An international petition against the US-Israeli war on Iran, titled “A Declaration to the Conscience of Humanity” and signed by 175 “personalities” from 30 countries, has been circulating recently on various blogs and social media. Its publication on 10 April on the US website CounterPunch, accompanied by a sympathetic introduction, gave it wider reach. This initiative may herald a more internationalised phase of political confusionism.
Broad rhetorical overlaps have indeed developed in France since the mid-2000s between far-right, right-wing, and left-wing discourses, on the basis of a retreat from the left/right divide. These confusions have helped strengthen the presence of far-right ideas in public debate and further disorient the left.
To better understand this process, I have borrowed from Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge (Gallimard, 1969) the notion of “discursive formation.” Confusionism can thus be read as a discursive formation — a composite rhetorical space, mobile and agentless: it is fed by diverse, even opposing, interlocutors who are largely unaware that they are thereby consolidating partially shared assumptions. This is not solely a French phenomenon: in an article in Boston Review published on 12 January 2021, researchers William Callison and Quinn Slobodian identified analogous phenomena, which they call “diagonalism” — as in a diagonal connecting distant poles — by comparing the German and US situations.
The international petition I referred to describes a world in which the United States stands on the side of evil and Iran on the side of good, according to a dualist and essentialist geopolitical vision — or, as the philosopher Daniel Bensaïd would have put it, an “anti-imperialism of fools.” The United States, “for 249 years — that is, its entire existence since 1776,” is portrayed as essentially embodying crime and genocide, without contradictions or transformations over time. An essence that, since its origin, unfolds undisturbed: “the worm is in the fruit,” one might say. Against this, the text glorifies Iran’s former Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, “internationally recognised as a voice against arrogance and terrorism,” and the regime he led: “Its civilisational continuity and social unity have merged into a single, unshakeable force.“
Crushing the concern for nuance
Nothing is said of the theocratic and bloody oppression specific to this Islamic Republic. As if one could not simultaneously condemn the US and Israeli war striking Iranian and Lebanese civilians, the Iranian dictatorship, and Hezbollah’s violence. As if one could not demonstrate solidarity all at once with Ukrainians under attack, with Israelis massacred on 7 October, with Gazans affected by a genocidal process, with bombed Lebanese, and with Iranians enduring a double violence. As if oppression were singular rather than plural. As if Manichaeism had to prevail in critical thought, crushing any concern for nuance — and for the intersection of diverse and sometimes opposing logics of domination.
The confusionism of the petition lies even more in its signatories. Let us take just a few telling examples. On the left: the sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, the founding theorist of “Southern epistemologies”; the US sociologist of Puerto Rican origin Ramón Grosfoguel, a star of Latin American decolonial thought; and the Indian historian Vijay Prashad, who identifies with Marxism and the queer movement. On the far right: several French figures, among them the founder of the “New Right” Alain de Benoist, the antisemitic and Holocaust-denialist comedian Dieudonné, and the neo-Nazi, pro-Putin activist Yvan Benedetti. For the rest, a fair number of conspiracy theorists, positioned — or indeed oscillating — between the far right and the far left.
Conspiracism
As for the best-known site to have published the petition, CounterPunch, this is not its first foray into confusionism. It is a magazine of the far left, growing out of a newsletter founded in 1993. On 2 March 2003, The Guardian described it as “one of the most influential political sites” in America. Yet as early as 2004 it published an article sympathetic to Holocaust denial. The fog thickened particularly during the 2010s, with the publication of conspiracist texts. During this period, antisemitic authors such as Israel Shamir and Gilad Atzmon appeared there regularly, as did Paul Craig Roberts, a former Under Secretary of State in the Reagan administration who has drifted towards white supremacism — all this amid many authors labelled as left-wing.
At first, such a petition simply juxtaposes people who are not necessarily in contact with one another. It then forms a base capable of activating the international circulation of marker-words and their reciprocal translation into different national contexts.
Faced with the national and international challenge of confusionism and far-right drift, the left has a profound task ahead of it: to reknit its ties with the popular classes, the middle classes, and social movements; to reinvent a common emancipatory imaginary; and to build a new internationalism after the fashion of a polyphonic galaxy.
Philippe Corcuff is a professor of political science at Sciences Po Lyon and a member of the Collective for Antifascist Struggle against Racism and Antisemitism (CLARA). He is the author of ‘La grande confusion. Comment l’extrême droite gagne la bataille des idées‘ (Textuel, 2021).
The French original of this op-ed was first published in Le Monde. This English translation, by Daniel Mang, was first published on the Left Renewal Blog.
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