Models, pathologies and liberal bullshit. posted by Richard Seymour

Some British viewers will have witnessed the astonishing Brass Eye-style spectacle of news broadcasters saying things like "of course, we Brits have laws against racism, while the French impose things like the Muslim head-scarf ban" last night on ITN. I bow to no one in my cynicism and contempt for the hijab ban in France, but it isobviously being carried out, much like some of the American coverage, in classic Francophobic spirit.

The more liberal, cosmopolitian and Francophilic BBC Newsnight last night featured a French rapper debating a French right-wing politician. Rappers, you see... they sort of understand the illiterate grunts the poor come out with once in a while. They'll help. The rest of the evening's news on this topic was structured around a debate with a right-wing politician - Sarkozy - and a right-wing criminologist, sympathetic to Sarkozy. This right-wing criminologist insisted, like Sarkozy, that these riots were being orchestrated by criminal gangs - the sort of quasi-evil breed of malcontents who can operate on sub-legal substrates at the blink of a dark brown eye. There were some vox populi in which French Muslims were invited to comment on their own condition - but let's face it, these are people 'we' condescend to and sneer at. No one takes them seriously.

To underscore this particular point, go and have a glance at this bitter little imperialist bigot Michael J. Totten. I don't read his nonsense ordinarily, although I did sample his post-prandial star-struck musings about dinner with Christopher Hitchens here. This is from Totten's latest on the Paris riots:

Paris has been on fire for 11 days now. The violence is out of control and it’s spreading. Some are calling this the French Intifada.

Meanwhile, Beirut is peaceful and calm. And Beirut has and has had a lot more political problems than Paris.

The Lebanese people threw off the yoke of Syrian occupation, oppression, and de facto annexation while committing no violence. The Western model of civil disobedience and protest worked beautifully and, more important, it worked rapidly.

The disgruntled of Paris, on the other hand, are inviting a brutal crackdown from a state infinitely less oppressive that the Syrian Baath regime. While some parts of the Middle East import liberal “Western” political ideas into their culture, some parts of Europe import pathologies from the illiberal places in the Middle East and North Africa. Ah, the ironies of globalization.

The interesting thing about this example of unadulterated racism is that Totten probably thinks he's being exquisitely liberal, displaying an internationalist comportment, while being refreshingly direct. Mark how he mocks the idea that liberal universalism is "Western", having already appropriate civil disobedience for the West. Western models, however, do not include the American Revolution, the English Civil War, the American Civil War, the French Revolution, May 1968 or even the LA Riots. Where, I wonder, does Totten suppose the "pathologies" came from that led to the LA Riots? And, since Totten mentions the word Intifada in the context of non-Western pathologies, was not the first Intifada a perfect example of civil disobedience and protest? Yet, strange to relate, that did not work beautifully: Israel remains an occupying power; the refugees remain dispersed; there are still 'Jewish Only' roads and racist laws in Israel; and it is still a quasi-theological state, moreover (try getting a divorce in Israel - it's exclusively rabbinic court, unless you're a shikse in which case you may get a Christian court).

What, indeed, is the sense of "pathologies" in this context? Pathology is the study of diseases but, like many -ologies (ideology, biology, epistemology etc), it has come to refer to the object of study itself. A pathology is, then, a disease - a cultural mutation, a virus that derails the process of coding and decoding that sustains the health of la République. Diseases being imported into Western societies from those dusky skinned countries is not a new concern. I could select a host of examples, but this seems apposite. Allegedly "Western" cultural imports, by contrast, are the right kind of contagion - they spread Freedom.


Pathologies.

Here, then, is the authentic white supremacist posing as a connoisseur of cosmopolitanism, cross-cultural understanding. The fixtures of Orientalist and outright racist discourse are harnessed to the cause of liberal internationalism. See how he helps his readers out of their blinkered trenches:

Lebanon is much safer than it appears from a distance, that it's actually safer here than in Europe. That runs directly counter to what most Westerners understandably think.

The dark-skinned folks are harmless - really, Mummy. They're just like you and me, except for when they have their pathologies. We just have to help them, you see - by force, if necessary. Elsewhere he writes about the Lebanese civil war as a "clash of civilisations", in which Israel and America just happen to become entangled - "a war of all against all", "the Yugoslavia of the Levant" (invasion and the colonial background inexplicably misses this guy's radar). Yes, they're harmless until they get their pathologies and drag Israel and America into their messy localised civilisational clashes. Iraqis too - harmless. "They are not servile people. They will never, ever, be anyone’s puppets". Unless they elect the wrong kind of government, in which case they will find American fingers crawling so far up their jacksies that a distinct lump will appear in their throats. They will "invite" violent repression, just as those foolish rioters are doing today.

This, then, is the kind of mind that understands an explosion following years of neglect and repression as resulting from "pathologies". French Arabs, encouraged to migrate from the former colonies and join the depleted labour force, exploited for all they were worth and then eloquently tossed into the scrapheaps of the banlieues when French capital no longer had the capacity to provide full employment: these are the people whom Totten demeans and slanders with his supremacist bricolage.