After the severe state of tension in France after the killing of the French teacher Samuel Batee after showing offensive cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad - may God bless him and grant him peace - to his students, and the subsequent flare-up of hate speech towards Muslims in general, and as a result the stabbing of two veiled girls.

After that, French President Emmanuel Macron decided to defend these cartoons as an example of freedom of expression, while according to analysts, what appeared to be an escalation of the right-wing tone by Macron towards the growing Yemeni segments inside the French interior.

As a result of this escalation, a wide campaign was launched to boycott French products in several Arab countries, declaring their categorical rejection of any offense affecting the Prophet of Islam, which prompted Emmanuel Macron to tweet in Arabic, saying, "Nothing makes us back off. We respect all differences in the spirit of peace. We never accept." Speech of hatred and advocate of rational debate. We will always stand by human dignity and universal values. "

In response to his tweet, Arab and Islamic reactions came in general rejecting this tweet, and the statements of the French Foreign Ministry, which said that the boycott calls came from a "radical minority" and its immediate demand to stop the boycott.

As a result, the response followed by the tweeters who recalled the colonial legacy of France, and criticized the "superior speech" as they described it.

Away from the current controversy, we recall the late French philosopher John Paul Sartre, who was a lover of his country, France, where he resisted Nazism and participated in World War II, but something changed in his love.

As the philosopher of freedom, as he is known, faced many problems with his land policy in its colonization of Algeria and other countries, and how this affected his vision of human rights and his criticism of many French policies.

Have you ever heard of someone who loves and hates the same thing at once?

There is no doubt that this could lead to insanity or - at least - to deep pain, and the situation could get worse if this thing is your home.

This was the case of Jean-Paul Sartre, as he was a French philosopher against France, a philosophical descendant of René Descartes and an admirer of Honoré de Balzac, who fought for France in World War II and was a prisoner of war in Germany.

However, the situation changed after the war.

He has become the fiercest critic of French policy.

Why is that?

Sartre saw how France - a land of freedom, equality and brotherhood - was a colonial predator in Algeria, Cameroon and Indochina (part of the French colonial empire in Southeast Asia).

In the first editorial of "Les Temps Modernes" in 1945, both Sartre and phenomenologist Maurice Merlio Ponti declared that the children of the French Resistance who fought to liberate France in World War II, and who were then in Indochina, were like German soldiers;

They fight for fascism.

For him, Paris was a symbol of freedom against the fascist mechanism, but only one week after Hitler's death, Paris - the same city whose name was associated with romance and freedom - sent forces to commit a bloody massacre in the Algerian economic city of Setif, and slaughter thousands of Algerians.

Years later, civilized France continued its brutal suppression of the spiraling anti-colonial movement, often sentencing individuals to death in military courts.

Jean-Paul Sartre reunites with revolutionary Che Guevara

This prompted Sartre to declare blatantly “We are all murderers” in the title of his 1958 article, in which he wrote:


“In November 1956, Fernand Efeton, a member of the Liberation Fighters Movement (a gang of gangs established by the Algerian Communist Party), planted a bomb in Hama power plant, which is a sabotage attempt that cannot in any way be equated with a terrorist act.Analysis proved that the accident was a carefully prepared time bomb so that the explosion could not occur before the employees left, but that was in vain. So Epheton was arrested, and a verdict He must be executed and refused any delay in judgment, so the man was executed. Without the slightest hesitation, this man declared and proved that he did not want to kill anyone, but we wanted to kill him and we did so without blinking us.

France was no longer Sartre's champion of freedom. On the contrary;

Anti-freedom.

She was playing a double game;

It tries to take a leadership role in human rights discourse, while at the same time suppressing the indigenous people of the lands it colonizes.

 In his preface to Franz Fanon's 1961 book “The Wretched of the Earth,” Sartre said that France must rid itself of France;

That is, France, that ideal free country, must separate itself from the France of the colonial state.

René Cassin, a professor of French law, was the French representative on the committee drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and worked on revising its first draft in the years following the war.

Undoubtedly, Sartre would have been nauseous if he had seen this project.

For his declaration that human rights presuppose a high degree of civilization, and therefore does not apply to those in "primitive" stages of development.

This indicates that human rights are not for everyone, but for the most humane.

(Remember the declaration of pigs at George Orwell's Animal Farm: "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others")

However, for three decades Sartre oscillated in the direction and away from the idea of ​​human rights, because he was questioning the integrity of human rights theory toward those tormented people whom he called "uncivilized".

If the one who issued the declaration were the colonial empires like France and Britain, would it really be a peace, fair and goodwill declaration, or was it behind that gentle human smile, a set of sharp teeth?

If Sartre was merely a left thinker, his position against absolute individualism would have been clear:

But it was existential as well, and individualism is one of the basic pillars of existentialism

Sartre would sometimes defend the declaration because he saw that despite its restrictions, it strengthened the basic rights that every human being should have.

In his statement entitled "Genocide" at the second session of the Bertrand Russell International War Crimes Tribunal in 1967, he expressed grave concern about universal human rights and condemned the United States for violating human rights in Vietnam.

But as a Marxist, Sartre was also concerned about what he considered to be bourgeois elements included in the declaration, especially extreme individualism, and he criticized "bourgeoisie" for using an analytical method to explain everything, in which every complex reality must be divided into simple elements.

Bourgeois analysis aims at reducing human society to being isolated individuals.

Sartre said in "Les Temps Modernes" that he believed that this principle presided over the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well, except that when a people loses their land, trade and young generation, and nothing remains with them except themselves, they do not need individuality and private property, but rather the opposite. So, he needs collectivism instead of individualism, and a return to his traditional group and their collective right to self-determination.

And if Sartre was merely a left thinker, his position against absolute individualism would have been clear.

But it was existential as well, and individualism is one of the basic pillars of existentialism.

In his 1945 lecture entitled "Existentialism is Humanism", he declared that the "starting point" of existentialism is in fact the subjectivity of the individual "not because we are bourgeois, but because we seek to build our faith on truth."

In his lecture "Existence and Nothingness" (1943), he said that each individual is existentially responsible for creating and adhering to his own way of life.

It is a type of being that the theological philosopher Surin Kierkegaard calls singularity or individualism.

It must be noted that for Sartre, uniqueness or individuality differs from individualism;

Extreme individualism is the negation of any group identity, while individualism can include being with others.

Slavoj Zizek - a left-wing thinker

Although Sartre is on the left side of the human rights debate, his criticisms do not entirely agree with contemporary left-wing thinkers such as Slavoy Zizek in his book Against Human Rights (2005).

Cicek connects human rights theory with liberal capitalism, just as Sartre did, except that he pays attention to a new phenomenon, the phenomenon of human intervention.

Critics like Cicek recently witnessed the destructive way in which Western countries intervene politically, economically and militarily in third world countries in the name of defending human rights.

As Cicek says: “It is clear, for example, that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein under the leadership of the United States, which gained its legitimacy on the basis of ending the suffering of the Iraqi people, was not only driven by political and economic interests, but also on a specific idea of ​​the political and economic conditions that Under which "freedom" is handed over to the Iraqi people; it is liberal democratic capitalism, integration into the global market economy, etc. "

It is therefore not easy to say that Sartre was absolutely supportive of, or completely against, human rights theory.

Two crucial points must be mentioned: First;

The theory of human rights has many human potentials, it can be said that it contains at least the seeds of equal rights for all human beings.

Secondly;

If we do not pay enough attention to the colonial capitalist enterprise to protect its political and economic interests, while ignoring human rights when they are incompatible with those interests, then human rights theory can be easily misused by those powers.

It can be said that although Sartre and Third World activists have appealed to human rights in their demands for equality and human dignity, the history of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights shows that in the beginning the rights were written in order to defend European citizens against the terror of Nazism, not to defend non-Europeans Against European colonialism.

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This report is translated from Philosophy Now and does not necessarily represent Meydan.