Goldnadel: "The religion of disembodied principles kills"

Gilles-William Goldnadel is a lawyer and essayist. Each week, he deciphers the news for FigaroVox. His latest book, Neuroses Medias. The world has become a raging crowd appeared at Plon.

Beyond the particular imperiousness of our authorities in the crisis, to compare in particular with the way in which our German neighbors go about it, one question continues to fascinate me: the impossibility of giving up our nasty habits. One of them is embodied by the religion of disembodied freedoms. We visibly observe the paralyzing power of this dogmatic current in the current procrastination of power in terms of tracing contaminated individuals for the purpose of prophylactic isolation. Evil runs out, the economy is crawling but our European commissioner Thierry Breton claimed, to postpone it, that this tracing would not be "in our culture" .

While we assure that this epidemic would be of such a morbidity that it would be necessary to stop everything (in reality, for lack of tests), we would be unable to give up for a time our alleged cultural habits while the house is burning!

In the reality of the alleged damage to our real freedoms, an enlightening decryption in Le Figaro signed by Enguerrand Renault on April 3 and entitled "Numérique. Between fantasies and acceptations " , the author concludes on the usefulness of tracing without making any other cultural objection than this remark: " It is the enlightened adoption by the greatest number who will make the effectiveness in the fight against pandemic."

Even Le Monde, ordinarily very practicing the religion of disembodied freedoms, notes in a well-balanced article of April 5 entitled: "Smartphones, apps ... the challenges of massive tracking to fight against the pandemic" : "It is possible to develop an application fully functional which protects privacy… assures Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, recognized expert… ”

It turns out that I would have spent a good part of my intellectual life tracking down this literally deadly danger of immolating thousands of human beings on the altar of so-called endangered freedom.

In my Martyrocrats (Plon, 2004), I counted, in a chapter entitled "Pavane for the sacrificed by principle" , how many human lives had been sacrificed to satisfy an intellectual aestheticism or a stupid moral narcissism as much as obscene. I gave two concrete examples: tainted blood and the sex crime index.

In the first example, I showed that, despite the known danger, we had deliberately agreed to mix the blood of healthy donors with that of AIDS-infected people under the very aesthetic pretext of not stigmatizing the largely contaminated homosexual population in particular. Concrete results: tens of thousands of dead… I also quoted a luminous article by Professor Roger Henrion (published in Le Figaro on February 23, 1999): “When Michel Setbon, researcher at Inserm, insists on the role, in the deplorable French exception of the absence of selection of donors, of the desire not to exclude blood donations from populations at risk for fear of promoting racial and social discrimination, he is perfectly right… Already little inclined to ask certain questions, many are the doctors who rant against the government injunction. In addition, the misfortune wanted that the epidemic reaches first the homosexuals, the drug addicts and the Africans. From then on, any proposal for screening or selection of donors became, at best, a manifestation of hostility towards homosexuals, drug addicts, Africans, at worst an incitement to unacceptable and scandalous discrimination. ” And it was under the jealous empire of this suspicious religion that the director of the prison administration refused to stop the donation of blood in prisons, despite the number of drug addicts they contained. So as not to “blacklist” she declared… To avoid a ghostly stigmatization, we therefore obtained a predictable and real contamination.

In the second example, I showed that the refusal of the so-called beautiful judicial souls to create a file of sex offenders under a pretext of which I never understood the true basis, beyond its disembodied principle, had prevented concretely saving the the skin of the victims of murderous assassins.

Thus Nicolas Sarkozy had proposed September 2, 2003 the creation of a file listing sex offenders without time limit. If this proposal had attracted the support of associations for the defense of children, it had caused a real outcry among certain magistrates. The Syndicat de la magistrature, a great defender of disembodied freedoms before the eternal, had made it "a matter of principle" (Le Monde, 8 September 2003). For this union, this file "would be a form of life sentence for sentenced persons". The Minister of the Interior had however observed that the prison did not cure those who have "monstrous" impulses: "it is not a question of sentencing people for life, but of protecting potential victims in perpetuity".

Some time later, we learned that a man named Guy Georges had committed six or seven rapes since his release from prison in 2002. He had been sentenced in 1992 to 20 years' imprisonment for two rapes committed in 1990 in Calvados. Heard in April 2003 in a case of sexual assault on a nine-year-old girl, he had been released by the magistrate, ignoring his background. The examining magistrate in charge of the case of Guy Georges has since remarked that the lives of two of his victims, Estelle and Magali, would have been saved, if the file contested by the so nice unions for smoking reasons had existed at the time. era… On one side of the disembodied principles, on the other the skin of women!

I could multiply at will the examples of this mania, especially French, of wanting to pass for culture what is in reality a reflex ideological stupidity rather than reflected.

I could mention video surveillance, which has been hotly contested for a long time but which has since rendered so many services to arrest murderers and terrorists.

I could finally and once again evoke our impotence to close our borders to prevent the Other, be it contaminating or fanatically dangerous, from freely entering our home without our permission.

The last example of our mortal principles was given to us in Drôme on Saturday evening and made two very real victims.

Requiem for the martyrs of this moral aesthetic easily traceable ideologically.