Comrades, against the State and against all priests, Long live blasphemy!

In the face of a deadly attack, unprecedented in this form in our latitudes – an editorial group of a satirical newspaper, historically anchored on the far left, decimated with an assault rifle for not being subjected to the religious prohibition of representation and publishing caricatures of Mohammed – a strong will to react manifests itself, large gatherings are held throughout France and beyond, social networks are full of messages …. You go out, perhaps both to express that you are affected, to understand what is going on, what this situation is the result of and what is going to happen, to talk, wander, not be alone, to think, refuse anything in the situation, feelings that we can understand and share, we who, in politics, like to be up to the situation.

This fervour, still formless and without established discourse, is soon brought to heel within the Republican framework: what defends anyone who demonstrates will be the State, its government, its police and the construction of social and political around the defence of the existent. This time the setting is magnificent: it will be in a plebiscite with a Gaullist accent, a true manifestation of State, the greatest number is called to make a mass behind the French and foreign ministers, religious leaders, political parties and bosses … We then have the urge to hum “my uncle villainous handyman …†of Boris Vian.

Transport will even be free in Ile de France on Sunday. Are we to see this as a temporary concession to the need for more precarious mobility or should it rather be seen as an indirect socialized salary for the role of mere onlookers that we are all called upon to play? Maybe the security consensus is not yet strong enough to justify that in addition to police control one must accept the risk of fines on the route of the demonstration. For the government and its police it is not enough to train, to discipline everyone to a more and more tight control of our lives, displacement, to crush the possible under the economic rationality: these murderous attacks are the chance to make security desirable.

Beyond the spectacular measures (massive systematic control of vehicles by armed police, for example) that have been set up during the hunt for the attackers, in the longer term, this is the time to strengthen the permanent exception. The “Vigipirate plan†[anti-terrorist security plan] goes up a notch to the attack stage, implying that one accepts a total intolerable police hold over our lives. The security is the same manifestation, in other forms, as this eruption of a fragment of war in Paris. As we see it, incantations to total police power are identical bills to conspiracy readings of these events.

Moreover, one can understand that one can do anything, including dying, to escape a future of solitary confinement for life, after such acts and after being put through the hands of the police: we do not wish that even on our worst enemy, but this does not explain the fact that, like all “fanatics†and “terrorists†, the 2 attackers of Charlie Hebdo and the hostage taker at the kosher supermarket were executed by police. One police chief reportedly even said that another justice had been done. Can we really find this death sentence without trial normal? To justify the death of Rémi Fraisse, it was put forward the clashes that had taken place and that police officers were injured. No need to make political philosophy to understand the change of paradigm from that moment: from the State’s “monopoly of legitimate violence†one goes to the demonstration that it is simply the stronger armed gang.

Neither God nor Valls!

Meanwhile much of the far left, in the broadest sense, is confined within the race for new “victims†and agitates spinelessly around a defence of the religious in its popular and minoritarian terms – which is nevertheless neither popular nor minority anywhere, it must be remembered – as the talk against ‘Islamophobia’ bears the trace. In a dangerous semantic shift “immigrant†becomes “Muslim†. Instead of opposing the endangerment of populations of immigrant origin, real at various levels either due to the presence of racists and fascists and demonstrations of sacred union or the current development of religious pressure, we should defend Islam, which, like all religions, imposes a moral, a respect for the existent contrary to all emancipatory perspectives. For our part we believe that on the contrary it is in the defence of immigration, beyond what it brings by blending or mixing, in the oppositions that will be born within it against the religious as possible fruitful aims.
There are many things to defend in what this “armed wing of god†wanted to kill at Charlie Hebdo. They also fired on the possibility of the expression of the refusal of religious morality, this permanent police of behaviour, on the refusal of submission of all to the prohibition of blasphemy.

Comrades, between austerity and the return of the religious (Islamism, manif for all), let’s find some conceptual autonomy (we would have no choice other than being fascist, republican or Islamo-compatible!). Considering the situation, and despite the times, we are still a few who aspire to revolutionary episodes, the return of struggles and movements that build from the shared and oppose the established order. It is in this perspective that we say that if God existed it would be necessary to destroy him. Just as we need to do away with the State, capitalism and the different morals and ideologies that support it. It is necessary, in the meantime, to find ways to offer forms of refusal, intelligible and reachable by those who seriously want to do battle with the present situation.

From security sacred union to religious morality by machine-gun or sermon, hard times for revolutionaries …

Charlie’s Angels
contact : droles.de.dames@anche.no

[Translated by actforfreedom.]