Léon Blum is one of my favourite historical figure. Though completely ignored outside of his roles in obtaining paid vacations for everyone in 1936, he was a visionary of his time. He fought and believed in justice, despite being threatened and assaulted almost to death.
In 1937 he published an essay, “du mariage”, in which he stated that, in order for a marriage to work, the man and the woman had to go first through a phase he called “polygamous”, meaning simply having sexual experiences before the wedding, a privilege only granted to men at the time. This book, which content in today’s view seems so evident, was received as a sign that, as a jew, Blum was trying to corrupt and mislead young women and destroy the holy institution of mariage.
One might wonder the relevance of this text today, but it does sound strangely similar to the outcry from the “good” society against gays corrupting or coercing the innocence of young souls, and destroying the holy institution of the heterosexual family model. Ironically enough, when it comes to corrupt, coerce or even rape, the statistics are unambiguously pointing at the heterosexual males, so one might wonder where all this outrage comes from… Moreover, if conversion therapies have proven that you cannot turn a gay into a straight, it reciprocally proves that you cannot turn a heterosexual into a homosexual. And for crying out loud, if after centuries of stuffing the youth with heterosexual stereotypes — princesses and knights, and its zillions of derivatives…— we haven’t managed to turn one single gay or future gay into a straight, how can one image of two men or two women holding hands or kissing traumatise a whole generation of kids and turn them into queers?
So then why just let them be and we could all live in harmony? Why are anti-gay being obsessed by an unthreatening way of life? One of the reason, also exposed by Leon Blum, resides in “a latent background state of cruelty that exists in every human being” and it doesn’t take too much effort to make it emerge. It is an embodiment of a deep rooted fear, a fear which has nothing to do with the object of discrimination, whether it’s a jew from the beginning of the 20th century, or a gay from the beginning of the 21st. A fearful pack is a dangerous pack. But most importantly, a fearful pack is an easily manipulated pack, because fear, as a survival instinct, has the ability to overpower reason. It drives us in a state of such unfathomable, groundless distress, any unsubstantiated fairy tale with a promise of relief will be welcome with open arms and a closed intellect. That’s why fear drives us into making the most irrational and stupid choices: we smoke not to gain weight, we undergo unnecessary surgery or inject toxins in our skin not to look old. We burn books and bully to push away what we think is a threat to our identity, when really, it only reveals how weak this identity is. Fear shuts the mind, annihilate any ability to reason and can ignite this “latent cruelty”. The monster isn’t the gay or the jew. It is neither rooted in our origine or belonging nor in our gender orientation. The monster is the savage we turn into when we give into fear.
Fear is used as an acronym in the rooms: False Evidence Appearing Real. As long as society will follow this trajectory of ghettoisation, in the material as well as in the virtual world, fear will prevail because we will antagonise an idea of “the other” and live in a fantasy where we excite each other against an imaginary threat. The reality is much less dramatic than that. We’re all human beings, some are cruel, some are perverse, some are generous and kind, some are selfless and unfortunately, only actions can reveal who is who, nothing else.
Léon Blum refused this intellectual laziness that creates a categorisation of evil . He faced the pro-nazi trial in Vichy and took the upper hand. He survived a blood thirsty anti-semite mob. He survived incarceration. He never gave into fear, he never gave into hatred. He never let cruelty win. Here’s a testament he wrote for his son, as he believed he was in his final hour — his prison compagnon having been delivered to the French militia to be slaughtered.
Testament of Léon Blum — written in Buchenwald, July 31, 1944
“This underlying cruelty that we have seen emerging in one people during the last five years — and that still pounds the world like a tide — exists, I’m certain of that, in a latent state in every human and very little is needed for it to cover with its bloody mud the acquired ground of civilisation. I do not believe in a race of masters or bruts any more than I believe in a race of damned or cursed. I challenge the racial condamnation of the germans as well as the jewish one. I deeply feel what happened and what is still happening every day but I also recall that on a spring morning I almost got lynched under the boot heels, on a sidewalk, of a crowd very french. I remember the horrible spectacle of Vichy during July 1940.
Everything that is said about the german people today, of its common responsibility, of the weight of its ethnic fate, it used to be said and written about the French in England and Germany in the wake of Waterloo. A tiny slide of circumstances sufficed to awake the beast in men, in manhood. However, I am convinced, and this is my inner optimism, that exists in men, in manhood, besides this secular savagery, an instinct for solidarity and fraternity, that we can also awake, by acting on their sentiment and on their interests.”
