by Cauf Skiviers, Cultural Inappropriation, ©2023
(Jul. 3, 2023) —
“Nature abhors a vacuum.”
Aristotle
The French Revolution was remarkably inspired by the American Revolution, but the two movements led to very different outcomes. The American Revolution was a success that led to peace, democracy, prosperity, and freedom. On the other hand, the French Revolution was a failure that led to war, dictatorship, imperialism, and genocide.
It was only in the aftermath of World War II, after roughly two centuries of wars against the rest of Europe, that France was relieved of its curse. Charles De Gaulle and the Fifth Republic had a vision to restore the greatness of France as a leader of a “Europe of Nations.“
However, that didn’t last long. France’s embrace of the European Project — which significantly accelerated after the fall of the Berlin Wall — replaced it with the vision of a chimera that would turn the Fifth Republic into the Fourth Reich. Standing in the way of that vision was the most important thing that European countries shared in common: Christianity.
The France that burns today is the same France that warned us of the dangers of Christian Nationalism a few decades ago, failing to see it was its last line of defence. Although it appears on the surface that the riots are a response to the shooting of a young man of African descent during a traffic stop, there’s much more to it. Even though the scripts are similar, the BLM riots in the US were fires raging on green wood. The fires raging in France are feeding on dry wood that has been strategically placed, almost like a sleeping cell.
Submission
“Islam is politics or it is nothing.”
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini
The first time I was in Paris was about 15 years ago. Ever since then, I have visited roughly every year; this year alone, I’ve been there twice. The first time, back in April, the country was paralysed due to the pension reform strike. Last month, I was there on the day of the Annecy attack. It is a society convulsing in plain sight, which you can clearly see when you look through the wall of bulletproof glass that was installed around the Eiffel Tower by 2018.
There’s no more skilled diagnoses of the French social convulsions than those by writer Michel Houellebecq (hence the importance of fiction over news and political analysis). It has become commonplace to point at the dystopic, Islamised France he described in his 2014 book Submission (Islam means ‘submission’ in Arabic) as a prophecy in the process of coming true.
In Houellebecq’s book (which is set in 2022), a coalition of Islamist and leftist parties comes together to defeat the threat of Marine Le Pen in a general election. However, if you are a raging Islamophobe, the book will disappoint you. This is because the Islamisation of France is just part of the landscape in Submission, much like it is now when you think about Annecy or the current riots.
To make it clear, Houellebecq breaks his own rule of naming his protagonists after himself as sort of alter-egos. The protagonist is not a Michel but a François, which means Frenchman in French, naturally. The book is about the life of a regular Frenchman during the beginning of speculative Islamic rule.
François lives a hedonistic life, detached from any religious morals or any sort of spirituality. He is a literature professor at Sorbonne (the French equivalent of Harvard), an expert on his own taxonomy, who paradoxically has no deep interest in politics.
The conflicts between a rapidly decaying, modern France, already divorced from its founding values of Catholicism, and Islam is nothing new in French literature. But it has evolved from the blasé astonishment of Albert Camus to the cultural pessimism of Houellebecq and Éric Zemmour (a French Jewish writer and former presidential candidate).
Near the end of Submission, François is summoned by the new Director of Sorbonne, recently appointed to accelerate the Islamisation of the university (mind you, Sorbonne is already partially funded by Saudi Arabia — I mean, in real life — of course, the funders of 9/11 were based there as well). He is told to choose between converting to Islam or resigning from his post.
While François is portrayed as virtually apolitical, many of his peers supported the coalition of Islam-leftists to defeat Le Pen, in a rather smooth process that evolved gradually. This is not unlike the ideals of Socialist Fabianism.
At the surface level, they seem like strange bedfellows. But when you consider that the Left fashions themselves as democratic, but praises dictatorships; they say they are for sexual diversity, but Marx singled out homosexuals as a capitalist perversion and posited that sex must be regulated for procreation; Houellebecq might not be wrong, the Left would embrace Islamic patriarchy if it comes to it.
Read the rest here.