THE PERSECUTION OF EDGAR MORIN

I was reminded that I had not yet written about the horrible persecution of Edgar Morin, as I've been intending to do, when I read Jean Daniel's new blog , which he inaugurated yesterday. Daniel (right) co-founded the moderate-left French newsweekly Le Nouvel Observateur -- now France's largest, with a circulation  of some 550,000 -- in 1964, and edited it for decades, but at 76 he's semi-retired and no longer directly runs the day-to-day editorial operation at the magazine, although he writes its weekly editorial, signed by him, and has enormous influence over the mag's political line. Daniel, a pied-noir, a Jew, and a close friend of Albert Camus, was one of the stars of the weekly l'Express in the 1950s.

The predecessor of the Nouvel Observateur , France-observateur, under its principled editor, Gilles Martinet (lower right), -- played an important role on the left as the voice of intellectuals during the 1950s, courageously opposing both France's war against Algerian independence (for which the magazine was seized by police several times) and General DeGaulle's return to power in 1958. (Gilles Martinet was also the guiding spirit of the short-lived but important PSU, a left-wing party formed in 1960 after the mainstream Socialists supported DeGaulle's legal coup d'etat. The PSU was the only significant party to support the May 1968 student rebellion; a majority of its members, led by Michel Rocard, rejoined the mainstream Socialists in 1974. Earlier this year, Editons Jean-Claude Lattes published Martinet's memoirs, L'Observateur engage.) Jean Daniel joined Martinet when he co-founded the Nouvel Observateur in 1964.

The Nouvel Obs, as Daniel's weekly is referred to in France, is infinitely less militant than its predecessor, and indeed has become the favorite weekly of French yuppies, in part because of its important business section and largely complacent profiles of business leaders and companies. Daniel in recent years has been churning out a series of memoirs, and in these books he recounts his role as the counselor and privileged interlocutor of powerful political figures in France and North Africa -- he's been much too much so for a journalist, in my view, and this was reflected in the magazine's loss of the cutting-edge quality of its predecessor, especially after the 1981 victory of Socialist President Francois Mitterrand. (As an aside, these days I consider the Nouvel Obs' current editor, Laurent Joffrin, to be an indigestible opportunist -- to take a recent example, as part of the Nouvel Obs' mendacious campaign in favor of a Yes vote in the French referendum on the new European Constitution, he was responsible for deliberately deforming a lengthy interview with former European Commission President Jacques Delors that the weekly featured on its cover, hyping up Delors' declarations so badly to favor the Yes vote that Delors found himself obliged to publicly clarify his views a few days after the interview was published -- an incident that undoubtedly had the opposite of Joffrin's desired effect, when he mudked around with Delors' views, on the now-famous defeat of the European Constitution.)

But Daniel still has a lot of influence, and so I can only applaud his decision to consecrate a big chunk of his first blog-post to the defense of Edgar Morin (at right), one of France's most important living intellectuals, against  trumped up accusations of "anti-Semitism" for criticizing Israel in an article for which he was condemned last month in the French courts.

Here's the background on this disturbing prosecution of Edgar Morin:

A world class sociologist, philosopher, and prolific author, translated into many languages and noted for his definition of a social anthropology that takes into account biology and the imagination, Edgar Morin has also published important works diagnosing the ethical decline in the world and defining a modern ethical system. He also spent twenty years working on a reform of our way of thinking, embodied in his monumental book Method: Towards a Study of Humankind -- The Nature of Nature.

Three years ago, Morin (along with Sami Naïr et Danièle Sallenave) published an opinion piece in Le Monde -- "Israel-Palestine: The Cancer," June 4, 2002 (the link is to an English translation ) -- criticizing the policies of the State of Israel. In March 2004, the France-Israel Association and Lawyers Without Borders took the three authors and the editor of Le Monde to court, charging them with "racial defamation and justifying terrorism" and accusing them of anti-Semitism. Although Morin won his first court case, he lost on appeal -- the appellate court in Versailles found the article's comments on Israel-Palestine relations contained "anti-Semitic" statements -- and, last month, Morin was sentenced (along with Le Monde) to pay a symbolic fine of one Euro. "It is a crazy sentence, I will have recourse to the Supreme Court, " Morin said at the time. He added that it was simply not possible to interpret his Le Monde text as an ethnic or racial attack, even moreso because it was written by someone of Jewish origin like himself.

Morin's Le Monde article attacks the policies of the Sharon government. But the association France-Israel had contested two passages: "It is hard to imagine a nation of fugitives, originated by a people that has been persecuted longer than any other in the history of humanity, that had suffered the worst humiliations and scorn, to be capable of transforming itself in the space of two generations into a people that is a self-satisfied dominator, and with the exception of an admirable minority, into a people that is arrogant and derives satisfaction from humiliating." The other phrase that was condemned was, "The Jews, who were victim of a merciless order, impose their merciless order upon the Palestinians." According to Morin these sentences were extrapolated and interpreted out of context.

The accusation of anti-Semitism and racism against Morin is, of course, absurd. A petition supporting Morin and released on June 24 was signed by 100 of France's most prominent intellectuals -- among them  Paul Ricoeur, Jean Baudrillard (left), Paul Virilio, Alain Touraine, the historians Pierre Nora, Pierre Vidal-Naquet (right), and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie; also, and former Portugese Socialist president Mario Soares, as well Theo Klein, the former president of CRIF, the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (an alliance of nearly all of France's respectable Jewish organizations which is considered the "voice" of French Jewry), and Gilles Martinet and Jean Daniel. As the petition noted:

"...Recognizing, on the basis of facts that have been internationally condemned (at left, Israel's "Wall of Shame" surrounding the Palestinians), the Israeli policy of repression, at the time particularly violent, the article expresses great distress at the disastrous consequences of the Israel-Palestine conflict in the world, especially in France, where it has provoked both Judeophobia and Arabophobia. The article underlines with indignation and sorrow that the experience by the Jews of persecutions and humiliations for two millenniums have hardly stopped humiliations and persecutions being inflicted on the Palestinians. In the mind of the authors, recognizing this contradiction carries with it respect of the memory of past suffering. It is an elementary principle of knowledge and of judgment that every sentence is given its full meaning by the complete text in which it is written, and that every text is explained by its context. In fact, the rest of the article makes it clear that the criticisms are addressed, not at a people, but at an occupant --indeed, the article itself makes that clear, saying: 'This logic of contempt and humiliation is not the particularity of the Israelis, it is the particularity of all the occupations, in which the conqueror sees himself as superior compared to a people of sub-humans.'

"Furthermore, as to context, the authors of the article are well-known -- in their persons and in their writings -- for being enemies of all the racisms and all the discriminations. Edgar Morin is recognized internationally as a humanist who all his life has condemned every form of denial of the humanity of the Other. .This is why we are indignant at any measure that seeks to reduce the freedom to criticize the policies of any State, whatever it may be. We fear that this condemnation of an imaginary anti-Semitism may contribute to the expansion of real anti-Semitism. And we express clearly our profound preoccupation with a judgment condemning an article that clearly pleads for Peace and fraternity between the protagonists of the Israel-Palestine tragedy on the basis of an analysis that is both equitable and complex." [My translation -- D.I.]

The deplorable persecution and legal condemnation of Edgar Morin, his co-authors, and the newspaper that published their entirely valid and respectable article was possible only because France, like many Western European countries which were under the boot of Nazi occupation during World War II, has laws which were passed in the post-war period to prevent a recurrence of home-grown hate-mongering by collalborators and fascists nostalgic for the Third Reich, and which made illegal any incitation (written or oral) to racial hatred or discrimination.

But the Morin case points out quite dramatically the dangers to free expression of thought and opinion inherent in such laws, and the superiority in this regard of the approach enshrined in the U.S  Constitution, whose First Amendment guarantees the absolute freedom of writing and speech, no matter how detestable. The best answer to hateful and repugnant speech is more and better speech that affirms the human rights of all peoples. Suppressing outrageous speech only feeds the martyr complex of the purveyors of hate -- as an obvious excample in France, the neo-fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen (shown, at left, with Ronald Reagan) has been condemned in the courts dozens of times over the last three decades for anti-Semitism and racial hatred, yet those legal condemnations only contributed to his populist image as an enemy of an establishment which wishes to silence him, and he saw his share of the vote grow to one in five French electors in the presidential election held the same year as Morin published his article in Le Monde. The legal persecution of Edgar Morin has yet to arouse much public indignation or solidarity from intellectuals on this side of the pond -- but it bloody well should.

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