The Center Cannot Hold
The center of Western politics is dead, and the ones who killed it are the managerial liberals who lived by lies—and believed their own lies. (That is what Bidan, etc. are trying to make up believe, “you didn’t see what you saw, go back to sleep, Bidan is Sharp as a tack”)
• Rod Dreher — July 1, 20241/3
Until Joe Biden took the stage in last week’s debate with Donald Trump, the most catastrophically stupid presidential political decision of the year was Emmanuel Macron’s calling a snap electionafter the National Rally’s impressive showing in European parliamentary elections. After events over the past few days, it is still uncertain as to which blunder will have been the most consequential. Whatever the outcome, we are all watching corrupt systems collapse in real time. Amid this apocalypse—literally, an unveiling—we are seeing a kind of Reformation, the messy birth of a new order.
This is more the case in France than in the United States. The strong National Rally results in Sunday’s first round of voting occasioned an outpouring on France’s streets that could have been scripted by Camp of the Saints author Jean Raspail.
In some French cities, Antifa and other leftist protesters set fires to express outrage at the results. In Paris, thousands of Islamists and leftists rallied against the ‘far right.’ Look at this clip captured by Luc Auffret. In this vast left-wing crowd, some protesters have raised various standards—the flag of Palestine, the flag of Pride, and so forth—but notice: you cannot see a single French tricolor there.
Compare this to the image from a National Rally victory party on Sunday. Thousands upon thousands of French voters waving the tricolor, and singing the Marseillaise.What does the contrast tell you? It hardly needs elaboration, does it?Among other things, it is visual confirmation that le Grand Remplacement is no conspiracy theory, but established fact. Renaud Camus defines the Great Replacement as “the change of people, the substitution of one or several peoples for the people whose ancestral roots are there, whose history had for hundreds or thousands of years coincided with the territory in question.” All those native Frenchmen in that leftist mob, the ethnically Gallic too ashamed of France to raise her flag, demonstrate that the Great Replacement is also a state of mind.
France is now in the middle of a fight for its future as a nation. France’s enemies are the Frenchmen who hate her, and the aliens they have brought in to replace the French who resist. This could not possibly be clearer now. Until Sunday, France’s enemies also included the elite establishmentarians of both Left and Right who facilitated le Grand Remplacement, and who counted on the French public’s fear of Vichy to blind them to the emerging reality.
Well. Thanks to Macron’s folly, and to the subsequent Sunday vote, his centrist party has been effectively demolished. True, France now faces a genuinely frightening future of left-right conflict that, owing to the Left’s radicalism and willingness to use violence, could finally mean the advent of the civil war that the French have long feared. Note well that the elites in politics and journalism have for ages warned that the far right is a threat to democracy. But who smashed windows and set fires to protest the results of Sunday’s democratic vote? Not Marine Le Pen’s crowd.
This is the truth that France’s establishment spent decades attempting not to see, and working hard to ensure that no French voter ever saw either. In a 2014 speech before a Paris court, in which he was on trial for inciting racial hatred, Rénaud Camus said that, in fact, the stubborn refusal of France’s leadership class to see what they were doing to the country with their idiotic migration policies was going to bring violence. It is worth quoting at length from that address (which appears in English in the recently published Enemy Of The Disaster, a compilation of Camus’s political speeches); in his work, Camus uses the neologism “nocence” to mean “harm”:
Far from calling for violence, but trying on the contrary to avoid it, to drive it away from us, I tirelessly denounce reckless policies—or perhaps policies that are only too aware of what they are doing—these friends of the disaster, these harbingers of misfortune, that day after day create the strict conditions for conflict, tension, animosity, and uncontrollable nocence. It is an ex-Yugoslavia that they are blithely preparing for France and for Europe—a Sudan, a Mali, a Central African Republic, a generalized Lebanon.
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/dreher/the-center-cannot-hold/