Category: Decline of the West

The Fall of France and the Folly of Immigration without Assimilation

France’s Long Slide “is an excerpt from Éric Zemmour’s book, The Suicide of France: The Quiet Revolution That Destroyed a Nation, which was translated by Nathan Pinkoski and will be published by Encounter Books on July 14.” Zemmour offers a perceptive take on rhe MAGA movement’s two phases separated by Trump’s 2020-2024 ‘sabbatical.’ Zemmour appreciates Trump’s world-historical significance.

Excerpts from the excerpt:

. . . in Arab-Muslim civilization, the process [of civilization] that Elias describes has never happened, and passions, impulses, emotions have continued to be suppressed by ferocious, brutal reprisals. When people who have learned to control themselves encounter, on the same soil, those who expect fierce and brutal reprisals that never come, it’s a safari for the latter, where the people who have undergone Elias’s “process of civilization” become game. Against them, anything goes.

[. . .]

The existential anguish of the French people in the face of their disappearance is finally being taken seriously. The “great replacement” is no longer marginalized as a literary fad or a conspiracy theory. The French people’s desire to emancipate themselves from the State’s shackles, standards, and taxes, which enslave them without protecting them, is also recognized by all. Ideological victory has not led to political victory, but we know that it always takes time to move from one to the other.

We saw this in the United States. Trump’s unexpected success in the 2016 presidential election had caused nothing irreversible. Nobody was really ready: neither the candidate’s teams, nor the president. Nor, doubtless, the country itself. The triumph of 2024 has a completely different significance. The MAGA camp engaged in a veritable counterrevolution. A counterrevolution in the sense of the “Counter-Reformation” of the Council of Trent after the Protestant revolution. I don’t think the comparison is excessive. The revolution brought about by the Left in the 1960s tore America away from its age-old history, like a river diverted from its course. France, as we have seen in this book, followed exactly the same path in the 1970s. This revolution, which started in America, set fire to the whole of the West. It was therefore necessary for the counterrevolution to start from America too, if it is to have any chance of prevailing. [emphasis added.]

[. . .]

The 21st century will be terrible: it will be a telluric mix between the 19th century and the Middle Ages. It will see the return of states, peoples, and nations, a confrontation between great powers, where “force takes precedence over law,” in Bismarck’s famous phrase, and where the game between European rivals, France, England, and Germany, will simply be extended to the whole world, with these new players: China, the United States, Russia, India, and Turkey. It will see the return of religious fanaticism carried out by Islam, as in the 7th century, with its cohort of violence, intolerance, sacrilege, and superstition; with tribalism, pillage, massacres, mass rape, obscurantism, and irrationality.

The time has come for every people, for every continent, to return to the very essence of their civilization. This is already happening all over the planet: Russians are rediscovering Orthodoxy and the tsars, even when they were Red; China is returning to the teachings of Confucius, India to Buddha, Islam to Mohammed and the Ummah, Turkey to the Koran and the Ottoman Empire. All of them are returning to their deepest identities in order to tear themselves away from Western universalism, which they experience—partly with good reason—as a dispossession, an illusion, a subjection. Only Europe and the West are slow to reclaim their roots, perverted as they are by a corrupted universalism and a poorly digested humanism. Paradoxically, this Western universalism, once the weapon of European imperialism, has now become its prison, even its deadly poison. In the United States, the Trump network, with Vice President JD Vance as its mouthpiece, no longer hesitates to proclaim the greatness of Western civilization, Jewish prophecy and Catholic majesty, Greek rationality and Roman law. Some European countries, often the smallest, in the east but also in the west of the continent, have understood the danger and are no longer deluded by the suicidal mirages of a nihilistic universalism. That leaves the great European nations, France, Germany, and England, who are the last to understand where the wind of renewal is blowing.

Through word and deed, I’m fighting with all my might to put France back at the heart of this struggle to return to our roots, to the roots of our Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman identity, to our genius for freedom, rationality, and beauty. [emphasis added]

UFC Fight at the White House?

A senator in cargo pants, and now this? Matthew Schmitz at Compact thinks something revolutionary is going on. His is a provocative article, and not too long.  I support Trump for a number of reasons, one of which is that he is a fighter.  On the other hand, while there is the decadence of suicidal empathy, there is also that of suicidal brutality.

Panem et circenses!

I am no fan of spectator sports.  We have too many sports spectators and too many overpaid* professional louts. I preach the People’s Sports, despite the leftish ring of that.

Remove your sorry tail from the couch of sloth and start a softball league with your friends and neighbors. Play volley ball whether in a pool or on dry land. Engage your fellow paisani in a game of bocce. (But don’t call it bocce ball. Do you call tennis tennis ball?)

Or take the Thoreauvian high road, leave the People behind, and sally forth solo into the wild. As Henry David said, “A man sits as many risks as he runs.” Old Henry puts me in mind of Cactus Ed, the Thoreau of the American Southwest.

In Vox Clamantis in Deserto Edward Abbey opines:

Football is a game for trained apes. That, in fact, is what most of the players are — retarded gorillas wearing helmets and uniforms. The only thing more debased is the surrounding mob of drunken monkeys howling the gorillas on.

Was Abbey a racist? That depends on what a racist is. I’ll leave it for you to decide what a racist is and whether Abbey was one.

_______________

*Can anyone be ‘overpaid’? If enough people like what you sell, and are willing to pay you for it, you may become rich indeed. Think of all the rich schlock novelists. Capitalist acts among consenting adults. That’s the libertarian line.  Or do you prefer more government intervention in people’s lives? For the record, I am not a libertarian. But I’ll take a libertarian over a leftist any day.

Europe in Trouble

Malcolm Pollack, back from Britain, reports:

I have to say, though, that the trip was ultimately rather depressing: it would be hard to overstate how utterly doomed the ancient British nation and people are. Among the staff of the shops, hotels, and restaurants we visited, we hardly ever even heard a British accent. (In particular, I’d been looking forward to hearing Scottish accents in Edinburgh, and hardly heard a one.)

In London, the cab drivers were still mostly English, and to a one they asked me what I thought about Trump; once I said that I was glad he’d won the election, and that he was a necessary correction to the damage that had been done over the past few decades, they felt free to unburden themselves about the moribund state of England. The tone was unvarying: weary, hopeless resignation, and mourning for the homeland they had lost.

The British people have annihilated not only their own future, but also the magnificent, thousand-year legacy that all of their ancestors had bequeathed to them as stewards for generations yet unborn. All of it is just gone, destroyed. In a generation or two, Britain will be an Islamic nation; the only thing that can possibly prevent this is a furious awakening of the virile and indomitable spirit that once ruled the world, and it would have to happen now.

But it won’t. The only ones who seem to care enough, or even to realize what has been lost, are now too old — and as far as I can tell, they’ve already given up.

The West seems bent on destroying itself, with the RCC under the ‘leadership’ of BergoLEO in the lead. (I owe the clever coinage to Vito Caiati.) Rod Dreher:

De Montbrial has a new book coming out in France next week, about what he regards as his country’s “emergency” situation. I suppose the talk he gave yesterday, in English, is part of it. He warned that western Europeans should prepare themselves for mass violence at the level the continent (minus the 1990s Balkans) hasn’t seen since the end of World War II. That is to say (though he didn’t use this term), civil wars. If you see this man’s Wikipedia page, you realize that he is in a position to know what he is talking about. He explained that Islamists have managed to infiltrate both public and private institutions all over Europe, and are using it to their advantage.

How did all this happen? De Montbrial, a practicing Catholic, said that the core of the problem is cultural — namely, that France (and Europe) has lost all sense of who and what it is. It has forgotten its past, and any sense of connection to it, and has lost its identity. (This is what Renaud Camus calls “The Great Deculturation”). How do you expect young people to resist people (Muslims) who are hostile to Western civilization, and who have a strong culture, if you have produced a generation, or generations, of people who have no culture? He said that in France, Muslim activists are even succeeding in winning over the hearts and minds of no small number of native-born French, by telling them, basically: “Look around you at what a nihilistic, pornified disaster modern Europe has become. Is that really what you want? Convert, join the ummah, and gain a story. Become part of the glorious march through history of the sons and daughters of the Prophet.”

Pope Francis Dead at 88

I have issued some trenchant statements over the years about the late Pope Francis, but for now my watchword is: de mortuis nil nisi bonum.  I will only add that in the wee hours of yesterday's vigil, before I became aware of Francis's passing,  I was re-reading Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger's 1968 Introduction to Christianity in pursuit of the question lately raised about the meaning of "My kingdom is not of this world." (John 18:36) I was once again impressed by the power and penetration of the thinking of the man who later became Pope Benedict XVI. As I was admiring Ratzinger's philosophical and theological 'chops,' I thought disparagingly of the pope now passed.

Our friend Vito Caiati sent me this morning a rather more incisive  take on the late pope.

I would like to share my thoughts on the current reaction to the death of Pope Francis, which I find worrisome and which reminded me of some advice of Montaigne on speaking of the powerful after death.

He writes:

“Among the laws that relate to the dead, it seems to me very sound those by which the actions of princes are to be examined after their decease. They are equals with, if not masters of the laws, and what justice could not inflict upon their heads [persons], it is reason that it should be executed upon their reputations and the estates of their successors—things that we often value above life itself” (Les essais de Montaigne, v.1, c 3 [my translation]).

All over X, yesterday and this morning, the whitewashing of Pope Francis, by his ideological allies and his “conservative” critics alike, continues unabated. Very few voices—most notably that of Archbishop Viganò*—dare to speak the truth, for self-interest and cowardice continue to rule. So, I ask: After twelve years of deceit, heresy, repression, and scandal, must we now also bear this mindless outpouring of fallacious sentiment, much of it nothing but deception, about this malevolent and destructive man? Rather on these days of all days, must we not, if “justice” is to be served, speak the truth about the grave harms he inflicted on the faithful and the Church?  If truth is not told, the current wave of historical eradication, both that purposely propagated by the leftist, doctrinally tainted episcopate installed by Bergoglio and that arising from the unreflective sentimentality of the masses, may well result in the irredeemable upending of the RCC, which is already in a perilous state of decline.   

 Vito

 * https://x.com/CarloMVigano/status/1914273114587824193

 

Politics by Assassination, Anyone?

Von Clausewitz held that war is politics pursued by other means. What I call the Converse Clausewitz Principle holds equally: politics is war pursued by other means. David Horowitz, commenting on "Politics is war conducted by other means," writes:

In political warfare you do not just fight to prevail in an argument, but rather to destroy the enemy's fighting ability.  Republicans often seem to regard political combats as they would a debate before the Oxford Political Union, as though winning depended on rational arguments and carefully articulated principles.  But the audience of politics is not made up of Oxford dons, and the rules are entirely different.

You have only thirty seconds to make your point.  Even if you had time to develop an argument, the audience you need to reach (the undecided and those in the middle who are not paying much attention) would not get it.  Your words would go over some of their heads and the rest would not even hear them (or quickly forget) amidst the bustle and pressure of everyday life.  Worse, while you are making your argument the other side has already painted you as a mean-spirited, borderline racist controlled by religious zealots, securely in the pockets of the rich.  Nobody who sees you in this way is going to listen to you in any case.  You are politically dead.

Politics is war.  Don't forget it. ("The Art of Political War" in Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey Spence 2003, pp. 349-350)

A semantic stretch is involved in Horowitz's "Politics is war." On a very strict definition of 'war,' war is only between states.  To put it pedantically, the only admissible values of the variables x, y in 'x is at war with y' are states. If so, there cannot be a war on drugs, on terror, on Christmas, a war between political factions or parties, between sub-state entities, or between a sub-state entity such as Hamas and a state such as Israel.

Critical thinking requires close attention to extended (stretched) uses of terms. Nevertheless, some semantic extensions are justified: politics is sufficiently like war to be called war.  In war sensu stricto assassination is often justified. 

This brings me to Luigi Mangione and his (alleged)  assassination of Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Health Care.  Mangione has been charged with the premeditated murder of Thompson whom he shot in the back, not for personal reasons, but for political ones. So, with a bit of a stretch, we may call Mangione's (alleged) killing of Thompson a case of political assassination, despite the fact that Thompson was not a politician.

Now to the point: if you have no problem with Mangione's deed, then, by parity of reasoning, you should have no problem  with some right-winger assassinating U. S. District Judge James Boasberg.  Recall:

Mr. Trump signed a proclamation under the Alien Enemies Act last month, claiming that Tren de Aragua is "perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion" against the U.S. and declaring that all members of the gang in the U.S. unlawfully were subject to immediate detention and removal. [. . .] 

The day after Mr. Trump's proclamation, five Venezuelan nationals who were being held at a detention center in Texas filed a lawsuit that alleged Mr. Trump's invocation of the Alien Enemies Act violated the terms of the law and asked a federal district court in Washington, D.C., to block their removals.

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg swiftly agreed to stop their deportations for 14 days and later expanded his temporary order to prohibit the administration from removing all noncitizens in U.S. custody who are subject to Mr. Trump's proclamation.

So: Do you have a problem with assassinating U. S. District Judges who unconstitutionally presume to put themselves about the duly-elected Commander-in-Chief who quite reasonably ordered the deportation of vicious Tren de Aragua illegal aliens?  I do! 

This is why I consider the death penalty to be what justice demands in the Mangione case, should he be convicted.  If he is found guilty, he should be made an example of and executed within a 'reasonable' period of time (two years?), time enough for a 'reasonable' number of appeals (two? three?).  I'm all for due process and the presumption of innocence.

We are doomed if we do not take a strong stand against  assassination.

Unfortunately, a majority of leftists, according to this article, think political assassination is a societal good. Excerpt:

Before the 21st century, Democrats were mostly working- and middle-class Americans who believed in the rule of law and loved America. The murderous ones—the violent Black Panthers and Weathermen—existed on the fringe. Now, though, the fringe has moved to the heart of the Democrat party, which is a death cult. And like all death cults, it’s requiring greater sacrifices. The latest manifestation is that a majority of self-identified leftists believe that assassinating people for political ends (e.g., Donald Trump and Elon Musk) is fully justified.

One of the things that radical Muslims and leftists have in common is that they are death cults. The Islamic penchant for rape, torture, and murder on gleefully sadistic scales (e.g., the Yazidis, Israelis, and Christians in Africa) speaks for itself. However, we in the West have been indoctrinated not to recognize the Democrat death cult for what it is.

To the leftist fools who call for political assassinations, whether in plain English, or under cover of such formulations as "Take down Elon Musk," I say:  Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind! (Hosea 8:7)

Related:  Paul Gottfried, On Democratic Party Violence

MACGA: Make the Continent Great Again!

Europe has lost its collective mind. The UK is especially troubling:

The University of Oxford, one of the most revered and historic institutions of higher learning in the world, has requested that Oxford city council officials add the names of five soldiers who fought against Great Britain in the First World War to a memorial honoring Britain’s war dead. You cannot make this up.

The five individuals – Oxford alumni all – include three individuals born on German territory, one born on Hungarian soil, and another born in Poland. They all fought against the Allied armies in World War I, but will nonetheless be "honored" alongside Britain’s war dead. Talk about losing the plot.

My maternal grandfather, of Hungarian birth, fought in the Austro-Hungarian army as a forward artillery observer in the First World War. He survived the war, but had he not, I would never expect his name to be added to a monument honoring the casualties of Britain in the Great War.

This bizarre news comes on the heels of real "progressive" depredations on European "values" – those old-fashioned things like freedom of speech, democratically elected officials and so on. In a case of political persecution via the judiciary, remarkably similar to what Donald Trump suffered at the hands of numerous U.S. courts, a French court sentenced the most popular French politician and likely future French President, Marine Le Pen, to four years in prison for alleged improper use of European Union funds. The case revolved around the conservative populist Le Pen and other members of her National Rally party using funds from the EU to allegedly improperly reimburse aides for political work. Le Pen and her colleagues denied all along that they did anything improper. Le Pen was sentenced to four years, with two years likely to be suspended and the other two years requiring an ankle bracelet and no incarceration.

If Trump Wins, the Left is Prepared to Intensify the War

Yesterday's Substack entry ended as follows:

Whatever the outcome on 5 November, the war will continue, intensify, and become increasingly ‘existential.’ That is to say: it will become less verbal, less cultural, [i.e., less like a mere culture war'] hotter, and more like a real war. The conflict unto death in which we are currently embroiled is deeply rooted in philosophical soil. To borrow the title of Thomas Sowell’s great 1987 book, it is A Conflict of Visions.

It appears that Trump has a good chance of winning. Our political enemies, of course, will not accept that result since they reject the American constitutional republic which makes provision for a  peaceful transfer of power. Aiming at a "fundamental transformation of America," in Barack Hussein Obama's phrase, they are out to overturn our system of government. But being the stealth ideologues that they are, they will not 'own their intentions,' which is to say: they will not plainly state their plans. This is why Comrade Kamala utters  the most vacuous of phrases when she is not outright lying. She comes across as an airhead, but she is less of a an airhead than she appears. She is a crafty political operator, not unlike Pelosi who also adopts the persona (mask) of the harmless dingbat. Kamala signals to her leftist base with the assurance that "my values haven't changed." She is assuring them that despite all the empty rhetoric, outright lies, and apparent reversals of position, she is still the same old hard-Left political Californicator she always was.

To appreciate the gravity of the situation and the danger we are in I refer you to Is the Left Preparing for War if Trump Wins? It begins:

The propaganda campaign labeling Donald Trump as an aspiring dictator determined to use the military and national security apparatus against his political opponents is designed not to affect the upcoming election but rather to shape the post-election environment. It is the central piece of a narrative that, by characterizing Trump as a tyrant (indeed likening him to Hitler), establishes the conditions for violence — not just another attempt on Trump’s life, but political violence on a massive scale intended to destabilize the country. 

As I write in my forthcoming book Disappearing the President, Democratic Party research and media reports show that many senior party officials and operatives are preparing for the possibility of a Trump victory. Accordingly, planning is focused on undermining the incoming president with enough violence to rock his administration. Prominent post-election scenarios forecast such widespread rioting that the newly elected president would be compelled to invoke the Insurrection Act. With some senior military officials refusing to follow Trump’s orders, according to the scenarios, the U.S. Armed Forces would split, leaving America on the edge of the abyss. 

Kamala the Destroyer

Tom Klingenstein understands what's going on:

Republicans criticize Kamala Harris for refusing to reveal her agenda, but, as Frank Cannon points out, she already has. Her agenda is the agenda of her vice-presidential pick, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota — someone Harris “ loves,” as she said recently. Unlike Kamala, Walz’s agenda and his beliefs are out there for all to see. He supports the full belief system of what I am calling “Kamalism”: a utopian society, today nominally led by Kamala, based on equal group outcomes. 

Admitting people to college or flight training school (or anything else) based on quotas is the essence of the destructive Left’s “social justice,” which is utterly irreconcilable with American justice, which is based on individual merit. Because these are two understandings of justice (as occurred in the Civil War) it’s one or the other, group quotas or merit. A house divided against itself cannot stand; it will be all one thing to another. Not to put too fine a point on it: Kamalism must try to destroy America (and of course the reverse: we must try to save it). So, let’s frame the election: “Kamalism versus America.”

This is by far the most important aspect of this election. One candidate wants to destroy our country ; the other wants to save it. This seems to me what virtually every politician misses. This election should not primarily be about immigration or crime or inflation or anything else Republican and Democrat politicians talk about. It should be about whether to elect a woman who wants to destroy America or a man who wants to improve it. But it isn’t. If we are to save America we must make the election about this choice, for every voter, right up until Election Day. 

The 2020 Theft Saved the Country

The argument of this article goes through even if the 2020 election was not stolen from Trump. Biden's reversal of Trump's good works has exposed the thoroughly depredatory nature of our political enemies and has galvanized Trump and his supporters. The Orange Man has learned a lot in the interim.  First-rate ass-kickers have joined his team, Elon Musk and J. D. Vance to mention but two. His four-year sabbatical has done him good.  Compare Vance to Pence to get a sense of what I mean.

I find it hard to avoid schadenfreude when I think of the pain of leftists, whether full-on Dementocrats or RINO-cratic fellow travelers.   So, to rub it in: if you depredatory chucklephucks hadn't opposed Trump with your vicious lies and dirty tricks, you would be done with him in four months. 

Some say that Trump is 'divisive.' Here is my 26 August 2017 rebuttal:

To say of Trump or anyone that he is divisive is to say that he promotes  division. But there is no need to promote it these days since we already have plenty of it. We are a deeply and perhaps irreparably divided nation.  So it is not right to say that Trump is divisive: he is standing on one side of an already existing divide.

Trump did not create the divide between those who stand for the rule of law and oppose sanctuary cities, porous borders, illegal immigration and irresponsibly lax legal immigration policies.  What he did is take up these issues fearlessly, something his milque-toast colleagues could not bring themselves to do.  

And he has met with some success: illegal immigration is down some 50%. 

So-called 'liberals' and their RINO pals call him a bigot, a racist, a xenophobe. That they engage in this slander shows that the nation is bitterly divided over fundamental questions. It also shows what kind of people our political enemies are. 

Too often journalistic word-slingers shoot first and ask questions never. Wouldn't it be nice if they thought before their lemming-like and knee-jerk deployment of such adjectives as 'divisive'?

Language matters.

We are in deep trouble as a country, and as a consequence, the world is as well.  The fight for civilization is only just beginning.