La force d’être juste
Although there are a thousand reasons to take issue with the world as it is today, to act as though the brutal 20th century had never happened would be to condemn ourselves to make the same mistakes and live through the same horrors again. With this observation as his starting point, Jean Birnbaum, managing director of the publishing house “Le monde des livres”, makes an impassioned plea against all forms of fanaticism, which leads to the exclusion of the Other and the toleration, even legitimisation, of all excesses, or injustices, in the name of an allegedly just purpose.
“Having been brought up in a left-wing family that cultivated the memory of anti-fascist, anti-colonialist and feminist battles, I was viscerally revolted by injustice”, writes the author, who was a committed member of the French Trotskyist organisation Lutte ouvrière as a young man in the early 1990s (our translation throughout). He draws many memories from his past, to feed into his conversation with a young student he met by chance on a train. Steering clear from any naval-gazing, this essay is a vibrant warning against collective dynamics of selective blindness, buoying up his argument by invoking the words of many dissident intellectuals.
The first of these is Viktor Lvovich Kibalchich, better known as Victor Serge. Born in Brussels to Russian parents in 1890, he would serve time in prison, firstly in France as an anarchist bandit, then in Russia as a “counter-revolutionary”. “A travelling companion of the Bolsheviks, he slid gradually into dissidence, moving towards Leon Trotsky. Excluded from the Party in 1928, then deported to the Urals, he was freed in 1936 thanks to the efforts of an international campaign conducted by renowned writers including André Gide, André Malraux and Romain Rolland. Having experienced bitter cold and hunger, he arrived in France with just one objective: to continue the fight. But now, he knows that this fight cannot succeed unless the socialist ideal is separated from the horrors that dishonour it and to call out Stalinist totalitarianism (he was among the first people to use this word for the Soviet Union). However, the revolutionary was met with a wall of silence. When he returned to Brussels in 1936 with his wife and two children (a son aged 16 and a one-year-old daughter), he soon discovered that his speech was anything but free. Members of his family were arrested by the Kremlin. The Belgian police placed him under surveillance. And his French comrades made it very clear to him that he must never speak of the gulag. This would jeopardise the antifascist unity so desperately needed by the Left”, the author wrote.
Birnbaum goes on to point out that “in the early 1930s, [the communists] labelled the socialist parties as ‘social traitors’ and ‘socio-fascists’, refusing to enter into alliances with them and describing them as a priority target. In Germany, this extremist strategy rendered the Left defenceless against Nazism, paving the way for Hitler’s triumph. Ernst Thälmann, the leader of the German communists, was able to write that ‘the Social Democrats are conjuring up the devil of Hitlerite fascism in order to keep the masses from effective struggle against the dictatorship of finance capital. And this bait, which is another form of the general policy of the lesser evil, is to be made more palatable to the masses by the addition of the sauce of strange and sudden friendship for the Communists […]. There were comrades who did not want to see the Social Democratic wood for the National Socialist trees”.
Soon after that, the British novelist George Orwell would write lucidly about the reality of political perversion as he experienced during the Spanish Civil War. “When one sees highly educated men looking on indifferently at oppression and persecution, one wonders which to despise more, their cynicism or their shortsightedness”, he wrote of intellectuals who kept silent about the crimes of the Spanish Republicans.
Another figure in the resistance to injustice movement was the French philosopher Simone Weil, who, after some time spent as a teacher, then as a trade unionist at Renault, also became involved in the Spanish Civil War. “The end justifies the means: in this axiom, Simone Weil saw the fundamental damage that corrupts engagement of all kinds; in its name, the most generous of soldiers can treat the individual like a thing. And so, the young reader of Marx shuddered when she read the texts of Lenin and Trotsky in which this axiom prevails. This is another reason to put up a common front with other rebels, on the surface a long way away from her ideals. One of these was Georges Bernanos, whom she happened to meet in Spain and who would soon write that ‘the first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means. But the proof that ours is no longer alive is that the means have become the end”. However, Birnbaum adds, “although Georges Bernanos and Simone Weil saw what there was to see, only the former said what he saw. ‘Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune’ and Simone Weil’s letter [to Bernanos] are often referred to as a pair of symmetrical gestures made by intellectuals who were by no means of the political stripe, but were strong enough to speak the truth without fear of offending their allies. In so doing, we forget that in the case of the philosopher, this was private correspondence. I myself took a long time to become aware of this difference in size, this hemiplegia of the memory, which actually changes everything. Weil’s letter was quoted for a long time as evidence that the French Left had its own Bernanos. No. In France, no major figure of the intellectual Left had the force of a Bernanos, nobody saved the honour of his ideological family by speaking out against the moral bankruptcy of his comrades in Spain”.
“If the 20th century taught us one thing, it is to be wary of intellectuals, of their intractable opportunism, their automatic fanaticism: in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia unlike, so many beautiful minds hurried to rally behind tyranny, so many prestigious writers stopped praising pariahs and dissidents… not only did intellectuals do very little to resist oppression, in many cases they were in the vanguard of the very worst”, the author stresses. The bad apple continued to rot the whole barrel of the extreme Left’s fruit, in particular: “thankfully, we never got into power! That is a sentence you often hear from militants today who are ‘bowed’ [a reference to the name of the French left-wing political party ‘La France Insoumise’, meaning ‘France Unbowed’: Ed] in private. Some of them are still members of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party, others left it or were thrown out, but while still in it, they all saw scenes of purification, remakes of Lambertist tragicomedies, themselves inspired by trials Moscow-style. All tell of a movement in which democracy is non-existent, in which debates are considered a waste of time, and the slightest criticism is taken as defiance, if not sabotage”.
Birnbaum goes on to add “now, with the Far Right poised to take power, where is the sense in focusing our attacks on other left-wing parties? Even if we disapprove of a particular comrade’s position, does that mean we should treat him as a racist? Can we call ourselves feminists when we stick up for perpetrators of sexist violence? And how can we defend freedom here when we stand guarantors for oppression elsewhere? Is not our support for Putin or a counterpart figure in South America contradictory to our progressive commitment? Do we really need to be saying that the Algerian dictatorship ‘carries the voice of human rights’? Barely is any one of these questions out of your mouth before the answer comes: ‘get out! You are trying to divide us, you want to split our community, you are stabbing it in the back. Get out! You know perfectly well whom that benefits, you are serving the interests of the far right, you are even speaking their language already. We can see whose game you are playing, you’re an agent of the social traitors, a fascist accomplice! Get out!’”.
From the century of the parties to the century of the digital: “the party mindset has easily outlived the parties themselves. For a long time, libertarians considered these political groupings the cause of all ills. By their nature, they argue, a party causes sclerosis in its members: by becoming its own end in itself, at the expense of its stated ideals and a minimum level of honesty, it rewards conformism and punishes disagreements. ‘Parties are publicly, officially constituted parties that aim to kill the sense of truth and justice in people’s souls’, Simone Weil wrote in a short pamphlet in which she described the PCF [French Communist Party: Ed] as the most perfect example of this collective perversion. Comparing the parties to a drug, she called for their abolition, for reasons of public health in the same way as drugs. But although the philosopher identified that renouncing one’s own thought is cool and ideological submission is an addictive pleasure, she did not predict that political shooting-up would be replaced by digital deals. The enjoyment of belonging, the pleasure of excommunication: addicts now get their fix on the social networks”. This only makes the 21st century more dangerous!! (Olivier Jehin)
Jean Birnbaum. La force d’être juste – Changer le monde sans refaire les mêmes erreurs (available in French only). Flammarion. ISBN: 978-2-0804-9876-2. 174 pages. €17:50
On ne sait pas comment cela finira
Through its format, this short book helps us to navigate the past and the present, between politics and culture, in Ukraine and, more broadly, the former Russian Empire and soviet union, on the basis of several conversations between two Jewish émigrés: Leonid Gershkovich (L.G.) and Luba Jurgenson (L.J.). The former, a musician and writer who was born in Leningrad in 1948, now lives in Berlin. The latter, a Moscow-born writer and translator, now lives in Paris. They both fled the Soviet Union in the 1970s. Selected extracts follow (the quotation marks indicate that the exchanges have been taken from different parts of the book; our translation throughout: Ed).
L.G.: “The hypnosis of the Cold War is still doing its work: Russia is a superpower.
L.J.: People understood that it was suicidal on Putin’s part, and yet they only gave Ukraine a couple of days. Nobody expected them to put up such resistance.
L.G.: We were in Kyiv, Soussana and I, when Zelenskyy won the elections. Everybody we spoke to about it turned their noses up: a clown, a creature of Moscow, he doesn’t even speak Ukraine.
L.J.: We knew that the invasion was imminent, at least since the association Memorial was dissolved in December 2021. Memorial was the last bastions of civil society in Russia, and its abolition was taken as a very clear message, by intellectuals in Ukraine as well as elsewhere. And then, there was already war, since the annexation of Crimea. And even before then, since 2008 and the Georgia conflict. But what am I saying, since the wars of Chechnya, practically since the start of the new Russia. And can we separate Chechnya from Afghanistan, Czechoslovakia, Hungary. When did it all start?
L.G.: In many ways, it started with the First World War. In 1918, the Russian Empire should have been split up, but it wasn’t. Its metastases produced Putin’s regime […]. If the Empire had been broken up then, there would have been no terror, no famine, no Second World War. The rise to power of Nazism is the consequence of the continuation of the empires. When Nazi Germany started to emerge, Russia understood its imperial ambitions and supported it. The Soviet regime lasted for 70 years. Private property was abolished, Christian culture destroyed. By coming out of the totalitarian circle, from behind the razor wire, Russia was completely incapable of democracy. It’s society was completely demoralised, State atheism turned into a religious mania that has nothing to do Christianity we don’t know how it will end, we are in the middle of a conflict between these demoralised people and free Europe”.
L.J.: “Kyiv/Kiev has just as much claim to the role of mother of Ukrainian towns as Russian towns, because the Russians and Ukrainians both come from the mediaeval Kyivan Rus, as did the Belarusians as well. The ‘baptism of Russia’ took place on soil that is now Ukrainian.
L.G.: But overall, Ukraine has not exploited the messianic myth, it is turned towards Europe.
L.J.: Russian messianism is an imperialist ideal. Russia has always been held prisoner by it. It has no other national ideal, no other vision than to ‘bring together’ lands and people. Today, messianism is a ball and chain around the ankle of a Russia that is an anachronism. As for Ukraine, the war has turned out to be an extraordinary uniting factor”.
L.J.: “When I remind my French friends that the war started in 2014, they often reply ‘but Crimea is Russian!’. I then have to explain that it was annexed in 1783, that it was a Tatar Khanate that became Turkish territory… and then I think of the streets of Istanbul that remind me of Crimea, little winding streets leading down to the sea…
L.G.: I do not really believe that Crimea should be given back to Ukraine. When the new Assyria crawls away, its backbone broken, the former Ottoman Empire will start to look upon Crimea with its janissary eye. You’ll see. Today, Ankara is refereeing the debates on the sovereignty of Jerusalem. But it is Crimea it really misses, that creates a feeling of loss”.
L.G.: “There are many different cultures. Each of them is a kind of national anthem. Each of them treats the others without mercy. The bloodiest wars are carried out in their names. Because culture is both identity in the present and lineage, seeing yourself as a link between ancestors and your descendants.
L.J.: Yet this clash of cultures does not happen during civil wars, the bloodiest of them all, taking no prisoners.
L.G.: Yes, that is true. The enemy is seen as a traitor to his own country. Russians see the Ukrainians as errant Russians and Ukraine as a rebel part of Russia, which is why they have been so much crueller and more merciless than the Ukrainians in this war. The way they see it, it’s a civil war”.
L.G.: “We put historical quarrels to one side, ignore landmarks of memory that seemed endless, almost to this day. We get behind our mutual Zelenskyy. Like the Zionist dissidents standing shoulder to shoulder with the nationalist dissidents to commemorate Babi Yar. The rabbi of Kyiv drew no distinction between Jewish and non-Jewish when organising the evacuation of women and children from Chernihov. But of course, there is the risk that this Judeo-Ukrainian love-in will end. Anti-Semitism will never disappear entirely, not in Ukraine or anywhere else. It will exist for as long as there are Jews. As you know, I do not believe in blood, for me the Jewish people is a construct. One becomes Jewish, one is not Jewish by affiliation”. (OJ)
Léonid Guirchovitch and Luba Jurgenson. On ne sait pas comment cela finira – Conversations sur l’Ukraine (available in French only). Verdier. ISBN: 978-2-3785-6240-3. 205 pages. €10,50