Before such a case in point, it is impossible not to think of the fire analysis of the academician René Girard of Oedipus of the Greek myth or that of Milomaki of the Yahuna Indians: two legendary personas persecuted and declared guilty by a mob of the evils plaguing their societies. They are in fact regarded as the outsiders who were at the root of the breakdown of the social and societal order that once prevailed.
Since the beginning of the Syrian tragedy, refugees are in turn perceived by a part of the population in host countries as the scourge at the root of every misfortune. Needless to say, moreover, that this existential angst that usually accompanies an identity crisis when faced with the arrival of the other, the one who is different from us, is today fully exploited by some political forces and some officials, who have made intolerance and hate their electoral stock-in-trade and the foundation of their populist rhetoric in some countries, including Lebanon.
Never indeed was the return to primal instincts so powerful, so much so that the whole world is beset with terrible identity convulsions. The recent controversy over the burkini in France has crystallized, for that matter, this alarm, mixed with fears and tremors, with the identity bag of worms triggered by the Syrian crisis, in particular, and the massive exodus of refugees to Europe, in general. The world finds itself plunged into a deep and critical crisis relating to points of reference. The progress towards the universality of human rights, a construction built on the ruins of the post-1945 world and in operation since the second half of the 20th century, has never before been so undermined as with the powerlessness of the international community to put an end to the violence ravaging the Syrian territory.
This fixation abscess, where extremes clash, has already developed. Violence and extremism have now spread far and wide. The tumors born in Syria, and recreated in the region, are now causing a mimetic reaction of the rise in extremism–another name for the identity crisis–across the whole world.
Globalization is in agony before our eyes, in atrocious and bloody convulsions. The so-called «end of history», predicted with optimism by Fukuyama with the end of bipolarity in the early 1990s, is now going through the end of its own history. The world is, unquestionably, ripe for rethinking.
But, please, shall we spare the Syrian refugees who are innocent. Compromised unanimity in a society and eroded unity cannot necessarily be repaired at the expense of propitiatory victims. For this is, without a doubt, paving the way for new tragedies that we had thought long buried in the last century.