideas in her later years, and whose death was accordingly an occasion for rejoicing. We have all, I am sure, felt a twinge of guilty pleasure when a particularly evil person dies, but it’s a different thing to condemn someone and celebrate their passing, not for their actions but for their thoughts.

This Othering of ideological opponents has a long history, and is an almost inevitable by-product of looking at the world in terms of abstractions. It can be argued to have begun at least as early as the persecution of heretics by the Christian Church, which believed that you would go to Hell for holding the wrong ideas. In modern time, people have “fought” (a word I return to) abstractions and collective nouns such as counterrevolutionaries, left deviationism, right deviationism, Stalinism, Trotskyism, “social fascists” (as the Communists elegantly described the German Social Democrats), “class traitors,” and so on, it being clear that the problem was not actions, but holding the wrong ideas. Thus, as people were variously expelled, imprisoned, purged, exiled and murdered, it became necessary to invent tangible crimes for them to have notionally committed. Thus, Marshal Tukhachevsky, whose military theories had displeased Stalin, was charged among other things with having contacts with the German military: a charge of which he was certainly guilty because it was part of his job. And of course “fighting Communism” was itself a priority for many western governments after 1917. In that case, at least there was an established ideology and an international organisation, but serious attempts to “fight Communism” (of which South Africa under apartheid provides perhaps the caricatural example) wound up just targeting anyone whose thoughts were different from those of the national establishment.

This Othering has entered the mainstream in modern times, and nowhere more dangerously than in the tragic farce of ”fighting fascism.” As I mentioned, the vocabulary is potentially dangerous, not least because the talk of “fighting,” “combat” and “struggle” leads inexorably from posturing and performative actions, in the direction of actual violence, and together with the inherent negativity of the Ideology, helps to create an atmosphere in which violence becomes more normalised and more acceptable. This is especially a problem in English, which has taken over various words from other languages which don’t necessarily have the same connotations. For example, lutte in French means any kind of organised activity in favour of or against something. So you have the lutte against accidents in the workplace, for example. It’s probably best translated as “struggle.” But English has pillaged various other languages, not just French but also German and Russian, for a vocabulary which when literally translated has overtones of conflict and even war. In English, people tend to be “fighting” for things. Fair enough so long as it’s fully understood that the “fighting” is symbolic or metaphorical, but the Left’s historic tendency towards progressive radicalisation means that it hasn't’t stayed that way.

Again, this would matter less if by “fighting fascism” for example, simply meant politically opposing certain defined small but extreme right-wing groups. But George Orwell noted almost a century ago that the term had lost any objective meaning, and by then just meant whatever the person using it didn’t like. If possible, it’s become progressively worse since. (Both Orwell and Victor Serge, for example, were treated as “Fascists” in the 1930s because they criticised Stalin’s purges.) But this term, like “extreme Right,” or the freshly-minted “extreme radical Right,” has lost even the pretence of any objective meaning in recent years. Yet before mocking the Monty-Python-esque vocabulary (how do you tell extreme radical Right from just ordinary extreme Right?) we should reflect that these terms can be now be used ascriptively of just about any opinion, even one which is held by the average person. For example, the idea that there should be some degree of control over entry and exit into countries used to be the default position of all political parties. Now, it’s apparently a view of the “extreme radical Right,” even if that label, in effect, applies to the vast majority of us.

What is happening is a progressive shrinkage of allowable discourse, combined with violent attacks on those who dissent from it. In turn, this has much to do with the incoherence of the Ideology itself, assembled as it is from odd bits and pieces, and existing in a state of constant internal tension. Anything which is too complicated or too divisive is simply forbidden to be discussed, or even mentioned. Thus, talking about crime in large cities is not allowed, because of the perception that doing so could be used by the extreme Right, the Fascists or whatever to strengthen their position. The result, needless to say, is that the omertà on such subjects produces exactly the strengthening effect on the radical Right (or whatever) that it was supposed to prevent. People of normal, moderate views find themselves vilified as “Fascists” for wanting to discuss issues that affect their daily lives. It’s hardly surprising if they then vote for parties to which the Ideology has given one of these meaningless labels, since those parties alone actually talk about things that reflect their everyday concerns.

The stupid thing about lumping everybody thoughtlessly into the “extreme radical right” (or whatever) bucket is that it conceals a whole set of very important distinctions, among people who in many cases don’t like each other very much. If some kind of larger alliance of the Right comes to pass in some European countries, it will be the Ideology that has pushed them together. Ironically, the young man who died in Lyon, like the feminist demonstrators, was an adherent of the highly traditionalist Catholic Right, which is not numerically strong but is quite influential in the traditional areas of the Army, the public service and banking and finance. They have nothing to do with, and utter contempt for, the kind of people who are members of the Rassemblement national. If anything, they look back fondly to the Vichy era, where, as people would no doubt recall if history were still taught, the Regime despised actual Fascists like Doriot, and the sentiment was reciprocated. But OK, they’re all the same really, it’s just easier.

The Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC) are both victims and perpetrators of all this. In most PMC organisations the Ideology is quite powerful, and the average PMC worker finds their professional, and sometimes personal, life increasingly circumscribed by what cannot be said, let alone done, and what cannot even be thought. On the other hand, the Ideology is also extremely useful as a mechanism for control of the plebs and demonising dissidence. (Yes, it does sound like 1984.) The difficulty is that, as the Ideology becomes more and more rigid and exclusionary, and ordinary people find that more and more of their lives becomes an no-go area for thought and expression, something is going to give.

We can readily see that parties that make use of the Ideology—most, but not all, from the Notional Left—are essentially prevented from broadening their appeal, because they are always carrying out new purges and finding new subjects to forbid discussion about. Thus, they seem be falling back on their core constituencies, and ignoring, or even insulting, those who under normal circumstances might be persuaded to vote for them. This has most publicly been done by Mr Mélenchon’s LFI in France, whose key support comes from immigrant areas and from the large credentialed class that can’t find decent jobs, and earns low salaries in teaching or stacking supermarket shelves. His plan is to try to double the percentage of those in poor immigrant areas who vote (it’s only about 30% on average) while assuring the loyalty of the de-classed with ever more radical social justice proposals, and ignoring and insulting everybody else. As for Mr Starmer, well, if you don’t know what your party is actually for, then it’s tough to work out how you can appeal to more potential voters. But we’ll see.

As I said at the beginning, this is all depressing because, whilst we expect nothing better from the Right, the humanist, universalist tradition of the Left , whilst always willing to defend itself and not averse to taking action, never behaved like this. But the Left is gone, replaced by amorphous groups with an entirely negative Ideology of “antifascism,’ with no objective but to destroy, and a vocabulary which makes it easier to rationalise destruction, harassment and even murder. Returning to France where we started, we have local elections in ten days, and Presidential and Parliamentary elections next year. The Right, faithful to the old rule that you never interrupt an enemy who is making a mistake, is being quiet and statesperson-like, and it is quite likely that, by next year, a right-wing coalition including the RN will seem the most likely outcome. At that point, it’s impossible to say what will happen, but it won’t be fun. The security forces of states are, by definition, intended to defeat challenges to the State and to public order. They are not intended to stop widespread, low-level violent conflict between political groups: they don’t have the numbers, apart from anything else. Heaven alone knows where that is going to take us.