Editor’s note: The following is a translation by Ibn Warraq and Robert Kerr of Michel Onfray’s L’Art d’Etre Francais (The Art of Being French, Bouquins, 2021), published here for the first time. Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here. Part 3 is here.

… and things

The history of France, since then, is one of the country’s long allegiance to Islamo-leftist demands: complicit silence on the fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie; acceptance of polygamy on national territory; promotion of Muslim human rights against those of the French Revolution; demand for repentance for the Algerian War; con­sti­tution of Islamic trade unions; exacerbation of the right to difference; the Islamic veil; celebration of Afghan jihadists; validation of sexual mutilation, namely female circumcision; proclaiming blasphemy as a crime; comparison of colonialism to national socialism; positive discrimination; attack on the freedom of conscience; reactivation of old-fashioned Muslim anti-Semitism; refusal of secular education; rejection of the national education system’s curriculum in science and history; presentation of immigration as an opportunity for France; rewriting history in the sense of a submission of white civilization to that of the so-called Blacks of Egypt and the Muslims; rejection of nativity scenes and Christmas trees in public places; generalization of halal slaughter; tolerance of Muslim violence in the lost territories of the Republic; invention of the notion of Islamophobia;  rewriting the history of France in a stigmatizing way; and then, worst of all: justification of Muslim terrorism…

How can we understand the reactions of this or that person to the attack on the Bataclan, [music venue in Paris] which killed 131 people and whose photos, which do exist, have been banned from publication? For what mysterious reasons? How could we have credibly combatted the totalitarianisms of the 20th century if we had not shown, as Alain Resnais did in his 1956 film Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard), the corpses of the victims of National Socialism? But then it’s true that we never show those of the victims of Marxist-Leninism either…

The attacks have been numerous and have allowed journalists, intellectuals, and philosophers who are fellow travelers of Islamo-leftism to react. For example, Virginie Despentes published an unambiguous piece in Les Inrockuptibles[7] (17 January 2015), the flagship publication of this ideology…

The argument can already be found in the work of Houria Bouteldja[8]: the emasculated white Westerner resents the Arab-Muslim man, to use the appropriate terminology, on account of his virility, or even his supervirility.

One needs only to read Virginie Despentes’ title to understand her thesis:

“Men remind us who is in charge, and how.” Obviously, it is out of the question that a white man can be in charge, that would be fascism, racism, sexism, phallocracy, homophobia, anti-Semitism, et cetera! Conversely, if we are dealing with non white males (the “Arab-Muslim” to express oneself as Houria Bouteldja does, of the mestizo, in the words of Guy Hocquenghem, of the creole in the diction of Édouard Glissant), then one can enjoy different privileges – sexual possession proves to be the great fantasy of those who, in their insults, propose to fuck mothers or threaten to sodomize anyone who looks at them in the wrong way. While Christian eroticism based on the imitation of an angelic or martyred body for men or a virgin mother for women, was not very balanced, Muslim imagination in this field does not seem to offer a more desirable alternative: the desire to penetrate someone’s mother’s pudenda or the rectum of men in order to punish them, never ceases to amaze.

Virginie Despentes says that after the attacks of January 7, 2015, which decimated the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo and which, the following day, caused the death of four Jews in a kosher supermarket, her first reaction was to love everyone, without distinction… She said she loved even those who were not Charlie, which hardly seemed a feat out of reach for anyone defending the Islamo-leftist line! Given that she loved what was furthest from her habitual loves, she even “was Charlie”, that’s how hard she tried.

But this wave of love went even further, for, in a statement that would have sent shivers down the spine of the Pope, such an extension of the scope of love was truly Christ-like, she added: “I was also the guys who went in with their guns. Those who had just bought a Kalashnikov on the black market and had decided, in their own way, the only one [sic] available to them, was to die standing up rather than living on their knees. I also liked those who made their victims stand up and ask them to identify themselves before aiming at their faces. I also liked their desperation. Their way of saying – you don’t want me, you don’t want to see me, you think I’m going to live my life crouched in a ghetto putting up with your hostility without getting in the way of your week of sales shopping or your round of golf – I’m going to break into your fucking realities that I hate because not only do they exclude me but they put me in jail and condemn all of my people to the dishonor of a ponderous precariousness. I loved them in the sweeping movement of the lens, their gesture also became a declaration of love [sic] – look at me, take me into account” – as if it were the only way to get to the sales and the golf course on one day.

But the declaration of love made to the terrorists does not stop there. Here is how the Passion, according to Despentes, continues: “I loved them in their awkward blundering – when I saw them with their weapons in hand sowing terror while shouting ‘we have avenged the Prophet’ and not finding the right tone to say it. Like a bad action movie, bad gangsta-rap. Right down to their heroic [sic] act, something that didn’t succeed.”

She goes on to talk about the victims of 9/11, the Jewish children murdered at close range by Mohamed Merah in front of their Jewish school, noting, “I can’t seem to differentiate between these different ways of dying.”

This is followed by musings on “the mushy leftism” of Libération and Charlie Hebdo which were attacked by these famous perpetrators of “heroic acts” – including the murder of Jewish children… Ultimately, Virginie Despentes resigns herself to defend the right-wing left – honor is preserved intact, the readers of Libération who go to the sales and play golf, those of the Inrockuptibles too, ditto with those of Le Monde, or the listeners of France Inter will have been spooked for nothing! They will still be able to vote Macron in the second round of the presidential elections…

COLUMN BY

MICHEL ONFRAY

REFERENCES:

[7] Inrockuptibles, first published in 1986, is a French magazine, initially covering only rock music, but now covers all matters political and cultural. It is on the hard left of the political spectrum.

[8] Houria Bouteldja [born 1973] with parents of Algerian origin. Houria has often been accused of antisemitism, homophobia, and antiwhite prejudice.

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

Editor’s note: The following is a translation by Ibn Warraq and Robert Kerr of Michel Onfray’s L’Art d’Etre Francais (The Art of Being French, Bouquins, 2021), published here for the first time. Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here.

Foucault went on a second trip in November of that year, and a new series of articles appeared. On February 13, 1979, when Khomeini left for Iran, the philosopher, who had made the trip to Neauphle-le-Château, was present at the airport.

What arguments do the articles he published in the Italian newspaper at the end of 1978 make?

That Islam is the answer to the Shah’s westernization of Iran; that, for want of justice, the Mullahs provide charity in response to the regime’s imperialism; that a Muslim killing another Muslim is scandalous – which is however to ignore the history of Shiite-Sunni relations for almost a millennium and a half; that Israel backed the Shah along with the United States and France (but then so did the Soviet Union); that, paradoxically for a normalien, modernity is archaism – and thus tradition is the true modernity; that the regime was corrupt and that the Shah was imposing on his people “a regime of occupation” comparable “to all colonial regimes” (III, 683).

– therefore, to oppose this is to resist; secularism and industrialization are no longer relevant

-and consequently, theocracy and feudal economy represent the true modernity; the Shah’s regime stands for archaism while that of the Mullahs  is modernity; that the traditional life defended by the Mullahs is preferable to the modernity advocated by the Shah; that “Islam, which for so many centuries has so carefully regulated daily life, family ties, and social relations” (III, 685), is most capable of offering “protection” against the regime – “didn’t its rigor [sic], its immobility [re-sic] determine its success?” Accordingly, “the Islamic government” and the left make common cause without any difficulty  (this is the genealogy of Islamo-leftism); that the Qur’an legitimized the struggle against the Shah, the Americans, “the West and its materialism”; that Islam is fascinated by death and martyrdom (and it is understandable that this proved irresistible to Foucault, who shared this fascination); that the Islamist sermons broadcast in the streets by loudspeaker reminded him of Savonarola – who headed the Catholic theocratic dictatorship in Florence without our philosophy professor being troubled about it; that the Shiite clergy disregards hierarchy, but that one must follow ‘the great ayatollahs’ because they crystallize the will of the people; that Islam is opposed to state power (a notion that a thousand years of Islamic politics refutes); and “that one fact must be clear: By ‘Islamic government’ no one in Iran means a political regime in which the clergy would play a leading or supervisory role” (III, 691) – Everyone will appreciate the philosopher’s immense foresight; that Islam once in power would protect freedoms, minorities, the equality of men and women, that the people could hold those who govern them to account; that this same political Islam would make it possible to reinsert spirituality, that is to say religion, into politics – which means abolishing secularism and restoring the theocratic order that the French Revolution had suppressed in order to favor the democratic order; that a ‘political spirituality’ (III, 694) is a project that ‘impressed’ (that’s his own word) Michel Foucault.

In speaking of this “political spirituality” as something we had forgotten “since the Renaissance and the great crises of Christianity” (though all counter-revolutionary thought was full of it in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one only has to read Joseph de Maistre[4], Louis de Bonald[5], Blanc de Saint-Bonnet[6]), Foucault writes: “I can already hear the French laughing, but I know they are wrong” (III, 694).

The philosopher, however, was also wrong on this subject: many French people did not laugh, many of them even subscribed to this reactionary and theocratic thinking, since it came from a man who called himself a leftist. I am thinking of Serge July in Libération or Jean Daniel in Le Nouvel Observateur, who also thought along these lines. The same applies to the Parti socialiste. Or with Le Monde, which, since the war in Lebanon in 1975, pitted the “Islamo-progressivists” against the “conservative Christians”. This has since become the dominant ideology of what presents itself as the Left and claims to be progressive.

Islamo-Gauchism was thus born in the wake of this Iranian revolution when Foucault believed that Islamic traditionalist thought, that is to say its anti-Semitism, its phallocracy, its misogyny, its theocracy, its homophobia, were susceptible to become the truth of the future.

He was certainly not wrong to write: “The issue of Islam as a political force is a crucial matter for our time and for the years to come” (III, 708). But why on earth did he think that abolishing secularism, suppressing democracy, renouncing progress, that is, restoring the power of the religious, rehabilitating theocracy, and re-establishing tradition, were the political answers to the crisis of the Western world? The ghost of Foucault hovers over European decadence.

REFERENCES:

[4] Joseph de Maistre [1753-1821] was a key figure of the Counter-Enlightenment. He regarded the monarchy both as a divinely sanctioned institution and as the only stable form of government. Maistre argued that the rationalist rejection of Christianity was directly responsible for the disorder and bloodshed which followed the French Revolution of 1789.

[5] Louis de Bonald [1754-1840], was a monarchist who opposed the French Revolution, and wished France to return to the principles of the Roman Catholic Church.

[6] Blanc de Saint-Bonnet [1815-1880] was a counter-revolutionary, anti-liberal who favored social Catholicism. He wrote, “You who separate reason and religion, know that you destroy both. Religion is the health of reason; reason is the strength of religion. Religion without reason becomes superstition. Reason without religion becomes disbelief” (L’Unité spirituelle)

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Editor’s note: The following is a translation by Ibn Warraq and Robert Kerr of Michel Onfray’s L’Art d’Etre Francais (The Art of Being French, Bouquins, 2021), published here for the first time

The words…

Sartre, again and again…

This man is a compass that points south! Sartre, deluded as he was, missed out on the perilous rise (as a professor in Le Havre, he found virtues in Hitler, according to Philippe Dechartre who was his pupil at the time – I have this information from his son Emmanuel…) of the Popular Front (he did not vote and despised the masses marching in the streets…), on the catastrophic defeat in 1940 (Beauvoir found the Germans who took her under their wing very sympathetic…), of the Occupation (in 1944, he found the German officers in the subway very polite and wrote about it….), the Resistance (he later claimed to be in the Resistance, but probably in the same group as Marguerite Duras, who was sleeping with a lout from the Gestapo…), the Liberation (he repeatedly concealed people as compromised as himself, including his publisher, whom he whitewashed and who whitewashed him in return…), he calls de Gaulle all manner of names (“fascist” being the most courteous, but there are also “reactionary pimp”, “pig”, “bloody bastard”, or “shit”, see his Interviews with John Gerassi between 1970 and 1974), he gave the Soviet kiss to all the Marxist-Leninist dictators the World has ever known (Stalin, Mao, Che Guevara, Castro, Kim Il-sung), he supported the Palestinian terrorists who killed Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, he defended the Baader-Meinhof gang, he asked people to vote François Mitterrand… One wonders why, in Le Siècle de Sartre, in the year 2000, Bernard-Henri Lévy undertakes to praise such a man!

Of course, Sartre is also on the side of the Ayatollah Khomeini! Never late for an infamy, Jean-Paul Sartre supported this man exiled in Neauphle-le-Château in the Yvelines where France had granted him hospi­tality. From October 1978 to February 1979, the Iranian dignitary spent 114 days there; Sartre joined his support committee! It is not surprising that this episode is mostly concealed. In fact, it is not mentioned either in his authorized biographies, nor in the Dictionnaire Sartre, nor in the Album Pléiade, nor in the chronologies which accompany the three volumes of philosophy in this collection, nor in La Cérémonie des adieux that Simone de Beauvoir brought out in 1981, to give an account of the last years of her companion.

Sartre’s political thinking was as superficial as a teenager’s petulance: a bourgeois had stolen his mother, whose affection he had enjoyed alone since her widowhood, the child was then fifteen months old, and this remarriage, when he was twelve years old, had triggered in him an unquenchable hatred of the bourgeois. At least the idea he had of them. From then on, anything and everything that attacked the bourgeoisie acted as an absolute ideal for him. The left was his family, since his mother’s remarriage had robbed him of it. Les Mots describes this neurosis between the lines. The existential psychoanalysis elaborated by the philosopher justifies this genealogical, biographical, and psychological reading of his political commitments.

Like Stalin or Mao, Guevara or Castro, Mao or Kim Il-sung, Khomeini is a kindred spirit of Sartre. Nationalism, imperialism, colonialism – these are the enemies since they embody the law of the father for this cultured man who ingenuously admits he has no subconscious… An Ayatollah who opposes the Shah of Iran – who was portrayed as an agent of American imperialism, also having good relations with Israel – is a new kinsman! It doesn’t matter that the Shah was dropped by the United States, which worked to replace him with the Ayatollah – by no means the least of the follies of American policy, which was also allied with bin Laden for a time, anticommunism makes for strange bedfellows Sartre was happy to support a man who proposed to do away with the bourgeoisie. There is no point in looking a gift horse in the mouth!

The same neurosis animated Sartre when he belatedly became an ally of the FLN in Algeria: the progenitor in this case was General de Gaulle, the aforementioned “reactionary pimp”. His zeal remained undiminished as the aim was to establish a socialist regime on the other side of the Mediterranean. It doesn’t matter that this change of regime ushered in the return to the traditional patriarchal values promoted by Islam. If the paternal demiurge were killed, the bloodshed would be without consequence, even acting as a catharic ablution.

This period of Sartre’s support for the Ayatollah Khomeini, between the end of 1978 and the beginning of 1979, is recounted by Beauvoir in La Cérémonie des adieux (published in English as Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre in 1981). The philosopher died a few months later, on 15 April 1980. She recounts the end of the life of this man who had smoked and taken drugs more than he should have for decades. Now half-blind, half-deaf, he was no longer himself, drooling, drinking, suffering from memory loss, having a peeled tongue from swallowing amphetamines, he rambled, taking two days to read Le Nouvel Observateur (in 1973), and furthermore he had diabetes, etc. This is this man whom his courtiers cast into the arms of the Ayatollah Khomeini, in the aftermath of which Pierre Victor (alias Benny Lévy; his last personal secretary) obtained from him, in March 1980, interviews for Le Nouvel Observateur in which he, who had justified Palestinian terrorism, converts… to philosemitism! These interviews were published under the title L’Espoir maintenant.

Let’s leave Jean-Paul Sartre there. He wrote nothing about this companionship with the Ayatollah, which is to say that he was no longer himself, having hitherto made a headline out of everything he did. While he gave the impetus to Islamo-leftism, the rest came to pass without him.

COLUMN BY

MICHEL ONFRAY

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.