Secular fanaticism must be exposed for its own hatred and xenophobia, and get over the old cliches of East and West.
By Hamid Dabashi
Al-Jazeera
"New York, NY - In a powerful new essay for Le Monde [Fr], Alain Badiou, arguably the greatest living French philosopher, pinpoints the principal culprit in the success of the far-right in the recent French presidential election that resulted in the presidency of Francois Hollande.
At issue is the evidently not-so-surprising success of the French far-right, anti-immigration, Islamophobe nationalist politician Marine Le Pen - to whom the French electorate handed a handsome 20 per cent and third place prestige.....
Who is responsible?
In this poignant and timely essay, Alain Badiou dismisses the pop sociology of blaming the rise of the right on the poor and the disenfranchised French, supposedly fearful of globalisation. He denounces the blaming of the poor French by the educated elite for all its ills - and instead offers a far more sensible and factual evidence of what seems to be the matter with the French - and, by extension, other Europeans......
Blaming the poor, Alain Badiou retorts, is reminiscent of Berthold Brecht's famous sarcasm that the French government evidently does not have the people it richly deserves. Turning the table against the French politicians and the French intellectuals, Badiou blames them directly for the rise of the right. Badiou turns to a list of the most recent anti-labour and anti-immigrant statements uttered by socialist politicians and charges them with the responsibility for the rise of the right.
"The succession of restrictive laws, attacking, on the pretext of being foreigners, the freedom and equality of millions of people who live and work here, is not the work of unrestricted 'populists'." He accuses Nicolas Sarkozy and his gang of "cultural racism", of "raising high the banner of 'superiority' of Western civilisation" and "an endless succession of discriminatory laws".
But Badiou does not spare the left and, in fact, accuses them of complacency: "We did not see the left rise forcefully to oppose... such reactionary" laws. Quite to the contrary, this segment of the left maintained that it understood this demand for "security", and had no qualms about the public space being cleansed of women who opted to veil themselves.
Badiou accuses the French intellectuals of having fomented Islamophobia, as he accuses successive French governments of having been "unable to build a civil society of peace and justice", and for having Arabs and Muslims abused as the boogymen of French politics.
But this is not just a French thing....."
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