At the end of the interrogation of Logan Nisin, founder of the extreme right-wing organization of the Social Armies (OAS, in tribute to his famous predecessor of the early 1960s), Thursday, September 23, the judge allows himself a “Personal consideration” : “When I read your file, I was fascinated by the mirror effect of your progress with that of the jihadists. In your intellectual construction, you are extremely close to those you claim to be fighting. “
Faced with the dumbfounded face of the defendant, who compared since Tuesday, September 21 with five other young men for “terrorist criminal association”, in pre-trial detention for more than four years, the magistrate details his thoughts: the taking of the oath, the initiatory journey, testing, clandestinity, binary vision of the world, etc. In his glass box at the Paris Criminal Court, Logan Nisin recognizes: “I spoke with Islamist terrorists in detention and saw some commonalities. I was radicalized but we, what we did was with a patriotic feeling. It’s not quite the same. “ This exchange sums it up: an intelligent boy, open to discussion, who has ” evolved ” as he says, but whose ambiguous formulas or “omissions” question. Awkward concealment, uncertain defense strategy, rough chatter? There is the question.
Logan Nisin, 25, was he, at the time of his arrest on June 28, 2017, a dangerous extremist close to acting out or the nickel-plated foot in chief of a band of incompetents mimicking the civil war? In fact, he’s all of these and that’s what makes his trial, with five other defendants appearing free, so confusing and interesting. The defendant sums it up with a formula: “I’m trying to tell my truth from yesterday with my reality today. “
Ultra straight young uninhibited
The trial of this neo-OAS is also that of an ultra-right young person – the defendants are between 23 and 33 years old, three others, minors at the time of the facts, must be tried in October by the children’s court – uninhibited and well of his time: “lol-racism” on social networks, mixture of currents of thought and references drawn from the Internet, recourse to Nazi symbolism without seeing any problem, virtual friendships, transnationality.
Despite this apparent “modernity”, it is an old acronym that Logan Nisin chose for the project that he has been maturing for a long time, according to his peregrinations in the extreme right of the Bouches-du-Rhône (of the Rassemblement national identity of the Popular Movement for a New Dawn through the anti-republicans of Action Française): OAS. “I am not claiming the reconquest of Algeria [mais] we had connections with that “, he explains. In addition to a “Personal dimension” : “I am the grandson of a returnee. “ “They were in Tunisia, but it was more or less the same story”, he adds.
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