It’s all the rage these days to want to pigeonhole each and every one of us. And to force us to hate and deny the other.
For example, we have to choose between defending French identity or European construction; between supporting Russia or Ukraine; the United States or the countries of the South; Israel or Palestine; reducing greenhouse gas emissions or denying climate change; respecting women’s rights or men’s rights. And if you’re for one, you must necessarily be against the other.
The madness of this radicalism goes so far as to push some people (as we read every day in the newspapers and on social networks) to ask us to choose between siding with Muslims and being categorized as anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist (which today amounts to the same thing, for people of bad faith), or siding with Jews and being categorized as anti-Palestinian or Islamophobic (which today are confused in troubled minds).
It is into this terrible and absurd trap of Manichaeism that the extremes want to draw us: their intention is to discredit any thought that is not univocal, complete, totalitarian and the negation of all others. Their aim is to discredit any thought that is not univocal, wholehearted, totalitarian and inimical to all others, and to remove from power (by denouncing them as “inhuman” or “genocidal” or “globalist” or “neoliberal” or “conspiracy theorist” or by using any other anathema) all those who do not share their vision of the world, which is necessarily just, necessarily the only true one. To remain only in head-on opposition to another extreme; convinced that only extremes should have a voice. And that the ultimate battle for power will only be fought between them. In France in particular, this is the strategy of the RN and LFI, to discredit the social democrats (“traitors” if they don’t rally to the extremist program imposed by LFI) and the center-right parties (“soft” if they don’t rally to the RN’s extremist program).
In reality, this absolute opposition makes no sense. There’s no need to hate those who don’t think like we do. Even when we’re faced with an extreme case: during the Second World War, for example, we had to fight Adolphe Hitler and his cronies, of course; but we didn’t have to want to annihilate German culture, or the German nation, and even less to take away the Germans’ right to have a country. Vercors, Camus and many others discussed this question magnificently at the time.
It’s the same today: you can hate capitalism as it goes, without being an apologist for Venezuela. We can worry about the lack of integration of certain immigrants without wanting to drive them all out. You can wish for Israel to survive, within secure and recognized borders, as a democratic and peaceful state, and just as ardently want an equally democratic and peaceful Palestine to exist right next door. One can consider Netanyahu a dangerous war criminal, harmful to his people, and whose true place would be in prison, without denying Israel’s right to exist; one can denounce Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist groups, and the Palestinian Authority as a den of corrupt people, without giving up on the birth of a democratic Palestinian state. We can be in favor of a democratic and independent Ukraine, while acknowledging that there is a great deal of corruption there today. You can denounce Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship without wanting to cut Russia up into pieces, as his worst adversaries wish. In the same way, we can fight for a strong, sovereign European Union, with an integrated army and industrial policy, and at the same time do everything to ensure that France regains its identity, its power, its autonomy and its originality, in particular by building a union of French-speaking countries. Similarly, we can do everything to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, while recognizing that they are not the only cause of climate change. Finally, there’s nothing to stop us dreaming of a harmonious and mutually beneficial cohabitation of genders and communities.
Don’t get caught up in the poison of Manichaeism. Don’t give in to the ease of exclusion. The life of some does not imply the death of others. On the contrary: the lives of some depend on the lives of others. The solution to the world’s problems lies in each person’s respect for people of other genders, other communities, other generations, past and future, other animal and plant species.
Credit: Nasa/GSFC/Arizona State University