Friday, November 13, 2015. Jihadism shocks Europe with a triple attack in Paris, with its epicenter in the Bataclan theater. There will be 130 dead and more than 400 injured among scenes of truly gruesome horror, as Emmanuel Carrère narrates in V13 (Anagram), the relentless, lacerating chronicle of the nine-month trial of the 14 accused of collaborating in the massacre, of whom The author of El adversario y Limonov, who spoke yesterday at the Night of the Books of the Community of Madrid, does not lose anything and even ends up addicted.
Why put up with that pain?
A long-term trial is an extraordinary experience. I have attended other large criminal trials, such as Romand's, from which The Adversary emerged, but it only lasted two weeks. A nine-month process is like a long journey and I was interested in doing it. At a certain point it made me addicted and the sign is that you are interested even when you are bored.
But how did he put up with all those testimonials?
It was devastating. Many times I would come home and start crying. When you hear such a discharge of suffering it is difficult to absorb it.
Among the questions raised in the book is the guilt of the West as the cause of the attacks. There is?
It is a question that must be taken much more broadly. There is a kind of devaluation of Islam from perhaps the end of the Ottoman Empire. There was a time when Islam was a glorious civilization to which everyone was proud to belong. At what point does it tilt and the Islamic world feels humiliated, relegated, miserable, and what is the part of the West's aggression are complex questions for an interview.
Does the 90 years of Arab decadence motivate terrorism?
For the people accused there surely not consciously, they are not intellectuals, they have zero historical culture, but in the inspirers and the inspirers of the inspirers, like the Muslim Brotherhood, yes.
Is Saudi Arabia's Salafi proselytizing over?
I couldn't make a political judgment, but if Islamic terrorism has prospered so much in Belgium it is because in the 1980s they entrusted the country's Muslim cult to Saudi Arabia and there has been a slow but very effective radicalization.
In the book he reflects on how the propaganda of the Islamic State (IS) is the first sadist.
True, propaganda often presents evil in the guise of good. The Soviet one did not show the gulag nor the German Auschwitz. IS featured people slitting throats and laughing. It's very disturbing. But maybe it's a new propaganda. We started seeing things like that with the Russians, like the video of the Wagner defector being pummeled and Prygogin laughing. It lives up to the propaganda of the Islamic State.
The question that is asked all the time. Why do young people kill other young people?
Some out of fanaticism, and we know their levers. In others there is pure sadism, as with Chief Abaaoud. It's a mixture, perhaps in some there is a part of idealism, in others conformism, they do like friends, they didn't want to seem less brave. Nothing is incomprehensible, I don't have the impression that I am facing the mystery of evil.
He quotes Simone Weil as saying that evil is actually monotonous and the amazing and miraculous is good. Is it what she saw in the process?
That phrase sounds great to me. He says something that is not heard, evil has great fictional and literary prestige, but most of the time the problem of evil is quite poor, monotonous. Good is much rarer and more mysterious. In this process there have been people who for me have been figures of good and that I have admired.
It is surprising in the trial to learn that the defendants are not poor.
Yes, you cannot give an explanation with sociological misery. Nobody came from very poor or severely dysfunctional families, they were families that earned a living, had studies. Poverty is not the explanation.
Search for meaning in religion?
Yes, belonging to a group, a community, are the springs of fanaticism and classic conformism.
How do you see the current political situation in France, the clash of the population with Macron?
I wouldn't want to be in his shoes, but he seems to be doing well.
What do you think of criticism of superiority, lack of empathy?
I think it s true. We must recognize his sincere, honorable conviction of having the historical courage to do something very unpopular and totally bet his political life on it and that it will later be recognized that he was right. The problem is that he is taking it very badly.
