2023-12-08 19:30:06
The war devastates everything in its path. And that between Israel and Hamas does not deny this tragedy which spans the ages. But this conflict, which mobilizes the international community, has already caused collateral damage. “This war is also fracturing a large part of the field of social sciences and thought, perhaps irreversibly”, alarms the philosopher Pierre Charbonnier, professor at Sciences Po. Indeed, from October 7, camps were quickly formed. On the one hand, demonstrators of the Palestinian cause are accused of “anti-Semitism”; and, on the other, of “fascism” the supporters of the war led by Israel. To the point that we could speak of “campism”, this way of immediately rallying to a camp without taking into account the singularity of an event.
A right-wing campism condensed in the famous formula of the American naval officer Stephen Decatur (1779-1820), « my country, right or wrong »which can be translated as “my country, rightly or wrongly”, a maxim of alignment with a patriotic policy, whether peaceful or warlike, just or deadly. “It’s like saying, ‘My mother, drunk or sober’”quipped the British writer GK Chesterton (1874-1936), who saw in this expression the manifestation of a primary nationalism, “something no patriot should say except in desperate cases”.
For the identity right, the unconditional defense of the Israeli government took the form of a Westernist reaction: Israel would be the advanced point of the West in a Muslim East. An importation of the conflict orchestrated by intellectual and media national populism which compares the situation of Israel in the Middle East to that of France and its “Islamized” suburbs.
“Campism is the disease of thought”
Left campism is, for its part, a legacy of the Cold War. It is a political reflex which demonizes a single enemy – most often the American empire – and leads to an inability to imagine other forms of imperialism, notably Russian, as during the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. Ordered by Vladimir Putin, the invasion of February 24, 2022 nevertheless buried “the obsolete vision of a black and white world where all the victims of imperialism alone – American – would be miraculously united against it”remarks Dominique Vidal, former journalist at Diplomatic world and Middle East specialist.
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