Tributes to the Bataclan victims. Demotix/Infosart. All rights reserved.It has been three weeks since the tragic events in Paris. I did not lose anybody close to me, but had a few huge scares – a good friend was miraculously only lightly injured by some debris of bullets and some people I know are still between life and death at the moment. Both my brothers live within a 200 metre radius from the attacks and my younger one lives where I used to live, 50 metres away from Le Carillon and Le Petit Cambodge restaurants. It is still hard, heartbreaking and nerve-racking, depressing and so often panicking. We are in the “oeil du cyclone”, and we are like headless chickens, too dazed to grasp the many complex layers explaining what happened on the 13 November. We are in the “oeil du cyclone”, and we are like headless chickens, too dazed to grasp the many complex layers explaining what happened on the 13 November.
What has been unfolding in the last weeks could unfortunately have been predicted: a “state of emergency” provoking countless arrests with very limited results and many blunders, the rise of Islamophobia and now, as I write these words, the Front National winning the first round of the Regional elections in six out of thirteen regions. It feels like a Greek tragedy: the attacks, the State of Emergency limiting our rights tremendously and criminalizing all together radical Muslims, ecologists or migrants, the aerial warfare conducted in Syria and Iraq and the probable alliance of circumstance with Bashar Al-Assad. At last Marine Le Pen confirms her power in France, while the Front National, everywhere, ends its process of “de-demonization”. What will happen next?
Our gentrified/precarious/educated or not/ multicultural/openminded generation, our neighborhood and way of life have been targeted, and it’s hard to move on. If you consider in addition the flows of racist, liberticide, pro-war, extreme-right bullshit pervading the media and almost all political discourse, it is tough. Hollande’s securitarian speech in Versailles on the 16 November was only the beginning. Marine Le Pen could not have done better, yet a quarter of the population voting in France preferred the original to the copy. I can only imagine what could happen if she gets elected after his reform of the constitution.
