Rolland Doukhan

A Radio Broadcast: At the crossroads of three anniversaries

It is interesting to note how specificity can sometimes take strange paths. Three days ago, on 8 May, France has just celebrated the commemoration of its victory over Nazism, the end of a horrific war that is often wrongly called the “war of ’39–’40.” For Algeria, on the other hand, this date recalls events that drenched the whole of the Constantine East in blood, a repression that left, according to widely divergent estimates, between 8,000 and 40,000 victims — the truth lying probably closer to 10,000 than to 20,000 dead. For Israel, these days of May commemorate the UN vote recognizing its existence in 1948, the vote that authorized Ben Gurion to proclaim solemnly the birth of the Jewish State, on 15 May. And I am sure that there exist throughout the world countless other anniversaries, joyful or tragic, that resonate diversely in the memory of the peoples concerned. For my part, I caught myself realizing that I was situated at the crossroads of these three anniversaries I have just cited. Born in Algeria, whose political life I followed from 1946 on, of Jewish culture and upbringing by my birth, but also of French nationality by the grace of the Crémieux decree, and of French culture by love of its language, I find myself, as the saying goes, called into question by the interference of these three events. Clearly, if the three observances commemorating these events took place on the same day, at the same hour, I would choose to attend the one that recalls the victory over Nazism. There are within us choices that escape us, paths that cross and that end up forming what we call our road.

Is this not one of the forms of culture? Is there not, already, in our hesitations the seed, the presence of a decision?

The community — there is a word so used that it becomes empty of meaning. Too often one believes that it designates a set of persons of the same belief, or the same origin, or the same conviction, or the same colour, who knows what — people who gather around anything at all that is a same, an identical that would be sole and unique. One forgets that this word designates people, human beings who happily have more than a single drive, with strengths and weaknesses, choices with diverse priorities, contradictions, freedoms; one forgets that, happily, neither biologically, nor sociologically, nor culturally, have clones yet been invented.

If I knew how to pray, I would not ask the Lord, whoever he may be, to protect me from the wicked, nor to allow me to keep to the good path, nor to keep me from evil — all things that I can very well take on myself — but to leave me my human condition, that is to say, my imprescriptible right to be unique. Because, after all, to know that one is unique is to accept that the other is so too. I believe very strongly that the syndrome of the clones is found at the origin of all fundamentalisms.

If all those who behave in this way were clowns and not clones, everyone would laugh at them. Unfortunately, this is only rarely the case, and the universe that those clones would engender would be a strange circus indeed.

Radio Shalom

11 May 1993