We covered the events at Bataclan on the podcast, but here are a few of the articles we consulted in prep for that episode.
Riffing on Baudrillard’s work on the media spectacle of the Gulf War, Hamid Dabashi’s article The Paris attacks did not take place makes for interesting reading.
The Syrian passport found at or near the scene of the crime ended up being a major story in and of itself. Was it real? Who did it belong to? Why was it there? Marine Le Pen certainly made a lot out of it. Read about it here.
Perhaps the oddest story to come out of the U.K. was how Jeremy Corbyn’s call for a moderate response to the events in Paris were taken to be extremist in nature, whilst those who pledged to bomb Syria because of it were taken to be the moderates. Certainly, divisions with U.K. Labour certainly didn’t help that story…
And, of course, there was the perennial question one gets in events like these: Was it all a false flag? Some even argued:
It happened on Friday the 13th (commemorating the massacre of the proto-illuminati Templars) in the 11th month, in Paris’s 11th district. It’s going to be remembered as “11/13” or “Friday the 13th.” Illuminati numerology or coincidence?
which, unsurprisingly, was a Veterans Today article.
And Press TV points out the West might blame Syria for the attacks, but somehow makes out that is evidence of it being a false flag (as, say, political expediency). They also interviewed Kevin Barrett of “Veterans Today”, who said predictable things.
Perhaps a more serious take on the same issue comes from the Activist Post, which at least provides some reasons as to why the authors think the Bataclan attack look false flag-esque (even though I think many of the questions they raise merely show that reporting on major events as they happen is tricky and leads to seeming inconsistencies in a developing story).
(They also raised a similar set of issues with the Charlie Hebdo attack.)
Finally, a more interesting take than usual (one which fits in with France’s long and protracted reaction to the Dreyfus Affair): what does the national narrative about Bataclan – and the War on Terror generally – say about the role of public intellectuals in France today?