by Andrea Widburg
Currently, my X feed is awash in images of the raging protests across France—the collapsing Limoges town hall, the looted stores, the ascendant Palestinian flags—even as mainstream outlets just fold the news from France into their other stories of the day, just one report among many. This dichotomy makes it hard to tell whether what’s happening is, as the media subliminally suggest, the French being French, as they’ve been periodically over the centuries, or whether we’re seeing the first domino fall, truly presaging the end of once-Christian Europe.
However, I saw one photo that was so stunning that I’m inclined to believe the latter view of events, no matter how much the media suggest that France is simply having its version of our 2020 George Floyd summer—something disruptive, costly, and (for some) deadly, but really just a blip in the life of an otherwise viable country.
Here’s the photo that stopped me in my tracks:
Google translates this as:
For me, this is the most horrifying image of this October 17:
An elderly couple stripped of everything, right in the middle of the street, left half-naked.
As if the pillaged Rolexes, Vuitton, Hermès, Dior, Sephora weren’t enough for resale.
The image that should be a wake-up call for the entire West.
The image of a so-called president who has lost control. Who has utterly failed his people.
The image of a radical left that has sacrificed your own identity to turn your country into a war zone, with cultural backdrops that have nothing to do with yours.
This image is terrifying!
Yes, this image is terrifying. Why? Because it’s about ritually humiliating the population.
While we civilized people may decry it, we all understand what could be termed “routine mob violence,” whether it’s smashing windows, looting (inevitably), setting things on fire, even killing those caught in the mob’s frenzy, etc. (Please note: Understanding does not mean condoning.)
These are the acts of people in a destructive frenzy. Someone or something has activated their limbic system, and they have reverted to purely savage behavior. The point is destruction, with a little profit on the side if you find a nice store or house to loot. Morality, decency, humanity…all have been swept aside in the frenzy of mob-driven insanity.
But stripping ordinary people of their clothes…that’s not mob madness. That is, instead, a very calculated act by which those in power ritually humiliate those whom they intend to destroy. The Nazis routinely did it to those whom they rounded up. People’s clothes are their armor. Strip them of them, whether getting them fully naked or just down to their undergarments, and you have made them emotionally helpless. (Just look at how the Dems humiliated Roger Stone and his wife: No clothes and a conveniently nearby CNN news crew.)
And that gets me to a famous 1941 photo from Lviv (then in Poland; now, in Ukraine). It was taken when Nazis and the local antisemites joined together for the infamous Lviv pogrom. Look at this photo (content warning), and then look at the photo above, and tell me how different they are:
What happened in Lviv began with ritual humiliation; it ended with 4,000-8,000 Jews slaughtered in less than a month. Eventually, the Nazis slaughtered 99% of the Jewish population, which accounted for as much 45% of Lviv’s total population.
Islam and leftism are both conquest-based faiths. Both begin by using Western norms to lever themselves into a base for violence, and then they destroy the societies that incubated them. However, Muslims, wiser than the leftist foot soldiers in the mob, don’t view leftists as their allies. They view them as their useful idiots.
Muslims spout leftist shibboleths while cautioning each other against making themselves impure by breeding with kafirs (unbelievers)—which is essentially what Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed effectively said, albeit cloaked in carefully scientific terms. In France, Muslims rode leftism to population density, used leftist values (school protests) to activate the mob, and then waved the real flag:
Whether events in France are “merely” scattered but violent protests across a large country, or the first domino falling across Western Europe, is just a matter of degree: the Muslims have staked their claim. It’s not about schools. It’s not about Israel. It is about civilizational conquest, and unless Macron does more than spout banal platitudes, Europe’s end is near.