London crowd. Flickr/Ant Jackson. Some rights reserved.Charlie Hebdo reminds us that life is much more complicated than the simple contrast between the bad guy, “the Islamist,” vs. the good guy, “the European”.
Left and Right
The Political Left always points at something “beyond,” or more precisely, “beneath” this simple picture where the truth proves much more complicated. The power of the arguments of the Left is hidden in premises with which the great majority of European people are assumed to agree.
Thus. It is indeed a simple “postmodern fact” that those Islamists who killed eleven people were not born killers. As we all start from zero, from pure nothingness and contingency, it must be concluded that there could be no unchanging, perennial, ahistorical essence in this world. If they “could” kill those innocent people just because they depict something, for them, wrong, then something external must have made them that way.
