Notes on Freedom

December 15, 2016

Kicking babies off trains: the heartlessness of proceduralism

 A much-shared video shows a woman carrying a baby being denied a seat by first-class train passengers. An elderly lady had her bag on a seat; the mother asked her to move; an argument ensued and the other passengers joined in.

What was striking about the exchange was the absence of any humane or civic lines of reasoning – as in, here is an empty seat, here is a woman with a baby who needs to sit in it.

Instead, the dispute pitted various formal rules and procedures against one another. Some passengers insisted on the santity of first-class: the woman didn’t have a first-class ticket, therefore no rights to the seat. Other passengers said that they heard the train’s first class had been ‘declassified’, which means the woman now did have a right to sit in the seat. Finally, the mother herself noted that it was a ‘priority seat’, reserved for groups such as mothers with young children.

The question of right or wrong – and of our obligations towards one another – appears as a competing series of procedural rules. People on a train are as bubbles, surrounded by a forcefield, and their relations are only made possible by the pecking orders handed down from above. These procedures are not something we have made, apparently – there is no intuitive sense of everyday ethics – but something handed down, written on the train walls or announced over the microphones.

To be ‘civic’ today is often to care disproportionately about the correct enforcement of the rules. It is not the case that everyone is just sitting there and ignoring each other: they are policing, watching, comparing each other’s behaviour with that specified. Even if it doesn’t affect you then there is an impulse to survey and insist that procedures are correctly followed.

This can mean that the majority of a train carriage (on a train to Brighton!) can shout at a woman with a baby to leave what had been an empty seat. The public sphere can be a hostile place; you do not know how people will behave. Mothers with young children was one of those groups intuitively helped out, assisted, but now any ‘special treatment’ is only condoned if specified. You do not have to give up your seat unless you are in a specially marked ‘priority seat’: only in these seats do babies have a (quasi-legal) ‘priority’ over others.

The video ends when a man offers to give up his seat for the mother. Such acts of assistance are no longer the enacting of general civic assumptions and normal forms of comportment. Instead it is strangely touching, personal; an act of personal kindness, one-to-one. It is a moment that breaks through the proceduralism that has become our hollow civic virtue.

June 21, 2016

The role of Islam in terrorism

After the terror attacks of the past two weeks (gays in Florida, police officers in France), the primary response has been to assert that the attacks have nothing to do with Islam.

French and American leaders studiously avoided the word ‘Islamic’ or ‘Islam’ in their condemnation of the attacks. It is strange: both attackers left theatrical dedications to the leader of Islamic State. The killer of the French police officers recorded a 12-minute discourse in which he urged the Muslim community to attack unbelievers by any means possible and to ‘make France tremble’ (Allah would inflict painful punishments upon them if they did not ‘march forth into battle’). Yet the attack cannot be called an Islamic terrorist attack, and Islamic State cannot be called Islamic State but instead must be called Daesch or ‘so-called’ Islamic State.

The attackers are described as evil, homophobic or disturbed, as if the violence is a result of mental disorder or prejudice. Some lefties see Islamic terrorism as a twisted form of protest or politics, the result of historic foreign intervention or segregation within French society (for which they apologise). While the terrorists are obsessed with drawing lines (you and us, believers and unbelievers), there is a great effort to avoid any lines whatsoever – to, as they say in France, avoid any ‘amalgame’ between terrorists and Islam.

Of course, the attacks are not the result of Islam per se; this is not the faithful rendering of the teachings of seventh-century caliphs. And yet this religion is not incidental either. Radical Islam is at present playing a particular historic role: to provide a guise for tendencies towards destruction and collapse, which in this religious form appear as something substantial and transcendent. It is thanks to the Islamic guise that commonplace nihilism appears to be on the other side of a line: to be for something else, for another people, another place.

In their actual content, the recent Islamic attacks are relatively indistinguishable from attacks such as the US school shootings. The attackers are largely frustrated no-hopers, some of whom failed in their attempts to get into the police or army. There is a rage against the world and a desire for a great explosion. ‘I’m going to make everything explode’, was the way two of the Paris attackers independently described their actions. There is a stated desire to humiliate, to make things pop or burn, to make France or Europe or America tremble.

The attacks have the vanity of the school shootings: the videos, the desire for notoriety and to show that they have done something big. The murderer of the French police officers streamed his testimony live while still in the couple’s house, while the Florida shooter phoned 911 before he had finished shooting. Militarily these are not sensible actions, but narcissism overrode practical considerations. There was a desire not just to act but to have their act recognised: to take ownership of it and say ‘look what I did’, and this was as important as any actual results. There is not a concern with killing great numbers of people, only to commit an act of destruction that you can make a speech about before you die.

There also appears to be the death wish of the school shootings – terrorists want to go out anyway so may as well take others with them, make it a party. And yet this nihilistic content appears in quite a different guise to that of the school shootings. Islamic nihilism appears in the form of a war, a battle; the attacker is a soldier. His acts are shown on videos overlaid with nasheed warrior songs and galloping horsemen. He stands on another side of the line from the people he is attacking, or the place he has grown up. He stands outside Europe and condemns it as a place of ‘nonbelievers’: the fantasy world of Islamic history has become another place to belong.

The murderer of French police officers addressed his video to his ‘dear brothers’ in the worldwide Islamic community, and gave instructions for how they can follow up his glory: he gave a list of targets, including prison officers, police, journalists, politicians, and rappers, as well as a list of particular public figures who he believed deserved to get it. His personal gripes are announced as a political programme. His death wish is also universalised and made transcendent: ‘It’s enough to throw yourself forward, to die, and you will arrive in paradise. At that moment there will be no more worries, no more tests, only an enjoyment.’

Some observers of Islamic terrorism have insisted that it is not merely nihilistic, that it also idealistic and transcendent: it aims at sacrifice for a cause, at serving something bigger than yourself. Yes, it has these two elements of destruction and transcendence, hence the insignia of Islamic State, the black flag and the finger pointed skywards. But the transcendent element is merely a delusion: it does not point towards something about to rise from the ashes, or to any mystified will or wellbeing of Muslim people.

We are now seeing a desocialised brand of Islam, stipped of relations with Muslim communities or schools of Muslim thought. Previous forms of political Islam provided a religious guise for particular social interests and forces. Political Islam had a social content, whether that was anti-colonialism, or the mobilisation of civil society against corrupt elites. The Iranian revolution translated Marxist concepts such as civil society and party into pseudo-Islamic terminology: Islam acted as a veil for social forces, a means by which they could be articulated.

Similarly, the Islamic duty of jihad is a mystified expression of one’s duty to defend one’s community (1). Every Muslim has a holy duty to defend his community when it is being attacked; he has a provisional duty to join his community’s wars for expansion. This collective duty of self-defence would have been familiar to members of a Greek city state or indeed modern Christian nations. It took a particular priority in Muslim lands, as a means of welding disparate desert peoples into a unified fighting force.

Now the Islamic duty of jihad has been stripped of its collective meaning, and has become reduced to the immediate whim of each person. Anything they want to do is immediately raised into the divine obligation of ‘jihad’. Similarly, ‘ummah’ has become an abstract, fantasy construct, to be chucked around in your own self-justification. The will of Allah seems to always precisely coincide with terrorists’ own: Allah is an imaginary friend, giving his blessing and urging them on. Faisal Devji notes how Islamic concepts have lost any systematic or established content, and are ‘available only in fragments’ (2).

The ground for this desocialised Islam has been prepared by recent neofundamentalisms such as Salafism, which are set against all existent forms of Muslim communal life as well as European and Western culture. Whereas the political Islamists of the 70s were modernist and socialist, neofundamentalists seek to build an Islam from scratch: they are firmly opposed not only to Western influences, but also to local Islams and practices as well as to schools of Islamic theology or jurisprudence and existent religious authorities. Theirs is the purity of asociality, the setting of religion against culture and intellectual inheritance.

Islam in its globalised form becomes a detached‘marker’ (in the words of Olivier Roy (3)), a free floating transcendent element to be used for any purpose. The role of Islam in terrorism is not because of anything specific about Islamic history or the situation of Muslim communities in Europe (around 25% of European jihadis are converts). Instead, it is by taking an Islamic form that nihilism can be pursued as if it were a universal cause.

So the attacks are not the result of Islamic theology or doctrine, and yet Islam is playing a particular historic role at the moment, quite unlike that of any other religion or cultural principle. It is only this religion – the only rival universalistic monotheism to Christianity – which provides the means by which internal tendencies towards collapse and destruction appear as an oppositional principle and a revelation.

(1) L’Islam et La Guerre, Jean-Paul Charnay, Fayard, 1986

(2) Landscape of the Jihad, Devji, Hurst and Co, 2005

(3) Holy Ignorance, Olivier Roy, Hurst, 2010

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January 29, 2016

What Clausewitz would say about Isis

The classic modern war, says Clausewitz, is ‘called forth by a political motive’ and is ‘a political act’: it is the mobilisation of a state, a people, in defence of the interests of that state (1). The form a war takes is determined by those interests, and the stronger the interests and passions the closer will the war approach the extremes of an all-out military conflict.

Now, in Syria and Iraq, we have a quite different model of war: war as the unravelling of political formations. As the war progresses, the various factions become increasingly numerous, fragmented, and estranged from any kind of popular base. There is a return to pre-modern tactics such as siege warfare and mutual avoidance, with skirmishes and deals rather than all-out battles. The cartography of a region or a city resembles a patchwork, with not one or two fronts but fronts everywhere, between or within neighbourhoods. In the city of Ramadi there are now Iraqi government and ISIS flags only yards from one another.

For Clausewitz, the essence of the war was the battle, the combat: ‘the combat is the single activity in war’. The war has the cell form of the duel: it is the ‘shock of two hostile bodies in collision’, each seeking to force the other to ‘do their will’.

Now, people are dying but often not in combat per se. Major cities have been won or lost with only a few dozen casualties. The Iraqi city of Mosul was won by ISIS in June 2014 with few casualties on either side: the Iraqi army just upped and left. Here is a city of 2.5 million people with 500 million dollars in the bank and military helicopters in the airport, and the army would not fight for it. Ramadi and Fallujah were taken by ISIS when the Iraqi army withdrew from the cities, after a dispute with local Sunni tribes: they walked into a vacuum. (The winning back of Tikrit in April 2015 by Shiite militias, led by Iranian commanders, was the exception that stands out as a more old-school battle, with significant fight and casualties on both sides).

Most notable is the woeful weakness of Iraqi state army: commanders defy orders to defend a district, soldiers take off their uniforms and go AWOL. Tribal militias will fight more than the state will fight. The Shiite militias ‘are stronger because they are ideological’, said one Iraqi, explaining why they now prop up the Iraqi army. The tribal and religious is what remains of ideology: they are the ones able to give meaning to battle and to risk their lives.

When Napoleon’s citizen armies first faced the elite, mercenary armies of Europe, the mercenaries were astounded at their numbers and their will to fight. Watching Mosul fall is like watching Napolean’s army in reverse: the state army is now the weakest thing, it is singularly lacking in ‘ideology’. The Americans did not build an Iraqi state but created a racket, a layer of people in their pay, a structure of phantom soldiers and kickbacks which crumbles at the touch.

The avoidance of battle is most glaring with the Western states of the world, who are uniquely obsessed with this patch of Syrian desert but will not put a foot in it. France pledged to ‘destroy’ ISIS but straight away ruled out any kind of ground troops. After a few weeks it admitted that it was ‘running out of targets’: ‘air strikes are of no use while there is no ground force to retake territory’.

There has been a fragmentation too of any international coalition, which were united in the first Gulf War, semi-united in the second, now split into as many parts as the Syrian opposition, often bombing sides being armed by other parties. They tell each other what they are doing only to avoid crashing into one another. Each nation has their favoured targets, which are developed in secret and change without warning – today Russia is bombing the opposition, then ISIS, then the opposition again. France admits that it is bombing Rakka because the government created the ‘narrative’ of the problem being Rakka.

International interests are primarily negative, set against a party, rather than for anybody. They were anti-Saddam, now anti-Assad, anti-ISIS, but they do not have clients or allies. They can destablise but not build; they can weaken but not take territory. It seems that the lesson of the war in Iraq was only not to try to build, not to try to occupy the country you are attacking. To attack them without trying to take them, without having a stake there, without being for anyone there. (Or not to actually know or control the people you are arming – as with US arms to Syrian opposition ending up across the border to be used by ISIS against the Iraqi army).

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Battle is no longer the most meaningful thing. The drama lies in other ways of killing: suicide attacks, beheadings, air bombings. These are forms of killing which don’t involve meeting or grappling with the other party. They are not assertions of the will in a duel, but forms of demonstrating your power in a theatrical manner over a prostrate subject.

The bombing functions as a pristine display of power, as in the past two Gulf wars. The French theorist Jean Baudrillard said that the bombing of Saddam in 1991 was an ‘illusionism of force’, the Americans presenting ‘to themselves and to the entire world the spectacle of their virtual power’ (2). Now, films of Russian planes show the military hardware in all its splendour, superior and aloof; you see the bombs fall but not where they land. Or there is the asceptic footage familiar from the last Iraq war of planes fixing on their target, a green square, and then the resulting explosion. The post-Paris French airstrikes on ISIS were mocked by French jihadis, who claimed there had been no casualties and that millions of euros of high-tech explosives had been pounded into dust.

ISIS’s execution videos are dealing with the enemy at a more intimate level, but still this is not a grappling in combat but a null staging of prowess. They don’t even look at the person they are about to kill, they wave their knife at the camera and address watchers of the video or world leaders. The methods of killing are chosen largely for their performative value, the way the person will look as they die. Hence beheading: so unnecessarily difficult! When they are shot then the moment of the person buckling is shown in slow-mo and rewound; the film is all about this moment of buckling. It is a theatre of staged dominance, where the captive stands in for and is made to play the part of the Western adversary.

This theatrical parading of captives goes back to Saddam Hussein’s performance with the captured US airmen in Gulf War 1. At least they were airmen, fighters; the current captives are nobodies, anybodies, bit parts dragged in to be swaggered over and to have their veins spurt blood at the right moment. This great drama around execution is unusual. Execution is normally done surreptitiously or clinically – it lacks the drama of battle, the grappling of wills, there is no glory in it.

Suicide bombings are like drone or air strikes in that they allow you to attack in an area where you have no stake. You can destablise an enemy without trying to take the terrain. Suicide bombings are ISIS’s most feted deaths in war; it is the suicide bombing that is seen as the ‘highlight of the battle’. There is perhaps something ignominous now about dying in battle, dying at hands of enemy, and losses are often covered up and denied. Suicide bombings alone seem to have meaning, and there are many videos of ecstatic bombers about to set out on their mission of blowing up a checkpoint or walls of an army base. Their smiling faces are superimposed over the resulting explosion to indicate their achieved spiritual state.

The suicide bombing is not a grappling with the enemy but the pure sacrificial offering, unsullied by a tussel with another party. The fact that you blow yourself up means your death in a war is can be seen as a gift for God which leaves nothing for the enemy. Suicide bombings are indicative of a battle where you are not seeking to prevail over the other party but to seek destruction per se. You die not in a failed attempt to impose your will in battle but in the great blast you yourself have made. They seem to see a transcendence in the all-encompassing explosion that dissolves its author.

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It is in this condition that ISIS can dominate – a condition in which all other interests, particularly regional and international state interests, have fragmented and pull at cross purposes to one another. Many of the cities ISIS now hold were abandoned by state forces, left for the taking.

For several decades, the process of Islamicisation has paralleled the emptying out of politics. Islamicisation means a mystification of the ends of battle, the basis of a conflict, and the basis of the organisation of a society. Since the Iranian revolution and the war in Afghanistan, questions of left or right or national popularism increasingly took an Islamic guise, as cover, as the underlying political motives weakened in their proper ideological language and justification. Now the political interests at the heart of a conflict have eroded further until it is practically only the Islamic mystification which remains.

ISIS is now the sole actor in the region with a universalising claim. They are centralised, coordinated, expansive; they have a body of people who will fight and die. They represent the grand mystification of any underlying political motives to the conflict, whether that is Sunni Arab political ambitions or Syrian national-liberation hopes. Their current dominance shows the inability of political interests to be posed as such, and the lack of viability of Western models of statehood or political interest formations.

Footnotes:

(1) Carl Von Clausewitz, On War

(2) Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, Power Publs, 2006

January 15, 2016

Terrorism and the crisis of Western culture

Islamic terrorism has no positive meaning or drive in itself. Instead, it is merely a negative, shadow form, an externalisation of the vacuum within Western culture and societies.

The defining feature of Western jihadis is their complete disdain for the places they are from: for their families, neighbourhood, country. They see their country as a nowhere place, somewhere they stand completely outside of and hold only in contempt. Their radicalisation is an activation of this negative orientation towards their home, a definitive cutting of ties. The attacker of the Paris Kosher supermarket branded his nine sisters ‘infidels’, and said that ‘for me, religion comes first, I don’t give a damn about family’.

This is not a religion in any classical sense of a practising community. There was a radical Islamic mosque network in the 90s, but today’s jihadis are deracinated and individualised, existing outside of community or institutional forms. As the Islam expert Giles Kepel says: ‘They situate themselves in rupture with society and shut themselves away…they fabricate their own beliefs and practices’.

This, then is the basis of the jihadist identity: not Islam as a thing in itself, but only an Islam held in a pose of hostile conflict with Western culture and society. Islamic observances are an adjunct to the attack, and not the other way around. Two of the Paris attackers only started to pray and stopped smoking dope in the weeks when they began to prepare for the attack. The cousin of the organiser of the Paris attacks was shown in a headscarf flashing V’s at the camera: the headscalf is the accompaniment to the V’s and not a sign of religious devotion.

To be in the state of jihad, of oppositional identity, becomes their new ‘place’ and their new grounding. ‘Since I began with religion that has always been in jihad and I knew that this was my place here’, said one of the other attackers.

This process is suggestive not so much of exclusion, but of the lack of a positive pole into which they might be included or excluded. The Conservative French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut said that he had been assimilated as a young Polish Jew through an education that ‘introduced me to a world older than myself’, to a philosophical and cultural tradition (1). This inheritance was not specifically French but European or civilisation-culture: you had to really know your Plato.

Now, says Finkielkraut, there is a turn against ‘old school’ culture, the self-dismantling of a cultural inheritance. The teaching of French language and literature is reduced in favour of ‘preachy eco-citizen and practical interdisciplinary assignments’. The position of the teacher is ‘de-intellectualised’ and seen as a facilitator rather than a transmitter of knowledge. To assimilate is to maintain the connection with a cultural tradition, says Finkielkraut: ‘today we break it, and the same dissaggregation strikes native French as new arrivals’.

The self-negation of Western culture is not a genuine New School. The left-wing philosopher Alain Badiou laments the equal loss of the ‘revolutionary tradition’ in France, which was first republican, then socialist, anarcho-socialist, communist and leftist. The new order is not radical or libertarian, instead it has a nothing quality, illiberal but devoid of values or content. It amounts to a cultivated non-attachment to values and a particular self-distancing from the works and history of Western civilisation.

It is only in relation to the non-place of Western culture that the jihad is something and attains the status of an obligation. One jihadi’s phone had an image of the Eiffel tower up in smoke, and the message: ‘Oh France! We are coming, prepare yourself for bombs and assassinations on your territories’. It is now ‘we’ against ‘you’ and ‘your country’. They plant their feet in a war-torn desert and point to say they will kill kuffirs ‘over there’. The owners of a Brussels bar return to Europe to shoot at people sitting in bars.

The form taken by Islamic terrorism has become increasingly arbitrary and fragmented over time. The attacks of 9/11 were the structured negation of the West, an attack on the military, political and economic centres of American power. The attackers were highly trained and disciplined, part of a hierachical organisation and following orders. It was the organisation that sent their plane tickets and paid for their flight training.

By contrast, as Giles Kepel observes, the attackers on the Jewish supermarket and the Bataclan behaved like ‘wicked adolescents’ playing video games (2). They have the moeurs of criminals or hoodlums, without ‘ideology or grand doctrine’. The terrorist act has become arbitrary, DIY: any act of violence or destruction can be pinned with the flag of jihad. They source and pay for their own weapons and plan their own attacks, often badly.

Much had been made of the ‘professionalism’ of the Paris attackers, but this should not be overstated. They apparently under-specced their suicide belts such that they failed to kill anyone in blowing themselves up: the ‘attacks’ at the Stade de France basically amounted to a series of Islamic extremist suicides. One would-be bomber bauked and abandoned his suicide vest in a Paris suburb, while the ‘mastermind’ allowed himself to be found by police at the same flat the team had used to hide out.

If 9/11 was the structured negation of Western culture, contemporary terrorism is the immediate negation, the arbitrary and nihilistic turn against Western culture and society. It is less and less distinguishable from plain gangsterism or events such as the American school shootings. One European Isis fighter announced that European Muslims should ‘kill anyone’ they can get their hands on back at home. Two of the Paris attackers independently used the same phrase to describe their actions – to ‘make everything explode’ – suggesting the undirected nihilistic impulse.

The black flag is used to give a universal and historic guise to lone operators acting on impulse against the things they do not like (such as Jews), or acting out petty resentments, such as the US Christmas dinner shootings or the Muslim employee who decapitated his boss. Workplace disputes are transmuted into the terms of some grand religious clash, whereas they in fact remain in all their banality as a workplace dispute. The abstraction of an ‘IS attack’ is stuck like an afterthought on violence of the basest particularity.

In this context, there is an equal inutility to repressive and appeasing measures targeting Muslim communities. The French government is currently preoccupied with an effort to strip French nationality from dual-nationals convicted of terrorist offences. Do they really think that terrorists care about their carte d’identité? He who wants the Eiffel tower up in smoke would gladly add his ID card to the bonfire, and indeed this is perhaps what the bonfire is about.

Meanwhile, the appeasing measures are even worse. There is a pedagogical discussion about ‘having the conversation’ with Muslim students after terrorist attacks – i.e., how to tell them that the attacks were wrong. If you cannot tell them that then you cannot tell them very much. Education experts are developing methods of ‘engaging’ Muslim students, for example teaching them to critique the conspiracy theories that are common in their ranks. One exercise involved setting the students a conspiracy theory assignment, designing a world-wide plot linking their French teachers and the CIA. This ‘engagement’ is only an encouragement down their disintegrative lines of thought. What is actually required with Muslim students is to have something to bear before them, something bigger than themselves.

Islamic terrorism is the self-negation of Western culture appearing in an external form: as a hostile, foreign force existing in a state of war against it. Their strength, their belief, is only the inverse of our lack of belief.

This situation makes clear the sacrifice that has been made: when a civilisation gives up on its values there are consequences. It doesn’t seem that serious, day to day, when the curriculum is being dismantled or cultural non-attachment is being cultivated. Discussions occur in smart conference halls with coffee breaks. It doesn’t seem that serious when museum officials judge that dusty old objects are ‘irrelevant’. But now we can see what it means: it means Palmyra in ruins, machine guns in concert halls.

Who dies now defending civilisation? The archaeologist who died defending Palmyra, perhaps he is the only one. The different aspects of civilised life should be pursued again with the status of an obligation. We should replace the self-negation of Western culture with its self-affirmation – not as an anti-terrorist strategy but because this is what is of value and true.

(1) Le Un, No 88, 6 January

(2) Le Un, No 84, 25 November

November 24, 2015

French ‘state of emergency’: the irrationalities of arbitrary power

The thing that separates a gendarme with a tricolour on his shoulder from a militia member with a gun, is that the gendarme is supposed to represent the law.

The thing that separates a modern state like France from pre-modern or retrograde political authorities is that the French state is supposed to embody rational principles: it acts where necessary to preserve the state of liberty.

Now the French state is responding to a terrorist attack – the embodiement of irrational force – by extending the arbitrary powers of state authorities. As with America and Britain before it, the ‘security’ agenda in response to terrorism amounts to the extension of arbitrary powers as an end in itself.

There appears to be a notion that the more latitude given to police authorities – the more latitude to enact surveillance, to put electronic tags on people, to confine them to residences, to ban events – the safer everyone will be.

President Hollande’s declaration of a ‘state of emergency’ was a performance in reassurance, the gesture of asserting state authority. By extending powers he says: I am in charge, things are under control.

Yet all that has actually happened is that the administrative parts of the state have been unleashed to use their force as they please. For the next three months suspects can be confined to their homes by an administrative order, searches and raids can be carried out without legal authorisation, and local prefects have summary powers to restrict the movement of groups or particular individuals, banning local events or declaring curfews.

‘In another context, I would be the first to condemn such a proceedure’, said the socialist president of parliament’s legal commission. There were some murmurs of dissent but a general view that this was not the time for questioning or for argument. The vote on the enactment of the state of emergency was 551 votes for, 6 against, and one abstention. Such majorities achieved without debate indicate the rubber stamping of administrative edicts not the enacting of laws.

An article on the leftist magazine Rue.89 argued that this amounts to ‘legalisation of arbitrariness’, and noted that ‘state of emergency’ powers were used in the Algerian war to arrest thousands of supporters of Algerian independence and inter them in camps.

The Rue.89 article points out that Hollande’s law allows someone to be confined to their home on the basis of ‘serious reasons to think that their conduct constitutes a threat to security and public order’, a condition which is ‘much vaguer’ that the Algerian war version which targeted ‘activities’ rather than conduct. Which radical political protesters could not be targeted under these powers?

Indeed, a Le Monde investigation of some of the 118 people confined to their homes finds that one man’s fault lay mainly in the fact that he had twice driven a radical Islamic preacher to the airport. The man describes how 12 police officers arrived at his house and said: ‘We have something for you to sign.’ The documents seen by Le Monde included a mix of correct and incorrect facts about the person’s ‘connections’, but were mainly based on the simple assertion that the person represents a risk to national security and is intent on joining jihadist forces in Syria.

‘They are taking people randomly to make examples of them’, said one confined man. Another said ‘They didn’t have anything to write, they charged me for the sake of charging me, to be able to tell people, “look, we’re doing something”.’ The lawyers who accepted these unfavourable cases said that the reasons for confining people to residence were ‘often obscure, or indeed unfounded’, and that the ‘rush to punishment plunges us increasingly in a zone of non-droit where we risk conducting ourselves like our aggressors’.

Now there are parts of France where people live under curfew, or where demonstrations are banned (though some are going ahead in spite of the prohibition). Events that have been cancelled on mayoral order include Lyon’s Festival of Light and Nancy’s festivities of Saint Nicholas.

Yet the French state’s inability to prevent the Paris attacks appears to lie in the failed use of existing powers, rather than for want of new ones. Several newspapers have criticised intelligence agencies’ failure to pick up on movements of the key suspects – many of whom were known Islamic extremists, and not because they once drove an iman to the airport – and indeed authorities were tipped off by an Islamist in August that Abaaoud (the Paris ringleader) had asked him to ‘attack a concert hall’.

The pressures of today are not, in fact, those of the time of the Algerian war. There is no civil war or threat of a coup, and the powers of state are not threatened. Dealing with terrorist action falls within the normal domain of police function. Perhaps the police need different skills, or more resources, but their task remains one of normal police function and not dealing with a crisis of state. Therefore they can perform this task with the normal judicial equipment.

The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens provides a ringing statement of the proper function of modern criminal law:

‘The law ought to prohibit only actions hurtful to society. What is not prohibited by the law, should not be hindered…No man should be accused, arrested, or held in confinement, except in cases determined by law… All who promote, solicit…or cause to be executed arbitrary orders, ought to be punished’.

Bien dit!

It is worth remembering that these controls upon state power do not only protect public liberty, but also guide state action towards effective ends. That is, legal protections exist not only to protect the public from arbitrary sanctions, but also to guide law enforcement down rational and effective lines. This applies for the pursuit of terrorists as much as for other areas of public service.

When 12 police officers are employed to deliver unsubstantiated accusations to an innocent person – who then has to report to the police station four times a day, taking their own and officers’ time – this represents the use of state force for a gesture, for the sake of it, which in fact distracts from the apprehension of terrorists or the routing of future attacks.