The Age of Violence by Alain Bertho

Author:Alain Bertho
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

A RIGHTEOUS ANGER

How and where can we find a principle for revolt and for struggle, faced with corruption and injustice? Without doubt, we can find it on the internet, contradicting all the discourses and all the judgements perceived as ‘institutional’. The ‘national reconciliation’ extolled by the Soral-Dieudonné clan and the ‘Egalité et réconciliation’ website – one of the most visited in France – outlines the possibility of a popular anti-Semitic and Islamophile Far Right at the margins of the official political space – as distinct, that is, from the whiter, Islamophobic Front National which is today trying to make people forget about its founder’s anti-Semitism, the better to establish its respectability. But doubt’s work and the advancement of a moral quest are far broader in extent than the little Soral-Dieudonné enterprise. The national principle is narrow indeed, when measured against the moral needs of young people left alone to face the lies and corruption of the powers that be – young people directly struck by the images of global chaos.

The conclusion is that God should not be sought out in Heaven, the church, the synagogue or the mosque. No: he is online. Seeking out a principle that is simultaneously both a provider of truth and an ethical reference point, Yassine, Clémence, Éric and Souleymane – the young people interviewed by David Thomson – went on the internet to look for the keys to the world. Clémence recounts her conversion, at seventeen years of age, on Google: ‘I searched Islam or Allah … And I started crying. I was so happy. I thought, “Woah! I really have a religion. I belong to a community” – but I hadn’t known it. All this time, I had felt alone in my thinking.’26 Like Clémence, the others had started searching by themselves, at a remove from any political, educational, religious or family authority – all of which they see as suspect. And they found jihad: an online truth, a revealed truth, a truth in revolt against even the authority of Islamic institutions, and, with the creation of Da’esh, an operative truth.

Solitary revolts seek a dissident community which allows them to live out their rejection of the commercial and corrupt world. Is it so surprising that they seek this community within the religion of the dominated in the West – the religion of the enemies who have been identified by the West itself? Michael (later, Abu Rayan) was struck by 9/11 like a thunderbolt. He explains: ‘I had not known any Islamists or any Islamic discourse. But even before Bush said the phrase “You are with us or against us” I felt that the just middle, neutrality, was no longer possible. For neutrality would be punished as cowardice, a lack of courage.’ Going outside the official media, he immediately sought to find out ‘who is claiming responsibility for this?’, ‘who is this bin Laden?’27 The official devil becomes the god of revolt, and bin Laden a hero.

The society of the spectacle has given birth to its counter-spectacle, a vast continent of images available to everyone.

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