Gilles-William Goldnadel is a lawyer and essayist. Each week, he deciphers the news for FigaroVox.
This week, this column intends to continue its reflection inaugurated last Monday, with supporting examples, on madness in the quasi-psychiatric sense of the Western world.
The past week was devoted mainly to race and gender, this week I intend to show what is at play irrational behind France's unilateral recognition of the crimes committed by it in Algeria.
I would remind you, insofar as it is necessary, that the President of the Republic felt it necessary to order a report from the committed historian Benjamin Stora on the Algerian war and decolonization which was given to him on January 20.
In this context, the Élysée issued a press release on Tuesday March 2 as follows: “
Today, the President of the Republic received at the Élysée Palace four of Ali Boumendjel's grandchildren to tell them, name of France, what Malika Boumendjel would have liked to hear: Ali Boumendjel did not commit suicide.
He was tortured and then murdered ”
Thus, after having already recognized, on behalf of the French Republic, that the Communist mathematician Maurice Oudin had been tortured and then executed by soldiers who had arrested him at his home, Emmanuel Macron is therefore continuing his initiative to recognize the crimes committed by the French army in Algeria.
No one in France today opposes the recognition of abuses, but within the framework of the principle of reciprocity.
I will quickly pass on the dispute by certain historians of the conclusions of Benjamin Stora on the murder of Ali Boumendjel as summarized in the Figaro of March 4, citing in particular Pierre Pélissier who declares: "
what is beyond doubt is that 'Ali Boumendjel had great responsibilities within the FLN in Algiers, of which he was one of the leaders and on behalf of which he carried out strategic missions
”.
Jean Sévillia, author of “
Hidden Truths of the Algerian War
” (Fayard 2018) adds: “
This is precisely where the whole problem of the Stora report lies, because at no time does it recognize that the FLN was at At that time a terrorist organization, these facts are nevertheless known and documented today: in 1956 and 1957, the FLN killed Europeans almost every day in Algiers and constantly bombed the civilian populations.
".
To read also:
Goldnadel: "leftist ideology makes us live in an asylum"
This is precisely where I wanted to come: the deliberately unilateral aspect of France's recognition of the crimes committed in Algeria.
No one in France today, including among repatriates, opposes the recognition of abuses, but within the framework of the principle of reciprocity.
How indeed to accept this title of the World of March 4: "Recognition of the assassination of Ali Boumendjel by France: in Algeria, many other families" wait for the truth on their missing children ""?
It happens, precisely, that in France too, many Christian and Jewish families are awaiting the truth about their 453 children who disappeared during the massacres of July 1962, committed even though Algeria had obtained its independence.
In the name of what ontological or political principle, the life of an Algerian Muslim would be more precious than that of an Algerian blackfoot or a harki?
Obviously, the presidential approach is sorely lacking in the elementary principle of reciprocity.
This principle of reciprocity is an essential and universal human principle.
Confirmed by sociology and psychology.
It is the basis of social relations.
Based on mutual donation.
But it happens precisely, that in the spirit of the present time, this reciprocity is expressly refuted.
I can prove it: World Title of March 3: "
France must take action without waiting for Algerian reciprocity
".
Article by Frédéric Bobin: relevant question from a reader:
“
Salutary recognition, for the sake of memorial appeasement, do you think that the Algerian government will recognize the responsibility of the FLN in the death of Guy Monnerot, a schoolteacher killed on December 1, 1954, the first civilian victim of the Algerian war?
".
Journalist's response: “
It's a sensitive affair.
If France wants to move forward, it must make gestures of unilateral recognition without waiting for Algerian reciprocity…
”.
And why would France want to move forward while Algeria would give up doing it?
While some in this country evoke a "
genocide
".
And that the Algerian state was built essentially and negatively on resentment towards its former colonial power.
Moreover, in my opinion, this fundamentally explains its economic, political and democratic woes.
To compare in particular his state of dereliction, with that of his Moroccan neighbor.
In the name of what ontological or political principle, the life of an Algerian Muslim would be more precious than that of an Algerian blackfoot or a harki?
To read also:
Jean Sévillia: "Benjamin Stora has a partial vision, therefore partial, of the war in Algeria"
In any case, if this consubstantially racist reasoning had as its pretext a hope of improving relations between French and Algerians on both sides of the Mediterranean, the opposite effect would be easily foreseen.
As in all fantasized memorial matters, the opposite would be to be feared, the Algerian State asking, each time more.
Thus, it is always the World (March 4, article by Mustapha Kessous) which quotes the historian Karima Diréche who takes the recognition of French responsibility as "
a gesture of appeasement which echoes the discrimination
" that the Algerian diaspora would experience in France "
especially in the current climate of accusations of separatism and attack against Islam
".
We can hardly be clearer.
More pragmatic, the historian adds, with regard to the Algerian population in France: "
it is an electorate that must be pampered
".
This preference for the other, is to be found in this unconscious shame to share with Adolf Hitler, the same color of skin.
But if it was only mediocre political concerns.
In the depths of this refusal of elementary reciprocity, there are all these causes of the madness of time that I keep explaining: the life of an FLN official who would be worth more than that of a small teacher French ?: This love for otherness.
And this preference for the other, I still think that it is to be found in this unconscious shame of sharing with the Antichrist of modern times, I named Adolf Hitler, the same color of skin.
This is why, a somewhat casual child of the century named Emmanuel Macron believed he had to consider that France had committed crimes against humanity in Algeria.
The same, who became president, declared in front of a stunned Jean-Louis Borloo that a white male could not order another white male to report to settle the issue of the suburbs.
White evil.
The verbalized unconscious.
So owes nothing to chance, this sentence uttered unconsciously on January 23, 2020 by the President of the Republic in the plane that brought him back from Yad Vashem: "
from a memorial point of view ... the war in Algeria has almost the same status as the Shoah for Chirac in 1995
”.…
The recognition of the French responsibility in the atrocities committed by France in Algeria without any spirit of reciprocity for the crimes committed by the FLN bears the mark of a shameful repentance which does not have the courage to admit thus.
This unjustified repentance is based on an unsuspected intellectual masochism.
It turns out that, precisely, it is this masochism, based on a deaf bad conscience of a fantasized racism, which paralyzes the State in immigrant neighborhoods where part of the population, victim of this obsessive fantasy constantly maintained, already suspects the French state and its servants of a systemic racism.
There was no need to feed it any further, to the great misfortune of the French people already so cruelly tried.
Yes, this intellectual and political masochism is dangerous madness.
