By Jörg Heiser
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People observing a minute of silence at Place de la République, 16 November 2015
In the aftermath of the Paris attacks, evidence-based thinking of ‘grey zones’ and nuances is what’s needed.
I hadn’t anticipated the effect of Place de la République on me. On Wednesday 18 November, as a major raid had been under way from early morning on in Saint-Denis, with 5000 rounds fired by the police, and the northern suburban area of Paris under lock-down, I walked onto the square where Parisians paid tribute and mourned the victims of the 13 November attacks, with a sea of flowers, candles and handwritten notes placed around the statue of La République.
Marina Warner, in her ground-breaking study Monuments & Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (1985), described the body of the monumental female allegory of 1880 as a ‘well-amoured vehicle’, with her general’s mantle and her Roman short sword. But no war cries, no thundering call to arms were to be heard on the square. Instead, the almost silent shuffling of feet, and the fake camera shutter sounds of smartphones, as people gathered around strange spectacles.
There were numerous people offering free hugs, one of them a bearded guy with a red blindfold. The offers were taken. In a hundred metre wide semi-circle around the monument, dozens of TV teams from around the world had set up shop under canopy tents, using the scene as a backdrop for their news reporters (who would surely, sooner or later, zoom in on the blindfolded guy). I walked up closer to the monument, and like many others around me, silently looked at the flowers and candles, and the tributes scribbled onto paper inside plastic pockets, many of them in children’s handwriting. I had of course seen many images of the impromptu altar on TV, online and in the papers already. Which is why I hadn’t anticipated to be moved the way I was, like a dark grey wave washing over me, or rather, through me.
What is the difference between being close-up, in the actual physical space of mourning, as opposed to seeing images of it? It’s maybe the difference you feel when, confronted with that physical space, you take out your phone or camera; the exact opposite of putting on sun glasses against the sun’s glare, it means to hold up a recording device against the dark void. And now imagine you’re not just a visitor to this place, like I am, but someone living here, in that district even. And now imagine you lost someone in the Paris attacks, or only just survived them, or both. And now imagine the same with any attack, anywhere, around the world. And now imagine you’re on the ground, on the run, in Syria (can we compare, or does it mean to falsely equate, or play off one against the other? I’ll return to that).
A charcoal tinge seemed to be superimposed on everything I saw and experienced for days (a feeling returning now and again like a flashback), and as on that Wednesday I walked through a couple of Paris exhibitions as if to test the effect, that tinge immediately made some work feel self-important and redundant, while others were elevated to another kind of grace under pressure. At the almost-empty Centre Pompidou, I saw Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s survey exhibition, and her filmic impersonations of Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, or of Martine Carol’s Lola Montez in Max Ophüls’s Lola Montès, or even her Natural-History-Museum-type diorama with science fiction books instead of taxidermied animals strewn across a desert floor, suddenly felt like gestures of defiant free-spiritedness amidst the horror.
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This was even more the case with a series of videos by Abounaddara, which after having returned to Germany I watched with art students in Hamburg. The Syrian anonymous collective has uploaded short documentary essay films about the situation inside the war-torn country since 2011. Whether it’s the film of the woman learning her son has died, or the one about activists underground in the city of Raqqa, the Daesh stronghold (see also this report about Raqqa activists that appeared in the New Yorker). ‘Abounaddarra’ means ‘the man with glasses’, which maybe can be read as a knowingly ironic play on the nome de guerre jihadists use (like Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader, and supposed caliph, of the Islamic State, or Daesh as they should be called from now on, as they don’t like that name). It’s a moniker that denotes the anonymous filmmaker as much as it denotes any intellectual or artist, anywhere (and, as I guess it should be read, of all races and genders), under threat from political savagery. And does it need to be said that these courageous people with glasses are not only under threat in Syria and Iraq, but also in Turkey (where journalists are imprisoned for reporting about the state’s secret service smuggling weapons into Syria), or Saudi-Arabia (where poet Ashraf Fayadh has been sentenced to death on charges of apostasy). And there doesn’t need to be any smug self-satisfaction in regard to the comparatively better record of the ‘free world’ as long as, for example, whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning are being smeared as cowards and traitors facing lifetimes in prison.
Two weeks later, one of the dimensions of the 13 November Paris attacks that we still need to get our heads around is what the events have in common with other recent horrific attacks in other parts of the world, from Ankara to Beirut to Bamaco to attacks in Tel Aviv and the Westbank to Tunis– and yet, what nevertheless sets them apart. Does comparing amount to falsely equating? Either with the good intention of raising awareness about media bias (indeed, there was some, but not enough reporting about Beirut, for example), or, to contribute to the by-now routine folklore of social-media-based grief-shaming? Or could it also mean, if we think all these recent attacks together (lest the ongoing slaughter in the warzones of Syria and Iraq), to learn to see what kind of malicious strategies unfold? Who was targeted and why? What exactly does it mean if, as has been argued regarding the attacks on the Bataclan concert hall and the bars and restaurants in the 11th district, one of the main targets was the libertarian, bohemian, multi-cultural lifestyle of artists and young urbanites?
In any case it didn’t take right-wing politicians long to make out who their main target was. Many used the 13 November Paris attacks to agitate against Muslims in general, and refugees in general: the former those who are in fact the number one victims of Daesh and the latter those that have fled to Europe exactly from terror – terror against civilians predominantly by the Assad regime, and by Daesh.
Markus Söder, of Germany’s CSU conservative party, tweeted on 14 November: ‘#ParisAttacks changes everything. We cannot allow illegal and uncontrolled immigration.’ I wonder what Mr. Söder and those promoting arguments in that vain– in France, the US, and elsewhere – make of the fact, if they care to consider it, that numerous experts on Daesh and Jihadi ideology independently of each other have said the same thing: that it was exactly the media scenes of refugees being welcomed in Europe in late August that pissed off Islamist extremists the most.
I chill at the thought that European right-wing politicians might not only share that sentiment of being pissed off, but also might perversely blame ‘Welcome Culture’ towards refugees as the factor that incited the extremists to take terrorist action (which is not to ignore the more sound, pro-refugee scepticism of how sustainable and majority-appealing that new Welcome Culture actually is). Daesh were not amused, ‘the pictures from Germany of people welcoming migrants will have been particularly troubling to them.’, writes Nioclas Hènin, author of Jihad Academy. The Rise of the Islamic State, who was a hostage of Daesh for ten months. The reason is that the images of refugees being warmly welcomed in Munich or Vienna radically undermines the claim that the self-proclaimed caliphate is where Muslims find shelter. Which is why, according to Aaron Y. Zelin from the Washington Institute Daesh last September released no less than 12 videos (!) in an attempt to re-spin the story. They warned refugees heading for Europe that they risk their lives making the dangerous journey (as if they didn’t know, and didn’t make it nevertheless!), and that they might ‘mix and fraternize with infidels’ (they might indeed!), and in an earlier e-book, portrayed the caliphate as a plush holiday resort.
All the more is it disingenuous to insinuate, as many right-wing politicians and media have done, that Daesh terrorists seriously need the trek of war refugees going through Greece and the Balkans as cover to smuggle themselves into Europe. How likely is it that they will risk drowning with a rubber dinghy in the Mediterranean, when they have, as Zelin writes, ‘very good document forgers’ and could just get on a plane in Istanbul?
As we have seen now again, most of the attacks in Europe are carried out by ‘homegrown’ attackers. The forged passport found next to one of the suicide bombers in Paris was one of numerous identical ones circulating amongst refugees who need a Syrian passport to be accepted as asylum seekers; why would it be found with the attacker? Again, the aim seems to be to discredit refugees and incite a polarization between them and the rest of society, a polarization that will result in violence against refugees, which is what Daesh want. As Zelin writes, ‘the sole reason for nesting additional operatives in the refugee flows would be to spark a backlash against Syrian and other refugees as well as the native Muslim populations of Europe.’
Many of the loud political voices (usually on the populist right, but sadly also significantly on the supposedly enlightened left), it seems, don’t care to consider pretty much any actual fact in contradiction with their presumptions and agitations, as for them, the game is not about truth to start with, but about public-opinion-mongering. And as Judd Legum, Editor-in-Chief of website Think Progress observed recently, it was a French philosopher, Roland Barthes, whose 1957 essay about professional wrestling holds ‘the key to understanding [Donald] Trump’s appeal’ (and not only him, but pretty much any crassly populist politician, one might add). That said, Trump is a presidential candidate whose blatant racism, islamophophia and general despicability not least in the wake of the Paris Attacks is just so breathtakingly and theatrically monstrous, undiluted by any pretence to decency and sportsmanship, that to compare Trump’s tricks with the routines of professional wrestlers, though convincing in its logic, still is an insult to the latter.
Meanwhile, other facts just get drowned out by the loud, populist debate over whether in the wake of the Paris attacks one should allow any refugees into Europe, or the US. What accelerated the current refugee crisis in the first place? Why did suddenly so many refugees decide to leave the camps in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan? The answer: the UN’s World Food Programme, in early September, due to insufficient funding from world governments or other donors, cut the monthly food payment to refugees from 28 to 14 US-Dollars, and stopped supplying about a third of them, more than 200000 refugees, altogether
(see also here
and here). Many of the refugees got notice of that decision via SMS
For another 211,000 #Syrianrefugees</a> in <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/jordan?src=hash">#jordan</a> they got this SMS frm <a href="https://twitter.com/WFP">WFP. How to survive on close to 50 cents/day? pic.twitter.com/2rLjPATrkP
— Andrew Harper (@And_Harper) 2. September 2015Now just imagine you receive such an SMS, together with hundred thousands of others. There has been surprisingly little coverage of these outrageous circumstances. The same governments that now whine about the costs of dealing with refugees earlier failed to support the WFP in the most basic manner. These facts centrally affect our understanding of the refugee crisis, in the context of current debates around a supposed connection between that crisis and the terrorism crisis. These facts should remind us that what’s needed is a wiser, more forward-thinking, pro-active approach to supporting refugees. And that we should never allow the populist opinion-mongers to lump refugees and Muslims and terrorists together as essentially one category. It is this lumping together that Daesh are also attempting to achieve with their attacks.
To understand the motivations of young Europeans joining Daesh, as much as those of the group’s strategic backbone not least consisting of former members of Saddam Hussein’s secret services, no expert has been as enlightening and convincing as Scott Atran. Atran, a former assistant to pioneering cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead, teaches in Paris, Oxford, and New York, and has made extensive research on the youth joining jihadist groups for years. Atran sheds light, in numerous articles and papers, on how, for example, Daesh put into practice, literally by the book, aims already set out in 2004 by Al-Qaeda strategist Abu Bakr Naji in his tract entitled Management of Savagery. And he writes that Daesh ‘conscientiously exploits the disheartening dynamic between the rise of radical Islamism and the revival of the xenophobic ethno-nationalist movements that are beginning to seriously undermine the middle class – the mainstay of stability and democracy – in Europe in ways reminiscent of the hatchet job that the communists and fascists did on European democracy in the 1920s and 30s.’ Atran goes on to quote from the ‘Management of Savagery’ treatise: ‘Capture the rebelliousness of youth, their energy and idealism, and their readiness for self-sacrifice, while fools preach ‘moderation’ (wasatiyyah), security and avoidance of risk.’
However the argument is not that a bit of social welfare and providing jobs will do. In a joint article by Atran and Nafee Hamid, of University College London, they write:
‘a pervasive belief among Western governments and NGOs is that offering would-be enlistees jobs or spouses or access to education could reduce violence and counter the Caliphate’s pull. But a still unpublished report by the World Bank shows no reliable relationship between increasing employment and reducing violence, suggesting that people with such opportunities are just as likely to be susceptible to jihadism. When I asked one World Bank representative why this was not published, he responded, “Our clients [that is, governments] wouldn’t like it because they’ve got too much invested in the idea.”’
It is what Daesh manages to do: to exploit the rebelliousness of a youth prone to the false promise of redemption, or plain gratification, through radical, spectacular acts of savagery. Atran quotes the research that shows that ‘more than three of every four who join Isis from abroad do so with friends and family. Most are young, in transitional stages in life: immigrants, students, between jobs and mates, having just left their native family.’ Atran describes here, on the basis of research evidence, exactly the disposition (one realizes with shock) that once defined (and in some ways still does) the transition to subcultural, bohemian, queer, youth-cultural rebellion, and to art. Only that here, instead, it leads to savagery.
It is a transition to art, instead of savagery and war, that has become dramatically less attractive in societies increasingly polarized economically between haves and have nots, and ideologically between ‘proper’ (read: white) citizens and homegrown ‘foreigners’. Which also implies that there’s a real task to restore counter-narratives, to (re-)establish the spirit of ‘each one teach one’, to offer real alternatives to the false redemption of sacrifice and savagery. There is a need to save and restore the ‘grey zone’.
‘The Grey Zone’, Atran writes, is a ten-page editorial in Daesh’s online magazine Dabiq) from early 2015 in which it was stated that ‘the time had come for another event to … bring division to the world and destroy the grey zone’.
So, again, who is targeted? Everyone who inhabits that grey zone. The Taliban, on 16 December 2014, killed 141 people including 132 school children in Peshawar, Pakistan. In the 7-9 January 2015 Paris attacks it was satirists, journalists, and Jews that were targeted; on 3 April 2015, 147 people, mostly students, were killed by al-Shabab militants attacking the Garissa university in north-eastern Kenya. In Ankara on 10 October, it was over a hundred peaceful demonstrators – many of them pacifists, workers’ unionists, or followers of the Kurdish party HDP– who were killed in a devastating suicide bomber attack. In the 13 November attacks, it was pretty much everyone, as the attack on the Stade de France showed (with one player of the French national team Les Bleus, Lassana Diara, a Muslim of Malian descent, having lost a cousin in the attacks), as well as targets associated with bohemian lifestyles (the restaurants and cafés), with music subculture and, arguably, Jewishness (the Bataclan concert hall, which until September 2015 was owned by two brothers who are Jewish, though one of the two dismisses the idea that the concert hall was predominantly attacked because of their previous owners).
In the Tunis attack last Wednesday, it was twelve presidential guards that were killed, but the timing seemed more than coincidental with the Carthage Film Festival, which, in defiance of the attack and the ensuing curfew, continued. One of the films shown there, the Moroccan production Much Loved about four prostitutes in Marakesh, has been officially banned in Morocco, and the cast received death threats.
One of the lead actresses was savagely beaten in the streets of Casablanca. Any tacit consent about these forms of everyday fascism, whether committed under the banner of European right-wing mobs or that of the islamicist hatemongers anywhere, helps to eclipse the grey zone.
That ‘grey zone’ may also include, if you look at the biographies of the Paris attackers, their own earlier selves. Brahim Abdeslam, who blew himself up at the Comptoir Voltaire café close to the Bataclan music hall (and, while seriously injuring several others, miraculously only killed himself), had himself run a bar/café called Les Béguines in the Brussels borough of Molenbeek (together with his brother Salah, who was involved in the Paris attacks as well and is still on the run).
Students, journalists; Jews and Kurds as much as Muslims of different denominations and Yazidis and Christians; white people as much as people of colour as they mingle in work and life, in bars and cafés; artists as much as their audiences; children, women, men with glasses (or without) – all of them are likely to be inhabitants of the ‘grey zone’ that is attacked in order to force everyone into a black and white scenario of ‘us’ against ‘them’.
Indiscriminate airstrikes against Raqqa are presented as effective retaliation for the Paris attacks, but actually they are leading to a civilian death toll that only serves the ends of Daesh – that is, the ends of eliminating the grey zone, and of enrolling freshly enraged and traumatized death fighters. As numerous French intellectuals have argued in a manifesto published on 26 November, they reject the idea that bombs are the answer, against the background of continuing weapons sales to regimes like Saudi Arabia, and the ever-increasing gap between the rich and the poor.
However, is refusing this system connected to profit interests and short-sightedness, as the manifesto states, really ‘the only way to fight’ the enemies? That is, unfortunately, a well-meaning but inapt attempt to rhetorically get rid of another ‘grey zone’: that between general pacifism and specific military intervention in the face of a savage power such as Daesh and its covert backers.
About a thousand ‘Don’t bomb Syria’ demonstrators took to the streets in London on Saturday. After more than four years of fierce war in Syria with around 250000 dead and twelve million refugees, how can asking now to not get involved, and effectively for the catastrophe to be left adrift, pass for a ‘peace demonstration’? Giving a speech at the London demonstration, Brian Eno asked: ‘why don’t we start doing the clever thing and follow the money’, referring to Daesh’s financial lifelines into Turkey and Gulf states. As much as that ‘clever thing’ is indeed a no-brainer that pretty much everyone across the political spectrum has been calling for lately, it’s also worth asking whether anyone really thinks that move alone will defeat Daesh.
Indiscriminate bombings are despicable, perpetuating what the Assad regime has rightly been accused of – leading a ruthless war against civilians. However, the Kurdish Peshmerga fighters who most successfully have fought back Daesh do seem to rely on air support to do so. On the day of the Paris attacks, they took back the town of Sinjar, where mass graves of Yazidi victims have been found.
In general, any attempt to offer a mono-causal definition of what needs to be done can only be misleading. Anyone arguing for diplomatic and economic measures to drain Daesh’s lifelines has to ask themselves how that speaks against also giving sustained military support to the ones fighting Daesh on the ground. Same for anyone arguing for the long-term approach to support more integrative social models in Europe that will prevent future generations to fall for terrorism, and against short-team measures to prevent further attacks: how does one preclude the other? Helping refugees in Europe versus helping refugees in the Middle East: again, why not both? It is the constant either/or-thinking that has played a part in the terrible delay of tackling the issues. Instead of having pursued a more nuanced approach backed by actual evidence, from what the World Food Program says to what researchers like Scott Atran say, we (the ‘we’ of civil society and democratic debate) are at an impasse. As much as admitting to be ‘at an impasse’, as Judith Butler has argued in an early blog post from Paris, is preferable to the fierce police state measures we have to be careful are not suffocating the freedom they are supposed to defend, it is only a preferable state in the immediate aftermath of an atrocity. It’s not a long-term strategy. Butler is right in pointing out that we need a kind of ‘transversal grief’ – not grief-shaming playing off one terrible incident against another, but an ability to share grief across the divides, which in turn is a precondition to be able to go from impasse to thinking again. In the days after the Paris attacks, the hashtag #prayforparis provoked a counter-meme that said: ‘Don’t pray. Think.’ I would like to think that it’s possible to pray (even if ‘only’ in secular forms of mourning the dead) and to think.
Walther Rathenau, the Jewish Foreign Minister of Germany of the Weimar Republic whom, after years of anti-Semitic smear against him, was assassinated in 1922 by members of a proto-Nazi secret society, once quipped: ‘to think is to compare’. That rings all the more true in a multipolar world.
***
I stand in front of the Bataclan, with the big sign announcing ‘Eagles of Death Metal’ still up, while across the street, there is an altar of candles and flowers and notes of similar dimensions to the one on Place de la République. A day later I would read a post by Henry Rollins reminding of the fact that large parts of Europe in general, and Paris in particular have for a long time been, as Rollins puts it, ‘a haven for artists and musicians. It was where Charlie Parker could go and eat in the same restaurant as any member of his audience’.
This may seem a minor point in the face of atrocities and an ongoing war, but in fact it isn’t. The attack on the Bataclan, apart from the horrific loss of lives, also has a cultural significance, maybe even in some way comparable to the destruction of the world heritage sites in Palmyra. Of course, not in terms of the building as such, but in terms of the wider repercussions – the connection being made between stigmatizing and killing people for what they are, and for making or admiring art.
Marco Roth, in n+1, reminds us of Jane Birkin, in 1987, recording a live album at Bataclan (as did, in ’72, Lou Reed, John Cale and Nico ), and of Agnes Varda’s film Jane B. par Agnes V. (1988). There is a scene in the film, about 1:30 minute into the you tube link, with Birkin performing at Bataclan.
The lyrics that sound like Lacan set to torch song (Si j’hésite si souvent entre le moi et le je, If I hesitate so often between the me and the I) are an expression of a culture that took hundreds of years to develop, amidst horror and suffering: from the age of absolute monarchy through the French Revolution, to the 19th century novel, to 20th century modernist art, with figures like Serge Gainsbourg (who wrote these lyrics and the music) being arguably fully aware of the dark sides of this French heritage – thinking of colonialism, and Gainsbourg’s Reggae version of the Marseillaise (Aux Armes et cætera, 1979).
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I hail a cab to take me to Charles de Gaulle airport. After about ten minutes, the car is stopped by two heavily armed policemen. As one of them stands by the window, with his finger at the trigger of his machine gun at an angle pointing to the floor, the driver turns around to me and says: ‘I’m in trouble, you better get out’. I do so, taking my suitcase and coat from the trunk, walking off mechanically towards the next junction, as ‘I’m in trouble’ still rings in my ear (what did he mean exactly?). I find another taxi there, continuing the journey. I tell the driver what just happened, as we drive on the motorway towards the airport, past Stade de France on the right, and Saint-Denis on the left. He says he is of Algerian descent, and that he came to France during the horrors of the ‘90s civilian war between the Algerian government and various Islamist rebel groups. I realize I’m still in shock, having just experienced a faint inkling of what it means to live in a zone of war and terror, where every other second someone can be stopped at gunpoint, where every other second someone might actually be killed. Just a faint inkling, but enough to remind again, urgently, of the need to grief, and think, and compare, across the divides.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.