* That Spaniard, Manuel Valls, knows full well that civil war – fought on racial lines – is more or less inevitable to occur on the territory occupied by European France, at some in determinant time in the future.
It is *inevitable* that France will end up as a majority black/brown Muslim dominated state.
Knowing the national character of the indigenous French, it is also very likely that the indigenous French will launch some kind of aggressive counterattack.
Valls knows this. The entirety of the French political class knows this. After all, they created and nurtured this situation for decades. They also know that they will likely be dead once it comes to pass.
Thus, they ‘can’t help’ but to let it slip sometimes. It’s all about Freudian projection and suppressed guilt and fear.
* Also worth bearing in mind a few differences between France and the US: France has maybe 10x as many Muslims as a % of its population, it’s more confident in the supremacy of its national culture, and its not as concerned about civil liberties in law enforcement.
* I am surprised Marine Le Pen is as successful as she is. Some time ago she gave an interview with the BBC in which they asked her what her response was to those calling her a fascist and a racist. In her reply she denied these charges, said she wasn’t a racist. She ought to have just said what she stood for, “To those who say I am a racist, I say that I stand for the right of France to retain its French character, for…” Or whatever she stands for. Trump would have had better instincts. Don’t apologise. Don’t fight on the battlefield chosen by the enemy. How are these things not obvious? I hope Trump’s example will serve as a lesson.
* Virtually the entire French establishment — media, intelligentsia, the other parties — are arrayed against the FN. Talk about ‘negative’ campaigning — it’s nothing but, 24/7 — the BBC never runs an article about the FN where they fail to refer to the party as “far-right”, a term as loaded as they get.
* French online magazine published a call – since removed – from a guy called Thierry Lecoquierre for right wing French women to be raped by “Blacks, Arabs, Gypsy people”.
Hopefully that will backfire and help the polling.
* An obscene tweet was posted by a doctor three days ago at the Twitter page of the left-wing journal Le Nouvel Observateur. It was quickly removed but Le Salon Beige managed to get a copy. It calls for the rape and impregnating by blacks of all those who sympathize with the Front National, and it is difficult to translate because of its obscenity. Here’s the general idea:
FN sympathizers assuredly provide us with sticks to beat them with. Since they like boots and macho, and loathe feminist ideas, let’s play their game: let’s beat them with our sticks (Note: “stick” refers to male genitals)… Let’s take them at their word, let’s just take them. Since they give us the recipe for mongrelizing the Blue Marine, let’s use it against her camp. Let’s dominate sexually the brainless little “frontists” (i.e., members of the Front National); let’s get them pregnant without hesitation for the survival of a smiling humanity. Since they are dumb and collapse easily before a deep argument, like woodcocks attracted to the hunter’s trigger, it should be easy. Let’s build a fuzzy-haired progeny (I was going to say curly, but I got scared!) for the party of the extreme right; let’s make a fuzzy chignon for those who say “France for the French”, terrorized by differences.
* A question about Houellebecq: How good is he (in French)? Or is his artistic advantage that he’s a fairly explicit Man of the Right in an era when other male top writers (e.g., David Foster Wallace) were in the closet about being rightists?
* FN has never been very good at politics, in addition to not having run anything. They have always reminded me of the American Paulist/Lew Rockwell/Libertarian types who seem to invest more in being weird for the sake of being weird than in learning how to be good at politics. My sense with FN is that the way to make them go away is let them win an election. Even running a small town would be enough to discredit them forever.
That’s what I find fascinating about Team Trump. They seem to be good at politics, despite their man’s grating style. Their manipulation of the free media has been as masterful as you will ever see in American politics. Progressives are the gold standard, but they own the megaphones.
Team Trump is using the tactics of the Progressives. David Horowitz has written a lot about how radicals have a different way of understanding the world. That even though he has left the movement, he still sees the world as a radical seed it. Whittaker Chambers wrote similarly about communism.
The Muslim business is a great example. Instead of trying to fit the events into his immigration proposals, Trump takes what’s there to shift the debate in his direction. If a nation is willing to debate a ban on Muslim immigration, it can debate bans on all other types of immigration so he spends some capital on getting the media to legitimize the debate.
It’s the same dynamic we saw with gay marriage, except that was orchestrated by the party and the media in a coordinated effort. Team Trump is doing this from outside the walls which is not something we have seen in our lifetimes.
* I’m sure most iSteve readers have noticed the tendency of the media to select unflattering photographs of nationalist politicians, poor Nick Griffin has one glass eye so they always managed to find a picture in which his eyes are pointing in different directions, I don’t recall seeing a bad photo of Marine Le Pen, however. What’s up with that?
* Except that Marine Le Pen is not well-regarded among the hardcore nationalists of the FN, whether Poujadist or Legitimist (her niece Marion is however very well-regarded by the traditional party cadres), especially since she cooperated in ousting her father earlier this year. I argued to a friend, “She’s not a nationalist; she betrayed her father and she’ll betray her country. The third commandment comes before the fifth; in my mind what she did was worse than murder.”
And I assure you it all goes far, far beyond some latter-day Ligue Catholique faction plotting in the midst of a last gasp attempt to put the Guise family on the throne. The general consensus among people “like us” in France is that she takes us for granted, knowing the only other option is the former UMP which with its new name “Les Républicains” does not seduce any nostalgic of imperial or regal glory. Her line of thought has been described in the mainstream press as a “cynical Gaullist co-optation,” though that’s not quite correct: notwithstanding her praises for Charles de Gaulle himself and her policy proposals which on reflection could fit into theirs, she does not hide her contempt for his protégés and political descendants. (On this point I have to agree with her, albeit with some qualifications.)
Meanwhile, her right-hand man, the flamboyant Florian Philippot (well-surrounded I might add by the passive would-be pénétrés of the FNJ) is a former protégé of the socialist-sovereignist Jean-Pierre Chevènement (who is little more than a dinosaur of old inter-war Radical nostalgia) willing to say or do anything to eat away at the left’s working class vote, admirably in one sense but without regard for the future cost of certain moves.
I definitely want Marion to win in PACA. I won’t be too upset if her aunt or Philippot lose in their respective fiefs.
* He’s bringing up civil war because he knows his people will start it in order to disempower the FN.
I know little about France but I know the analogous situation here would end very, very poorly for the left.
If leftists started a civil war against Trump supporters, it wouldn’t last all that long unless the police and military took the left’s side, which is unlikely.
* Compare and contrast these two clips, the opening of the 2012 London Olympics, and the opening of the 2014 Sochi Olympics.
vice
(I just went with the first two short clips that came up for me searching “opening ceremony year place Olympics.”)
* I’m really glad other people have picked up on this. Those two opening ceremonies really neatly capture the difference between the eastern and western parts of what we used to call Christendom and now has no name. London’s ceremony was a sort of secular black mass meant to make us delight in witnessing a self-hating and dying culture while Sochi’s depicts a nation that’s been through hell but is getting back up again and starting to find its stride.
* From my reading of “Submission,” I understand Houellebecq as suggesting that Islam (at least in the novel) does not really put an end to Western civ, but rather provides a more vigorous, confident religious underpinning for Europe, once the social power of Christianity has evaporated.
My sense is that the civilizational “identity” of Europe is revealed by Houellebecq to be the Roman Empire–which can flourish in a pagan, Christian, and the projected Islamic form. It needs religion to sustain itself; but the religious underpinning is irrelevant doctrinally, so long as it promotes social cohesion and a “thick,” believable moral environment.
A key political fact in the book (which I found tremendously enjoyable) is that while the Socialist alliance brings the Moslem Brotherhood to power, all of the latter’s enthusiasts, and its most powerful actors, are associated with the French right. They seem to embrace Islam as the pathway–perhaps the last one left–to renewing French greatness, and perpetuating the big European idea envisioned by Augustus, Charles Martel, and now Ben Abbes.
* I wonder if the backlash against Trump’s call for a moratorium on Muslim immigration could lead to a less discriminatory call for a moratorium on all immigration? That would be a happy improvement.
* Everyone knows that if you don’t support the right of every person in the US to immigrate to the United States, you are literally Hitler and should be opposed by any means necessary.
* Why do nationalists — National Front, Stormfront — use “front” in their names? It reinforces the idea they are composed of warmongers and brownshirted thugs. They need a name with warm, positive associations. Instead of National Front, maybe something like the Brie Society (La société de brie).
* Even the world’s premier globalist propaganda organ, The Economist, concedes that the 11 towns with National Front mayors are very well run – as are towns with minor party rightwing mayors, such as Orange under the leadership of Jacques Bompard.
* I’ve noticed this strange phenomenon of dubious arguments for good policies being more acceptable/effective than good arguments.
Consider the Birther stuff. It’s silly to argue, in the absence of credible evidence, that Obama can’t be President because he wasn’t born in the US. But, as eccentric as it is, it’s based on an explicit constitutional requirement for the presidency, so, as weird as the Birthers’ premise is, their reasoning from that premise is not controversial.
A more accurate statement about Obama is that he is not a member of the American *nation* because of his assiduously cultivated hybrid identity of resentful minority/deracinated SWPL–the Henry Tudor of post-America, as Steve once said. But that hits the Left too close to home, so it’s inadmissible even though it is highly plausible.
Likewise, we have to argue that Mexicans and Muslims are dangerous criminals and therefore must be kept out. Of course, this isn’t true in the vast majority of cases, but it seems to be an effective line, judging by Trump’s great success thus far.
I don’t mean to minimize the reality of Muslim terrorism or Mexican underclass dysfunction in those cases where it exists, but the real reason we want to keep them out is because this is our country, and we want to preserve it for ourselves and our posterity.
Personally, I think this is a sane and normal point of view, but for some reason you can’t actually say that in America, so patriots like Trump have to resort to sensationalistic claims about dangerous foreigners.
* Trump is using the hard boiled everyman shtick he used to great success on The Apprentice. He is playing a role and playing it well, winning the hearts of the dwindling class of real white Americans who still love “baseball, apple pie, hot dogs, and Chevrolet.” It’s deliberately lowbrow. It’s what I like least about him, even though I recognize it for what it is. A kid at the New York Military Academy who spoke as Trump does in this campaign would have had the vulgarity beaten out of him long before being admitted to Fordham and later Wharton. I’ve wondered if before the general election we might see the real Trump seen by his family (all high achievers), friends, and off-camera business associates. But is the risk of alienating his base worth the gains he might make among better educated or cultured voters who don’t already understand his pretensions?
I’d love to be a fly on the wall at President Trump’s first private meeting with President Putin.
* It is ironic that you mention the French as the historical champions of clear prose because 20th century French intellectuals and continental philosophers in general were notoriously known for their obfuscation. (Derrida is the infamous one).
