Two years ago, a group of retired French generals gave scandal by publishing an open letter warning the Macron government that it was setting France up for civil war with its softness on both ‘wokeness’ and radical Islam.
[I]f nothing is done, laxity will continue to spread inexorably in society, ultimately causing an explosion and the intervention of our active comrades in a perilous mission to protect our civilizational values and safeguard our compatriots on national territory. We see there is no longer time to procrastinate, otherwise tomorrow the civil war will put an end to this growing chaos, and the deaths, for which you will bear responsibility, will number in the thousands.
The French government criticized these generals as out of line, which prompted a follow-up letter from active-duty soldiers, writing anonymously in defense of the older ones. Those soldiers said that decline such as they were seeing in France “precedes collapse,” and that the real threat to France was not from military men speaking out, but from “civil insurrection.”
Last week, French authorities banned demonstrations in favor of Hamas. This did not matter; defiant French Muslims massed in public spaces to show support for the murderers of Jews and the Palestinian cause. A friend who returned to Budapest from Paris at week’s end said he observed young Muslim men traveling in packs along the streets, taking pleasure in frightening others with their show of power. All of Paris became a banlieue last week.
It perhaps goes too far to claim that the phrase “lost territories of the Republic”—that is, the Muslim-dominated districts where the laws and culture of France do not in reality apply—applies to the whole of France. But now that Israel’s invasion of Gaza has begun, let’s ask ourselves again at the end of this week.
The shocking display of Jew hatred and contempt for Western civilization and its values by Muslim masses and leftist supporters must not be understood in isolation. The idiocy of the lies we have been telling ourselves about the nature of the Left and its sacred causes is now being laid bare. So too—let’s be honest—is the fecklessness of the Right, which failed repeatedly to stand up effectively to these monsters.
Many American liberals have been shocked to see various Black Lives Matter chapters around the country openly express solidarity with Hamas, even before the Jewish blood had dried in the towns and kibbutzes near Gaza. They shouldn’t have been. BLM and other black organizations have long been on the side of Palestinians against Israel, which they consider to be an apartheid state. Despite what the once-respectable Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is now saying—that black backing of Hamas is limited to “fringe groups”—the alliance is actually old and deep. Here is what a black member of Congress, a member of the grouping of left-wing female member called ‘The Squad,’ said during the last round of major fighting between Israel and Hamas:
The ADL is trying to save face. It has been a total supporter of BLM, and now can’t cope with the fact that it signed on with people who celebrate the slaughter of Jews. The cognitive dissonance that the ADL and other liberal Jews are struggling with now is no surprise to conservatives. We saw the movement for fair treatment for blacks at the hands of police officers—something all decent people should support—quickly become a cover for black criminal violence. Any lies that need to be told to uphold the left-wing narrative are justified.
And so, Michael Brown, the shoplifting thug from Ferguson, Missouri, who died attempting to wrest a white cop’s gun from his hand (this, according to an Obama Justice Department investigation), became the martyred gentle giant shot dead while surrendering, pleading, “Hands up, don’t shoot!” The days of rioting and looting that followed in Ferguson were, according to the Narrative, justified ‘rebellion’ against racist overlords.
According to the Left’s narrative, George Floyd, the drug addict who died with fatal levels of fentanyl in his body and a police officer’s knee on his neck, cannot in any way be responsible for his sad fate. Despite the fact that police body cameras showed officers struggling for eleven minutes peacefully with the disorderly and drugged Floyd to get him into a police car, the fault for Floyd’s death lay entirely with the police. To be clear, police brutality should not be tolerated. The point here is that the Left’s concept of Oppressed vs. Oppressor irons out all human complexities, to create politically useful narratives.
After Floyd’s death, of course, riots broke out all over America—riots that some in the media characterized, once again, as “rebellion.” American elites, including business elites, went into total moral collapse, and stampeded towards showing their solidarity with BLM through conspicuous display of signs, and more substantively, by embracing anti-white hiring practices and internal policies to propagandize their employees into embracing the left-wing Narrative.
Since then, BLM has fallen into disgrace, as it emerged that its founders spent millions on luxury properties. Ibram X. Kendi, the guru of ‘anti-racism,’ has also fallen on hard times, as his lavishly-funded Center for Antiracism Research at Boston University was exposed for burning through tens of millions of donated dollars since its 2020 founding, with nothing to show for it. It was a very successful grift.
Meanwhile, the dominance of the Left’s race narrative in American life, and the timidity of the Right in challenging it, has led to an explosion of violent crime post-2020. As usual with crime in America, both the criminals and the victims are disproportionately black. Now, though, Americans daily see videos of mobs of young black people openly shoplifting from stores, while employees—usually following corporate policy—stand by helplessly.
Unable to absorb the cost of criminality, stores are closing all over, especially in black neighborhoods, where ordinary people depend on them. The actions of the criminal few hurt the law-abiding many, but somehow, the U.S. media and leftist thought leaders never make that connection.
Similarly, they rarely (if ever) point out that the Palestinians suffer in large part because Hamas murders Israelis. We are told, for example, that Israel has turned Gaza into a “prison” through its semi-blockade since Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from the territory. Why would Israel do such a thing? To keep weapons out. To prevent Hamas from doing the kind of thing it did on October 7.
Then again, we are told by anti-racism educators that “cause and effect” reasoning is a characteristic of whiteness. Until it withdrew the teaching document under criticism, the Smithsonian Institution’s museum of African-American history in Washington told us so:
The point is this: under the Narrative, favored minority victim groups—black Americans, Palestinians—cannot fail; they can only be failed. In the state of Oregon last week, the state Board of Education unanimously recommended that legislators remove both literacy and mathematics proficiency requirements for high school graduation. Why? Because expecting high school graduates to be able to read, to write, and to do basic math is racist against people of color.
Most major American cities, even in red states like Texas, are governed by the Left, owing in large part to the concentration of racial minorities there, as well as white liberals. It is no coincidence, then, that these cities are struggling with overwhelming problems with drug-addicted homeless people. And, these places for years touted themselves as ‘sanctuary cities,’ where illegal migrants could go and enjoy protection from law enforcement. Now, though, with governors from states near the U.S.-Mexico border transferring some of these migrants directly to New York City and other liberal metropolises, mayors are pleading for help as they are having to pay the hard cost of their easy virtue.
Of course both Britain and Europe have to deal with their own versions of the same problems. This past summer, a seminar at the Sorbonne on the transgender issue at which I was supposed to speak had to be scaled back in the face of threats by trans defenders at the university. At the lone talk organizers chose to stage, trans demonstrators slung paint on participating professors. ‘Wokeness’ knows no borders. Even here in Hungary, which is largely immune to the madness, a left-wing district mayor in the capital erected an American-themed antiracism, pro-LGBT monument in 2021. When asked what Hungary has to do with America’s problems, the city official said we all have a responsibility to be on the right side of history.
The same UK police who have arrested people in the recent past for misgendering trans persons or for praying silently near abortion clinics have been extremely tolerant of public Islamic calls to harm Jews. It is a shocking disgrace, but it reveals who has the real power in contemporary Britain. Several British friends shared with me in recent days their despair over whether the UK even has the wherewithal to confront the Left. The weakness of the authorities in the face of hysterical Muslim anti-Semitism was a true ‘blackpill’ moment for them. Last week, I had drinks in Budapest with a British man in town looking for a bolthole to which his family can escape when things go belly-up in his native land. That’s how bad it is.
The examples are endless. The pro-Hamas mass demonstrations only bring the meaning of ‘wokeness’ and decadence to a sharp point. We in the West, especially our leadership classes—in the state, the media, academia, business, the church, and others—have allowed things to get this far.
We permitted, and still permit, particularly in Europe, mass migration of people from Muslim countries who hold what we might delicately call strongly ‘anti-liberal’ views. Even Pope Francis, presiding over the death of Christianity in Europe, and in the face of ongoing Islamic pogroms against Christians in Nigeria, mindlessly calls on Europe to open its doors even wider to alien migrants. The one European leader who has spoken out most forcefully on the issue—Hungary’s Viktor Orban—has been widely demonized by Europe’s governing and media class, for whom he is a scapegoat for their own colossal failures.
By failing to defend classical liberal values, we permitted, and still permit, racist opinions to enter mainstream discourse. Everybody knows that law, medicine, and academia have surrendered to the barbaric philosophy of ‘wokeness.’ Migrants to the West from the Soviet world have been saying for years that what is emerging in the West is totalitarian, but nobody cared to listen. Even the respectable Right has fallen in line, mostly, I suspect, out of fear that to tell the truth about what’s happening would mean damaging one’s career prospects in professional worlds controlled by the ‘woke.’
I recently suggested to a prominent Washington-based Republican pollster that the reason GOP politicians at the national level rarely criticize the illiberal, even totalitarian, policies of the ‘woke’ regarding race and sexual orientation is that they are afraid of the media and the wealthy donors who contribute to the party. Yes, he said, that’s the truth. One is reminded of a passage from the memoirs of Pyotr Wrangel, a Tsarist general who returned from the disastrous front in 1916 to find bourgeois and noble Russians in St. Petersburg wearing red ribbons signifying their solidarity with the coming Bolshevik revolution. They could not imagine that the radicals would eventually come for them.
There is no excuse now not to know. The evidence of what we in the West have done, and our cowardice, is now visible on the streets. The revolt of the elites, the class tasked with administering our societies, has left us all vulnerable to the barbarians inside the gates. In her classic work The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt said that one reason both Germany and Russia embraced totalitarianism is because the elites in both countries did not mind sacrificing the pillars of civilization for the fun of watching the formerly excluded rush in and take power. We are once again living that out. To Europe’s immense shame, once again, for the second time in less than a century, Jews here have to fear for their lives.
The same Muslims and white leftists untroubled by the bellies of Jewish mothers slit by Hamas militants will come for the rest of us next. They all live by the radical left’s Marxist-Leninist principles that say first, anything is permitted as long as it advances the revolution, and second, the morality of an act depends on who is doing it to whom. That radical view has now overtaken mainstream left-wing discourse. Polls showing pro-Hamas sympathy among young adults in the West are consonant with previous surveys showing that what older people dismiss as ‘wokeness’ is now the majority view in the rising generation.
If the West somehow gets through the coming weeks without our cities burning at the hands of rioting Muslims, we will still have to face an even more fundamental crisis: that the lost territories of the West are not Paris suburbs or Trafalgar Square, but the hearts and minds of an entire generation. The mainstream left-of-center parties and cultural leaders have advanced this revolution, and their right-wing counterparts, terrified of being called bigots, have been cowed into feeble resistance. It turns out that the ‘Great Replacement’ is not only about mass migration, but also about the conquering of the soul of the West by an ideology that is leading to the only place it ever could: to civilizational suicide.
This might be our last chance. What will we do? If what remains of the West is to survive, then we must accept that we have neither the luxury of time, nor the luxury of despair. The French generals and soldiers dismissed so arrogantly by the government viewed things more clearly than those watching from the Élysée. Now, nobody with eyes to see can deny the reality.
And we must not be so foolish as to forget that the Nazi-like barbarism we have all seen manifest on the streets of our capitals these past couple of weeks is not merely an Islamic thing, or a migrant thing, but the blossoming of evil flowers that could only have grown in cultural soil made rich with leftist manure.