Amidst the horrors of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Bosnia-Herzegovina, continuing attacks on foreigners in Germany and the repatriation (read expulsion) of thousands of gypsies from there to Romania, it, on the face of it, appears odd to take note of the case of mass hysteria that recently gripped the French port town of Calais. This would indeed be so if Calais was another instance of racial prejudice. But Calais speaks of the vulnerability of a section of European society under stress to fears which may run even deeper.
To the extent the sequence of events can be constructed on the basis of The New York Times report (International Herald Tribune, October 31), a surveyor armed with a camera was at work on September 25 near a school, some children saw him taking pictures; dark rumours spread; hundreds of parents descended on the headmaster insisting that several children had been abducted, raped, beheaded and eviscerated; the police and the press found that no untoward incident had taken place; children gave different descriptions of the person allegedly found taking pictures and propositioning ‘blond’ children.
Finally a pock-marked half-Arab youth was located and held guilty; he was threatened and driven into hiding and so was his French mother; the hysteria persisted.
Calais is a depressed town. The port and its lace industry are in decline; unemployment is as high as 50 per cent in the worst affected area where the school is located.
So it is tempting to link developments there with the spread of Le Penn’s anti-immigrant movement in similarly depressed areas of France and the explosion of neo-Nazi racist violence in high-unemployment East German towns. But Calais has only a few immigrants; as such it has no history of racist violence.
The explanation has to be sought elsewhere. The abuses hurled at the hapless youth may provide a clue. ‘Dirty Arab’ was only one of them and possibly not so important, though the ‘dirty Arab’ had to be a ‘rapist’. He was called, more pertinently, in my view, a ‘Dracula’ and a ‘Frankenstein’.
The true importance of these references becomes clear when we take note of the long history of the European view not just of ‘barbarian’ but of monstrous races which can be traced back to the Greeks in the 8th century BC. The architects of philosophy and science also fathered the theory of monstrous races.
Homer describes one of these in the Odyssey which he calls Cyklops. The name itself suggests that they were single eyed. They were, of course, cannibals, and lived on raw human flesh.
When Columbus set out for the new world, the most popular ‘travel’ book was Sir John Mandeville’s Travels. It gave ‘descriptions’ of people in the Andaman islands. He wrote: “In another part, there are ugly folks without heads, who have eyes in each shoulder, their mouths are round, like a horse-shoe, in the middle of their chest”.
The list is fascinating and covers the known world outside of Europe. But this should suffice to establish that there lurks, however far below the surface, in the European intellectual tradition a view of humanity which is shocking.
Even our experience of their ‘civilising mission’ of ‘primitive’ or ‘barbarian’ peoples cannot give us a proper idea of it. It is this aspect of the European psyche that breaks into racist violence from time to time, the holocaust being its worst expression in our times.
To their credit, a vast majority of West Europeans are now opposed to racism. But they too have no idea that they are up against a long and persistent, even if a distilled, past.
If anti-semitism is as old as Christianity, the theory of monstrous races is much older. The two merged in the 19th and early 20th century to produce horror stories of Jews kidnapping, killing and drinking the blood of ‘blond’ children.
Calais may be a reminder that the terrible past may not have been wholly disposed of. That is why the episode of mass hysteria there is significant. It occurred incidentally amidst re-emergence of anti-semitism not only in Germany and Australia [Austria?] but also France and Italy.
Economic Times, 13 November 1992