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The Coming of Raspail’s Beast

In fact, the non-Muslims of France are now experiencing what some of their ancestors endured in the days before Charles Martel beat the Muslims back into Spain. Do not expect French politicians (apart from the “extreme right”) to use such language. Interior Minister Sarkozy, after describing the rioters as scum, now declares his government’s eagerness […]

In fact, the non-Muslims of France are now experiencing what some of their ancestors endured in the days before Charles Martel beat the Muslims back into Spain. Do not expect French politicians (apart from the “extreme right”) to use such language. Interior Minister Sarkozy, after describing the rioters as scum, now declares his government’s eagerness to promote civil rights. France, like the countries of North America and Western Europe, is a leftist country, where so-called conservatives talk only of free markets, equality, and economic growth. Only a fascist beast like Jean-Marie Le Pen or Charles de Gaulle would waste time talking about the French nation. Nations, in the eyes of liberals—whether of the Marxist or libertarian stripe (not much difference, actually), are an optical illusion. There is no forest, only trees, and if an entire forest of trees were to disappear while they were not looking, then nothing would happen unless they happened to have an investment—political in the case of Marxists, financial in the case of libertarians—in the place.

To make things worse, the Arab youths, as victims of discrimination, are behaving exactly as leftists think they ought to behave. Imagine you are a French intellectual approaching 60, forever dwelling on the glory days of the student riots in which you and your pals burned cars in 1968. Isn’t this the same scenario? Dispossessed people struggling for freedom and dignity?

In a sense, yes. The riots of ‘68 and ’05 are both outbursts of hooliganism that need to be repressed by the most violent means at the French government’s disposal, but there is a difference. The Marxist students believed in the political violence for the sake of revolution; the Islamic youths believe in violence against infidels for its own sake, as a divinely sanctioned method of dealing with pigs and cattle. I have not talked to Jean Raspail in years, but these riots are, in miniature, the unfolding of his scenario in Camp of the Saints: violent and licentious Third-Worlders whose attacks meet with no resistance from the demoralized self-hating West.

At the heart of the problem is not the teachings of a wicked and stupid religion but the stupid leftism—in both Marxist and classical liberal forms. If you do not believe that there is such a thing as societies or nations, that only contract-making individuals matters, then you will not object when your country is flooded with immigrants who bring an alien and hostile religion. Religion is all bunk, after all, so what difference can a few million Muslims make?

Large nation states, it is true, are the constructs of post-Medieval (dare I say post-Christian?) man, and it is more wholesome to feel a deeper allegiance to Brittany than to France, to South Carolina than to the United States. Nonetheless, in the world in which we find ourselves, nation-states are one of the last bulwarks against a globalism that is bent on destroying all distinctions between man and man (to say nothing of man and woman and man and beast). The result will be a world in which there is no place for us, either as Christians or as people of the West, and there is small consolation in the fact that the liberal-libertarians, whose moral, social, and cultural anarchy got this ball rolling, will be among the first to be eliminated. ~Thomas Fleming

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