by
Theodore Dalrymple
Should
there be any limitation on the freedom of public expression, and if so why, how
and when imposed? The question has become acute in France where the Minister of
the Interior, Manuel Valls, has declared his intention of
seeking to silence a stand-up comedian, Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala, because of his
increasingly anti-Semitic tirades. M. Valls, hitherto the most popular
minister in President Hollande’s government, has managed to corner himself by
an astonishing lack of adroitness, having fallen prey to the illusion of many
politicians in a highly centralized state, namely that they can control what
happens in society.
M’Bala
M’Bala – known universally in France by his first name – was born 47 years ago
of a French mother and a Cameroonian father. He started his career as a
left-wing satirist in a duo with a Jewish colleague called Elie Semoun, but
they fell out and M’Bala M’Bala thereafter grew ever more anti-semitic in his
comic act. In 2007 he was fined nearly $10,000 for having called the Holocaust
‘memorial pornography.’ Increasingly refused access to mainstream media, he
bought and still runs a one man theatre in Paris, theThéâtre de la Main d’Or,
where it now takes several months to obtain a ticket. Repeated denunciation by
the great and the good has done nothing to curb his popularity: he has 400,000
‘friends’ on Facebook (more than half the number of Jews in France) and has popularized
a gesture called la quenelle whose precise meaning is contested
(especially by M’Bala M’Bala when he is in trouble with the law) but which now
seems to almost everyone to be a forme
fruste of the Nazi salute.
The social
composition of M’Bala M’Bala’s friends and supporters is revealing and
instructive. There are Holocaust deniers, of course, or those who think it did
not go far enough (among them M’Bala M’Bala himself, who said of Patrick Cohen,
a Jewish radio announcer, ‘When I hear him speak, I say to myself, gas
chambers… what a pity.’); members of the national Front; disgruntled youth of
North African origin and Palestinisan sympathies; Third-Worldists who, again
like M’Bala M’Bala himself, are against what they call ‘the System.’
Hostility
to, and resentment against, ‘the System’ is what unites these groups, and what
makes possible a de facto,
and indeed intellectually semi-coherent, alliance between the far left and the
far right: for what both really hate is the spontaneous order of liberalism
which they see as the origin of their woes and dissatisfactions.
The French
press, media and intellectuals castigate ad
nauseam what they call the
‘ultra-liberalism’ of the present-day western world: and their
characterization, as intellectually lazy as it is inaccurate, now goes
virtually by default. Very few are the commentators who see through its
inaccuracy. That a country whose public sector accounts for more than half of
economic activity, and which is as highly-administered as France (and, it must
be said, often well-administered, for who would not rather go on the Paris
Metro than the New York Subway?), cannot plausibly be described as
‘ultra-liberal,’ ought to be perfectly obvious even on the most casual
reflection, but alas it is not. If France is ultra-anything it is
ultra-corporatist, but even that would be an exaggeration. And so present
discontents are laid at the door of ultra-liberalism, though in fact a
considerable proportion of the resentments and discontents of the young who
approve of M’Bala M’Bala are attributable to the rigidity of the French labor
market, which is caused precisely by an illiberal nexus of protections and restrictions.
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