In Brussels a spectre is circulating – the spectre of humour. To discern it, however, whether prospectively or after the fact, some wits are requisite, and the ranks of officialdom in the European Union capital distinguish themselves by the lack thereof. For, unwittingly, by their conduct, these functionaries have illustrated the case made by those whom they deem to be their enemies; whereas the latter notice the humour of the situation, while the larger numbers of observers are availed an even better vantage-point in this respect.
What has occasioned the own goal (this phrase springs to mind) the dimwits have scored against their side? Nothing more nor less sinister than this year’s edition of an international conference held by the Edmund Burke Foundation, which maintains a separate website for these gatherings and related projects, under the title of National Conservatism. (“Oh! the horror!” To be entered immediately on the cancellation list!) Now, while the conference has finished, but beginning are the repercussions of the brutal, clumsy attempts to suppress it. – The facts are told in two reports, one by Melanie Phillips, who spoke at the conference, the other by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was invited but could not attend (though, she says, had she foreseen these abuses, she might have joined, to make her solidarity plain).
About the specifics of this incident there will be a bit to say, in a moment; here I should like to pause at the ineptness of those who tried to interdict the conference by means of the police. As they stated their reasons, the usual epithets were called up, a rote slander one by now expects (alas) in this age when rhetorical inflation (carelessly or otherwise) demolishes in advance the force of the words one might soon have required (may everyone avoid this looming exigence); but alongside the stereotyped rationale a desire was voiced in Brussels of wanting to prohibit the statement of political views whose content is, in the officialese, Euro-skeptic. Actuating this set of opinion are doubts aroused by the trend towards centralised control in the European Union, as usurping its member-states’ powers, thereby approximating ever more nearly an oligarchical formation of the kind which during the last decades of its existence the USSR once comprised (a character patent in its internal make-up and in relation to its satellite states). Over the years the doubt has been expressed with a range of variation in seriousness and tonality, to the point where one cannot refer credibly in the singular to “Euro-skepticism”: but regardless of the variations amongst them, the substantive doubts were not allayed, but rather quite actively fed by the actions taken to squelch the Brussels gathering. At the end of the day, such missteps did and do furnish the “skeptics” further items of evidence in support of their main claims.
The Brussels guardians against dissent, therefore, bungled their task, and to them, accordingly, an impartial observer may assign a failing grade. Back to the training institute for aspiring functionaries of an illiberal power they should go, to repeat the course at least once. Perhaps by the year they graduate for the second time, there no longer will be any employer in need of their services: at this late date, amongst the possible albeit unlikely outcomes one may envision that as the best.
By contrast, the contentions of a main enemy of theirs, the inner arch-bogeyman of the European Union, namely, the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, who also attended the conference, emerge afterwards seeming more perspicuous, more plausible, more persuasive to the non-doctrinaire. Through all of this, a large QED was as though freely given! While on a smaller scale, one begins to take note of the man’s sense of humour, as being a quality at odds with the usual characterisations, and even goes on to award him high marks for it.
After a little research, I chanced upon a comment he issued last year, and after some further reflection, the question arises: who else amongst his peers could have compressed a serious insight into such a declaration, both pithy and witty as it is?
Előfordul, hogy a történelem ismétli önmagát, de szerencse, hogy ami elsőre tragédia volt, az másodszor már komédia. Moszkva tragédia volt, Brüsszel csak egy rosszul sikerült kortárs paródia. És ha Moszkva fütyült, akkor úgy kellett táncolni, de ha Brüsszel fütyül, akkor mi nem táncolunk, ha nemakarunk.* Now, though I cannot ascertain much beyond the most patent sense of these Hungarian words, and that only very tentatively as guided by dictionaries and other works of linguistic reference, nonetheless the translation of his sentences which I am able to offer does perhaps suggest the original to be appreciably informed by awareness of the humour of his and his country’s current situation. (Of course, in this judgment, to those who know the language I would have to defer.) Every so often, history repeats itself, yet fortunately what had been tragedy the first time, is comedy the second. Moscow was a tragedy; Brussels, a present-day parody that’s gone awry. If Moscow whistled, we had to dance; but whenever Brussels whistles, we do not dance if we don’t want to.
* quoted in Szabolcs Dull, “Orbán Viktor: Brüsszel nem Moszkva, csak egy rosszul sikerült paródia”
Urbane actors on today’s international stages, who know when it comes time to mark the music, stop the dance, and make for the exits: if only there were more of these virtuosi! Who knows if the dearth may prove not a minor cause of our . . .
Events may come at any moment; if they could not, they would not be events. Without waiting for them, at present one can think further about the rhymes in history and about its rhythms: perhaps this attention is a tribute to which the semi-musical dimension of everything that happens, lays some rightful claim.
During the course of the last half-year, from the seventh of October onwards, a vast wave of invective and action against Israel has washed over the political terrain in many countries, propelled to a considerable degree by animus against Jews and “the Jews” which more and more is openly admitted to, in the Western countries which (one had wanted to hope) did by their own collective memories largely immunise themselves against the temptations to such low sentiments. Well, the occurrences of these six months in their entirety I cannot even begin to untwine here, obviously; what is more feasible by way of an essay, is to focus on three manifestations of it all in particular, taking these together as an invitation to reflect upon older pasts stretching out behind the outbreaks one now witnesses.
Firstly, in Westminster, British parliamentarians set aside the procedures of their own institution during a session concerning the war in Gaza: this they did not least under threats and intimidation directed against them, deployed by the anti-Israel and (to speak without euphemism) Jew-hating mobs in the streets of London and other cities. Pressure applied strategically from the outside and from the inside, foments and even accelerates the decline of this political body, lowering the esteem in which it still is held, not least by itself, as remaining if only in principle a locus in the sphere of politics of that by now endangered species, persuasive speech – even though, let the point of fact not vanish in fogs of amnesia, over the course of recent years, and obviously so in its acquiescence when it was sidelined amidst the Corona hysteria, much of the grave damage to its profile was and continues to be inflicted by its own hands, such that the inner decomposition seems to come from an aberrant act of will. The resulting weakness Phillips has mentioned,* with foreboding; while regarding the broader background, namely, the hatred aimed at Jews, now become almost a fashionable opinion to utter, on the streets of the capital and elsewhere, which does conduce towards the steps a number of these politicians may already have wanted to take, Tom Slater** has raised an alarm. Nor should these developments be dismissed as isolated incidents; rather, they may be understood as representative of what is now transpiring in several countries. Not wishing to weary myself by adducing illustrations of these things (though I could indeed do so), all the less as anyone who seriously has been observing events may do it on his own, I shall merely instance a comparable application of these tactics, around a month ago in the Hague, amongst whose results was likewise a hastening of the decay of this parliament’s profile as a locus of persuasion: to this occurrence the Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders*** has called the public’s attention, in the hope that it will not be allowed to become a precedent there.
* “British MPs melt down over Gaza” and “The antisemitism crisis is out of control”
** “The sickness of anti-Semitism” *** “Jew Hate in Dutch Parliament”
Secondly, the protests which took place in numerous countries on April 15, were co-ordinated directly by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, in its capacity of intelligence agency, with the actual aim being to abet the dissolution of civil order throughout the world, in keeping with the over-arching program of the Iranian régime. (“Palestine,” then, is but a pretext.) This operational complicity was revealed when Vahid Beheshti,* an eminent Iranian dissident in London, procured and published a secret memorandum by way of substantiating his main contentions regarding the régime’s tactics since October 7: attendees of the protests against Israel since then, unwittingly or otherwise, have ranged themselves on the side of a foreign power playing a different and (needless to say) exceedingly dangerous game. Moreover, the pace of the activity undertaken with the assistance of those thus duped, does seem to be accelerating (though of course the exact rate varies from locale to locale): thanks not least to the fact that these manifestations are being capitalised on by the politicians in search of votes, the journalists in search of clicks, the ignorant in search of adulation for their signals of virtue, and similarly with other groups (some show themselves to be quite absurd and risible) in societies that more and more are nothing if not mercenary.
* Tweet, April 15, 2024
Thirdly, there are the numerous indications of duplicity on the part of intelligence agencies of some Western states, and on this point one enters into very murky realms indeed. To be sure, the suspicion antedates last October that these agencies, via their undercover agents seeded amongst the ranks of those who have been opposing the “emergencies” which, palpably since 2020, have succeeded rapidly one after another, each affording excuses for something like a totalitarian system to aggrandise itself more and more and burst forth from within the shattered shells of the older constitutional arrangements in Western countries, themselves did stage it when old anti-Semitic canards also (alas!) circulate through the precincts of these essentially honourable forces of opposition, thereby inflicting disrepute on such opponents generally in the eyes of public opinion, while also serving to distract the latter, the large and as yet unpersuaded middle, from the more pressing tasks facing everyone, under the present circumstances. Nor with this does the already extant suspicion conclude: for by the same duplicity, the Western intelligence agencies would annex some further fields of operation to themselves, signalising their own importance in countering the spread of ideas which they themselves do encourage: surreptitiously, of course. Yet the public demoralisation which flows nearly ineluctably when an intelligence agency exceeds the very narrow limits within which a due vigilance on the part of the citizens ought continuously to restrict it, has spread with a rapidity noticeably greater since October than beforehand, and along with it, too, the suspicion that the ever more frequent expression of the old canards might in part be credited to just such a covert source. – Now, let me hasten to concretise all this by recalling the doubts which, around a year ago, greeted the release by the Dutch intelligence agency, the Algemene Inlichtingen- en Veiligheidsdienst, of a report which claimed to show the perils of extremism on the right by an alleged penchant for anti-Semitic ideas there. Reporting such “facts” is easy when you yourself have had an underhanded share in producing them! – such was the tenor of this serious doubt as it was voiced at the time, and it seemed then, given what one knew of the operating procedures of Western intelligence agencies, and all the more so now, really rather persuasive.*
* Burgercomité-EU, Tweets, April 21, 2023 (x2), and May 30, 2023
Calling these three episodes back to mind, pondering this time a bit further the significance of each of them, and now returning to the attempts to interdict the Brussels conference which the functionaries who took upon themselves the task patently appear to have bungled, the question comes up, whether in this case the appearance is deceptive, for perhaps their aim was quite another, one which as it happens they have indeed met. Was their actual goal perhaps to stir up strife within and around the European Union of which in its current form they only claim to be the guardians? – if so, it seems they succeeded. Strife thus stirred up, is meant to work as a solvent upon political life in the vicinity of Brussels in its present configuration. Hence this quasi-chemical experiment, as though the effects of a reagent were being tested out, may itself contribute an additional impetus to hasten the transition to what will be, politically speaking, the next régime, that is, the totalitarian system of rule now gestating in those precincts, or, in the terms of demography, the new peoples emerging alongside those which still exist in Europe and their senescent comity, the successors by which they or whatever remains of them shall soon enough witness the completion of their own replacement . . .
– Will be? Surely the aspect of natural fatality cannot simply have the last word when these processes (such a troublesome term!) are described. What else does the raison d’être of human action include, if not, from time to time, the averting of “transitions” occurring otherwise automatically? Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst . . .
– To continue (let’s not get ahead of ourselves). These incidents in Brussels could act as harbingers, foreshadowing the alterations that will befall the continent everywhere, and even speeding up their pace. How so? By adroit manipulation of a semblance, the supposed inevitability of all of it, bolstered by these would-be totalitarians’ own statements of confidence that they have ever so many likely routes to victory, as some of them themselves crow, whenever they are given half a chance. But let me swerve around these murky prospects, lest by peering into them they begin to stare back into me, as a philosopher might remark.* Moreover, there’s an inadvertent irony, the unwitting humour just behind these incidents in Brussels, to get back to; the bleakness will still be as bleak, but at least one should not forfeit the laughter at the disparity of situation between the realities of 2024 (including the semblances which cover them), and the dreams by which the decline of today was initiated, more than fifty years ago.
* Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Viertes Hauptstück, 146
– Though there’s some irregular rhythm to what you say, like a flag flapping in the breeze on a balcony, it does sound portentous. Oh, very well, have at it!
– Merci. Consider this . . .
Expectation that alliances with the Arab states, cemented by a parti pris in international fora for their rejection of Israel and its existence, and guaranteed moreover by the importation as honoured guests of entire populations from those countries, would permit France, and subsequently the other members of the organisation from which the European Union has developed, following its lead in this policy, to move on the same plane as the United States of America in world affairs, becoming a global force to be reckoned with by dint of these networks: such a policy was adopted in the last years of the 1960s by Charles de Gaulle, led to it by the stubborn dream of the country’s national glory. More than half a century later, how has that eminence, which after all is essentially a tangible quantum, materialised? The short answer is, it has not. Neither France, nor the European Union whose leaders often exhibit a megalomania similar to their French predecessor’s, displays anything like a parity by which Washington is counterbalanced, even though they may fantasise themselves filling such a role whenever (as they so often do) they are distinguished on the international stage by their joining in the efforts to drive the Jewish state into a corner. What then have they to show for this decades-old policy? Even the incidents of Islamic terrorism, so numerous around 1970 and afterwards, of which the European politicians of that period sought to avoid the occurrence in their own countries (or at least, when they did take place there, that they be limited to striking Jews, Israelis, and Americans), have for years now raged through the European Union: the idea that these outbreaks could be channelled by some bargain entered into, is long gone.
De Gaulle probably imagined that in this alliance, France, conjointly with the other European states it drew to its side, would retain the upper hand, remain the real centre of the endeavour. Or at least this is my impression after reading the two works which have attempted to recount the origins and the elements of what its proponents at the outset called “Eurabia,” a coinage that yields the title of the first of them.* Their author, a francophone Jew born early in the 1930s in Egypt – hence her nom de plume, Bat Ye’or, signifying in Hebrew a daughter of the Nile – who like many other non-Muslims, not only the Egyptian Jews, were degraded and compelled by the régime of Gamal Abdel Nasser to flee in the mid-1950s, knows well where pan-Arabism and pan-Islamism lead. For these movements’ importation, or rather, exportation to European countries from around 1970 has as it were ratified the latter’s gradual colonisation by both populations and capital that had become superfluous amidst the conditions in the oil-rich Arab countries, thereby deferring the outbreak of their own inner instability, as if in replay of the stopgap measures comprising the European imperialism of the decades prior to 1914 and culminating in it.** Nor, within these new colonies, did it take long before the results appeared in all their dishonour, although the denouement of what he himself had striven to bring about was never seen by the General.
* Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis (first published 2005), and as a sequel, Europe, Globalization, and the Coming Universal Caliphate (2011).
** Hannah Arendt, “Imperialism, Nationalism, Chauvinism,” ii
Annexed in effect by the Islamic countries whose assistance he had sought on behalf of his country’s stature, and assimilated step by step towards acquiescence to or even an enthusiastic embrace of some of the worst of their conditions, surely the bitter humour of France’s and, in its footsteps, the European Union’s situation would stick in the General’s throat, whose proud umbrage at the stubborn realities of history was so vehement, were he to return to observe the international stage today, more than fifty years after exiting it. Plentiful ironies he now could not help but notice amidst these inadvertent miseries engendered in the longer run by an ill-advised pursuit of a nation’s glory – or would he?
– Perhaps his aims too had been other than they seem on a first acquaintance . . .
Weigh in full seriousness the fact that the Grand Mufti escaped prosecution for his activities on behalf of Germany during the Second World War by the intercession directly after it of – de Gaulle! Amin Al-Husseini obtained refuge in France in 1945 with just this help, then after a public outcry decamping with the authorities’ connivance to Egypt the next year, remaining in communication with the French embassy in Cairo, and subsequently departed for Lebanon, early in the 1960s.*
* Ye’or, Eurabia, pt. i, ch. 3
If already then the idea of acquiring as allies the movements which the Mufti represented had been one the General was entertaining – would he, observing the realities in Europe and elsewhere today, give way to bitter mirth at these displays of history’s odd sense of humour, therewith exposing the folly of his own plans? Or would he rejoice in the present-day consequences and cheer them on, with Gallic discretion to be sure? Hence, as regards the acquiescence to subjugation under the Islamic supremacy, the complex of attitudes of self-abasement which Ye’or has trenchantly categorised as dhimmitude, the propensities towards abnegation now coursing through many Western countries, is it so clear he would really object?
– But not even in France is a General an island, so . . .
Indeed, at home, in 1945, he was surrounded by corps of bureaucrats and climates of opinion that emerged from the World War in a condition far from clean, to put the matter mildly, not to mention the circumstances common elsewhere in Europe, nor the state of affairs later, from the end of the 1950s onwards, when the first steps towards establishing what has become the European Union were taken.
This dark background was called to mind again two years ago, in an interview with the journalist Giulio Meotti given by Ye’or. There she sketches out some of the connections tying the guiding ideas of the European Union as regards Israel and its principles back to what she terms an “international of ex-Nazis,” some of whom did indeed go on to the highest offices, in Paris, Bonn, and even New York. This unvarnished statement is shocking, and it is meant to be; for the reader’s convenience I have excerpted the main points from it (please see the Appendix).
While consulting her two studies of the European Union’s policies regarding Israel, which have played such a main role in the crystallisation of it and its subsidiary institutions into their current proto-Eurabian form, I find myself sympathising with her heroic efforts to analyse and account for so much folly, fiction, and farce – for this is the character of the plane on which the older National Socialist programs are pursued again by other means. Against such propaganda, mis-education, and attacks upon the opponents to besmirch, defame, and silence them, perhaps even the gods would fight in vain: but struggle her works do, and if the literary stamina she musters falters in some of their passages, it is only natural considering the great depletion induced in their readers almost inevitably by these documents, so repetitive and numbing is the atrocious officialese. – At their best, as in the remarks to be found in the Appendix, in her words there is to be heard some sad laughter at all this immense aberration, and the undertone itself may add some further persuasive quality to what she has to say.
“Eurabianisation” which the concerted action of these coteries aimed to achieve, from the end of the 1960s onwards, one would think was best served when the agreements entered into and organisations set up along the way, were withheld as much as possible from public scrutiny, especially during the earlier stages. Indeed, her two books pertaining to the European Union, read with care, tend to confirm this suspicion. The profusion throughout the 1970s and 1980s of new activities, agencies, arrangements, did entail a reduplication of the functions which they were entrusted to discharge, such that it becomes nearly a Sisyphean task to ascertain in which of them or where precisely the operational decisions were actually arrived at. By its inner proliferation such a conglomerate insulates itself in advance against future dissection, and already this feature instantiates (or else adumbrates) the totalitarian character of the ruling formation (Herrschaftsgebilde, souveraineté) envisioned as the final result of all these undertakings: “Eurabia.”
More than a whiff of totalitarian ambition also courses through the interventions in the educational and intellectual domains requisite in such an agenda, and specifically the re-writings and writings-out imposed upon the texts and contexts of history, in order to transform the past of Western civilisation (as though the historical dimension were treated like a river whose direction a corps of engineers was dispatched to reverse), that thus fundamentally altered or adulterated it abet the acquiescence of a more and more ignorant public opinion to all the changes introduced deliberately in stages into the way of life of the European countries. Along this route, in particular, the history of Andalusia, which factually speaking does not lack for bloodshed, destruction, and subjugation, has been transmuted into a mythic ideal of an Islamic supremacy, deployed as a mirage by which the unwary and unwise are diverted. – Operations like these performed upon the historical record, are meant to foster wilful ignorance, and anyone who at present witnesses the latter when it becomes an active force, as it now so obviously is, above all over against Israel and “the Jews” amidst the current round of warfare, thereby gains a foretaste of the peculiar substitute for those principles of action one knows from the older forms of government, namely, totalitarian ideology.*
* Arendt, “Ideology and Terror,” ii
Ideology in the acceptation of the term specific to totalitarian formations of rule, that is, the preparation of individuals and even of entire populations to enter into the relation of perpetrators and victims such that both those roles are to be played as required, with the anticipated mass-murder running the gamut from the more figurative senses of the word to the quite literal, is something whose rumbling one may hear in a number of the incidents recounted by Ye’or. Announcement of the type of relations to come (if the catastrophe is not averted somehow), for these harbingers she evinces an ear, and literary skill to get the noise onto the page in the shape of a telling anecdote. She does so, for example, when she recounts the strictures placed upon the instruction of Europeans in the Arabic language and literature, when this element of the overall policy was adopted in official meetings during the 1970s: the European academic professionals who participated in these discussions themselves acceded to the position of the Arab countries that the instructors too would have to come from the latter, that is, they also had to be imported into Europe, as the indigenous teachers were deemed unsuitable or incapable of meeting the goals of said teaching. Ponder the message sent by this agreement to their own exclusion! It is strange that European professors whose profession is precisely teaching Arabic and Islamic culture should themselves accept their incompetence in their own field and demand to be replaced by Arab teachers.* This abnegation on their own and, worse still, on everyone else’s behalf, speaks loudly indeed of much that was then yet to come, presaging the acceptance, willing or otherwise, by so many of their own supposed obsolescence and superannuation, attitudes which spread ever wider subsequently. By now they are found nearly everywhere in the West, by no means solely on the campuses, though under their preponderance it has been and is in the universities where the conditions of the 1930s do begin again to hatch. The progression – how very “progressive” all this is! – towards totalitarian murder on a large scale, the readying to participate in it as both perpetrators and victims, once more rears its death’s head.
* Eurabia, pt. ii, ch. 8, “University of Venice, 1977”
Ideology’s embrace one does well to flee, as far as one can; and yet, at some point, to it as an overwhelming brute fact replies may have to be made. Perhaps then the best would point out how those caught up in it, at least whenever the ideology is no more than incipient (is this still generally the case?), do forfeit their individual dignity, thereby rendering themselves personally risible and humanly terrible to behold, a suggestion one offers to them in the mode of a verbum sapienti, that they not any further entrench themselves in its abandonment, whatever the motive be.
As two statements appear to show, if a reader focuses upon them, already around twenty years ago Ye’or had reflected at length upon this delicate matter of tact and politesse and of political acumen.
There is, firstly, the risibility that can attach to those who do espouse the ideology. Nowhere is Euro-Arab foreign policy fusion more seamless than in the EU’s total acceptance of “Palestine.” To this cause, the EU devotes all the passionate fervor of a senile lover who sacrifices to his lust the ultimate shadow of an illusory dignity.* Has not the other side at times wondered about these attentions? – Then, the terrible posture adopted when this choice is pursued to the end. The Christian attitude of self-mutilation – and rejection of the very essence of Judeo-Christian spirituality – represent the final stage of dhimmitude preceding conversion to Islam.**
* Eurabia, pt. iii, ch. 10, “1998: European Actions Against Israel”
** pt. v, ch. 16, “Palestinianism: Christianity’s Flight to Marcionism,” “Palestinian Marcionism”
Preparation to accept the dual roles of perpetrator and victim is audible in the background in each of these cases: the totalitarian temptation can indeed be a voluble force both officially and individually! Hence her rejoinders were given as a sort of medicine, before the tendency progressed any further and it got simply too late to turn around. – How much farther down this road have we traveled, two decades later? Have interventions like hers now any chance of achieving very much, or is the sheer fact of putting these matters into public words somehow the most that could reasonably be hoped for, under our quite noisy circumstances?
Because at issue here are observations of the later consequences of changes set in motion by policies European states themselves adopted, joined to the sense of inevitability that often accompanies reflection upon matters of demography, sentiments of the futility or fatality of all action do prove troublesome and hard to circumvent. Let one not delude oneself: this zone conduces to nihilist assessments whose taste or aftertaste tends to the bitter, where, for example, someone weak who manages to turn the powerful into mortal enemies (Todfeinde) seems as if willingly he himself were breeding his own hangmen (gleichsam sich seine Henker selbst züchtend).* Confronted by such dispiriting views and noises, laughter may fall silent (or catch in one’s throat), for what good then can it ever hope to do? And if nonetheless it does eventuate, the scornful sound might notice nothing else at all.
* Nietzsche, notebook, June 10, 1887, “Der europäische Nihilismus,” 11 (5, 71)
From the end of the 1960s onwards, the concerted policies whose “Eurabian” fruits are now blooming everywhere, expended great effort on the task of demoralising and where possible wiping out the forces of opposition to the project. Critics have had to think hard whether going public with their objections was worthwhile or advisable, in view of the defamation, execration, and intimidation they were likely to face. (How to forget that a number of them have been murdered, notably in the Netherlands, or surrounded by silence after falling prey to character assassination, the Rufmord more frequent throughout Germany and Austria?) Abuse of the dissenters as it has been manifest, both as intended and as put into practice, provides a further marker on the way to a totalitarian form of rule.
The case of an Austrian critic is instructive in this regard. Earlier, in his inquiries into National Socialism, Michael Ley analysed it as a “political religion,” and these incisive works were reviewed, discussed, and read, while he complemented the books with a university career.* When, however, his focus on the role played in that chapter of German history by anti-Semitism prompted him to look into the old hatred’s part in the Islamic world generally and in its new outposts in Europe specifically, then the silence and the shunning descended; but he did not cower. What he published were trenchant studies of the changes wrought inter alia by mass immigration, in which consideration of the bleak prospects for European countries was not neglected.** – Towards the end of last October, he took his own life, and while I have no knowledge of his reasons for the act, still there hovers over it a question whether he was prompted by somber intellectual anticipation of things likely to come. If so, the deed is itself an indictment and a warning.***
* Amongst the works of this first period, see Genozid und Heilserwartung (1993) and Holokaust als Menschenopfer (2002). ** This sequence of books which pertain more to present conditions and have a more prognostic aim, was initiated by Die kommende Revolte (2012).
*** vide Werner Reichel, “Michael Ley (1955-2023)”
Catalysed in a strong sense of the word by the outbreaks of hatred, since last October the pace at which the civil, political, and social structures are dissolving, has accelerated in numerous countries. Amongst these, especially pronounced is the tendency in Germany. For there too the universities, pervaded by incitement, have become locales where “they” are not welcome, in occurrences too numerous to be recounted, while at lower levels of the educational system, conversion of students en masse to Islam takes place more rapidly, stemming from varieties of pressure, violence not excluded, applied tactically by their classmates.* None of this the authorities show much interest in countering; Berlin keeps busy with other matters, issuing moral lectures to the government of Israel, seeking an illusory victory in its self-declared war with Russia, or mounting phantasmagoric campaigns against the political opposition at home, on behalf of venerable human rights like pre-pubertal sex-changes and the imperative demand for pronouns of anyone’s choosing: these measures, equipped it seems with penalties, were passed recently by the Bundestag.
* Frank Schneider, “Kinder konvertieren aus Angst zum Islam”
and Tatjana Festerling’s commentary (April 23, 2024) on his report
Penalties which the passage of this law (“Selbstbestimmungsgesetz”) now makes it needful to evade, could occasion discord in social and even in personal relations, prompting their breakdown and severance, preventative measures by those who wish to avoid becoming targets of legal proceedings their erstwhile acquaintances or friends would initiate on account of some “offence.” Transgenderism, being the program to which this legislation owed its birth, thus engenders – Verzeihung, it dissolves the already tenuous bonds comprising civil order, foments estrangement, dissociation, and separation of individuals, even – some irony here! – amongst the capital letters that have been mixed together into these times’ most stupid of acronyms (for the title there is quite a competition). Thus, now in Germany as already in some other locales that have sent their laws down this path, outspoken Gs and Ls have said they will no longer have anything to do with the Ts, as a wise safeguard against litigious acts by the latter.*
* for instance, Ali Utlu, Tweet, April 11, 2024
Sheer chaos – so many are the hidden paths (Schleichwege) towards it,* something the rulers in Brussels and Washington seem to gamble on! – it may be the goal of today’s agendas to create, as a solvent to clear away whatever still persists, to make room for the new order. (Paradigm in this and other respects, the Corona hysteria, so deliberately sparked from above by the powers that be and delightedly fanned by their counterparts down below, as if both had agreed to a tacit pact, continues to pay out its manifold dividends.) As the chaos increases explosively, ever less convincing are the attempts to allay this suspicion, while some conjectures go yet further. They surmise the ulterior aim is to heighten the disorientation to such a pitch that many citizens will positively beg to submit to Islamic supremacy, as the sole power remaining believed able to restore a modicum of sanity, or else convert willingly en masse (especially the men amongst them) to the religion, that they may enter this oasis of the successor society, thereby saving themselves from the last years’ grotesque social experiments (groteske, soziale Experimente) – the mad experimentation whose instruments were fashioned not least by the theory and practice now dominant of “gender.”**
* Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Sechstes Hauptstück, 209
** Festerling, entries of March 21 and April 12, 2024 (x2)
Sensible people are indeed afraid of the experimental devastation which has been unleashed, though how could all this fictive performativity itself not also bring them to laugh? – for it too is farcical. Mirth at the expense of these follies, appears to declare that soon enough, one way or another, they will no longer matter.
Even in California, where this intellectual fashion has been taken farthest, its own supplanting to come seems to be dawning upon the most prominent theoretician, to judge by the tenor of “their” new book.* This an English reviewer has noticed.** Thus, whatever once may have been the writer’s “laughter in the face of serious categories,”*** throughout this latest work an awful humourlessness discloses, as though to spite “them,” how “they” apprehend “their” position to be ever more precarious. What’s causing the trouble? Not enemies but rather erstwhile friends and followers! In a nutshell, it is the age-old tale of monsters turning on their maker and devouring him and then with some luck themselves too, which this author has begun to fear as a presage of the adversarial fate engendered by none other than – “themselves.” “They” might have entertained this same prospect insouciantly, in an earlier period, amused as it flit over the screen in the theatre of “their” mind, projected in the mode of a private show, but today the consequences are coming due to be reckoned with. Despite “themselves” the outcome of all these lives given to self-entitlement starts to perturb “them.” Some moments of reflection upon it are not so easily evaded, after all: to defer them indefinitely would require a great deal more than puerile rhetorical questions. Thus, how ever and to whom to render a persuasive account of the role – absurd pronouns now set aside – one played in abetting this? To be sure, no mea culpa is offered, nothing of the dread openly admitted; instead, as per the reviewer’s commentary, one infers it from the numerous polemical paranoid passages of pseudo-psycho-analysis by which the tract disfigures itself. Accordingly, how literary self-mutilation expresses much else outside the text, is a subject the readers would be as though authorised to assess, in this particular case and “context.”
* Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender?
** Kathleen Stock, “What is Judith Butler afraid of?”
*** Butler, Gender Trouble, Preface
All the grotesque noises “gender” now emits furnish a clue: in their most honest moments its advocates do sense that what they have espoused will prove transient. Because those with whom alliances are now made, fully intend at an opportune time to do away with them, how could the latter not have some presentiment of it? Hence, looming over this whole terrible crime-scene, there are more than a few suicidal prospects; noting the shadows cast by acts anticipated and not yet carried out, adumbrations of totalitarian ideology marching towards the present, in the face of such nihilist harbingers the Nietzschean astonishment surges up again.*
* Here, for humour’s sake, to glean a joke from today’s demonstrative professions of stupidity, repeat the generic exclamation by which murder-mysteries are spoilt!
But enough of such ideologues and the alibis they provide to today’s barbarisms. (Lunatics such as the “Queers for Palestine” may be left to their own devices.) Even without these useful idiots and their role in easing the way for a total form of rule to arrive or supervene, the pace at which things one had thought still held solid are evaporating, would itself probably be quickening. Under present circumstances, not refutation of oddities that practically do refute themselves without the help of others, but further thought about the anti-Israel campaign in general and the mood of negation peculiar to it, which seems to supercharge the overall acceleration, garnering appeal on just this account, may be the better track to pursue.
Odd as it is to notice how over the last half-year the worst epithets in the current lexicons, above all “racism” and “genocide,” furnish weapons wielded offensively, linguistic missiles with which to bombard Israel and, ever more openly, all Jews, shot off by and on behalf of those who harbour the goal of advancing the program itself to completion, that what National Socialism began an Islamic supremacy may finalise – strange as are the duplicitous inversions of language, shored up against criticism by the ruins of historical instruction, these too draw the force they now muster from a polemical conjunction of those two words. Accordingly, one ought to bestow some further attention upon the latter. Hostilities such as the present can then bring forth a thought obscured at other times, though audible already somehow in the pair of terms itself, were each of them listened to more attentively: the birth of a people or race seems necessarily premised upon the murder of another. An inkling as terrible as the war-inciting massacre on October 7 that engenders it, an intuition one does want to neutralise if one can: so the murk shrouding this nexus of ideas, one should move to dispel, however far one is able. If only they undergo an estrangement (остраненія),* that into a clearer focus at least a few of the relations amongst them are brought! Perhaps then some who, knowing not what they do, have ranged themselves on the side of those who know it very well, may rescue themselves from the heart of darkness on whose verge all now totter.
* Викторъ Шкловский, “Искусство какъ пріемъ”
Words as weapons, likely always are aimed pre-emptively at that higher power, persuasive speech, while, as now seems obvious, when wielded synchronously on a larger scale they do strike and kill the very possibility of the latter. Such words one can hardly imagine as ever having been complete strangers within any polity, and στάσις haunted Athens at its heyday; but cities insulated from them, where speech of the other kind could freely be heard, bestowed lustre upon their political life in its best periods, when it was most a venue which flourished for its own sake, not beholden to extrinsic purposes, shielded from intimidation, threats, and violence. Perhaps, though I have not now opportunity to go in search of documentation for or against this idea, it was mainly in the era of decline, with persuasive speech no longer flying as high, that the idea of a forthright or fearless speech (παρρησία) took on a greater prominence. Prompted by the typical quality of this mode of speaking, one might wonder if the notion pertained initially to a setting where ideas were discussed routinely, the academies in antiquity, more than to the cities tout court, or if to the latter, then mainly when a city began to focus its life upon the activities of higher education, a choice which evidently was made by Athens even before the Romans arrived. – The fortunes of persuasive speech in the universities prior to the debut of the research institutions, at the outset of the nineteenth century, might also be recounted, with world enough and time; but I’ll mention only its decline thenceforth. Beset from one side by the new prominence of faculties apart from the humanities in the broad sense, especially the hard sciences, in whose results it had or should have had no share, persuasive speech was also hollowed out from within by the rash of “opinions,” that is, the “bright ideas” (Einfälle) whipped up with a bit of literary skill, which increasingly all intellectual bodies large or small did set themselves to conceive, produce, and circulate, as if, replicating the turns of a metabolic process, what they offered were consumables of, by, and for the mind, without which they themselves could neither survive, nor prosper, nor grow. Thus the ideal of persuasion found itself more and more feeble as that century wore on. In retreat before the burgeoning claims of strictly scientific truth, and weakened inwardly by an awkward reluctance to present itself otherwise than in the mode of expressing a transient opinion, the prospects for persuasive speech within the universities, in which it still might have hoped to resound with some modicum of glory, did melt away into mere air, like so much else during those years.
At present, whether in the city square or on the university campus, one seldom hears from persuasive speech. Perhaps it is too proud to deign, or else too fearful or too ashamed to venture to show its face amidst the degraded environs of today.
Persuasion by the word, entirely without any violence, exemplifies a significant rapport amongst peers. And reverence towards the words, for that too is a relation. In a pure aim to persuade there resounds the meaning of human dignity, and if the latter is relayed, this augments the dignity of human meaning. Due respect to the words themselves, one seeks to convey, much as poets do; not destroying the sense but deepening it before posterity. – These efforts are persuasive. – At their pinnacle: the Periclean Funeral Oration.* From the present, alas, it is as remote as Parnassus.
* Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, bk. ii, xxxv–xlvi
Who could devise a persuasive epitaph for today? Political life, the arenas of battle that were the universities not excepted, is consumed by the offerings of a perverse school of “opinion.” By its main tenet, speech constitutes or even is violence and violence, speech. With this basic notion alone, the transition towards a totalitarian form of rule, already far advanced, speeds up appreciably. Inadvertently or not, through this “idea” and others akin to it, individuals and entire groups of people are engendered who will readily be both victims and perpetrators in crimes which these times seem to portend.
Epithets – “racism” and “genocide” – are applied slanderously, in warfare stoked by hatred against the Jewish people, in Israel and elsewhere, by its enemies whom the two terms do befit, as shown by their own avowals, in less guarded moments, themselves more and more frequent. The mass media, in large part, has rushed to be the latter’s accomplices, by its tools of equivocation and evasion doing what it can to broadcast the slanders, while scores of others, from the willing allies around the world to the gatherings of useful idiots found mainly in the West, follow along.
Observed from without, with some impartiality, how dispiriting a spectacle it is. What a commentary on the state of opinion in the West, anticipating its own death with spasms of delight, thereby bowing in advance to totalitarianism. The history that is a cautionary tale about the current plight, largely goes untaught. Least of all is it studied by today’s fashionable “left,” which now busies itself with quite other matters than the serious inquiry into history. (So much easier and less troublesome it proves to take their “conscience” into the streets, the stages where they make such noise about “virtue.”) Negligence on this point of historical knowledge, now is amongst the causes why the “left” joins in the pursuit by other means and in other war-theatres of the international project that was Nazism. What a denouement!
Generations have grown to adulthood marked by the failings of education with some degree of historical illiteracy, and with it a telltale streak of immaturity and unworldliness, whereby they don’t even care that they know not what they do. Regarding them in the aggregate as though from a future vantage-point, it seems they were composed of people whom probably each and every ideology would have been able to force into line* – but what then to recommend to any of them who would wish to extricate himself from such a finality while he still can? If his life is guided by the love of words for their own sake, not as materials for dictates nor as instruments in the hands of dictatorships, he might do well to procure copies of the early studies of the devastation wrecked upon the German language by the National Socialists,** for similar enreichments now haunt us all, and even if the farce of history elicits some laughter, as a precaution one again may have to reach for a knife.***
* Arendt, “Race-Thinking Before Racism,” iv
** Heinz Paechter, et al., Nazi-Deutsch, and Victor Klemperer, LTI
*** Bertolt Brecht, “Deutschland”
– After ninety years the poem is a sonic alarm once more. Will we ever awake?
Appendix
There follow some remarks by Bat Ye’or in an interview with Giulio Meotti, published May 20, 2022, concerning the not-so-obscure history of the positions adopted by the European Union regarding the state of Israel and the Jewish people. From October 7, 2023 onwards, it hardly needs be said, the actuality of this whole question has been renewed. – They are offered solely for the reader’s convenience; the interviewer’s questions have been omitted.
Even today there is no mention of dhimmitude. A condition not accepted by universities, by the public, by governments. When you do not see a situation that has existed for 13 centuries in theology, politics, law, society and you do not want to see it, then this condition does not exist. What has no name does not exist. […]
[…] The millions of Europeans who, from France to Russia and Norway to Africa, had fanatically joined Nazism as early as the 1920s and then collaborated with the Nazi forces that occupied their country, did not disappear or suddenly change in 1945. After that[,] some purges, most remained in their ministerial, administrative and influence positions. The examples are innumerable, in France with Mitterrand, Couve de Murville, René Bousquet… or in Germany with Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger (CDU), but also throughout Europe.
[…] In international organizations Kurt Waldheim, a former Nazi officer, was secretary general of the United Nations from 1972 to 1981. One can speak of an international of ex-Nazis who directed national and international European politics. This explains the prevalence of various aspects of Nazism during the second half of the twentieth century and to this day in European Union politics, the institutional and ideological foundations of which were created by Walter Hallstein, first president of the European Commission from 1958 to 1967, a Nazi by choice and from the start.
The extent of the participation of Muslims from Europe (Balkans, Crimea, Ukraine, Caucasus), from North Africa and especially the Middle East, in territorial expansion and the Nazi genocide, their enlistment and indoctrination in the troops of the Wehrmacht and the SS during the world war is a taboo subject. […]
Euronazism quietly re-establishes its 1933-45 alliances with the Nazi-Islamism of united Arab leaders in a war of extermination against the people of Israel to which European countries, with the exception of Czechoslovakia, had refused in 1947 to sell weapons to defend themselves. This collaboration continued openly with al-Husseini’s relative Arafat’s acknowledgment of the EEC’s official support for the PLO in 1973, the popularity and enthusiasm for the Palestinian jihad in Europe. The politics of Nazi extermination of the Jewish people is expressed today in the European policy aimed at creating in Judea and Samaria a false Palestinian state, Jüdenrein [sic] with Jerusalem as its capital. It is this genocidal policy that the European Union calls the ‘peace process’.
[…] The politics of the European Union is a Shoah of memory […] and of the rights of the people of Israel. We are destroying the foundations of the Judeo-Christian civilization based on biblical values. When we rewrite the Bible by deleting the word Israel to replace it with Palestine, and when biblical objects in European museums are designated Palestinian by an anachronism of thousands of years, we are Islamized.
They actually say: How can a true Christian talk about the Temple Mount without being a Muslim? But do you think Jesus went to a mosque? It is this campaign to erase and suppress the history of the people of Israel, the contestation of its legitimacy and its right to self-defense, which I call ‘the Nazi meaning of European politics’. For me, the Nazi way of liquidating the State of Israel is Christian suicide. Destroying Israel means destroying the living matrix of Christianity deriving from the Jewish notion of Christ (Messiah) the redeemer, a notion that does not exist in Islam.
This is why I argue that the EU which adopted this extermination policy is already Islamized. And it is precisely because it is Islamized that today it cannot defend itself from the allies it has joined since the 1930s through Nazism, which was the foundation of its alliance with the Muslim peoples. Christianity is inextricably linked to Judaism by the Bible and by the founding notion of Christianity, that of Christ the Redeemer (Messiah). The hatred of the Jewish origins of Christianity had led the Nazis to regret that Europe was Christian and not Muslim. This Nazi meaning is expressed today in the confrontation of Christianity with its destruction by Islam.
[…] Consumed by [t]his [?] execration of Israel, perhaps Christianity will disappear by choice in Islam. It is not the choice of the people, but of their political leaders.