« Wir schaffen das! ", " We'll get there ! “, insists Angela Merkel, since she opened the borders of her country to a million Syrian refugees. It is still too early to know if the bet will hold, but one thing is certain: this bet has destabilized Germany.
Ninety deputies from the AFD (Alternative Für Deutschland), a party born out of frustration and concern caused by the policy of “Mutti”, have just entered the Bundestag. Merkel's admirers are not shaken, however. This upheaval reinforces, on the contrary, their admiration. They conclude that the people, or a fraction of the German people, is not up to the great hopes that Angela Merkel and all of enlightened Europe had placed in them. He disappointed. Instead of seizing the opportunity to atone for his crimes by accepting the immense challenge of unconditional hospitality, he wanted to shake off the yoke of memory and gave himself the right to become wicked again.
Certain signs seem to validate this interpretation. I learn in Le Figaro that during the press conference given by the AFD the day after this triumphant election, Alexander Gauland, the doctrinaire of this formation, wondered about Germany's commitment in favor of Israel's right to exist, and that Wilhelm von Gottberg, elected in Lower Saxony, quotes, in an essay published in 2001, an Italian author of the neo-fascist movement regretting that the Jewish truth of the Holocaust is under legal protection. I discover that there are, in this party, former informants of the Stasi. Still, we find in the program of the AFD neither praise of the single Party, nor call to overthrow the institutions, nor genocidal inclination, nor exaltation of a superior race. And I don't see anything Hitlerian in Marc Jongen, former assistant to Peter Sloterdijk in Karlsruhe, today co-president of the Bade Württemberg AFD, when he asserts: "European nations must replace the culture of self-suppression with the will to survive". In this culture of self-suppression theorized by Habermas under the name of constitutional patriotism, the great historian Thomas Nipperdey already discerned an unexpected avatar of Pan-Germanism. By instilling its post-national consciousness in the unfortunate who are still in a deplorable state of backwardness, advanced progressive Germanism “would thus once again have the charge of healing the world. The rejection of our nation is a reissue of the German particularity, and this is precisely what it is a question of going beyond. In other words, rather than getting drunk on missionary ideas and wanting to rule the world again, Germany should return to the “normal nationalism of identity and self-preservation”.
But, for the resolute adversaries of the AFD, there is no normal identity. The identity is already Hitler, if we are to believe Carolin Emcke, one of the most influential intellectuals across the Rhine. And in his essay against hate which earned her the Booksellers' Prize for Peace, she cites in support of this diagnosis a famous passage from book of the righteous. It is about the war between the people of Gilead and those of Ephraim: “When one of the fugitives from Ephraim said, “I want to pass! The men of Gilead asked him, "Are you from Ephraim?" And if he said no, they said to him, "Pronounce 'Shibboleth'."1 ! And he was pronouncing "Sibboleth" because he couldn't speak properly. So they seized him and cut his throat. At the ford of the Jordan there fell at that time 42 men of Ephraim. " And Carolin Emcke comments: " The old story of Shibboleth is still current, it describes all the arbitrary procedures that societies can use to exclude or denigrate isolated individuals or groups. »
To those who would object to him that one cannot reduce to a matter of pronunciation the way in which Islam and the previously unknown words of "kuffars", of "jihad", of "niqab", of "Allah akbar" have invaded our present, Carolin Emcke responds without flinching: "Imagine a Facebook page, a newspaper, a television program where Christians are mentioned exclusively when they have committed a crime or an offense, and where each crime is represented in a causal relationship with his religion. How would this schema change perception? » The lucky recipient of the Friendenspreis forgets an essential difference: the Islamists take the Koran at face value. Literal Islam leads to jihad or, at the very least, a break with the surrounding society. But when a Christian takes the Gospels at face value, it gives Pope Francis, unconditional hospitality, and “Wir Schaffen das! » of Protestant Angela Merkel. And what feeds the cultural insecurity of many Germans and Europeans is the feeling that Christian literalism is the least appropriate response to Islamic literalism. But nothing dismantles Carolin Emcke. Leaning against her "Shibboleth", she recites the catechism of well-meaning. “All this has already happened, the hatred of the foreigner, the exclusion of all difference, the vociferations in the streets, the rampaging graffiti, the invention of self-segregation as a nation, as a people, and making any piece of those others who are to be excluded from it, the deviants, the asocials. The idea that foreign men importunate our wives and daughters has also existed before, it is one of the assertions of Nazi propaganda, anti-Semitic texts and cartoons regularly warned against Jews supposedly assaulting German women. »
We understand, reading this text, why the Jews feel so alone in the face of the new anti-Semitism. Taking it into account, in fact, would ruin the ideological edifice of vigilance. It is therefore passed over in silence or, like Eric Hazan and Alain Badiou, it is renamed: “The hostility of young people from the suburbs towards the Jews is fundamentally linked to what is happening in Palestine. They know that there the Jewish Israelis oppress the Palestinians whom they consider, for obvious historical reasons, as their brothers. And they are forced to note that the organizations representing the Jewish community give unconditional support to the racist State of Israel. The Jews having become the target of the anti-racist ideology, we must fight this ideology as we once fought against totalitarian ideologies. Welcome to the XNUMXst century!
The XNUMXth century, however, has not said its last word. It is possible that wordless xenophobia and nostalgia for the Greater Reich prevail in the ranks of the AFD over worried lucidity and concern for self-preservation. Public discussion would then be reduced to a confrontation between the politically correct and the politically abject. And as in America, these two delusions would reinforce each other. You couldn't imagine anything worse.
Source: © Alain Finkielkraut: “For some opponents of the AFD, identity is Hitler” – Talker
