Bulletin N°425

Object: ON REINVENTING THE WHEEL AND OTHER BASIC SKILLS:  FROM THE CENTER FOR THE ADVANCED STUDY OF AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS AND SOCIAL  MOVEMENTS, GRENOBLE, FRANCE.

16 November 2009
Grenoble, France

Dear Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,

"There are good people and bad people," my mother told me at a very early age, "kind people and cruel people; intelligent people and stupid people; gifted people and dull people, happy people and bitter people in every race, in every religion, in every nation and ethnic group."

"How can you tell the difference," I asked, selecting arbitrarily one of her categories, "between an intelligent person and a stupid person?"

"If you can't tell the difference, then you are stupid," she replied.

This folk wisdom of a high school librarian and single mother of four has stayed with me for more than half a century.

I don't know how other families bring up their children, but looking around at the greed and selfish consumerism that passes for culture, I would say that at a very early age many children are made to feel an acute sense of scarcity, against which they must compete to attain what they belive to be "the necessities of life," and they are carefully taught one supreme ethical value : that ends can always be used to justify means.

I suppose this is what is behind the historic attraction of watching public executions for entertainment, like the famous description of Damiens' execution in front of the main door of the Church of Paris, reproduced by Michel Foucault in his classic work, Discipline and Punishment (1975):

On 2 March 1757 Damiens the regicide was condemned 'to make the amende honorable . . .  where he was to be 'taken and conveyed in a cart, wearing nothing but a shirt, holding a torch of burning wax weighing two pounds' . . . ; 'where, on a scaffold that will be erected there, the flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs and calves with red-hot pincers, his right hand holding the knife with which he committed the said parricide, burnt with sulphur, and, on those places where the flesh will be torn away, poured molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulphur melted together and then his body drawn and quartered by four horses and his limbs and body consumed by fire reduced to ashes and his ashes thrown to the winds'.(p.3)

The accused's appearance before the Bishop's tribunal began with an oath sworn on the Gospels. It continued in the form of an unequal dialogue. Jacques Fournier asked a series of questions, pursuing various points and details. The accused would answer at length --a deposition might easily cover ten, twenty or even more big folio pages in the Register. The accused was not necessarily kept under a state of arrest throughout the trial. Between interrogations he might be shut up in one of the Bishop's prisons in town. But he might also be let out under house arrest, bound to keep within the limits of his parish or of the diocese. When the accused was imprisoned, various pressures were brought to bear to make him confess. Apparently these pressures usually consisted not so much of torture as of excommunication or confinement either 'strict' or 'very strict' (the latter consisting of a small cell, fetters and black bread and water.). In only one instance did Jacques Fournier have his victims tortured: this was in the trumped-up case which French agents made him bring against the lepers, who brought forth wild and absurd confessions about poisoning wells with powdered toads, etc. In all the other cases which provided  the material of this book, the Bishop confined himself to tracking down real deviants (often minor from our point of view). The confessions are rounded out by the accuseds' descriptions of their own daily lives. They usually corroborated each other, but when they contradicted, Fournier tried to reduce the discrepancies, asking the various prisoners for more details. What drove him on was the desire (hateful though it was in this form) to know the truth. For him, it was a matter first of detecting sinful behavior and then of saving souls. To attain these ends he showed himself 'pedantic as a schoolman' and did not hesitate to engage in lengthy discussion.   .  .  .

When the trials were over, various penalties were inflicted: imprisonment of varying degrees of strictness, the wearing of the yellow cross, pilgrimages and confiscation of goods. Of the five guilty who ended their lives at the stake, four were Waldensians from Pamiers and the other a relapsed Albigensian, Guillaume Fort, from Montaillou.(Montaillou, The Promised Land of Error, pp.xvi-xvii)

Hunting heretics has been with us for a long, long time, and we can presume the "hunt" itself represents a source of excitement, independent of the practical consequences, like the labor of a mathematician, passionately engaged in solving a complex problem, and seeking no reward more tangible than the satisfaction of eventually resolving an interesting differential equation.

"The most common form of 'Jew hunt' [in Poland, during the fall of 1942 through the spring of 1943]," reports Christopher R. Browning in his study, Ordinary Men, Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1993),

was the patrol into the forest to liquidate an individual bunker that had been reoprted. The battalion built up a network of informers and 'forest runners', or trackers, who searched for and revealed Jewish hiding places. Many other Poles volunteered information about Jews in the woods who had stolen food from nearby fields, farms, and vi9llages in their desperate attempt to stay alive. Upon receiving such reports, the local police commanders dispatched small patrols to locate the hiding Jews. Time and again the same scenario was played out, with only minor variations. The policemen followed their Polish guides directly to the bunker hideouts and tossed grenades in the openings. The Jews who survived the initial grenade attack and emerged from the bunkers were forced to lie face down for the neck shot. The bodies were routinely left to be buried by the nearest Polish villagers.(p.126)

Though the 'Jew hunt' has received little attention, it was an important and statistically significant phase of the Final Solution. A not inconsiderable percentage of Jewish victims in the General Government lost their lives in this way. Statistics aside, the 'Jew hunt' is a psychologically important key to the mentality of perpetrators. Many of the German occupiers in Poland may have witnessed or participated in ghetto roundups on several occasions --in a lifetime, a few brief moments that could be easily repressed. But the 'Jew hunt' was not a brief episode. It was a tenacious, remorseless , ongoing campaign in which the 'hunters' tracked down and killed their 'prey' in direct and personal confrontation. It was not a passing phase but an existential condition of constant readiness and intention to kill every last Jew who could be found.(p.132)

One morning when I was six my father said to me: When you let out the cows, keep Fourgère behind, she's going to the abattoir today. I undid the chains of the other cows --I could just reach the locking links with my arms above my head-- and the dog chased them out. Later I would take the cows to the slopes by the place which we called Nimes.

Left alone in the stable, Fourgère looked anxiously around her, her ears full out like wings. By this afternoon, I said, you will be dead. She started to eat the hay in the manger. After pulling out several mouthfuls, each with a toss of her head, she looked around again and lowed. The other cows were already grazing outside. I could hear their bells. The sunlight coming through the holes in the planks of the stable walls made beams in the dust which I raised as I swept.

My father unbuckled the wide leather collar Fourgère was wearing. Attached to this collar was her bell which weighed five kilos. Before he turned away to hang the collar and the bell on the wall, he looked at the beast and said: My poor cuckoo, you'll never again go to Nimes.

Whilst the funeral service was being performed inside the church, most of us men stood outside. This group of standing figures, solemn and still, always looks dwarfed  by the mountains. We spoke in low voices, about the murder. Everyone was agreed that the police would never discover who the assassin was. Each said this as if he himself had a clear idea of the truth. She was fearless, they said, this had been the Cocadrille's trouble.["The Third Life of Lucie Cabrol," in Pig Earth (1979) p.166.]

Both Berger and Wylie capture the pathos of a culture of survivors facing the onslaughts of modern capitalist expansion by accepting violence when it seems inevitable and avoiding it when at all possible. In this culture, the future belongs to the past, a "Paradise Lost" which serves to orient present concerns toward strategies for survival, and very little else.

In the 8 items below we can see the results of today's culture of violence as the perpetrators of violence (who themselves are victims of terror) continue to walk the narrow line between complete psychotic collapse and an external conformity, grasping at the trappings of dysfunctional traditions in an effort to adapt themselves each day, as if by magic, to the senseless routines they are tied to, so as to show once more that they belong to an audience which in reality has long since left the arena.

Item A. is an article from Le Monde in Paris covering Israeli's "water war" and "house thefts" against the citizens of Gaza.

Item B., is the film of Jean Bricmont's presentation at the CEIMSA International colloquium held on May 6, 2009 at The University of Paris-Nanterre on "The Role of Ethics in the Class Society of Contemporary America," in which he discusses : "Zionism, the ideological conflict of our time?".