Bastille Day 2016

Saturday 16th July

I was going to post a pleasant light-hearted blog about the Bastille Day Celebrations here in Eymet; it was going to be full of fun, food and wine, music and (though I left early) the fireworks.  Bastille Day, the fourteenth of July, is a special day for the French.  It marks the day in 1789 when the Revolutionaries stormed the infamous Bastille prison and released the prisoners, some Political but many simple thieves or worse.  But it marks the day when France really became a Republic, a new idea at the time.  No King, no aristocracy lording it over the peasants.  Of course, the Revolution soon disintegrated into chaos and dictatorship, but out of it grew the idea of the Citizen, and most famously “Egalite, Liberte, Fraternite”.  And it is Liberte which is now once again, and with a sickening realization that it might never stop, at risk.

And how do we protect ourselves from these atrocities, and especially this last one?  A crowded Boulevard (I was there about six years ago on New Year’s Eve), a balmy night, a day of Celebration, the crowd awaiting the fireworks – and then out of nowhere a large white lorry, driven at speed straight at ordinary people, the driver apparently swerving to kill as many as possible.  What hatred motivates these people?  What can cause such senseless cruelty?  And it is our very sense of incomprehension that we must tackle first.  It is no good simply dismissing this as the act of a lone lunatic, a terrorist (whatever that is) or even a fanatic.  Vowing to kill those responsible is almost as pointless.  The only long-term solution which stands any chance of success at all is to talk to our enemies, try to discover exactly what they want so badly that they are prepared to kill absolutely innocent people for it.  And maybe we will have to, in the end, give them what they want – or something approaching it.

We cannot kill an idea, and simply killing those we can identify as Isis or Daesh, or whatever they are calling themselves these days, will not solve the problem.  In fact, as we have discovered in Afghanistan and Iraq and Libya and now in Syria, violence simply feeds the monster.   Just like the War on Drugs, we have to see if there is any way of accommodating those who disagree with us so much they are prepared to die for their beliefs and kill as many of us in doing so.  It may not be possible, but unless we try then there will be many more Bastille Days.