Introduction: Thucydides and Jesus Christ

In The History of the Peloponnesian War, an account of the conflicts between Athens, Sparta and the other Greek cities, the Athenian historian Thucydides (460-395 bce) states the following law: 'Justice does not enter into the reasoning of men unless the forces on both sides are equal; otherwise, the strong exercise their power and the weak must yield to them.' This is a law of the ages: the powerful rule, the wretched bow down. It was a Christian revelation, heralded by Judaism, that reversed this paradigm, much to the dismay of the pagans, who were appalled by this exaltation of a God who allowed himself to be crucified like a slave in order to save humankind. 'Was it fitting for God to allow himself to be tied up and dragged away like a criminal? Much less was it fitting that he should be abandoned and betrayed by those closest to him, who followed him like a messiah, the Son and messenger of God himself', exclaimed the Roman philosopher Celsus in the first century.1 For a man of antiquity, it made no sense for Jesus to pronounce the commandment to love one's enemies and to enjoin believers to give precedence to the sick, the poor and the dispossessed. It's an anthropological upheaval that puts the low above the high, the ignoble above the noble, and against which Friedrich Nietzsche, the great worshipper of strength and aristocracy, never tired of railing.

A common homeland

In the Passion narrative, Jesus offers his suffering as a common homeland to all the downtrodden and brings them the cross as an aid. This is Christianity's stroke of genius and its absolute singularity, the new agreement proposed to the human race: the invention of a man-god who has the weaknesses of the former and the transcendence of the latter. Contemporaries were astonished that this obscure sect should have succeeded among the cohort of fanatics, zealots and healers who populated Galilee at that time. The Son of Man did not preach for the rich or the righteous, but for sinners, loose women, thieves and the fallen. He made himself humble among the humble. His intransigence was not of this world and it put a bomb under every institution, even the Churches. With the mixture of gentleness and aggression that characterizes the Gospels, his call for an insurrection against the powerful would shape the whole of the Western world, including the great secular doctrines of modernity. What is the working class in Marxism if not the body of Christ constituted as a revolutionary bloc to overturn History and establish the perfect society? What are minorities in 'wokeism' if not so many Christ-like effigies to be revered, no matter what? Is it not their misfortune that legitimizes them, especially when that misfortune is written in the plural through Kimberlé Crenshaw's 'intersectionality', the crossroads of various oppressions?2 Christianity inverts hierarchies and gives pre-eminence to the vanquished over the brutes. The language of the victor consists of saying: I am right because I am the strongest. The language of the victim, on the other hand, says that my weakness is my weapon and my right. There is a transcendence and almost a sanctity to it; I share their pain; their destitution makes it incumbent on me to come to their aid.

We know that this quasi-divinity of the vulnerable is the prerogative of civilization. For better or worse, we are the heirs to this Christian revolution. Over the last two millennia, and often against the advice of the Churches, it has given consistency to the rights of women, of children, of the exploited, of slaves and the colonized. But a derivative strategy has been grafted onto this invention: the attitude of victimhood, which can be found at both the State and the individual level. It seems to be stronger in rich countries, devoted to material pleasures and structurally dissatisfied with their lot. Our pantheon is made up only of the downtrodden and the crushed. They are the only ones eligible for our sympathy, and we find new ones every day. This is our great democratic passion; even the privileged want to play the victim. Freedom, the ability of each individual to lead their life as they see fit, is above all permission to lament their own fate.

Respect my suffering

The word victim has many meanings even though being subjected to robbery, rape, accident or torture are not the same thing. But in this area there is an escalation to extremism and confusion reigns. Everyone aligns their condition with that of the person most affected. 'Respect my suffering', individuals demand. 'Prove to me that you are suffering', demands the State, insurance companies, public opinion and the media. But what can be done about those who suffer neither enough nor too little - in other words, the majority? Traditionally, the status of victim was obtained from historians or the courts. The historian described the reality of a massacre, and the courts recognized this reality and drew out the consequences. This process of recognition took a long time, and was often enshrined by the State or governments in official ceremonies. But these days, in an age of impatience amplified by social media, people want to speed up the process of crowning themselves martyrs. For instance via 'grievance studies'3 in the USA, where university departments specialize in grievances affecting all sorts of categories: fat people, women, minorities, queers, lesbians, trans people, etc., and who grant themselves this title from the outset, so to speak. Armenians, deportees, slaves, colonized people, Harkis and homosexuals all had to wait a long time for recognition. We no longer have the courage to wait; we want the title of oppressed immediately.

What is victimization? It's a narrative identity that we ascribe to ourselves and expect others to confirm. It is a pathology of recognition, a desire to be identified without having to come forward.

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries' dominant dreams of heroism have been replaced, in the twenty-first, by intense dreams of victimhood. This is the result of three reversals: the frenzied quest for happiness is flipped into a frenzied obsession with misfortune. Suffering is annexing ever-expanding territories to its empire, including areas that were previously outside its jurisdiction. Lastly, the promise of democracy, always a disappointment, exacerbates dissatisfaction and puts complaint at the centre of the contemporary psyche. In a word, the ideology of victimhood sins three times over: it discredits the spontaneous stoicism of each individual in the face of evil. It distorts priorities: under the guise of protecting the vulnerable, it smuggles in false victims who obscure from view those genuinely in trouble. Finally, it becomes the alibi for the killers who use this false flag to commit their crimes.

Promotion of the damned

In the past, the victims, whether male or female, were sacrificed by fire, hanging or lynching in order to repair a fractured community. They were sacrificed and sometimes sanctified. Nowadays, it's the other way around: first we sanctify, then we sacrifice. After 1945 and the Holocaust, the figure of the Jew was put on a pedestal, then pulled down when it became that of the Israeli, accused of all the evils of colonialism, racism and imperialism. The prime position has become damned: from being a model, the figure of the Jew has become a rival to be eliminated in order to take its place.

On a global scale, there is a complaint competition, with each trying to howl the other down. The fraternity of the fallen is matched by the cacophony of complainers, who hoist the figure of the martyr on high, while feeding the two great passions of revenge and resentment. White or black supremacists, radical Islamists, bitter masculinists, angry neo-feminists, furious ecologists, revanchist Slavophiles, vindictive neo-Ottomans, each cashes in on a past glory or disaster to blame their enemies. How many defeated empires - Russia, Turkey, Iran, China - dress themselves up in the trappings of the doomed to then dive headlong into the hubris of reconquest? How many independent states invoke the former colonial metropolis to continue exploiting their peoples? The natural inclination of any persecuted person, once in power, is to metamorphose into a persecutor. Victimism is warmongering: the more people feel sorry for themselves, the more they feel justified in punishing those they see as their enemies. Their tears are heavy with rage and enmity.

Concern for the humiliated is humanism's strong point. But blackmailing with victimhood is the flip side of this progress. Its final stage is the erasure of the truly unfortunate in favour of carnival pariahs whose only distinguishing feature is that they possess the networks and notoriety that allow them to promote themselves. They seize the language of the oppressed to usurp a position. They enter into a war of words, taking them hostage, kidnapping them. From one end of the social ladder to the other, each brandishes their hard-luck certificate that raises them above their fellows. This character, this strange kind of professional sufferer, is on the march through every country, cutting across all social classes. So how do we distinguish the counterfeiters and cheats from the others?

This book has three parts: the first examines how the message of the Enlightenment and the Revolution, of a better world free of fatalism and fanaticism, leads to a...