What has come to be known as the «Marshall Plan» re-built and stimulated investment, thus creating jobs. This huge event opened up a market too abundant for the Europeans, so the doors were flung open to the young people from the colonies and former colonies: Come to us and come with your families. And indeed, the workers came.
Belgium’s embassies and consulates in the Maghreb circulated a famous brochure reading «Living and Working in Belgium». Its aim was to entice young Maghrebis to emigrate to «provide our country with your strength and talent».
The Belgian statement was distributed in 1964, two decades after the beginning of decolonization. Brotherhood and the right of peoples to equality and self-determination were the symbols of the time. As for the believers, a fresh breeze began to blow their way starting in 1958 with the arrival of John XXIII at the Vatican. He was the Pope who convened the Second Vatican Council and who was eager to reconcile Christians with the Jews, always reaffirming his liberal views and championing human rights.
This European climate was reinforced in the US by the presidencies of Kennedy and Johnson. Great Britain, on the other hand, suffered a setback that struck horror in the progressive public opinion. In mid 1968, the politician and aristocrat Enoch Powell delivered his Rivers of Blood speech, attacking immigration from the Commonwealth and opposing anti-discrimination legislation, foreboding «rivers of blood» if this process was not stopped.
Blood did not flow. But what the experience had revealed, as an early warning-and which is exactly what has exploded in recent years- is that «hardworking British masses» were sympathetic with him, while the leadership of his «elitist» party punished him. Edward Heath, the Conservative leader, dismissed him from his position as Shadow Defence Secretary. Later, Powell leaned to Labor, and his switch was one of the reasons for Labour’s victory in the 1974 elections.
Powell’s experience invalidated the Leninist hypostasis on the unity of the workers of the industrial West and the national liberation movements in the colonies. This is what the future will aggrandize. But Powell’s foreboding, which had shocked the 1960s, youthful and sympathizing with Vietnam, suggested that the waters were more mixed than they appeared to the eye.
Envenomed Backgrounds
The countries of the Eastern camp, which had not been exposed to the debates witnessed in the democratic West, were more discreet about this issue in particular. They were not societies sought by immigrants, nor did they encourage such immigration.
But those countries, with the semi-propagandist banner of «brotherhood among peoples», served as envenomed backgrounds for the debate.
Soviet rhetoric continued to use the accusation of «fascism» lavishly and without restraint. Thus it stripped the concept of its uniqueness and specificity, undermining the uniqueness and specificity of the struggle against racism and hatred. Its discriminatory and intolerant security measures against foreigners and Jews were accompanied by a Stalinist antagonism of the «cosmopolitan» (often referring to Jews) which is «subversive» and «espionage ideology».
But the democratic West carried on with its take off. In 1971, Canada adopted «multiculturalism». In 1973, Australia followed suit, and Britain and the rest of Europe imported the concept from those two remote countries. However, pluralism raised as many problems as it solved. Pluralism is based on the assumption that cultural, ethnic and religious «identities» are solid social units, even though it exhorts tolerance. Moreover, even if it replaced «assimilation» with «integration», it did not specify who integrates into whom. With regard to equality among cultures, there is no longer a culture in itself with something to offer to modern society, and integrates the others coming to modernity.
Those issues were only to become more serious. By the second half of the 1970s, Western economies had begun to contract and slow down, driven by rising oil prices. Thus, the tendency to make immigrants the scapegoats was strengthened, and racism began knocking on doors.
The French National Front expressed this shift. In 1972, Jean-Marie Le Pen founded the party to be a voice challenging established views of Petain and Nazi collaboration, and at the same time a platform for anti-immigration and xenophobia, opposing inter-European rapprochement. This movement led by Le Pen, the old fighter in the movements of the populist right, alerted to three indicators:
- Racism was no longer based on alleged biological differences or claims of essential superiority. It was now characterized by cultural differences: we are equal but different. So let each reside in their own house.
- Hostility to foreigners and immigration became inseparable from hostility to Europe (a project that was accused by most of the left as to be bourgeois). Thus, the interests of immigrants and foreigners were not only not irreconcilable with the interests of workers, but also were more reconcilable with the bourgeoisie.
- Anti-Semitism and apologist views of Hitler were a theoretical opponent to the interests of foreigners and immigrants, and a practical opponent when required.
The Seventies Course
In 1977, the grip of the parties associated with their countries newly won independence began to show cracks. For the first time since its 1947 independence, India witnessed the defeat of the Congress party. Israel also witnessed the fall of its Labor Party for the first time since its establishment in 1948.
Two years later, Iranian anger erupted. In the name of Islam, the Shah was overthrown and the country fell into the hands of the angry cleric Ayatollah Khomeini. But Iran was not the only arena in which religious identity took center stage in 1979. At the time, Polish Pope John Paul II made his famous visit to Poland. Half a million people greeted him. Ten million attended his masses. The communist power recoiled. A year later the Solidarity labor union was founded.
Also in 1979, Afghanistan rose up in the name of «jihad» against Communist rule, which was stoked by the Soviet invasion end of that year.
God had become a more active political actor than the state.
The «pre-» state was now gnawing at the state. The «post-» state was also gnawing at it. Neoliberalism, reinforced by the Chicago school doctrine, captured the horizon. In Britain, Thatcher came to power in 1979 carrying her neoliberal gospel. A year later, Reagan arrived at the White House.
Neoliberalism preached that it was important to encourage investment and remove the tax sword hanging over its head. The State, its services and its benefits should be reduced. «Government is the problem» not the solution, according to Reagan, and «there is no such thing as society», according to Thatcher. And the poor? They have to arm themselves with patience and endurance.
(Our) Hatred Discourse
The Arab world did not remain silent. It too had something to say on hatred. In contrast with the exclusive link prevailing between that discourse and the West, Arab political discourse ventured beyond politics to culture and society, and from the specific to the general.
Between the 1940s and 70s, anti-colonialism dominated the racist and essentialist discourse. This was the case of the Nasserism at its height. But with Khomeini’s revolution, which was preceded four years earlier by the collapse of the state in Lebanon, things became different. Essence opposed essence. Good against evil. We are all good. They are all evil. The Khomeinist imagination had «a bigger demon» and a «smaller demon» capering around.
This came in parallel with the decline of Arab nationalism that Saddam Hussein personified. The world was Arabs, non-Arabs, Safavid, Persians and Majus. An anti-Semitic library translated in Iraq. Capture Babylon again? Why not. Saddam had dexterously reached his hand into the museum to borrow an image of the future.
The Iranian and Iraqi museums of hatred consumed the 1980s in fierce fighting.
The 1967 Israeli intoxicating victory and the unification of Jerusalem, followed by the electoral victory of the Likud a decade later, provided part of the right, especially its most fanatic rabbis, with implacable hatred. With its Law of Return, the partial identification of Israel with Judaism, and the remnants of confrontations with the Arabs, the State of Israel developed an unappeasable predilection for hatred. In 1994, this predilection put itself on display when Baruch Goldstein, a settler and a member of the Kach party, killed 29 Palestinian Muslims who were praying in Hebron. The government of Israel had banned Kach, but the hiss of hatred bit off half the peace accord signed a year earlier in Oslo. The suicide operations of Hamas, the assassination of Rabin, and the Israeli barricades took care of the rest.
Globalization and Its Contradictions
With the floodgates of identity open and the shift of the conflict with the West from politics to culture, hatred of America became a feature of a cultural, European and third-world movement, rightist and leftist alike. It had become legitimate at every mention of a denounced American political position, to bring up that it had slaughtered the American Indians, or to label it as the country of hamburgers and the culture of Coca-Cola.
With each rise of cultural relativism, the meanings of enlightenment and progress were falling ever lower. The values of rival groups began, day after day, to expel the singularity of the values of society and state.
Globalization, meanwhile, was making its way. As its birth was linked to neoliberalism, its effects were strikingly contradictory: unprecedented wealth, and unprecedented lopsided wealth distribution. As the presence of the state and its benefits diminished, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, neoliberalism began to act as if it were having its revenge on the social question as a whole. What collapsed was not only the totalitarian system, but also the ideas of equality and well-being. Thus, the luster that surrounded the great gains following the end of the Cold War, such as the end of apartheid in South Africa and the military dictatorship in Latin America. The progress of freedom appeared to be a companion to declining well-being.
In terms of values, profit-seeking dominated all other values. The new capitalist is no longer the capitalist Max Weber who saves and practices self-restraint. The new capitalist spends and puts on display.
The center-left began to go back on its former convictions politically and ideologically: it is the «third way». Britain’s Blair, America’s Clinton, France’s Jospin, and Germany’s Schroeder all found their own ways to reconcile with neoliberalism.
The cocky one was Berlusconi, the swindler millionaire who, as of 1994, ruled the country of Machiavelli and Gramsci. The rich, who were no longer the old rich industrialists and agriculturists, began to express their displeasure at living alongside the poor. In Italy, for example, the Northern League emerged, with its cause the independence of the rich north from the impoverished south. It wanted to establish Padania as an independent country for the northerners.
Berlusconi was a crude expression of a broader phenomenon. In terms of the composition of elites, pursuing a university education became more difficult for the middle classes, and practically impossible for the children of the lower and working classes. The new elites became haughtier and citizens despaired ever more from their policies: the differences between the parties became negligible, and the election results no longer brought change. The turnout on election day declined, as did the membership of the center-right parties. The populist fringes, left and right, were swelling. Democracy was in crisis.
In 2000, the pseudo-Fascist Freedom Party in Vienna, led by Jörg Haider, made it in a government coalition. In 2002, in Paris, Le Pen was able to reach the second round of the presidential election. Le Pen’s expansion and new front in labor fortresses that long championed communists were revealed.
Fundamentalism and Terrorism
The poor, with television and other means of communication, have gained more access to the rich and their lifestyles. They no longer need to snoop from behind high walls. The whole world lives in one age. But in this «global village», anger has grown stronger precisely because it was a global village. Those rushing into the future do not offer hope to the inhabitants of alleyways and the ghettos. The latter have turned to the past, actual and imagined. It is in this past that they sought that their countries of origin lie-countries where the bells of identity are ringing loudly, where tyranny, violence and intolerance reign. They only migrate with their bodies while their souls remain there. Cheap travel has made things easier, and having over family, or visiting them once or twice a year has become possible. In London or Paris, the immigrant can now watch Al Jazeera while eating a falafel sandwich. It has become possible for a migrant to live for years without speaking to the native residents of the country. Integration environments, such as political parties and unions, have been hit. Neighborhoods and children schools segregated. The West has become just a place.
Since migrant workers are poor by definition, they have become candidates for exclusion, which has brought attention to their differences of religion and culture. The inhabitants of the suburbs among them are an exploitable class. They are not even a class, placed outside the economy. Their implicit demand is to be exploited.
At the same time, technological advances result in the aging of old industries, from the Detroit car industry to the textile industry of northern Britain. The displacement of production units abroad, and transboundary trade agreements have reduced the number of available jobs which were already at a low as a result of technological progress. On the other hand, rehabilitation programs for the new economy remained poor and limited due to lack of resources, although the stock market blows billions over the heads of citizens-amid the silence of the state and its impotence-and tax evasion grows in the billions. The 2008 crisis made matters worse: banks caused the crisis, but the aid went mostly to them.
Anger…
The angry, then, are many: poor whites whose anger is compounded by their fears akin to fears of extinction, as the number of people of color in pluralistic societies grow at a higher rate than their number. Non-whites, especially Muslims, are also angry. Terrorism no longer comes from their countries of origin only, as descendants of immigrants in the West are also producing their own terrorists.
Among the poor whites, there are those who have felt, since Bin Laden’s 2001 attack, that «Muslims» are a threat that resides among them. The other terrorist acts in the cities of the West have convinced them that the «state of law» no longer guarantees or protects. Previously, they lost confidence in the «welfare state» and «elite state».
Among Muslims, the feeling that they are hated and oppressed has been reinforced. They face oppression both in their own countries and in their host countries. They are outcasts there and outcasts here, and they have nothing but Allah, so let them be the soldiers of Allah. In Iraq in 2003, the cruelty of the American war and the atrocities of Abu Ghraib prison bolstered anti-American sentiment with pretexts and justifications. «Our» worst values were galvanized in the face of «their» worst values.
And since anger does not think but feels, and sees only with one eye, the angry have designated their partner in pain as the enemy.
When the miserable refugees, in their vast numbers, crept northward, crossing borders and seas, some inhabitants of host countries thought they saw the barbarians arrive. Some of them attributed to these refugees their past and future poverty; others felt afraid for their own numbers; others still, in central and eastern Europe, blamed them for their political shortcomings, which are caused by chronic political repression, their bewilderment in the present, and the border with which they have not reconciled since the collapse of the Habsburg empire a century ago.
In the United States, the Mexicans served this function, coupled to a white-vs-black ethnic crisis, aspiring to a «Southern confederacy». Muslims have not fled to America, but the legacy of 9/11 is capable of rearing its ugly head at any moment and including them in its curse.
There are many titles summoned by the reactionary mind in order to sustain hate. In Europe, as well as refugees, immigrants and foreigners, there is the Brussels red tape. In America, where less than half of voters voted for Trump, many things were said: eight years of a woman presidency after eight years of a black presidency? Satan’s rule should be resisted.
Putin’s Russia has in turn broadcast a borderline consciousness, from Zhirinovsky to Dugin: white Christian civilization is threatened by Muslims. ISIS, in the meantime, was beheading and spreading its images, declaring that Islam was threatened by white Christian civilization. And all, east and west, have expanded their presence on website lacking credibility and going viral, providing hatred with its loudest and most vicious voices.
Many reasons have come together to make hatred a crime of many authors: economics and politics, isolation and mixing, backwardness and progress, right and left, East and West. We are all, in a sense, perpetrators because we are all human beings. But this pseudo-metaphysical interpretation does not get in the way of pointing the finger for most of the blame to the transitional era in which we live. To its transformations and anxieties. Each of us chooses, according to his background and the history of his biases, an enemy of his, that he hates and takes pleasure in this hating him.