Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [3]
Nor have I given up trying to beat my eczema, but I believe I have finally realized that for the rest of my life I will have to suffer the microparasites who can—literally—no longer survive without me, whom I provide with a reason for existing, who will go so far, as in the recent Assouline case, for example, as to rummage through notes for a conference in Chile (where I felt I might be somewhat sheltered), anything they can dig out, cutting and remixing it a little to present me as ridiculous or odious.
And yet I don’t want to have enemies, sworn, self-confessed enemies, it simply does not interest me. While I have in me a desire to please and a desire to displease, I have never felt the least desire to vanquish, and it is in this, I believe, that we differ.
By this I do not mean that you do not also feel a desire to please, but that you also feel a desire to vanquish; in this you walk with both feet (which, according to president Mao Zedong, is preferable). And it’s true that if you want to go far, go fast, it is preferable. On the other hand, the movements of a one-legged man have something whimsical, unpredictable about them; he is to the ordinary walker what a rugby ball is to a soccer ball; it’s not impossible that a healthy one-legged man might more easily escape a sniper.
Enough of these dubious metaphors, which are simply a way of evading the question you were asking: “Why so much hatred?” Or more exactly, “Why us?” Even if we admit that we were asking for it, we still need to understand how we so consummately succeeded. It might be thought that I am senselessly wasting my energy on individuals as insignificant as Assouline or Busnel. The fact remains that my personal parasites (and, in the same way, yours) have, in their relentlessness, had certain results. On several occasions I have received e-mails from secondary-school students telling me that their teachers warned them against reading my books. By the same token, there has always been a scent of the lynch mob around you. Often, when your name comes up in conversation, I will notice an evil grin I know all too well, a rictus of petty, despicable pleasure at the prospect of being able to insult without risk. Many times, as a child (every time I found myself in a group of young men, in fact), I witnessed this vile process, the singling out of a victim that the group will then be able to humiliate and insult to their heart’s content—and I have never for a moment doubted that, in the absence of a higher authority, specifically of their teachers or the cops, things would have gone much further, would have resulted in torture and murder. I never had the physical courage to side with the victim; but at least I never felt the desire to join the executioners’ camp. We are perhaps, neither of us, particularly morally admirable, but we have nothing of the pack animal about us, this is one thing at least that can be said in our favor. As a child, when confronted by such painful scenes, I simply turned away, happy at the thought that I had been spared this time. And now that I am one of the victims, I can still turn away, more or less convinced that things will not go beyond the verbal, at least, as long as we live in a reasonably well-policed state.
Or I might try to understand, to contemplate this unpleasant phenomenon—although I have never really been convinced by the essentially symbolic explanations given for it, based on the history of religions. The phenomenon existed in rural civilizations, it exists today in our cities, it would continue to exist if cities ceased to exist and all communication were virtual. It seems to me to be entirely independent of the political or spiritual order