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    Is Michel Zecler France’s George Floyd?

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    In recent weeks, France’s President Emmanuel Macron has accelerated his recent campaign to bolster his credentials as Europe’s most determined authoritarian leader. Citing France’s secular philosophical tradition, he appears to believe in the 18th-century cultural meme of the enlightened despot.

    Macron came to power in 2017 after painting himself as the inclusive centrist standing midway between the left and the right, whose parties were in total disarray. Like Joe Biden today, he promised to unite a nation that had suffered from a system of “alternance” (alternate rule). For decades, it had allowed the powerful political organizations on the right and left to repeatedly replace the other as France’s ruling elite, perpetuating a political class that had lost touch with reality.

    After three years of Macron, and because of the events last week, the president may be suddenly realizing the truth behind William Butler Yeats’ observation a century ago that “the center cannot hold.” Yeats was of course referring to Western civilization as a whole, not French politics. Macron wants people to believe he represents Western civilization. After claiming Jupiterian authority at the beginning of his reign, he has increasingly projected himself as the all-seeing arbiter of modern political truth. He claims to embody what he calls “the principles and values” of la république. His version of the Enlightenment has become the French version of Puritan America’s shining city on a hill.

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    Macron may have noticed that the American politicians — notably Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush — who successfully marketed the shining-city meme to justify their militaristic authoritarianism, represented the right rather than the center. The right traditionally applauds xenophobic nationalism. But Macron still sees his brand as centrist. This obliges him to thread the needle by emphasizing secular universalism, traditionally approved by the left, as opposed to the right’s typically faith-based nationalism.

    In recent months, Macron has pushed two distinctly authoritarian themes: declaring cultural war on Islamists (meaning he has a beef with Islam itself) and reinforcing France’s already well-structured police forces to help the nation evolve into an enlightened police state. At the same time, he poses as the promoter of European unity, encouraging the EU to rally around his “liberal” values that notably include “freedom of expression,” redefined as the right — if not the duty — to blaspheme, so long as the target is Muslims, who clearly take their religion too seriously.

    Macron’s crowning achievement of the past week was the French parliament’s passing of the global security law, with its provisions to punish journalists and citizens who dare to film the police in the act of enforcing the always fair and just authority of the state. Those found guilty of filming the police face a €45,000 fine.

     Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

    Global security (Sécurité globale):

    The universally valid application of authoritarian methods of policing human activity in France and, why not, everywhere around the globe, since France is, as everyone should know, the source of universal moral values.   

    Contextual Note

    The vote in parliament took place the same day the surveillance video was released of the brutal beating by the police of Michel Zecler, a black music producer. The police booked Zecler for “violence against a public authority,” which, if successfully prosecuted, would have landed him in prison for many years. The three officers failed to notice the surveillance camera in Zecler’s professional premises, where the beating took place. The episode has proved severely embarrassing for Macron’s government. Although alive and safe, Michel Zecler could become the George Floyd of France. The law was already contested, but a massive protest on Saturday highlighted the symbolic importance of this incident. Others are likely to follow as the government hesitates on what tack to take.

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    Without the video, Zecler would have undergone the fate of so many other members of minorities harassed or brutalized by the authorities. The police officers claimed that he had assaulted them and attempted to seize their weapons. What judge or jury would believe Zecler’s word against theirs in a courtroom? Zecler has insisted on expressing his own respect for the police. He considers his attackers as three bad apples who do not represent the vast majority of law enforcement. What they do represent, however, is the workings of an arbitrary, racist and authoritarian system that Macron has chosen to reinforce and place beyond any criterion of accountability.

    The government finds itself in a quandary that in some way resembles the comedy of the Keystone Kops. The right-wing interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, a J. Edgar Hoover-type personality whom Macron appointed to demonstrate his commitment to authoritarian rule, immediately dismissed any reconsideration of the law. Within an hour, Prime Minister Jean Castex contradicted him, asserting, as France 24 reported, “that the government would review the wording of a controversial draft law that would place restrictions on citizens filming the police and publishing the images.” Castex immediately promised to set up “a commission to rewrite the text.”

    It didn’t take long for Macron’s own legislators who voted for the law to protest, calling the idea of appointing a commission to rewrite their law an insult. One complained of being treated like a “vulgar floorcloth” (serpillière), another like a doormat (paillasson). How embarrassing! The president had crafted the entire operation specifically for electoral purposes, following the results of private polling that showed a positive response to Macron’s promise to get tough on Muslims.

    Macron’s minister of justice, Eric Dupond-Moretti, speaking to BFM-TV, dared to undermine Macron’s and Darmanin’s logic: “It’s out of the question to forbid journalists from filming and informing the public.” He called for “amending a number of the law’s provisions.”

    Historical Note

    Macron has been heralding the 18th-century Enlightenment as an export rivaling champagne, Bordeaux or foie gras. This tells us a lot about the political philosophy of a man whose career oddly parallels Donald Trump’s. For both men, the presidency is the first political office they have been elected to. Theoretically, that should be good for democracy in two nations that have suffered from the corruption associated with government by political professionals whose idea of governing amounts to playing off vested interests against one another.

    Neither Macron’s center nor Trump’s solipsistic system have the capacity to mold reality to their purposes. But if both political mavericks managed to make it to the top, it is also because the traditional parties had themselves succumbed to a reality they could no longer control.

    Future historians will undoubtedly look back with curiosity at this strange period of history inaugurated by Osama Bin Laden in 2001, in which small terrorist groups and individuals managed to destabilize the immense power of the Western nations not through the damage they did do it directly, but through their ability to provoke self-destructive authoritarian responses from Western governments.

    Embed from Getty Images

    To be elected and respected, leaders had to show their electorate their determination to base policy on paranoia. In the meantime, the entire political class had lost its ability to analyze causes and effects, for the simple reason that they were focused on the task of balancing the interests of the powerful cliques — financial, industrial and military — that formed a club they aspired to belong to.

    Their governments’ growing authoritarianism had a two-fold effect: It punished its own citizens by restricting their liberty and reducing them to puppets in a system increasingly designed for a single purpose: to protect the status quo. Since terrorists were attacking the existing system, good citizens could accept the idea that it was the system that needed protecting, not the people themselves. 

    The second effect was more fundamental. The laws and political practices designed to protect the status quo augmented the power of private interests, increasing their wealth and control over the economy. This produced devastating social effects. The people — the supposed bedrock of democracy — were faced with an intolerable psychological dilemma. They were asked to adhere willingly to an increasingly arbitrary system that pushed them further and further into economic oblivion. Up to now, the system has worked because it seemed like the only system possible. But Yeats was right: There comes a moment when the center cannot hold. Sometimes it’s an obscure name that triggers it — a name like George Floyd or Michel Zecler.

    *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      What Is Behind the Rise of Islamophobia in France?

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      On October 29, the French Ministry of Interior sent out a message on social media warning of “Violent radicalization, Islamism … If you have any doubts about someone you know, contact the toll-free number.” The situation in France has exploded into what is now increasingly reminiscent of 1930s Germany when Hitler sought informants on Jews.

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      Samuel Paty, a schoolteacher who showed his students the derogatory cartoons of Prophet Muhammad that inspired the 2015 attack on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris, was killed by an 18-year-old Chechen refugee, Abdoullakh Anzorov. When French President Emmanuel Macron defended the display of the cartoons, which are considered by Muslims to be extremely offensive, as a matter of freedom of expression, the ongoing tension between the French state and its roughly 6 million-strong Muslim population (or 10%) is, in fact, a manifestation of a much deeper crisis, heralding what seems to be a growing trend across Western civilization.

      French Islam

      For France, the issue has its roots in the country’s domestic and international politics. The concept of radical assimilation has been a part of France’s governance tradition since its colonial reign. In the 19th and 20th centuries, in Francophone Africa, the natives were considered “French” and “civilized” as long as they rejected their own cultures in favor of that of the colonial power.

      The same mentality applies to the immigrants who have moved to France from former African colonies, particularly Algeria, Tunisia, and those countries across West Africa. This strict interpretation of the assimilation policy is further reinforced at home by the rigorous redefinition of French secularism, or laïcité, whereby the visibility of religion, particularly Islam, is suppressed in the public sphere, and the responsibility of immigrants, and Muslims in particular, is to demonstrate their attachment to French values and culture.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The suppression of religion in the public sphere has created enormous friction between the secular state and Muslims, whose faith requires observance around the clock. For example, the arrest of Muslims who have had to pray in the streets due to lack of mosques has become commonplace. In a striking display of French secularism, a Muslim woman was forced on a beach in Cannes in 2016 by police to remove her Islamic burkini and given a citation for “wearing an outfit that disrespects good morals and secularism.” France’s aggressive attempt to create nationwide equality has naturally led to repression of diversity, forcing Muslims to retreat to ghettoized suburbs. This in turn created discrimination and a fear of social rejection among France’s rapidly growing Muslim population.

      This brings us to how Islam is viewed in France. Much as across Europe, Islam is the fastest-growing faith in France. French Muslims are much younger and have considerably more children than other French nationals. Correspondingly, Christianity in France is in free fall. According to the survey by St. Mary’s University, London, only 25% of the French between the ages of 16 and 29 identify as Christian. What is even more concerning for the French state is that the number of people converting to Islam is on the rise as well. Out of France’s 6 million Muslims, 200,000 are estimated to be converts, among whom are celebrity figures such as the rapper Diam’s and footballer Franck Ribery. Conversion to Islam is particularly prevalent among women, which has created a body of research examining this trend.

      The increasing demographic disparity between Islam and Christianity, coupled with an increasing refugee influx from Muslim countries, has given rise to the notion that within two generations, Muslims are going to be the majority in Europe. Naturally, this argument has been used by right-wing politicians across Europe. France is no exception. Marie Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Rally, has skillfully used this argument throughout her political career. In the first round of the 2017 French presidential elections, Le Pen garnered a sizable 21.3% of the vote against Emmanuel Macron’s 24%, only to lose in the run-off election. The 2017 election clearly showed that right-wing politics are on the rise in France and elsewhere in Europe.

      Macron’s harsh stance toward French Muslims should also be seen from this angle. In the 2022 French presidential race, Macron is expected to seek a second term against Le Pen, his most likely contender. To the president’s dismay, the current polls suggest that at 26%, Le Pen has an edge over his 25%. This being the case, the incumbent Macron is clearly courting the far-right constituency by adopting Islamophobic policies that would be expected from a Le Pen presidency.

      More Problems

      The current atmosphere is highly conducive for a further rise of the far right across Europe. Adolf Hitler’s rise to power was facilitated by the Great Depression of 1929 and its devastating impact on Germany. Likewise, the 2008 global financial crisis jolted the West so much that we have been witnessing the demise of the center-left and the gradual rise of the radical right in Poland, Hungary, France, Germany, Italy, Britain and the United States.

      Macron’s current effort to elevate Islam as France’s biggest problem should also be seen as an attempt to distract the public from his failures at home and abroad. The rapidly deteriorating economy, austerity measures, heavy taxation and the proposed pension reform have inspired the yellow vests movement that has been staging violent demonstrations against the government since 2018. Abroad, France appears to be bogged down in its never-ending wars in former African colonies as French casualties pile up. In Libya, Macron has failed to secure warlord Khalifa Haftar’s rule. In the East Mediterranean, France has failed to secure the interests of Greece, an ally.

      There is one country that France has had to unsuccessfully counter in the above-mentioned regions: Turkey. It is for this reason that Macron has consistently perceived Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as his archrival and increased his anti-Turkey rhetoric. Furthermore, Erdogan, at the moment the most outspoken critic of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, is the only world leader who can influence Muslims in France, and Macron knows it. Erdogan’s call on Muslims for a worldwide boycott of French products prompted the French government’s plea to the Muslim world to denounce the boycott. While the economic effect of the boycott is not known yet, Macron seems to be softening his tone on the cartoon issue.               

      France’s unsuccessful assimilation policies, rapidly deteriorating economy, failed foreign policy alongside the ensuing rise of the far right have all contributed to the current demonization of Muslims in the country. As Western values such as democracy, human rights and equality are losing relevance, there is little hope that this trend will change any time soon.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in World Politics

      Emmanuel Macron, France’s Islamophobe-in-Chief

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      France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, may be unique on today’s world stage in an era marked by the rise of populism. He came to power in 2017 as a centrist maverick. He had no established party, ideology or tradition to guide him or fight for his future agenda. And yet, in the midst of that uncertainty, the rules of France’s Fifth Republic’s presidential regime gave him a stable position to govern from for a full five years. It was an enviable position. The media could not accuse the centrist Macron of the political sin of the age: populist extremism.

      In 2016, following Brexit and Donald Trump’s election in the US, populist extremism appeared to have overtaken the English-speaking world. It was rapidly spreading across Europe and elsewhere. The most obvious populists are branded right-wing. They demonstrate a taste for nationalism, authoritarianism and majoritarianism. They include Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Boris Johnson, Rodrigo Duterte, Narendra Modi and Viktor Orban. The left-wing populists appear as reformers and even revolutionaries, ready to upset the status quo and alienate any number of vested interests. They include Bernie Sanders, Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales and Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

      In 2017, Macron miraculously parted the waters of the French political Red Sea when he managed to split the political spectrum down the middle, neutralizing the traditional ruling parties on the right and left. As a centrist, he claimed to be capable of embracing the diversity of the nation. During his electoral campaign, he reached out to Barack Obama, who publicly supported him. This bolstered the image of Macron as an open-minded, globalizing liberal. The former Rothschild banker also had his neoliberal credentials, affirming his identification with the mainstream values of the existing economic superstructure, the traditional enemy of both right-wing and left-wing populists.

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      So why is Macron now embracing Islamophobia, the policy most clearly associated with right-wing populism? Can it be that the centrist Macron, who has built the strongest part of his reputation on the anti-nationalistic idea of strengthening the European Union, is at heart a populist? 

      Writing in The Conversation, Charles Barthold and Marin Fougère describe what may be called the populist method of French president: “Macron crafts his speeches to cater to the emotions and demands of the public, be it through ramping up the rhetoric on climate change or pushing for further European Union integration — whether or not he actually has the policies to match his words.” He shares with pure populists a deep sense of electoral opportunism. He simply lacks the fanatically loyal base that they cultivate and seek to excite.

      With the trial of the authors of the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attack in the news, Macron has decided to use his pulpit to instruct the nation about the largely discredited thesis Samuel Huntington famously launched in 1993: the clash of civilizations. In what sounds like a call to arms, Macron says “we must attack radical Islamism.” He offers this deliberately vague but hugely provocative historical judgment: “Islam is a religion experiencing a crisis today, everywhere in the world.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Experiencing a crisis:

      The usual diagnosis made by those undergoing a crisis against those whom they seek to use as a scapegoat to explain their own crisis.

      Contextual Note

      Macron attempts to clarify the nature of the crisis when he explains that it concerns “tensions between fundamentalisms.” What does he mean? Is he referring to the rivalry between Sunnis and Shia? Are the “religious and political projects” he mentions those of the governments of Saudi Arabia and Iran? He never clarifies this. His aim is less to elucidate historical trends than to exploit a sense of fear.

      The full text of Macron’s speech reveals his intentions. He introduces his remarks on the crisis of Islam by proudly pointing to his own “humility.” He admits he is not a specialist. In other words, what he is about to say has no scientific authority. Instead, he generously offers “to share his understanding of things as he sees them.” After all, who needs experts when everyone knows that what counts are the subjective feelings of a leader? The method resembles Donald Trump’s, who routinely excoriates experts as frauds. The gentler and subtler Macron uses the prestige of his office to simply leave the experts on the sidelines.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Macron follows this up with a laughably incoherent allusion to a nation he calls “our friend, Tunisia.” He explains that “Thirty years ago, the situation was radically different in the application of this religion, the way of living it, and the tensions that we live in our society are present in this one which is undoubtedly one of the most educated, developed in the region.” Is he more surprised by the fact that some things change over time or that some educated people may not think and act in the same way he does? Both can be attributed to a special form of French, and Macronian, hubris.

      Macron resorts to the method of sounding logical when he announces: “There is therefore a crisis of Islam.” “Therefore” implies that the evidence he has presented concerning Tunisia is conclusive. The debate is over. He has made his case. That enables him to lament a “reinvented jihad” which he oddly defines as “the destruction of the other.” He then describes the litany of horrors routinely cited by Islamophobes across the globe. He even obeys the command enjoined by hosts of Fox News or Bill Maher to “say the words” and identify the evil: “We must name it.” Naming is blaming, and clearly Islam is to blame, a message he expects the non-Muslim voting majority of France to appreciate.

      Macron clearly believes Islamophobia is a winning strategy. But France, unlike the United States, is a nation that also appreciates intellectual nuance. And so the president goes on to admit, in a way that Trump would never be tempted to do, that his nation bears some of the blame for today’s evils by allowing ghettoes to be created and failing to realize mixité, a French word for integration. He even refers to the failure of France to come to terms with the trauma of its colonial past, while at the same time demonstrating his own obvious failure to do so.  

      Historical Note

      Macron’s party, La République en Marche! (Republic on the Move, or EM!), is an example of what the French call bricolage, meaning basically cobbling things together and hoping they work. The fact that his party is still more or less intact says less about Macron’s political skills than it does about the sclerosis of the Fifth Republic’s political institutions and the dominant, if not regal role of the president.

      From the start, EM! was a dog’s dinner. Now it is at risk of spilling out of the bowl at any moment. That may explain why Macron occasionally feels the need for a populist fix, and Islamophobia is the only reliable fix for a centrist. For decades the Le Pens, both father and daughter, have deftly exploited the growing anti-immigrant sentiment of the working class. Thanks to that strategy, Le Pen’s National Rally (formerly National Front) managed to capture what was once the Communist Party’s working-class constituency after it had fallen into irrelevance.

      The difference between Macron’s electorally convenient Islamophobia and Marine Le Pen’s becomes clear in his discourse. He wants Muslims to integrate, to become ordinary French people, whereas Le Pen — like Trump in reference to certain young, darker-skinned legislators — simply wants them to “go home.” Presumably, Macron and Le Pen would be satisfied if the Muslims simply stayed out of sight. But that would pose another problem. It would remove the convenient distraction of blaming another culture for the failures of one’s own.  

      France and other European nations share with the United States an underlying problem rooted in their history. Just as the US has never managed to come to grips with its slaveholding past, former European colonial empires have never worked out how to deal not just with their own colonial history. To some extent, this reflects and incapacity to deal with history itself, whose reality they prefer to deny. This is especially true of France, a nation that, like the US, believes its own political culture of human rights and the championing of freedom represents universal norms. Both the French and the Americans should ask themselves this question: Who is experiencing the deepest crisis today? The answer should be obvious.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More