05/30/2013
While no one is looking, Europe is poised to re-enter History. The Main Stream Media is squabbling about homosexuality, Islam, and unemployment, but at the heart of the Traditionalist specter haunting Europe is the core issue — immigration.
On May 21, 2013, the distinguished French historian and traditionalist activist Dominique Venner committed suicide in the Cathedral de Notre Dame in Paris, occupied France. The media quickly declared that Venner was a fanatical Catholic who had killed himself in order to protest gay marriage, a narrative a typical Huffington Post reader could understand and comfortably denounce. See for example Right-wing historian shoots himself in Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral 'in protest at gay marriage', Daily Mail, May 21, 2013 and Notre Dame Suicide: Far-Right Activist Dominique Venner Reported To Have Shot Himself, Huffington Post, May 21, 2013
In actuality, Venner was a pagan in the mode of Alain de Benoist, a “New Right” intellectual who bemoaned Europe’s lack of an “identitarian” religion and referred to himself as a “French-speaking European.” He saw his death was neither a desecration nor gesture of reactionary self-indulgence but a kind of ritual, an act of supreme self-affirmation and a “[rebellion] against the crime of the replacement of our people.” Notre Dame’s importance was not that it was a cathedral, but that it was that it was a center of an “immemorial” and uniquely European spirituality.
Left wing activists chortled at the death of a hated old white man and “fascist.”[The Fascist History Behind Dominique Venner’s Suicide at Notre Dame, by David Sessions, Daily Beast, May 23, 2013]
The uniquely vile feminist activists of FEMEN openly celebrated his death with a topless protest at the church. Of course, just as they misread Venner’s religion, they misread his intent. Homosexual “marriage” in France, is, as Venner stated, a red herring. Within decades, the new Islamic population the Republic seems determined to import will do more to homosexuals then just put them in the closet.
The issue is not gay marriage. It’s the French state’s war on the French nation. The massive street protests rocking the French Republic are not about stopping homosexuality, but about stopping the entire French establishment and its anti-European agenda.
Meanwhile, outright violence has already erupted throughout the Continent. On May 22, Drummer Lee Rigby of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers was butchered and decapitated in broad daylight.
His two killers, Muslims of black African descent, strolled calmly around with knives in hand, giving interviews for 20 minutes, until the police deigned to arrive. “Conservative” Prime Minister David Cameron gave a statement making sure that Islam was not blamed for the attacks — and then went on a Mediterranean vacation. [British P.M. David Cameron takes fire for vacation during terror probe, By Cheryl K. Chumley, The Washington Times, May 27, 2013].
Meanwhile, the police’s concern seems to be the mobilization of the English Defense League in the aftermath of the attacks, as thousands marched in protests, to the scorn of hostile MSM and violent left wing protestors. Police clash with far-right EDL protesters in Woolwich, Daily Telegraph, May 23, 2013
On Memorial Day, British war monuments were defaced and the word ISLAM was painted in triumph. British media speculated that the English Defense League was responsible. "It is unclear whether the vandalism was perpetrated by Muslim protesters — or right-wing groups seeking to inflame anti-Muslim sentiment." [Woolwich Tension: London War Memorials 'Defaced with word Islam', By Gareth Platt, IBTimes UK, May 27, 2013] There have also been reports of other attacks. The police leapt into action — to arrest anyone who says disrespectful things about Islam on Twitter.
Meanwhile, while Conservative Party leaders insult their own followers as “swivel eyed loons,” the United Kingdom Independence Party is slowly gaining strength, now outpolling major parties (and even the Conservatives) in several locations. While UKIP was first organized on the issue of withdrawal from the European Union, both supporters and critics agree that immigration is key to its current success.
The British Establishment’s blithe indifference is not surprising. Cameron is actually one of the founding signatories of the Leftist enforcer group “Unite Against Fascism.”
In Sweden, as of this writing, cities continue to burn as Muslims riot. The police have defined their role as doing “as little as possible” so as to avoid being hit with rocks and antagonizing people. However, the police have found the time to ticket the burned out wrecks of Swedes' cars for illegal parking.
According to some reports, Swedish nationalists have begun taking matters into their own hands to stop the destruction of their cities. This action has finally moved the police into cracking down — on Swedes. Needless to say, the Swedish Left is concerned that Muslim youth have not been given enough opportunity. (Sweden is notoriously famous for its brutal capitalist excesses and nonexistent welfare state.) Swedish libertarians, meanwhile, blindly believe that more immigrants will help the economy. And the Swedish MSM is openly conspiring to sanitize the news.
In France, a soldier was stabbed in the throat by a Muslim. [French soldier stabbed in Paris, By Harriet Alexander, and Peter Allen in Paris, May 25, 2013 ]
Meanwhile, in the wake of Venner’s suicide, French protests by traditionalists have become noticeably more militant, forcing the normally savage French Left onto the defensive. The French government has responded with threats to simply ban the political movements that it does not like.
All of this contrasts with a remarkable passivity in the United States. Though America still has the First Amendment and is not (yet) subject to the frankly tyrannical controls on freedom of speech and political action that the European Union imposes, it has nothing that can compare with the potential of the French Right. The closest thing the Republicans have to a populist right winger, the chameleon Rand Paul, is currently crusading to make sure that Apple never has to pay American taxes on the profits its Chinese coolie labor generates for them.
Although liberal journalists still regularly refer to America’s supposed “Puritanism” regarding homosexuality and frantically denounce the “Religious Right,” even the surrender of the Boy Scouts of America on homosexuality has been greeted largely by shrugs in Conservatism Inc. Instead, the Beltway Right is fixated on the Benghazi and IRS scandals — neither of which seem to bother the American people.
The Beltway Right is altogether unwilling to devote money and resources to putting protesters in the street against Obama’s immigration agenda — even though research suggests that Tea Party rallies had an important impact on the Republicans' 2010 victories.
As the battle on the 2013 Amnesty/ Immigration Surge bill moves to its climax, it’s crucial to understand why “national conservatism,” a conservatism that values national and cultural identity, is essentially unspoken in the US. The answer is (partly) ideological. American political debate has historically been liberal, in the classical sense. But with ethnopolitics becoming the driving force in much of the Western world, liberalism, classical or otherwise, is increasingly irrelevant.
European intellectuals have begun to develop a system of thought in response to the crisis of liberalism, in the European New Right of figures like Alain de Benoist and Dominique Venner. The European Right actually has an intellectual case against egalitarianism and mass immigration — but Americans are reduced to arguing that it costs too much. These ideological differences can be seen at the street level — while French youth occupy mosques and issue a “Declaration of War,” young Americans ostensibly opposed to progressives are mostly concerned with not being seen as “right-wing.”
This doesn’t mean that Europe will triumph and America will not. America has more natural conservatives that any other nation in the Western world. Despite all odds, I believe immigration patriots have reason to be confident as the Amnesty/ Immigration battle is about to begin in June.
However, at a deeper level, American patriots are confused about what they are fighting for, while the Europeans are building movements that have the real potential to overturn the entire system that pushes their replacement.
The Europeans have a greater amount of state repression targeted against them, but they also have a core sense of identity and an ideology beyond the “limited government” mantra that can allow them to respond.
If Europeans are sick, at least they know what disease they have.
In contrast, American conservatives are plagued with tangential issues, farcical outreach to minorities, and intellectual cowardice. The amnesty battle is critical, but it is ultimately defensive.
Whether American patriots meet with victory or defeat in June, events in Europe may tell us more about America’s future than anything coming from the Beltway Right.
James Kirkpatrick travels around the United States looking for a waiter who can speak English.
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