March 26, 2016
European Parliament
Source: Bigstock
Now, without wanting in any way to propose a moral equivalence between the jihadists and the European Union, I think it is worth pointing out that Europe (in the purely technical sense of the word) is no slouch when it comes to spreading gibberish; indeed it seems to be the native tongue of European politicians. “A European project” is an excellent example of that gibberish, for what exactly is the “project” referred to? It is a word frequently bandied about but whose precise, or even approximate, meaning is never vouchsafed to humble listeners or readers. Is it a unified state? No. Is it a federal state? No. Is it a state at all? No. Is it something other than a state? No. What is it, then? The uninitiated and the paranoid might think it is a slow, creeping coup d”état by a perpetual self-appointed class of bureaucrats and politicians who seek to bypass the tiresome necessity ever to consult anyone other than itself. This is not exactly the project, to coin a phrase, of a humorous, disrespectful, self-deprecating people whom Le Monde praises in another context.
As for the word “cosmopolitan,” it is likewise misused. A cosmopolitan city, such as Alexandria in the old days, is one in which several nationalities and cultures coexist with some actual knowledge of each other’s languages and sympathetic participation in each other’s customs, not a city in which the citizens of 167 different countries happened to have turned up in the hope of social security and/or a decent job. There is, after all, a difference between a cocktail and a Mickey Finn; and I doubt that many extollers of cosmopolitanism in the Le Monde sense of the word have taken a serious interest in Somali culture, for example, even if there is a large Somali “community” in their city. (I have been to Somalia, and I intended at the time to read the works of a celebrated specialist anthropologist called I.M. Lewis about Somali culture. Thirty years later it is still on my list of things to do, and I will do it”provided someone assures me that I shall live to be 7,000.)
When I read Le Monde and other worthy journals, it seems to me that what we need is…yes, a change in our mental posture in the antiterrorist struggle. We must think lucidly, above all, differently.
