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One the Usefulness of Fighting Windmills

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At the threshold of the third millennium France, like most of the planet, was in throes of uncertainty. The entry into the new era was appropriately preceded by what might have been (we would never know for sure) one of the most successful hoaxes in history: the “millennium bug” affair, which cast thousands of serious, down-to-earth business corporations and governmental offices, as well as millions of their clients and subjects, in the state of alert aroused by the horrifying, well-nigh apocalyptic vision of the Planet Earth routines stopping dead and the life on the planet grinding to a halt at the moment of encounter between the New Year’s Eve and the New Year’s Day. That end of the world failing to arrive, the computer-service companies counted up their blessings and summed up their profits, and the disaster that never struck was promptly forgotten, elbowed away and out from the endemically excitable and chronically agitated public attention by disasters that did strike, or were expected to hit at any moment; whereas the crumbling of public trust and the condensation of public uncertainties, the kind of troubles which the story of the “millennium bug” symbolized – stood fast and refused to budge, let alone to bid farewell.

Perhaps the end of the computerized civilization “as we knew it” was not after all nigh as it was proclaimed at the threshold of the preceding millennium, but the end to the happy-go-lucky years which that proclamation presaged may well be. One by one, the habitual foundations of security trembled, cracked and fell apart, the prospects of steady jobs and incomes dimmed, the once solid bonds and partnerships grew sickly and frail, many a lighthouse of allegedly unshakeable reliability collapsed or trembled under the burden of their own corruptions, or imploded together with the confidence of beguiled and straying sailors. As to the governments expected to make the insecure secure again and put the disorderly in order, they responded with a staunch and blunt “there is no alternative” answer to the complaints and protests of their increasingly confused and frightened subjects; that is, if they stooped to responding, instead of returning the “help me” and “do something” petitions with a “wrong address” or the “addressee unknown” stamps…

Against the background of all such noises and silences, the words (and the televised shows that followed them shortly) of the newly appointed (in 2002) French Home Secretary, Nicolas Sarkozy, sounded as a message overflowing with just the right meaning – first such message for years… The appointment coming so quickly after the beginning of what promised to be to many a millennium, or a century at least of uncertainty, seemed to open the door to a new governmental role and strategy, and to usher into the times of a “listening government”, a government following the example set by banks that insist on “loving to say ‘yes’”. Sarkozy’s appointment seemed to augur the advent of times that will render the powers-that-be once again trustworthy, and their subjects once more not-finding-themselves-abandoned-to their-atrociously-scarce-resources in their desperate struggle to find a firm ground under their feet…

Sarkozy’s message was threefold. First: the hothouse of the insecurity known to torment the ordinary folks like you and me, the den of vice and the source of daytime horrors and nightmares, has been found, pinpointed and located: in the banlieues, the French wholesale name for rough districts and mean streets, populated by people of strange (read: not like ours) look and demeanour, and so probably strange (read: dangerous) habits and intentions. Second: as the deepest roots of the adversities and inequities of Frenchmen’s fate have been finally mapped, we the people-in-power, powerful guys, can and will at long last “strike at the roots” of evil - something which we are indeed beginning already to do (as seen on TV). Third: what you’ve just seen on TV (forces of law and order flexing their muscles when raiding the fortresses of crime at dawn in order to round up and incarcerate the past, present and prospective criminals, those ultimate culprits of your harrowing days and sleepless nights), is but one yet vivid example of the government in action, determined from the start and surely bound to end in triumph (lest such optimism bewilders the present readers, let me recall that it was the year 2002; a timing fortunate for the author of the message, because two or three years later he could have added, to his subsequently yet greater shame, “bound to end in triumph just like the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are bound”). In short: what is said by the government, by the government is done… Or at least is already beginning to be done.

It is 2010 now. In the course of the years past, the Home Secretary has been elected, on his “death to insecurity” ticket, the President of France (in 2007), and moved from somewhat humbler premises on Place Beauvau to the dazzling splendours of l’Elysée. And it is now, eight years after the message was first broadcast for the Frenchmen and Frenchwomen to listen and take note, that identical triple message is being sent again, with the passionate endorsement and blessing of the current President, by Brice Hortefeux, his successor at Place Beauvau. According to Denis Muzet writing in today’s Le Monde, the replacement and heir of Nicolas Sarkozy followed point after point the eight-years-old feat of his boss and mentor, extending his own workday to 20 hours and using the impressively expanded time to show and cause to be seen “where the action is”: personally supervising the dismantlement of Roma camps, rounding up the evicted and sending them back to “where they came from” (that is back to previous misery), summoning local prefects for reporting and briefing, or catching them “in the field” in order to admonish and spur into more action: into one more try, one more effort, one more Summer (Autumn, Winter, whatever) Offensive against the perpetrators and culprits of the decent folks’ misfortune known under the name of “insecurity”; one more final drive to finish another war to end all wars… You are haunted by monsters? Let’s start from getting rid of windmills… This doesn’t stand to reason? Perhaps, but at least you know now that we don’t sit idly. We do something – don’t we?

The French warriors against insecurity-by-proxy are not alone when promising to burn insecurity out in Roma and Sinti effigy. Their close ally is il Cavaliere ruling the neighbouring Italy. It so happened that also today Elisabetta Povoledo reported in the New York Times from Italy, where Silvio Berlusconi government, with an eye on the Roma, passed in 2007 a decree allowing European Union citizens to be expelled after three months of stay in the country if they lacked the means to support themselves; and followed it in 2008 with another decree, granting the state authorities new powers to expel European Union citizens for reasons of public safety; if you are a threat to public safety, you may, should, and will be picked up and escorted to the nearest airport.

To profit from such brand new wonder weapons in the war declared on insecurity, one needs first to make sure that the hated Gypsies do become, and are seen as, a paramount threat to public safety; just to make sure that the word of the powers-that-be become flesh indeed, and the forces of law and order do not flex their muscles in vain. Or yet more to the point, to make one’s prediction into a self-fulfilling prophecy: having foretold on the Good Morning TV a forest fire, proceed right away to sprinkling trees with petrol and striking matches, so that by the end of the day one’s reliability and trustworthiness may be documented on the Newsnight. “When municipally authorized camps are built”, Povoletto reports, it is often on the outskirts of a city, segregated from the rest of the population, with living conditions well below standard. That allows the governments “to bypass the question of integration, a process that would include giving Roma permanent residences and access to schools”. The governments incite suspicions towards Roma on the ground of their nomadic inclinations, and then the same governments force Roma to stay nomadic despite their wish to settle, and try hard to force back into nomadic life those who have already settled, willingly and quite a time ago - so that the original summary dismissal of the whole ethnicity as “travellers” be after all convincingly corroborated by statistics, those least debatable “facts of the matter”. Roma are resented as obtrusive beggars? Well, make sure that they have no chance of “decently” earned living. And as to our forest-burning allegory, “temporary camps are a hazard. Last week in Rome, a 3-year-old Roma boy was burned to death when a fire broke out in the hut he was living in with his family in an illegal camp near Fiumicino Airport. Afterward, the mayor of Rome, Gianni Alemanno (another politician elected on fight-insecurity ticket), said the city would begin dismantling 200 illegal camps this month.”

Marx said that history tends to happen twice: first time as a drama, second time as a farce. That rule acted once more in the case of two successive wars against insecurity declared by Sarkozy in the course of one decade. On the second of the two wars, Alain Touraine caustically observed that in a sharp difference from the crowds applauding the declaration of the first war “no one believes that the Roma or Gypsies are responsible for our misfortunes”. Indeed few do, even if some still swallow the bait and delay spitting it out. But it is not in order to debate the causes of evil, or make the nation believe their official version, that this particular campaign of fear had been launched. Touraine hits the bull’s eye when he observes that all that first-page-headlines hullabaloo and public excitement takes place “in a setting remote from great catastrophes we live through”. The effects of politics Sarkozy-style are not to be measured by the number of minds converted to, or continuing to cling to anti-Romaism, but by the number of eyes diverted (even if only temporarily) away from what is truly relevant to their lives and their prospects - as well as away from assessing how far if at all the government of the country acquits itself from the duties which as it claims legitimise its prerogatives, its pretensions, and its very presence. If measured in this – proper - fashion, the Sarkozy-style politics cannot be easily dismissed as a straightforward failure. Neither is it bankrupt – as vividly testified by the growing number of governments busy to concoct and set in operation its local imitations.

That the eyes of the nation, as you may comment, are unlikely to stay averted forever, and so the respite gained by the rulers will be short-lived? But what, forgive me asking, is nowadays long-lived? And how many suckers still believe in long terms and ultimate solutions? It will quite enough, thank you, if the respite lasts long enough to allow the rulers to find another attraction similarly likely to pull to itself the eyes otherwise likely to turn to what does really matter, but about what the rulers are neither able nor willing to do anything that matters?

There is also another collateral casualty of the Sarkozy-style governance: surprisingly, or rather not at all surprisingly, the additional casualty is the self-same value which such governance promised and continues to promise to promote and serve: the sentiments of safety and security, of being protected and insured against adverse fate… Frenchmen may be now more sceptical or even downright cynical about the effectiveness of the governmental promises, and of the value of the videotaped and televised governmental undertakings, than they were at the beginning of the first of Sarkozy’s wars; but surely they are now more than ever before frightened. They have lost much of their past faith in the possibility of making their situation any better. They are beginning to believe that insecurity is here to stay, and that it is likely to turn into a natural human condition; and that most certainly the state governments are not the sort of instruments with which one could try to tinker with that particular verdict of nature, of history, or of human fate. Whether by design or by default, Sarkozy’s war actions ploughed and fertilized the soil for the lush fundamentalist and tribal crops… The soil so prepared is a temptation to adventurous conquistadores which few if any aspiring politicians will find easy to resist.

This kind of governance can’t do either without appointed victims. In the case reported by Denis Muzet and Elisabetta Povoledo such victims are, of course, Roma and Sinti populations. But in the politics increasingly à la mode, victims, whether appointed or “collateral”, are not just pawns in other people games; in the games currently staged they are in addition anonymous, expendable and easily to replace extras - supernumeraries whose demise or departure no players and but a few spectators are likely to notice and memorize, let alone to bewail and mourn for long.

September 4th, 2010