Defending “French Values”? The Paris attacks and our loss of innocence

Paris terrace cafe, July, 2014. Flickr/ zoetnet. Some rights reserved.I wrote a piece for The Postcolonialist earlier last year on the Charlie Hebdo massacre entitled “Defending Charlie Hebdo? Secularism, Islam and the War on Error” in which I hoped to show the intricacies of hermeneutics, especially when it comes to the art of caricature. My goal wasn't to take a clear-cut stand on whether or not Charlie Hebdo was Islamophobic, as many on the Left were tempted to do; the journalists and illustrators at Charlie knew that what they were doing was eminently political and were aware of the risks involved. In this light, the 13 November attacks in Paris were different in that its victims were innocent bystanders, concert goers, café regulars sitting at terraces – or were they really?

France’s New Anticapitalist Party (NPA)’s slogan following the attacks, “Vos Guerres, Nos Morts” (Your Wars, Our Dead) would appear to confirm this viewpoint and yet, no one is ever entirely clean. First, there is the fact that France is waging a war (more or less declared) against ISIS. War is a dirty business, precisely because it kills innocent civilians. Unless citizens decide to take to the streets to protest war, whilst remaining victims, they are certainly not innocent.

The absence of mass anti-war rallies such as the ones over the Iraq War back in 2003 shows a complicit support for war by the population and the political parties representing them, regardless of the efficacy of such an antiwar movement, or the failure of the far Left to mobilise.