“If the law supposes that,” said Mr. Bumble in Oliver Twist, “then the law is an ass – an idiot“. Can a nation’s cherished rule of law run counter to its national interest? Well, yes, of course. The examples are legion, but here’s a particularly egregious one from Mrs. Merkel’s Germany. From the Berliner Zeitung.
One of the objectives of The Europeans is to republish in English translation articles written originally in French or German by or about people who know what they’re talking about. One such is Stephen Smith, the American journalist, academic, Francophone, and Africa specialist. Smith’s view on migration from sub-Saharan Africa to Europe might be summarised in the American vernacular as: you ain’t seen nothin’ yet! The richer Africans become, the freer they will be to migrate to Europe. Both development in Africa and “co-development” of Europe and Africa through one-way migration — a sly form of practical progressivism — will contribute to stalling their own ostensible objectives by actually promoting an African middle-class exodus, rather than rendering it unnecessary.
Managing the now rare trick of scholarly detachment, Smith simultaneously keeps in mind the three contradictory paradigms at play in the migration ‘debate’: the progressive, the conservative, and the third that always imposes itself on the other two: objective reality. The spectre of sustained mass migration from Africa hangs in Europe’s future as a portent of the great demographic substitution: Le Grand Remplacement, as described, feared and resisted by the French writer Renaud Camus. As Camus never ceases to point out — in a continual da capo made necessary by constant references to the Great Replacement as a mere theory that remains unsupported by “statistics” — the substitution is already well advanced in western Europe and clearly visible to every naked eye. And there is another perspective to be recognised here: whereas the contemporary Islamisation of Europe and the continuing threat of Islamist terrorism have taken the lion’s share of media attention, these are merely aggravating factors that serve to eclipse the main theme: the extinction of European civilisation through the replacement of European peoples by exotic populations, principally from Africa. It is not obvious that Stephen Smith and Renaud Camus would disagree on any substantial point.
FIGARO/INTERVIEW : According to the American journalist Stephen Smith, migration from Africa, which weighs so heavily on Europe, constitutes the grand challenge of the 21st century. He says that the scale of the migratory pressure will submit our Continent to a trial without precedent, leading to the final rupture between the cosmopolitan elite and the populations who are attached to their identity.
The French-speaking American journalist, Stephen Smith, directed reporting on Africa at Libération from 1988 to 2000, then at Le Monde from 2000 to 2005. Since 2007, he has been professor of African studies at Duke University in the United States. He has just published La Ruée vers l’Europe [The Stampede for Europe], Editions Grasset ⇑.
A few years ago, a contributor to The London Review of Books wrote, “For the first time in its history, the European Left no longer has a project“. Not so: the Left has never lacked a project. When it divorced its white working-class constituency, it did so in order to channel its passion into the greatest of all social projects: to make amends for colonialism and WWII by declaring all accidents of birth, wherever they might be found, null and void. Redress could be had simply by migrating to Europe. Not only would the European taxpayer provide all the necessary resources, he would also be disciplined to erase all cultural references to his colonial past, lest they give offence to the rescued, and to modify his comportment wherever necessary, for the same reason. Some of the visible figures behind this settlement were Mitterrand, Blair, Soros, Juncker, Schulz, Merkel, the hapless Hollande, and now Macron and Pope Francis. This was to be ‘The End of History’ and the beginning of ‘Otherly Love’. The great migration crisis duly followed in September 2015, with everyone from Hollywood to the captains of global commerce chiming in with adulatory support for Angela Merkel.
Three years later, things are different. There is a sustained shock of belated recognition that the fate, not just of the European Union, but of European civilisation itself — hitherto a defunct concept — is now definitely engaged. This has translated, most recently, into the election of the new Italian ‘populist’ government.
The Left’s ultimate project and raison d’être is now being challenged relentlessly from every angle, the principal focus being on immigration from Africa and the Middle East. There is scarcely an issue of public policy or private thought that remains untouched by the spectre of mass-, or even of long-term trickle-immigration. The European media are full of it, all day and every day. The cost to Europe of this stubborn and rudderless Chancellor is incalculable, but it can be curtailed with one simple and effective formula: Stop the boats! The Australian solution. Europe cannot assist Africa in any way at all, while she remains under extreme migratory pressure. The necessary paradigm-shift is at last on the move: from Human Rights to Common Sense.
France’s many lawless zones form a kind of widely-distributed archipelago of deeply rooted crime: all part of what might be called The Molenbeek Archipelago, after the Brussels neighbourhood that gave Paris the attackers of the Bataclan. They are the cités — the housing developments that look puzzlingly spruce on Google Earth, but whose intimate ecology is controlled by the caïds, the drug bosses. A French attorney responds to questions from Le Figaro.
FIGAROVOX/INTERVIEW : Several districts of Toulouse have been prey to urban rioting since Sunday night [15th April, 2018 – Ed.]. Guillaume Jeanson, attorney at the Paris bar, believes this violence demonstrates that state security policy is still failing to restore republican order to the “lost territories”. VIDEO
The sanctimonious shades of Hillary visit the Boy President in his undisturbed and righteous sleep. In his waking hours, bombast and the acquired high moral tone of the investment-banker-turned-statesman, replace the gravitas of office. The Basket of American Deplorables has been restocked with the Populist Lepers of Italy — and by extension, also with those of the United States, who elected Donald Trump. Since Trump failed to deliver on the promise of their recent public amour, the Boy President evidently now feels free to make a bonfire of all the lepers everywhere. #LeGarçonPrésident shows his hand, stooping even to conjure the ghost of Nazism from the new Italian government’s defensive actions, taken against a migratory tide that is aided and abetted by some of the NGOs.
LE FIGARO : The countries of Central Europe will boycott the summit meeting on the migration crisis set for Sunday (24th June) in Brussels.
Progressivism, as is little if ever observed, is a deeply immoral project — both in its structural assumption that personal values can be processed on an industrial scale, and in its spiralling consequences. ‘Western Values’ have been trading while insolvent on the global morality-market for decades, with the result that European culture is now threatened, amongst other things, by an implacable army of new Bowdlerites.
His name has passed into the language. Thomas Bowdler, an English physician, re-processed Shakespeare to render him inoffensive to genteel 19th century women and children. And in contemporary Europe, it is powerful ‘progressive’ women particularly, who have taken up the crusade to place European high culture beyond reproach from any quarter. Cherchez la femme. From their respective citadels in the French national government, Françoise Nyssen (Minister of Culture) and Marlène Schiappa (Minister with Responsibility for Gender Equality) are pushing moral vanity towards its imaginary limits. In this anecdote from Le Figaro, it is the Florence Opera that twists the end of Carmen — in order to oblige a hashtag. #MeToo.
FIGAROVOX/ANALYSIS : To avoid showing the death of a woman, the opera Carmen has been rewritten. Welcome to the era of thought-policing through art.
Friedrich Nietzsche was probably the first humorist to satirise self-righteousness in terms of pharmaceutically induced mental states. Moralin. Mixed in full strength for the European Left, and in various homeopathic concentrations for the Right and Centre. Dull conservatives have always preferred to take Umbrage, and are now doing so in ever greater numbers. The Swedes traditionally consume more Moralin per head of population than any other European country. This has allowed their great leaders to pocket the credit for their nation’s humanitarian generosity, while at the same time unloading all blame for the disastrous social results onto the Umbrage-takers. Now comes the turn of Germany’s Die Linke party to sniff the rapture of righteousness-without-responsibility.
SPIEGEL ONLINE : At their Congress, delegates of Die Linke [The Left Party] have voted by a large majority for a motion put forward by the party executive in favour of open borders for refugees. Yet the debate on this issue will continue.
According to Jacques Attali, cosmopolitan social theorist, and bête noire of cultural conservatives, “Every country should think of itself as a hotel and of its people as hoteliers”. This is indeed the era of the Idiot Sage, and of the policy-vacuum that delivers reality to their prescriptions. Attali might have noticed that it is the discriminating guest who is now being paid by the hotelier, as the following analysis from Le Figaro bears out. In Attali’s world, migrants — Homo electans — are encouraged to choose between countries because choice is a philosophical and practical Good in itself; one that creates new and powerful economic combinations. Ceteris paribus. And yet Attali, doyen of ‘influential thinkers’, and for all his attachment to the arts, remains merely a more-than-ordinarily conspicuous example of the cosmopolitan crank who lacks the deep personal culture that can be acquired only through residence, allegiance, and the painstaking curatorial mentality that goes with them. Limitless cosmopolitanism evacuates the mind.
FIGAROVOX/TRIBUNE : In declaring that asylum-seekers compare the various legislative regimes on offer before choosing a country to go to, the Minister of the Interior, Gérard Collomb, has merely stated the obvious, explains Jean-Thomas Lesueur, delegate-general of the Thomas More Institute.
FIGARO/LIFESTYLE : Dinner in White. On the 30th anniversary of this pique-nique chic in Paris, 17,000 guests from the four corners of the world set up their tables and chairs in front of Les Invalides. The vast lawns became entirely white. At the very last minute, about 8 p.m. on Sunday [3rd June], the organisers revealed the venue for the dinner: the Esplanade des Invalides. It broke all records. The 30th ‘pic-nic for polite society’ in Paris attracted, according to the organisers, 17,000 participants: of whom some 6,000 had come from abroad especially for the occasion.
