Paris: One step beyond in the systemic chaos

Once again we are short of correct words, in the moment when events like these break with our established analytical grids - without giving way to any potentially positive thing for the times to come. In these hours, literature is maybe having a better time in saying something interesting about the subversion of the reference points (it is not by any chance that, here in Italy, a writer was able to grasp some basic elements in order to explain what is happening*).

Lucidity is not certainly increased by cynical coolness, therefore we try to start again from the impact - for the time being. We will return later on geopolitical considerations about this act of war. The first sensation to be experienced is that of a deep annihilation: we are thrown off balance by terribly expected events, that are even anticipated in their own way: who did not think even once, in the last 15 years, that this would have been one of the possible outcomes of the asymmetric war? Is there anything easier and, in its own way, effective than shoot randomly out there - if the cherished effect is the production of a blurred, faceless terror, able to make an individual feeling powerless and vulnerable?

More than the ISIS, this attack tells us about the form of life of the Capital as the sole really existing human-community, about its tics and obsessions, of its miseries, of ourselves as metropolitan individuals, consumers, of beings that are dispossessed of life and sense. The youngsters that are ready to sacrifice themselves for the Caliphate are the reverse mirror of a nihilism that is structuring everyday life by now, of the suffocation of feelings, of the (missed) imaginaries of a life which is reduced to survival; in the clear disruption with the political history of the recent past, and of their own being situated as social and historical beings.
Let’s start again from here, then. From the need of a common feeling of the ongoing war. To understand that the dead of Paris are a bit more than those caused by the bombs of the Islamic State in Ankara a month and a half ago does not mean to downplay the pain of witnessing some peers of ours dying at a concert that we may have been attending ourselves, too. It means to start to break with the public form of life of the West, which is a deeply cynical and irresponsible one. While a considerable part of the world plunges into political and military chaos, in our context we pretend to live "as if" nothing is going on, as if we were not already inside a war that our governments declared against the 4/5 of the globe (and, without saying that, against us as well). In which warring country, when gunshots are heard on the streets, the first reaction is that of mistaking them for fireworks?

To break with this form of life, to break with the tragedy that the West is, that is - with the tragedy that we are, as someone would say - does not mean to call upon the blaming sadness of the privileged or the dulling penance of the #prayforparis. Anyone who had been a witness in war areas - and not only in the glass of the mainstream televisions - knows how much suffering peoples there elude the stereotype of pathetic passivity, by celebrating good life whenever it is possible. It means that, in our context, we are paying for a political-psychological-cultural naivete which is not only unbearable, but certainly an unsuitable one, in order to catch the stakes of the present and of the immediate future. What does it means to stand for peace today? Here comes a question of a certain actual character, and would be deeply wrong to think that it could be answered to with a new estrangement, with a revival of the "Not in my name" of the early 2000s. The times are different, as the historical phase and the way of waging war (and we will surely return on this last topic) are.

A common feeling of the ongoing war is due also as a necessary premise in order to understand the lines of the front. To understand where our friends are. The young Kurds - which are often Muslims - that have been fighting the ISIS for two years, while Putin was still diplomatically pondering over the opportunity of a Russian intervention. To understand where their friends are. In those Americans that played financing Sunni fundamentalism for a post-Assad regime change, in Erdogan’s NATO that supplies the Islamic State with weapons, hoping to resolve the Kurdish question in such a way. But also in those who would like to apply the ISIS method in Italy, too: if all the Europeans are culprits in the eyes of these "Islamic bastards"**, then all the Muslim should be considered the same, too, according to them.

Hence, we should/would have enough strength to say that the butchers-assassins that shot at random in Paris are not worse than Hollande, Sarkozy, Obama, Cameron, Renzi... or than those wanton pigs of the Saudi princes - to which our rulers repeatedly bow and scrape to, while the former invest a significant part of their petro-dollars in financing a social reproduction of the Muslim world made strong of obscurantism through madrassahs, Quranic schools and by fostering repeated transnational generational waves of mujaheddins (a good way - for them - to keep busy a potentially unemployed and antagonist youth); that are able today of also drawing from the Europe of the second/third post-colonial generations (and also in tinier shares - but unscrupolously ready-to-go - of white newly converted individuals).

We must start to think our times. We live in a unique global city of which the metropolises of the different continents are nothing more than its different neighbourhoods. Beirut, Paris, Nairobi, Tunis, Ankara are nothing more than suburbs of the same big city; not because the geographical distances are erased by low-cost flights or by the web, but because we are talking here about interconnected productive centers, of hubs of the same process of accumulation and distribution of goods. The price of the cigarettes or of the fuel for an outdoor trip, in Europe, are also the product of the bullets that are shot in the Middle East, or of the social choking of millions of Chinese workers. Who bombs the Kurds who fight in Rojava wins the elections thanks to the European funding that comes, in turn, from the coffers of a Commission that taxes - through the states’ budgets - the equivalent of our daily work, already net of surplus value.

As if it was any need for blood in order to prove it once again, the age of innocency for Europe which was built with the EU after World War Two has come to an end. It is not Greece that is beyond the corner, it is Syria; and the whole world with it. A world where suffering for the dead can be understandable: but where, above all, it is necessary to organize ourselves. In order not to let the scoundrels on duty to do that, or the adventurers (often being the patrons and sponsors of the former) of a neo-colonialism that wants us to pay the price of its own wars.

InfoAut, November 2015

*A reference to a post by Italian writer Giuseppe Genna
**The headline of the Libero right-wing Italian daily the morning after the Paris attacks