DSA Jewish Caucus Members respond to Melenchon
Note: Just as DSA blog posts will not represent every DSA member’s views, the below does not represent every member of the unofficial Jewish Caucus.
As members of DSA, we followed closely the campaigns of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France, often seeing them as corollaries to Bernie Sanders. A new socialist tide was rising in the West, displacing old notions of progressivism, and it was exciting to watch. All of these campaigns were also significant for us as Jews. Bernie himself is Jewish, of course, but the two European socialists were embroiled with accusations of antisemitism, with the ones against Mélenchon being quite accurate.
In 2013, Mélenchon accused Pierre Moscovici, a French Jewish politician, of thinking “in international finances, not in French.” And the other day, Haaretz reported this:
“In his blog, Mélenchon didn’t deny the involvement of French citizens in rounding up Jews for deportation, but…he declared it ‘totally unacceptable’ to say that ‘France, as a people, as a nation, is responsible for this crime.’ In April, during the French presidential campaign, Le Pen sparked controversy for saying: ‘I don’t think France is responsible for the Vel d’Hiv,’– a reference to the Velodrome d’Hiver stadium where thousands of Jews were rounded up before being sent to Nazi death camps.
Some 13,000 Jews were deported by French police on July 16–17, 1942, many of whom were first detained in harsh conditions at Paris’ Vel d’Hiv. In all, about 75,000 Jews were deported from France to Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Only 2,500 survived.”
Following Corey Robin’s blog post on Melenchon, where he says “Mélenchon resorts to the worst nationalist tropes to defend the honor of the French nation,” we’ve also prepared some responses from Jewish members of DSA.
Emily Lever
I am a French citizen and I am currently experiencing a familiar emotion: shame, hurt, and embarrassment at the French nation and at myself for being a part of it.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s statement is utterly saddening because we should be able to expect better of someone who is by default the most visible and powerful representative of the French left — especially one who knows the history of the Second World War well enough that he wears a red triangle on his lapel in homage to the communists deported to concentration camps. I also thought that, since then-president Jacques Chirac acknowledged France’s responsibility for the Vel d’Hiv roundup in 1995, this question was settled in the minds of the general public (if not in the mind of Marine Le Pen).
I say “we should be able to expect better” of Mélenchon because he has always been a little suspect. Mélenchon, just like his enemies in neoliberal bourgeois Socialist Party, proclaims his colorblindness while refusing to acknowledge structural racism; he worships an ahistorical ideal of secularism while pretending Muslim people are not the particular targets of “secularist” policies.
Mélenchon is unfortunately not alone on the left (French or otherwise) in refusing any analysis of identity politics, and someone who won’t give more than lip service to the fight against racial oppression in 2017 is unlikely to have a good understanding of racial oppression in 1942. For instance, in a lengthy blog post about how Macron was “going off the rails,” he didn’t think to criticize Macron’s invitation of Benyamin Netanyahu to a ceremony commemorating the Vel d’Hiv roundup. Implicit in Netanyahu’s presence was the idea that he was a representative for French Jews, even though he’s not a French Jew — a callback to the idea that Jews are a nation of their own and not full citizens of the country where they live. That idea was the basis for the laws passed in Nazi Germany and its occupied territories that stripped Jews of citizenship, thereby clearing the way for their deportation.
Furthermore, Mélenchon’s statements about France’s responsibility are a useful reminder that the negation of history is not some fringe phenomenon restricted to the far right: it’s systemic. There is a real need in France to deny every part of French history that doesn’t reinforce the narrative of France’s greatness. This is the reason so many French people will claim that their forebears were in the Resistance: to overemphasize the tiny minority that were on the side of good, enshrining them in collective memory as the “real France.”
In reality, all of society was complicit in the Holocaust. Let us not just point the finger at the anti-Semitic intellectuals like famous novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the members of Parliament who voted to give Marshal Pétain full power, the industrialists who signed contracts with the Nazi state, or the French police officers who rounded up Jews. Remember the ordinary people who were fine with the exclusion of Jews from increasingly vast sectors of society, who joined one of the many pro-Nazi parties and collectives, or who ratted out their neighbors to get a piece of their property. That is the “real France” that so many don’t want to grapple with.
Ultimately, I see Mélenchon as a leftist who’s agnostic on racial oppression and fails to question nationalism — and perhaps this isn’t a blind spot but a choice for political gain. As a French person and as a leftist, I reject any implication that he represents me, and as someone with Jewish heritage I reject his dismissal of the historical reality of genocide to burnish an illusory image of France.
Lane Silberstein
Deeply frustrating blows to the Jewish left coming from all sides recently. Jewish socialists have had to contend with one of history’s most egregious eras of antisemitism — from which the left was not immune in promoting — and yet they continued to proudly identify as socialists with a clear vision for liberation; we will carry on that tradition and not shy away from working with the left, as frustrating as it can be.
Melénchon is under the influence of French nationalism, without proper commitment to international struggle. He might as well have said the US entered WWII to rescue the Jews. This is a man who (rightfully) wants Zionists to confront their complicity in the occupation! But he can’t do the same for French nationalism?
There’s an inkling of the “no true Scotsman” fallacy in here, but people like Melenchon haven’t made an effort to understand Marx’s theories on the state, which, in my understanding, grew out of a commitment to Jewish liberation. Melenchon repeats the laziest canards of goyim like Bruno Bauer, demanding assimilation in order for Jews to be free. He can’t square the dialectic.
Meanwhile, in some naive attempt to combat antisemitism, American politicians want to jail supporters of BDS, who are already unable to visit their families in Israel/Palestine. As of this writing, three Palestinians have been killed in protests in Jerusalem, Gaza is experiencing an inhumane power shutdown, and more Palestinians are dying while unable to cross checkpoints in order access medical treatment.
All of these are representative of the failed logic of borders, of fealty to the nation-state. As socialists, we must fight simultaneously against this limited thinking while pushing for a democratic economy. You can’t have one without the other.
Jerry Vinokurov
My take on it was that even European society is so steeped in anti-Semitic history that even its leftists and secularists have absorbed it by osmosis. To me, ever since Christianity came along and framed The Jew as the perpetually unassimilable alien, it has been impossible for Jews to be truly equal in Europe. Hell, I think that Christian society qua Christian society (as opposed to a society that just happens to have many Christians in it) is fundamentally unable to accept Jews; it’s true in Europe and it’s true in the US as well, just not uniformly. It all reminds me of a joke I read recently about a guy being stopped in Dublin and asked whether he’s a Catholic or a Protestant; he says “I’m an atheist, actually,” and his questioner says, “Catholic atheist or Protestant atheist?”
To me, Melenchon’s comments are disgusting but sadly typical of a Europe that wants to forget its collective responsibility for what it did to us. I even have distant family in France who are descended from my great-grandfather’s sister, who left after the Russian Revolution and settled in France. I think she might have converted and that’s how she and her family survived but I’m not really sure. Melenchon wants to get around French collective guilt by pretending that the Vichy government wasn’t legitimate, but this is bogus; sure, it was a collaborationist government, but there were lots of people who made the individual choice to collaborate because it was the easier path. Ultimately, the very existence of a collaborationist government was predicated on a cynical attempt to ride out the war in a semblance of normalcy, and it couldn’t have lasted without the tacit approval of the majority of French people.
This doesn’t change my commitment to left politics, which is grounded in my belief about what is moral and good. But I don’t know how I can plausibly see myself in solidarity with someone who can’t bring himself to acknowledge a basic historical truth about what his country did. It would be unacceptable for a white American when discussing slavery or the Native American genocide, and it’s unacceptable here too.
