Another in a series of news, views and essays expressing viewpoints not often seen or heard in the US mainstream press, this one from the archives of Le Monde (subscription only). Another diary today reminded me of this essay, which is the best I've read on the subject since 9/11.
Translation of Patrick Declerck's editorial in Le Monde (subscription only archives)
http://www.lemonde.fr/...
On Islam, Religion and the Affair of Man: I Despise Islam, Among Other Religions
Kant paid tribute to Hume for having awoken him from years of dogmatic somnolence. What if there were a sort of dogmatic somnolence peculiar to democracy? What if democracy, beyond its political institutions, had the insidious and underhanded property of creating, by force of its ideological extensions, a soporific, narcotic effect? A gentle numbing of thought, something along the lines of a frontal lobotomy, leaving the citizen-subject semi-conscious, languidly blissful? What if democracy were at the end of the day also a mental illness?
For example, take the proposition : "I despise Islam." Now here is something that, in polite company, is simply not said. And this is true for many reasons, which are mumbled, in unison, by boy scouts from all quarters.
First off, in this time of compulsory open-mindedness and of vacuous, expected shows of respect, "despise" just is not done anymore. It is even practically illegal, not to mention a clear sign of an obnoxious sort of carelessness. Accordingly, our politico-religious dogmas - and please note that democracy has put man in the same central spot which God occupied in the old tectonic architecture of Christian theology - bar us from thinking "enemy," of conceiving of it, of representing it. In short, of hating it.
A fine wit, scrupulously center-left, recently announced that he had no enemies. Childish man! As if such a choice were possible, as if enemies were subjective. Subjectivity, affectation, emotion, for today's democrats, these are what take the place of thought.
So one asks one's self a question: does democracy allow, fundamentally, at its core even, for the existence of fact? Of objective fact? Does any heuristic whiff of the principal of reality live on within it? No. No, for democracy is nothing more, in fine, than the last facade, sullied and debased, of Christianity, that old consoling superstition of the slaves of Rome, a religion founded by men so terrified by the idea of an oedipal conflict with a real father that they went so far as to imagine, unfortunate neurotics that they were, a celestial father. Now, "war and courage have done more great things than charity. Not your sympathy, but your bravery hath hitherto saved the victims." Thus spake Nietzsche! Thus spake Zarathustra! Thus spake virility!
Meantime, on the other side, they are getting set up. They organize, they plan, they slit throats and they decapitate...I despise Islam... But Islam is not criticized. Or rather, when it is criticized, it is done so with a very prudent obsequiousness and with thousands of semantic precautions. All in contorting one's self, sheepishly, in circumlocutions, neologisms and understatements: "This is not about Islam, it is about Islamism. This is not about religion, but about fanaticism. Not about counter-racism, but about communitarianism."
Thus does one find dubious refuge in the hidden recesses of history. Carefully chosen excerpts. About Islam, one extols with nostalgia its brilliant past. One digs up this and that old scholar, preferably deaf, blind and senile. It never fails. One dusts him off quickly, and we are very pertinently reminded that notwithstanding, Avicenne, in the 11th century...
It is very funny really, not unlike if Erasmus, More and Montaigne were to erase, solely on the basis of their individual greatness, the scandals of inter-Christian wars of religion or of four centuries of books banned by the Church of these catholics, only very recently champions of all-terrain tolerance. And only very recently, must one be reminded, because forced to so become.
Freud said religions are the neuroses of humanity. But there are neuroses, and there are Neuroses...Judaism tends toward an obsessive neurosis: rite for the sake of rite. Hidden away at the heart of Christianity is an anxious hope of drowning one's vitality in a pool of asexual indifference: Christ's love is a lukewarm herbal tea. As for Islam, it tends to promote a certain madness because it imposes an extra-ordinarily and specifically pathological partition between the sexes: a disgust and a fear of woman and her sexual pleasure, all powerful in its adherent's wild fantasies.
In the grips of this latter neurosis, man has but one solution - a fierce oppression of all femininity. An all the more radical oppression in that it has, first and foremost, the function of covering up with a veil a distinct phobia - the secret, intimate, unspoken but omnipresent fear of masculine impotence and its eternal companion, the revulsion-temptation of latent homosexuality. Thus the necessity, for these "brothers" of Islam, of themes at the same time erotic and defensive. Before the hallucinatory threat of a sharp-toothed vagina, there is safety, and escape, in numbers. Accordingly, so as to protect himself, Islamic man lives in schools, like little fish.
I hate religion in general, because it alienates man in having him take the messianic for illumination. I hate Islam in particular, for Islam is a system which tragically oppresses both sexes.
Meantime, on the other side, they are getting set up. They organize, they plan, they slit throats and they decapitate...I understand very well that a majority of muslims disapprove of these acts. All the same, I persist in my hatred of Islam, because as a system of thought and of conducting one's affairs on this earth, it allows for holy war, and for sharia.
Throat-slitting and decapitation are ubiquitous in this system, if but as a structural possibility, for at the heart of Islam there is a topos for it. In much the same way that Marxist thought carries in its bosom the perennial possibility of the abomination of proletarian dictatorship. In much the same way Christianity is inextricably, at its essence, afflicted with anti-Semitism.
I publicly demand the right to express this hatred of Islam. Publicly. Even so far as to, as the case may be, break the laws of the Republic. For today, to denounce the savage imbecilities of religious belief is more than a pleasure, it is a duty. A duty to show that it is possible to stand up, without crutches and without illusions.
In these times where, once again, religion makes war, it is urgent to exclaim, now and in the future, and with a loud voice, the superior dignity of godless man.
Patrick Declerck is a writer and psycho-analyst, Author of "Garantie sans moraline" (Flammarion, 2004).