Click to listen

an introduction

After the intense state of congestion that France witnessed after the killing of the French teacher Samuel Baty after showing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad - may God’s prayers and peace be upon him - to his students, and the ensuing flare-up of hate speech towards Muslims in general, which resulted in the stabbing of two veiled girls.

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

Following this escalation, a massive campaign to boycott French products was launched in several Arab countries, declaring its categorical rejection of any insult to the Prophet of Islam, which prompted Emmanuel Macron to tweet in Arabic, "Nothing makes us back down, ever. We respect all differences in the spirit of peace. We never accept." hate speech and defend 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, there were several responses from the tweeters who invoked France's colonial legacy, and criticized the "arrogant discourse", as they described it.

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

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

Jean Paul Sartre (networking sites)

Report text

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

There is no doubt that this can lead to madness or - at least - to deep pain, and the situation may become even worse if this thing is your homeland.

Such was the case of Jean-Paul Sartre. 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 harshest critic of French politics.

What is the reason?

Sartre saw how France - the 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, Sartre and phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty declared that the sons of the French Resistance who had fought to liberate France in World War II, and who were then in Indochina, were like German soldiers;

They are fighting for fascism.

Paris was for him a symbol of freedom against the mechanism of fascism, but only a 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 Sétif, and massacred thousands of Algerians.

A photo of Jean-Paul Sartre with the revolutionary Che Guevara (networking sites)

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


“In November 1956, Fernand Eveton, a member of the Liberation Fighters Movement (a guerrilla group established by the Algerian Communist Party), planted a bomb in Hama power station, an attempt to sabotage that can in no way be equated with a terrorist act.Analyses proved that the accident was a time bomb carefully prepared so that the explosion could not happen before the departure of the employees, but that was in vain. He had to be executed and refused any reprieve, so the man was executed. Without the slightest hesitation, this man announced and proved that he did not want to kill anyone, but we wanted to kill him and we did so without batting an eyelid."

France was no longer a champion of freedom for Sartre. On the contrary, it was;

against freedom.

She was playing a double game;

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

France should get rid of France!

In his preface to Frantz Fanon's 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth, Sartre said that France should rid itself of France;

That is to say, France, the ideal free one, must separate itself from France, the colonial state.

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

No doubt 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 do not apply to those in "primitive" stages of development.

This indicates that human rights are not for all people, but for those who are most humane.

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

In any case, Sartre vacillated for three decades toward and away from the idea of ​​human rights, because he was questioning the integrity of human rights theory toward those tormented so-called "uncivilized" peoples.

If the declaration was issued by the colonial empires such as France and Britain, would it really be a declaration calling for peace, fairness and goodwill, or was there a set of sharp teeth behind that gentle human smile?

If Sartre was just a left thinker, his stance against absolute individualism would have been clear;

But he was existential as well, and individuality is one of the cornerstones of existentialism (communication sites)

Sartre sometimes defended the Declaration because he saw that, despite its restrictions, it reinforced the basic rights that every human should enjoy.

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

But as a Marxist, Sartre was also concerned about what he saw as bourgeois elements implicit in the Declaration, especially extreme individualism, and he criticizes the "bourgeoisie" for using an analytic method of explaining everything, in which every complex reality must be broken down into simple elements.

The aim of the bourgeois analysis is to reduce human society to 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 its land, its trade and its young generation and has nothing left to own but itself, it does not need individuality and private property, but on the contrary Therefore, he needs collectivism rather than individualism, and a return to his traditional group and their collective right to self-determination.

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

But he was existential as well, and individuality is one of the cornerstones of existentialism.

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

In the lecture Being and Nothingness (1943), he argued that each individual is ontologically responsible for creating and adhering to his way of life.

It is a type of being that the theologian Søren Kierkegaard calls singularity or individuality.

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

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

Slavoj Zizek - a leftist thinker (networking sites)

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

Cicek links 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 have recently witnessed the destructive way in which Western countries are interfering 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 motivated only by political and economic interests, but also relied on a specific idea of ​​the political and economic conditions in which Under which "freedom" is handed over to the Iraqi people; it is liberal democratic capitalism, integration into the global market economy, and so on."

Therefore, it is not easy to say that Sartre was absolutely with the theory of human rights, nor completely against it.

Two critical points must be mentioned: first;

Human rights theory has many human potentials, and 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 institution to protect its political and economic interests, while ignoring human rights when they conflict with those interests, human rights theory can easily be misused by those powers.

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

————————————————————

Translation: Sarah Al-Masry

This report is translated from: Philosophy Now and does not necessarily represent Medan's website.