Public Enemies (13 page)

I’m afraid no, dear Bernard-Henri, the problem is that it is not a piece of provocation and I believe I understand Goethe’s maxim exactly as he intended it.

Injustice can, in effect, mean sparing a French (or German) soldier who may be (or may not be; let’s say who probably is) a major criminal.

There is disorder in any case that involves killing someone at random. Because that, may I remind you, was precisely the aim of acts of the Resistance: to spread terror through the occupying army; to ensure that not a single German soldier felt safe in the metro.

Greater disorder in a case where that same soldier (whether German or French) is lynched by a mob—greater disorder, I must point out, simply because in the second case, the death will be that much more disgusting. Although perhaps that is to exaggerate a little; there are always a few clumsy oafs in a crowd, the death blow must come pretty quickly. Well, I say that mostly to reassure myself; the moments preceding the death blow must nevertheless be utterly appalling.

Disorder, too, in the planting of a bomb in a crowded place. Anarchists, Al Qaeda … there are few people, to be
honest, in history, few people to
justify
the act (but many, almost as many as you could want, to carry it out).

No, obviously I don’t like disorder: I am one of those who believe that disorder results in the greatest injustices.

Goethe’s maxim, deep down, is that of all those who believe that the authorities in charge of a situation should make a decision,
any decision
, be it vague or unjust, rather than leave the last word to the “crowd,” or to the “street”—to the big nasty impulsive animal always ready to pillage and massacre. That of all those haunted by the idea that we are never far from primal savagery, that civilization is merely a veneer. To believe that, one doesn’t even need to be caught up in a civil war; it is enough, as we talked about earlier, to witness what a pack of children or of teenagers is capable of when they’ve chosen a victim. It’s enough to have been in a crowd when access to the emergency exits is blocked. The ease with which they lash out and trample. Maybe we would be better off talking about cheerful subjects.

I have absolutely no idea in what sense Barrès understood it, and I confess that I don’t really understand. (In what sense can reopening a case that was badly conducted constitute a cause of disorder? Isn’t this how the judicial process normally works?) I don’t really know anything about Barrès; I remember starting
La Colline inspirée
,
^*
slogging through and finally giving up without finishing the book. In a nutshell, I can’t say he is an author that particularly impressed me.

I later heard he was some sort of
nationalist
. In short, someone not very interesting. Developing an overweening national pride is always a sign, to my mind, that you have nothing much else to be proud of.

Okay, I know what you’re going to say: Barrès is an important author, I read the wrong book. In that case, tell me which book I should read, because so far, in my opinion, quite frankly, Barrès is a nonentity.

Let’s wait until I’ve read Barrès; but where does the German soldier fit into all this? No, of course I wouldn’t have done it. I think I would have trouble killing a pig, And you’re right, it’s not (or not principally) about cowardice. The expression I find odious, almost unbearable, is a simple, anodyne phrase (one that you didn’t use, but if I had to be disagreeable, let’s say I think it was implicit in “with a heavy heart” and “dragging your feet”; thankfully, in the end, you didn’t say it). This simple phrase which, to my mind, carries within it every crime is “The end justifies the means.”

With the appropriate judicial proprieties, yes, maybe, I think I could kill. I could manage to be part of a firing squad. (Though I am happy never to have had to do so; I know that, in any case, the condemned man is blindfolded, and I wouldn’t want to have to look him in the eye, but I would fire, yes, I would fire, if I believed that the man had been fairly tried.)

I am not really convinced, to finish with those points on which we disagree, by the distinction you make between the Basques and the Chechens. The Basques (
some
Basques) believe it is important to have an independent Basque state; they fought for it under Franco, they went on fighting under various successive Spanish governments; in what sense has the nature of their cause changed, simply because they are now fighting a democracy? As for the Chechens, I don’t know much about them; I don’t think that an independent Chechnya has existed in past centuries. From time to time there has
been a movement in favor of independence (isn’t there some mention of it as early as Tolstoy?); it’s quashed, usually by military force, by the Russian government of the day. So yes, from all I know, I do still consider it an
internal matter for Russia
.

What precisely confers legitimacy on a nation? The length it has existed? A
common will
? I wonder. If it is a common will, I don’t understand why people don’t use the simple means of a referendum on self-determination. In the case of Corsica, the outcome would be a foregone conclusion (I say this because I know the area quite well). In the case of the Basque country, of Chechnya, of Flanders? I confess, I don’t have a clue.

The case of Tibet is very different. Tibet has an age-old, a millennial existence; it was a sort of theocracy that developed a very interesting variant of Buddhism. And then brutally, fifty years ago, it was invaded by Communist China. At that point the resistance began, under the leadership of their spiritual leader, who was forced into exile. Since then, the resistance has never ceased.

I do not personally consider the Dalai Lama to be a “pure spirit,” I consider him rather to be a tactician and a subtle one. And if, at the present time, he refuses to call for a boycott on the Beijing Olympic Games, I suspect he has his reasons. He can, of course, like any of us, be mistaken; but I am more or less sure that in terms of the
media coverage
, he has made his calculations.

Let’s go further and say that the adoption of an attitude of nonviolent resistance, or a morally admirable form of resistance, perhaps, may also be a form of calculated self-interest; nor is it necessarily a losing strategy.

Stalin’s famous phrase—“The pope! How many divisions has he got?”—is somewhat laughable given the not insignificant role that Pope John Paul II would play decades later in the final collapse of communism. Stalin, in short, was a stupid arsehole. Or, to be more polite, his view of human nature was rather limited.

Let’s state the obvious: man is not, in general, a morally admirable creature. To delicately state something less obvious: man, in general, has enough in him to admire that which, morally, is beyond him and to behave accordingly. Tibetan resistance, from the outset,
commands respect
. And, in the long term, to command respect is not necessarily a losing strategy. I don’t know who the idiot was who coined the phrase—like the title of a dissertation: “Kantian philosophy has kept its hands clean; but it has no hands,”
^*
but I do know that he would have been better off saying nothing that day. Moral law does have hands, and powerful hands at that.

Because what is at stake in Tibet is not the vague, historically variable entity the nation-state; what is at stake in Tibet, in the eyes of the whole of the civilized world, is moral law; yes, itself, personified, as is manifest by the impeccable behavior of the victims. And what motivates the Tibetan people is not the fickle phantom, that mixture of frustrated resentment and silly pride we call national feeling; it is a principle of a spiritual nature, the most difficult thing in the world to defeat (something that is perhaps, strictly speaking, invincible).

I certainly have no wish to put the “spiritual” on a pedestal; it is also a
principle of a spiritual nature
that motivates the Islamic revolution throughout the modern world; in fact it is this that makes it so terribly dangerous.

Moral law was also at stake, to the greatest possible extent, in Nazism. There, too, there was a
principle of a spiritual nature
(one that you obviously know much more about than I do). There was only one (one can hardly define as “spirituality” a mishmash of Nordic mythology, a tedious
remix
; Chesterton noted that even a committed freethinker would give himself a serious headache if, in the space of an afternoon, he had to come up with a blasphemy intended to offend the great god Thor).
^*

And it was a spiritual principle that triumphed; or at least in retrospect one can read history that way.

Problems, real problems, begin when two spiritual principles come face-to-face; this is why I am not terribly optimistic on the subject of the conflict between Israel and Palestine.

I have made my choice, it is the same as that of Maurice Dantec
^†
(though we express ourselves differently and do so for different reasons). Maurice converted, good for him; but for my part the choice continues to be one of uniquely moral considerations. I am gathering together the conditions for perfect objectivity on the subject: I have, as far as I am aware, no Arabic or Jewish forebears; the religions they practice seem to me almost equally absurd. But there is, to my mind, an essential, crucial difference between a
blind attack
and a
targeted strike
. You see the importance I attach to the
means!
They go so far as to influence my judgment of the end.

•    •    •

Well, well, well. I believe I have just proved that I too could easily have been a pontificating/grandiloquent/sincere individual. Let’s go back to the admittedly more trivial question of the
nation
. Here too I think I need to go back a little. Some years ago, I was included (together with Maurice Dantec, Philippe Muray,
^*
and a number of others) as one of the leading figures in a small, easily readable book that described us as the
new reactionaries
. My first reaction was one of amusement; then, some weeks later, I began to feel annoyed. Not because of the whiff of shame attached to the term
reactionary
, that seemed rather funny; but because it’s important to agree on the meaning of words. A reactionary is someone who favors some previously existing social configuration—something it is possible to return to—and someone who militates in favor of such a return.

Whereas, if there is an idea, a single idea that runs through all of my novels, which goes so far as to haunt them, it is the
absolute irreversibility of all processes of decay
once they have begun. Whether this decline concerns a friendship, a family, a larger social group, or a whole society; in my novels there is no forgiveness, no way back, no second chance: everything that is lost is lost absolutely and for all time. It is more than organic, it is like a universal law that applies also to inert objects; it is literally
entropic
. To an individual convinced of the ineluctable nature of all decay, of all loss, the idea of reaction would never occur. If such an individual could never be
reactionary
, he would on the other hand, obviously, be
conservative
. He would always consider it best to conserve what exists, what works more or less, rather than
rush headlong into some new experiment. More attuned to danger than to hope, he would be a pessimist, melancholy by disposition, and generally easy to get along with.

In short, I was angry with Daniel Lindenberg, who, in calling me a reactionary, demonstrated such a complete lack of understanding of my books that it occurred to me that maybe I was a bad writer; then I thought maybe he was a bad reader (or that he hadn’t read me, that he was working from index cards). Eventually I reread the magnificent article Philippe Muray devoted to
The Elementary Particles
, entitled “And, in Everything, Foresee the End,” and I felt serene.

All things, therefore, die, including mental constructs, and as for the French nation, French patriotism, they are already dead. They have been dead for a long time; specifically, they have been dead since 1917 at about the time the first mutinies took place because, to be frank, it was all getting to be a bit too much.

Here too we need to step back a little. Here is a verse from a song that, at the time, everyone in France would have known:

Okay. It must be admitted that the Third Republic, with its famous
Black Hussars
, had clearly succeeded in something for an entire generation to go off to be massacred in 1914 with the feeling that they were only doing their duty and, in some cases, go off
enthusiastically
.

A few days ago, the last French combatant in the First
World War died and, to mark the occasion, we heard again the testimony of his comrades, the former
poilus
. People have always been killed in wars, that’s what wars are for. But back then men lay howling and dying for days at a time, a few feet from their comrades, and then rotting and decomposing, still only a few feet from them. These men who had to share their trenches with rats, their rations with worms, who were riddled with lice, who had to relieve themselves in the trenches wherever they could; and all this went on for months, for years, for a war that was utterly absurd, the reason for which no one can quite remember.

A government can ask much of its citizens, of its subjects; but there comes a moment when it asks
too much
; and then it’s over. In going beyond the acceptable in that appalling, unjustified war, France lost all right to the love and the respect of its citizens; it brought discredit on itself. And such discredit is, I repeat, permanent.

This, it seems to me, explains a lot of things.

The nihilist rage of Surrealism and Dadaism, the surge of fury André Breton sometimes felt at the sight of a uniform or a flag.