When politics are no longer enough, civil society must take over to prevent autism and indifference from paving the way for the assertion of principles and actions contrary to fundamental and non-negotiable values.
These deviations are the ones that the “Citizen Collective Against the Deception and Spread of Far-Right Ideas”* denounces in a document presented yesterday.
An alert with no follow-up? A futile fight? A spotlight that will be lost in the daily news cycle?
But, doesn’t one also say that if you have a voice, you must make it heard?
Declaration of the collective
We, the “Citizen Collective Against Political Deception and the Spread of Far-Right Ideas,” publicly denounce today the words of politicians from the so-called republican right who are in fact promoting far-right theses.
For too long, the media and commentators on public life have labeled as “slips” statements that hinder living together and cultivate rejecting the other.
For too long, there has been an attempt to sidestep the problem by talking about “rapprochement”, then “porosity”, then “collusion” between right and far-right to finally speak of “extreme right” and “far-right”, as if simply inverting the terms could still disguise the unity of ideas.
No, fighting the far right is no longer limited today to denouncing the statements of the National Front but also to combating any vector of dissemination of its ideas, including by so-called “republican” parties.
No, denouncing the language excesses of national politicians is not “taking sides” against “a party” but fully assuming our role as a citizen watchdog and defending social cohesion in our country.
For too long, Christian Estrosi, deputy, Mayor of Nice and President of the Nice Côte d’Azur Metropolis, and Eric Ciotti, Deputy and President of the Alpes-Maritimes Departmental Council, to name but a few, have multiplied hateful and reactionary statements about migrants, Islam, the Republic, secularism, school or “May 68”.
Thus, by declaring that “Islam is incompatible with democracy” Christian Estrosi voluntarily maintains the confusion between Islam and radical Islamism.
By asserting that the “third world war” would be declared between “our Judeo-Christian civilization” and “Islamo-fascism” and its “fifth columns”, the deputy Mayor of Nice incites generalized distrust of everyone against everyone to ferret out the “enemies from within” and thus cultivates a climate of suspicion and denunciation.
By daring to declare, regarding the death of two youths, Zyed and Bouna, that: “the families just have to educate their children and ensure they are not delinquents”, showing no respect even for the families’ pain, Christian Estrosi has taken brutal ignominy one step further.
The publication of his book “Authority!”, meanwhile, allowed Eric Ciotti to engage in true reactionary excess in which he covers the essential topics he holds dear: stigmatization of migrants and the poor, a return to the “right of blood” favored by nationalist parties, “national preference” disguised under the name “differentiated social model”, xenophobic manipulation of secularism against Muslims, and unfortunately, the list goes on…
Christian Estrosi and Eric Ciotti here place themselves in the continuity of their logic, which for several years has consisted of manipulating media buzz in obvious electoral opportunism and a true populist bidding with the National Front.
Questioning the right to soil is to permanently install foreigners and their children in precariousness, slow down integration, and ultimately foster identity-based communitarianism.
Systematically stigmatizing “the Other” means maintaining and encouraging the xenophobia and hatreds that divide French society, which promotes the spread of far-right ideas resulting in an increasingly strong political presence of the National Front.
No, Messrs. Estrosi and Ciotti, your statements portraying Islam, the foreigner, the poor, supposedly necessarily assisted, profiteer, and fraudster, as the sole causes of the supposed ruin or decadence of France, and the very real economic crisis, do not make you opponents of the National Front but indeed allies in fact of the far right in France and promoters of its ideas.
The “Citizen Collective Against Political Deception and the Spread of Far-Right Ideas” recalls the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights particularly in its first article: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood”.
It is not by spreading the ideas of the National Front that one fights it but on the contrary, by relying on citizen mobilization for equality of rights and fraternity.
