Mikhail Kalashnikov is part of this tradition. As noted by Olivier Rohe in his superb text called Ma dernière création est un piège à taupes ("My Latest Creation Is A Mole Trap"), the ex-sergeant of the Red Army, who is now approaching 100 years of age, is basically an homme d’ordre, passionate by work done well and an abiding hatred towards criminals.
By inventing the AK-47 assault rifle in the aftermath of World War II, he wanted to arm the hand of the workingman along the road to emancipation. In another of those ironic twists of History, this globalized gun is now one of the most destructive tools in the service of international capitalism. It is seen also as a fetish for bling-bling gangsterism all over the world, and even in the heart of this urban France, of which Marx and Engels once so admired the lucidity.
On Sunday July 1, in the northern French city of Lille, a thug unloaded his “kalash” in front of a nightclub, where he'd not been allowed to enter. Two people were killed: a 25-year-old man, working for a company that manages low-rent housing, and a 26-year-old woman, who worked at the nightclub's coat-check to help pay her university fees. These two young workers have been killed by the bullets of a weapon, invented once upon a time with the aim of brightening the future for the underdogs of the world.
Just as his friend Karl Marx used to do, Friedrich Engels was telling the workers of the world to get rid of the “scum.” He used this term with no hesitation, while describing “these dredges of deprived persons,” those whom he viewed as the most dangerous enemy of the working classes. “At every revolution, when the French blue collars wrote on the walls of the houses “Death to thieves” and when they shot several of them, they were not acting out of enthusiasm for the ownership, but rather because they know they had to first get rid of this gang,” Engels said.He doesn’t get around to mentioning that the crimes would come to mean “disagreeing with the revolution”, or for that matter, that the man with the “kalish” is more likely to have thought that HE was the lumpenproletarian, who, turned away, needed to address “the crime,” and wanted to emancipate the vicitms in his very own special way.
This is especially cute, in that the crime took place in Lille, a place where anarcho-syndicalism IS the only idea in the air. In fact, it runs a close secont to "red Brest" in it's communist-mob-rule tendencies.
Also by Birnbaum are titles such as:
Is our future democratic ? and...wherin he explores the “xenophobic excesses” of gays questioning the abuse of gays by extremely common and “mainstream” Moslems.
Is Nationalism about being Gay ?
What’s curious about all of this is that Birnbaum was one of the last people to interview Jacques Derrida, who, while broadly known for his post-modern uncaring rubbish, was morally clear when it came to the defense of individuals rights against the oppressive force of a politically correct group, dominant world view, or social tribalism that hangs like a damp, cold, fog over published ideas and “philosophical conversation” in much of Europe.
At about the same time, Birnbaum was also feeding lines to pointless hater Thierry Ardisson for “Tous Le Monde en Parle”
