Redemption Through Cruelty
by Theodore Dalrymple
One little phrase in Le Monde’s report of an incident in Nice—in which a man aged 30 called Moussa Coulibaly attacked with a knife three soldiers guarding a Jewish community center—caught my attention: rien de bien méchant, nothing very bad.
It was used in describing his prior record: Coulibaly had been found guilty six times between 2003 and 2012 by French courts of “theft, use of drugs, insulting policemen,” and had received either fines or suspended prison sentences for his rien de bien méchant. Given the percentage of offenses that are actually elucidated in France (as elsewhere), the chances are that he had committed at least ten times as much as he had ever been charged with, and it is also very likely that some of what he had done was a good deal more serious than anything that has come to light. At the very least delinquency was his way of life; and the total amount of harm he did, the misery caused to or inflicted on others, considerable. Rien de bien méchant doesn’t quite capture it, and could only have been written by someone inhabiting so utterly different a social world that he has no idea of the nature of Coulibaly’s.
The trajectory followed by Coulibaly is by now depressingly familiar: so familiar, indeed, that I could have written the outlines of his biography myself merely by having read what he did in Nice. As with many others of his type, his delinquency was followed by religious radicalization that gave to his criminal impulses a patina of moral justification. It not only gave him permission to do bad things, but made them morally obligatory. Could there be any greater pleasure in life than making others suffer for righteousness’s sake? For such as he, and those worse than he, sadism is next to godliness, or even the thing itself.
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Read more: takimag.com
One little phrase in Le Monde’s report of an incident in Nice—in which a man aged 30 called Moussa Coulibaly attacked with a knife three soldiers guarding a Jewish community center—caught my attention: rien de bien méchant, nothing very bad.
It was used in describing his prior record: Coulibaly had been found guilty six times between 2003 and 2012 by French courts of “theft, use of drugs, insulting policemen,” and had received either fines or suspended prison sentences for his rien de bien méchant. Given the percentage of offenses that are actually elucidated in France (as elsewhere), the chances are that he had committed at least ten times as much as he had ever been charged with, and it is also very likely that some of what he had done was a good deal more serious than anything that has come to light. At the very least delinquency was his way of life; and the total amount of harm he did, the misery caused to or inflicted on others, considerable. Rien de bien méchant doesn’t quite capture it, and could only have been written by someone inhabiting so utterly different a social world that he has no idea of the nature of Coulibaly’s.
The trajectory followed by Coulibaly is by now depressingly familiar: so familiar, indeed, that I could have written the outlines of his biography myself merely by having read what he did in Nice. As with many others of his type, his delinquency was followed by religious radicalization that gave to his criminal impulses a patina of moral justification. It not only gave him permission to do bad things, but made them morally obligatory. Could there be any greater pleasure in life than making others suffer for righteousness’s sake? For such as he, and those worse than he, sadism is next to godliness, or even the thing itself.
......................
Read more: takimag.com
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