November 15, 2015
Justin Erik Halldór Smith
ПОМИЛУЙ МЯ, БОЖЕ
http://www.jehsmith.com/philosophy/
[I wrote this on request as a dispatch for an American publication, which ended up only running pieces from their staff writers. So I am posting it here, two days later.]
A series of attacks occurred earlier this evening in Paris. While the full death toll is not known, it has already far surpassed the total number of victims in the attacks on Charlie Hebdo (and on a kosher supermarket two days later) with which we rang in this bloody year. President François Hollande had been attending a friendly match of the national team against Germany when grenades went off at the Stade de France north of Paris in St. Denis. He was whisked away of course, and a short time later declared a state of emergency throughout France. It is being reported that the borders of the entire country have been shut. Just a few moments ago a hostage stand-off at the popular concert venue, Le Bataclan, came to an end with the deaths of two terrorists, a twist the jocular California band The Eagles of Death Metal, who do not in fact play death metal, but rather ‘desert rock’, could never have imagined when they set up their show a few hours ago.
I was on a train from Turin as the crisis began. If I had set out an hour later I suppose I would not have made it across the border. On the train, out in the fields, I was among the only people whose 4G connection was working, and so I became an information-relay station for frightened Italian vacationers and Parisian students returning home to their families. At issue for us was the safety of the Gare de Lyon, where we were to arrive, not so far from Le Bataclan. Surely the conductors have been notified, I told my sudden flock. They would not simply pull into a train station under siege. We’ll be fine. (Later in the evening bomb threats at the Gare de Lyon would briefly appear on Twitter, as they would for almost every major site in the city.)
Scattered people tried to convince the stone-faced policemen that they lived just on the other side of the barrier. A group of Magrhebin boys was hanging around smoking pot. They heard me speaking English on my phone and said: “Yeah, man.” People milled, and chattered. I heard a retching sound and caught a glimpse of a young man vomiting into the bushes. The police looked on. In the end, it was a late Friday night in Paris, and no act of violence could transform the city entirely. Only 100 or so meters from the barrier, I would later learn, a methodical massacre was still going on, with automatic weapons, at a concert of the Eagles of Death Metal.
I manoeuvred through side streets, pulled out GPS on my iPhone, and eventually made it to the Canal St. Martin, near the Petit Cambodge restaurant from which the first reports of a Kalashnikov attack had come some hours earlier. I turned on narrow street after narrow street, hoping to find a way to reach one of the drawbridges over the canal, and pass into the safety of my peripheral apartment near the Buttes Chaumont in the 19th arrondissement. On narrow street after narrow street, the voices of men in camouflage holding guns yelled at me from a distance: Turn that bicycle around. When I finally made it home, I flipped on all the sources of news, and let it all flow in, writing nothing, saying little, for two hours or so.
A dinky French academic society with which I have a close but unofficial affiliation had been planning to hold its next meeting in Tunis, in Spring, 2016. This was going to be great victory for the Francophone Tunisian organisers, who had hoped that a conference devoted to a European Enlightenment philosopher in their country would send a message to the native forces of dark and irrational violence. Then, in June of this year, 38 people were killed in the Tunisian coastal city of Sousse, by dastardly hitmen who stormed the beach from the water, dressed as frogmen. The little academic society began to quiver, and made the cowardly decision to move its next meeting back within the safe confines of the Hexagon. We do not yet know how many times more people were killed in Paris tonight than were killed in Sousse.
The lesson for me tonight, before the bodies have been counted, before the inevitable forces of reaction and phobia set in, before the time of endless analysis and of the posturing of the impotent men in power, is this: there is nowhere else to go.