Gilles-William Goldnadel is a lawyer and essayist. Every week, he deciphers the news for FigaroVox.
At the time of putting a temporary end to my weekly chronicles because of summer holidays, I would like to try one last time to try to make sense of the insane.
My reader knows very well that I am questioning the mental health of contemporary collective psychology.
Not that I have never considered the human mental universe as rational but that I discern a headlong rush towards unreason for various causes that I have tried to put in order in my
Media Neuroses: how the world has become a unleashed crowd
(Plon) with the help of the analyzes of Freud and Le Bon.
My end-of-season reflections will focus on two sets of massive political-media behaviors that I consider seemingly meaningless but to which I will attempt to give not a rational sense but a sensible ideological explanation.
The West in general, France in particular and especially patriotic France, continues to inspire the French left with a critical spirit sharpened to the point of acute unreason.
Gilles-William Goldnadel
My first perplexing question relates to the collective vision of the Ukrainian conflict.
More exactly, I do not stop questioning myself on the reasons, in my opinion very unreasonable, which could explain that the same people who show a sometimes selective historical hypermnesia to continue to give part of the French right the color sepia petainism, look at the Azov battalion with dazzling admiration even though some of its members now wear disturbing paranazi insignia.
This senseless difference in treatment in space, wildly anachronistic in time, can only find its explanatory meaning because the West in general, France in particular and especially patriotic France, continues to
I am a little ashamed to have to specify that the foregoing reflection has nothing to do with a judgment on the armed initiative of Putin's Russia in Ukraine, which it is difficult to regard as anything other than an unforgivable aggression against a State sovereign.
As if the noble warrior patriotism of the other suddenly put on the repulsive mask of belligerent nationalism when there is a face from the West and particularly a French figure underneath.
On the other hand, I have accustomed my reader to my perplexity for this way in which the conventional press conceals the information which disturbs it.
I called "concealment authorities" this media power to hide such a major fact for the benefit of another more minor but ideologically more accommodating.
A deadly media silence, broken only by social networks that allowed the victims not to be entirely buried in the indifferent earth.
Gilles-William Goldnadel
What do seven hundred Catholics murdered in Nigeria in the last three months have in common, ten people, all white and of all ages, killed by a Syrian last year in Boulder (Colorado), a military doctor murdered "in the name of God" in Marseille in front of the Catholic school of its children and many French people who in recent weeks have been murdered or injured in the streets of France, almost daily, some by Eritreans, some Tunisians, some Afghans, some still others, all or almost all without papers?
A deadly media silence, broken only by social networks that allowed the victims not to be entirely buried in the indifferent earth.
Networks which then allowed certain news channels - or
Le Figaro
to deliver the victims, with this time delay which prevents the heat of popular emotion, under the cold light.
Networks so shouted down by the authorities of occultation, annoyed, that I baptized them by grateful derision "unfortunate sphere".
But there is another point in common between the different people deliberately buried under a shroud of oblivion.
All were victims of media-protected executioners.
For ideological fear of giving some advantage to the adversary of radical Islam or of massive and illegal Islamic immigration.
Therefore any natural compassion due to the innocent victims is weighed down by this concealing ideological passion.
When the human heart is prevented from beating by professional Pavlovian reflexes.
This is the meaning we can give to this insane behavior.
We live in quite unreasonable times.
