Philippe-Joseph Salazar: the philosopher whose essay on Isis has shocked and enlightened

To win a war on the ground, you need first to win the war of words, says in essence French philosopher Philippe-Joseph Salazar in his latest essay, Paroles armées: Comprendre et combattre la propagande terroriste (Armed Words: Understanding and Fighting Terrorist Propaganda), which has made a mark on the public debate about the Paris attacks. It is through words that statesmen galvanise their compatriots, and call to arms. Words have the power to spur millions of people into action. La Marseillaise, the French anthem which has echoed through the world since the Paris attacks, as a symbol of defiance and a cry to defeat the oppressor, is a perfect example. And so is the jihadi propaganda freely available on the internet. Politics is the art of persuasion and rhetoric a weapon of mass persuasion.

But if rhetoric is the art of influencing the thought and conduct of an audience, and the ability to use language effectively, we democrats, we French republicans, have lost, and they have won. Who are they, he asks. An enemy whose name we cannot even start agreeing on. And that’s not the least of our problems.

We European democrats are in vocabulary panic mode, one that mirrors our political panic in front of an enemy we have conveniently thought of as a polymorphous monster, too ugly to contemplate, let alone understand. However, as long as we bury our head in the sand, as long as we refuse to see what this new enemy is – the first one to speak our language and kill us in our streets since Nazi Germany – we won’t be able to fight back in any meaningful or effective way.

After two weeks of overflowing emotions, sentiments and solidarity, the sharp and clear voice of Philippe-Joseph Salazar has recently pierced the clatter of 24-hour news culture and the fog of war. His views are the sharpest and most thought-provoking I have read in a long time on the subject. His essay, published only weeks before the attacks, has not only intrigued, shocked and enlightened many of my compatriots, it has garnered awards and is being reprinted, a rare event for what remains a rhetorician’s study. A distinguished professor of rhetoric at Cape Town University, and a former student of Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes, Salazar has caught the zeitgeist. The French are looking for clarity at a time when their political class only gives them confusing and contradictory messages.

Salazar spent two years watching, viewing and reading Islamic State prose and propaganda. Not because he enjoyed it – it made him sick – but because he wanted to understand and measure the enemy, and assess our response to it. Look at us, he says: we are still arguing over the choice of names and acronyms – Isis, Isil, IS, Daesh, Daech, or even Syrak – while they are successfully recruiting throngs of young people in Europe to fight for the caliphate. We are busy discussing whether Daesh should take an “s” or a “c”, while they dare European youngsters to transcend themselves and give their lives to a cause, to an ideal however warped and evil it may be. Ironically, there was a time when France was a champion at giving people ideals worth dying for, for instance in 1792 and in 1940. On those occasions, Georges Danton and Charles de Gaulle, great rhetoricians, summoned the French people to surpass themselves, the first one urging them to always be more audacious against foreign invaders (“il nous faut de l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace, et la France sera sauvée!”), the second one to fight the Nazi occupants by every possible means.

In fact, on a purely rhetoric level, Salazar draws a parallel between our reaction to Isis and that of European monarchies towards the newly born French Republic in 1789. Europe’s aristocracies turned to sneering to mock the emergence of republican and democratic ideals, incapable as they were to apprehend it and take it seriously.

Salazar offers frightful and at times unbearable clarity. The enemy has a name, the one it has chosen for itself: the caliphate. No need to jeer or mock the caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. His first homily as new caliph was “as grand as a pontifical homily, in the best Islamic tradition” according to Salazar, but “western media failed to notice, too busy as they were mocking him for wearing a Rolex watch”. Sarcasm will lead us nowhere and if we keep at it, Baghdadi will have the last laugh. How to call the caliphate’s recruits? Simple, says Salazar. The 30,000 or so western converts present in Syria are the caliphate’s international brigades; as for recruits of the caliphate at home, for instance in France, they are partisans of a foreign cause, and they are traitors.

From clarity and lucidity will spring the courage to face up to our responsibilities, thinks Salazar. But for the moment, our political class’s response is all but clear. It is fuzzy and confused. “At the moment there is a double language which weakens us all.” It leads us to act incoherently. We claim to be at war with a new enemy, but when confronted with its homegrown accomplices, we treat treason as if it was mere misdemeanour. Salazar takes the example of a female police officer who was in a relationship with an accomplice of the kosher supermarket’s killer, Amédy Coulibaly. It was later proved that she had passed on confidential information; she was then removed from duties. This, for Salazar, sends off a confusing message. “The usual sentence for this crime, in time of peace, is a 30-year imprisonment, and perpetuity, in time of war. Yet, she simply lost her job.”

Going further, Salazar measures both mentalities. The soldiers of the caliphate, as he calls them, are ready to die for their cause. Western democrats, and more precisely French republicans, have lost the will to fight to the death for their ideals. Seventy years of peace seem to have eroded our once visceral and hard-fought attachment to liberté, égalité, fraternité. Who remembers in France today that the republic’s full motto was “liberté, égalité, fraternité or death”?

We could go back to the rhetoric of the republic in arms, like in 1789, but who, today, would dare pronounce – let alone put in to action – the words of Louis de Saint-Just: “No liberty for the enemies of liberty”; of Maximilien de Robespierre: “When they invoke God, it is to usurp our world”; or Jean-Paul Marat: “It is through violence that freedom must be established.” No western democrat, no French republican, is willing or perhaps even capable to use such rhetoric. The caliphate is – hence their incredible symbolic force and appeal.

However, all is not completely lost for Salazar, but the glimmer of hope he offers does send shivers down one’s spine. The caliphate, feeding on democracies’ weakness, will grow more powerful, a little like the Ottoman empire in the 16th and 17th centuries. “However, I don’t see why we could not talk to the caliphate and live with them. After all, we lived for six hundred years in a state of bellicose peace with the Ottoman empire.” The French philosopher adds, “but to talk to them does not mean we cannot strike them”.

Philippe-Joseph Salazar, Paroles armées (2015, Lemieux éditeur). He is also the author of Mahomet (2005, Klincksieck), and Paroles de leaders (2011, François Bourin éditeur)