Chronicles of Totalitarianism 8 - Tribute to the French heroes of September 15, 2021

And in memory of my great-grandfather Jacques-André Girolami, French General Staff officer, Knight of the Legion of Honour (1924), who renounced his title of General, refusing to serve the Pétain government.

Accompanied by a quote from the writer Stefan Zweig, I want to pay tribute to all the professionals and staff (caregivers, firefighters, doctors, administrative staff, etc.) who, through their heroic refusal of blackmail and the division of the social body (which is attributed to them by a perverse reversal of guilt), have suffered reprisals from the authorities.

These reprisals are just a prelude to an even more worrying continuation, because it is certain that the harassment will not stop there, either in intensity, or in its propensity to spread to other citizens.

It is clear that all those who pretend not to see or understand what is happening, or who take refuge behind pretexts which demonstrate that they have not made the effort to inform themselves properly (which is everyone's responsibility), bear an immense responsibility before History.

Harassment is never just a matter between a harasser and their victim.

It is the affair of an entire group that endorses, remains silent, and participates in it through its silence, or through even more active complicity.

There are decisions and actions that strengthen our integrity, just as others degrade it.

What happened in France on September 15, 2021 is a moral, ethical and deontological scandal that places categories of citizens in the status of pariahs.

The banal indifference and mocking silence in the face of the suffering that this repeated violence engenders in the population are today culpable.

Stefan Zweig, in "The Great Silence", a speech delivered on May 4, 1940:

"Yet the strangulation of freedom of thought and the violence inflicted upon German intellectuals were only a prelude. You all know the bloody calendar of Hitler’s aggressions against individuals and nations. The victims changed, but the method remained the same. Each time, a sudden attack against a weak country, a cry almost immediately stifled: ‘Help! Help!’—then silence. Icy silence, total silence. Not a single groan, not a single sigh. As if this country, with its cities and villages, its millions of human beings, had been swallowed up by the earth. No more letters, no more reliable news. Dead, the voices of family and friends; dead, the voices of poets and writers; no more sign of anyone, just silence… A silence that today weighs like lead on so many nations, on so many peoples who were still free yesterday, and whose voices were, for us, those of our brothers.

This silence, this dreadful, impenetrable, endless silence, I hear it at night, I hear it by day; it fills my ears and my soul with its indescribable terror. It is more unbearable than any noise; it contains more horror than thunder, than the wail of sirens, than the crash of explosions. It is more devastating, more oppressive than cries or sobs, for every second I am aware that this silence is pregnant with the enslavement of all these millions of people. It is in no way the silence of solitude. When great calm reigns over a mountain, over a lake, over a forest, it seems as if the landscape holds its breath to rest, to dream. That calm is natural. But the one that torments and overwhelms me, I know it is an artificial calm, a silence imposed by threat, by coercion, a silence commanded, extorted, a silence of terror. It is a gigantic shroud, woven from lies, and beneath it I glimpse the desperate gasps of those who refuse to be buried alive; I sense and feel behind this silence the humiliation and indignation of those millions of gagged and stifled voices. Their silence pierces and wounds my ears, it assails my soul, day and night. (...) They have nothing left now but the ultimate weapon of the weak: hope and prayer. From thousands of homes, from millions of hearts, this secret prayer rises to heaven. And life would have no meaning for me if I did not have the burning conviction that eternal justice will hear their accusing silence."

Ariane Bilheran.