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Antisemitic carnivals: "Spitting on the victims of the camps", denounces Glucksmann

2020-02-26T20:21:19.290Z


The MEP (Public Place-PS) and essayist demands an apology after the anti-Semitic cartoons in carnivals. Judging that he


European MP (Public Place-PS), essayist, Raphaël Glucksmann was the first to denounce in a tweet the carnival of Aalst (Belgium), where "the Jews are vermin and the Nazis are nice guys". The author of "Children of the Void" (at Allary's) warns of a dangerous time.

How to explain the appearance of these sinister anti-Semitic carnivals in Europe?

RAPHAËL GLUCKSMANN . First of all, there is the amazement in front of these images. We are just coming out of the commemoration of the 75 years of the liberation of Auschwitz. Our society has a memory of goldfish: these images are sputum on the victims of the concentration camps, on our history. Memory, for peoples, is what makes it possible not to reproduce the crimes of the past. Gradually, this memory will fade and we will resume the most abject caricatures of the 1930s, which allowed the dehumanization of the Jews and their extermination. To represent the Jews as insects, as in Belgium in Aalst, is to fall back into dehumanization. The Jews, we gassed them because they were lice, they had to apply the same pesticides as pests. To make all this a joke is scandalous!

What to do ?

One must restore a limit by indignation: one does not have fun on the gas chambers. I see three options. Either the carnival officials apologize and promise to end the cartoons. Either there is a legal ban. Finally, if we are unable to ban this type of Nazi imagination in Belgium - in France laws prevent it - we need a boost from European civil society. Let us make Aalst a meeting point for the fight against anti-Semitism and racism. And let's be hundreds of thousands on the spot, to prevent onlookers from applauding bantering Nazis with a beer.

But in the meantime, nothing concrete is possible?

In the European Parliament, we are going to take initiatives, between different political groups and different member countries, to make this impossible. By trying to establish pan-European regulation on the issue. If we do not succeed, it will be up to public opinion to restore the taboo in society. We are at a turning point in our history.

That is to say ?

The climate is deleterious, the expression of xenophobia is becoming widespread. Jews are the favorite scapegoats in European societies, but it's not just them. In Poland, there are “LGBT free” zones, without gays or lesbians, in Hungary we hunt for Roma, in Italy a black footballer can no longer touch a ball without hearing the cries of monkeys. The most xenophobic imaginations sink into our barriers like butter. It is up to each of us to restore the barrier.

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How? 'Or' What ?

We live in the illusion that our democracy can hold without taboo. It is not true, there are taboos. We have the right to make fun of all ideologies, public figures. If they had scrolled Moses with a feather duster in the buttocks, or Jesus, or Muhammad, they would have targeted public figures, not peoples as such. Stigmatizing people because they are Jewish, because they are black, or Arab, is not part of freedom of expression. It was part of the taboos that we gradually installed, by dint of horrors. However, these taboos jump because we fall into an immense mental pulp. We put a line of equivalence between mocking a policy, a religion and caricaturing a people as an insect or a monkey.

Why are we at such a time?

The democratic, social, moral crisis is such in the West that this temptation of the scapegoat resurfaces. This is why taboos must be restored. These were solidified by the living memory of the genocide of the Jews, but this living memory fades. This is the immense challenge before us, which also partly explains the crisis in the European Union.

Why ?

Because it is a project based on this memory of nationalism and its consequences. We cannot base a political project on memory, because when it fades, the project loses its meaning, we have a nationalist revival.

Is this a dangerous time?

Ah yes, a deep danger hangs over our democracies. Hyperdistrust has developed towards the institutions of liberal democracies. We are no longer at all in the period when I grew up, of relative confidence in the future, of certainty that we were going to live forever in a democracy. The worst is possible, the disintegration of the interior of the European project, of democracies. These carnival images remind us that we are not vaccinated.

Source: leparis

All news articles on 2020-02-26

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