The Sickness Unto Death is the title of a book by the nineteenth century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855).* He diagnosed the sickness as despair – the despair of individuals. An individual despairing of himself is sick with a psychological disease. “Psychological” is the author’s word for it. Kierkegaard was a Protestant Christian – but opposed to the established Lutheran church of Denmark – and the cure he prescribed was Christian faith.

In the twentieth century the French writer Jean Raspail (1925-2020) published a novel titled The Camp of the Saints. The story diagnoses guilt as the lethal sickness of the pan-European community called the West. Its guilt is a political disease, making it impotent and moribund. Raspail was a Catholic – but angry with the Catholic Church – and the cure he prescribed was Christian faith.

In May 2023, First Things published an article by Nathan Pinkoski on The Camp of the Saints. These are extracts from it:

The most important dystopian novel of the second half of the [20th] century is Jean Raspail’s Le Camp des Saints (The Camp of the Saints, 1973). Its central plotline concerns an armada that transports one million migrants from India to the shores of France. It’s an invasion, an occupation of the Global North by the Global South. As the migrants land, France is thrown into chaos, along with the rest of Europe, and Western civilization dies.

Yet The Camp of the Saints is not a disaster novel. The book’s significance does not hinge on whether Raspail was correct to predict mass immigration or describe it in catastrophic terms. Rather, the novel’s genius lies in the depiction of an apocalypse in the original sense of that term. Properly translated, apocalypse is rendered as revelation, disclosure, literally an “uncovering.” The Camp of the Saints unveils the perverse logic that pervades late Western civilization, and throws into sharp relief the nihilism of guilt whereby the West welcomes its own destruction. …

Raspail will not allow the migrants to be idealized. Throughout the novel, he emphasizes their vulgarity by providing lengthy descriptions of their crudeness, sexual promiscuity, and repellent hygiene. … [T]he migrants are materially and culturally destitute. That is why they find the West attractive. They do not have a mission to redeem sinful Europe; they are seeking deliverance from poverty and from the sometimes-brutal oppression and inequalities of non-Western cultures.

They will not obtain what they seek. In discussing what to do about the armada, the French authorities persuade themselves of their own ­illegitimacy. At the climax of the novel, the French president delivers an emergency speech meant to authorize the use of military force against the migrants and prevent them from landing. But he ­cannot bring himself to deliver the order. France will not defend itself. When the migrants alight from their boats and wade ashore, the West has already capitulated.

European governments fall as the migrants arrive, and European citizens withdraw from public life. Civil society collapses; as a result, the migrants enjoy no real improvement in their condition. They bring their bad rulers with them, replacing European regimes with the very regimes they have fled. ­Dictator-generals and Brahmins take up positions in French government, ruling as they did in their own lands. The migrants and their supporters do not “include” the Rest into the West. They expand the scope of the Third World, and wretchedness goes global. The purported blessing of the arrival of the wretched, so cherished by progressive voices in the novel, does not come about. What emerges is not a particularly harsh despotism—there is only the occasional boot stomping on the human face—but the pain of the survivors is great, because of their vivid memories of what they have lost. …

The left-wing intelligentsia herald the coming of the migrants as the dawn of a new age of multiculturalism, but they stoke a media frenzy and deploy the tools of cancel culture against those who demur, ostracizing or punishing them. …

Raspail is unsparing in his depiction of the betrayals urged by left-wing intellectuals, but he reserves his most scathing passages for the treason of the Catholic Church. In the novel, the previous pope has sold the treasures of the Vatican in a failed bid to win the approval of the Third World. The sitting pope, a Latin American, spends his time flying around on humanitarian missions and selling off whatever Vatican assets remain. He sees himself as a champion of the Third World. As the migrants arrive and the native French abandon their lands, priests go down to the beaches to cry, “Thank God!” They turn their backs on their countrymen, imagining they see Christ in the migrants.

In Raspail’s telling, Catholic Christianity has for some time been in thrall to humanitarian universalism. The novel satirizes a left-liberal Catholicism that disdains national and civilizational particularity and renders the faith indistinguishable from the moral universalism of non-believers. Under the banner of “charity, solidarity, and universal conscience”, progressive clerics abandon their neighbors for the sake of the stranger. They practice the religion of humanity, a Christian heresy …

The First World must be taught to be ashamed of itself, to believe that its death will be its greatest gift to the future of humanity. The new civic liturgy of Western nations must express submission to the morally superior non-Western “other”. Those in the West need to be trained to take the knee …

Again and again in the novel, cowardice and self-hatred are masked and moderated by the conviction that mass immigration into Europe and the deconstruction of European identity will somehow take away the sins of the West. But Raspail knows the truth: Third World immigrants do not have the power to deliver Europeans from their sense of worthlessness. Once one embraces the logic of civilizational repudiation, the endpoint is nihilism and cultural death. …

The West is responsible for its own fate. Raspail is right. God will not deliver us from the consequences of our guilty self-­hatred. It is up to us to decide whether we will reject […] atonement through occupation and turn instead to the Lord.

Contrary to Pinkoski’s opinion, ours is that the really interesting thing about The Camp 0f the Saints is the accuracy of its prediction of what is happening in the 21st century: the non-violent invasion of the First World by a vast number of immigrants from the Third World; the failure of First World Governments to prevent it or turn it back; the sabotaging reaction to it of leftist intellectuals; clerics of the great churches – the Catholic priests following the lead of a Latin American pope –  passionately encouraging the shattering, the befouling, the abandonment of Western civilization.

What accounts for the capitulation of the rich and mighty law-governed civilized West to poor, weak, ignorant hordes from (in our case) the dark continent of Africa, corrupt republics of Latin America, cruel khanates of the Middle and Far East, hellholes of vicious Communist dictators?

Pinkoski declares, in apparent agreement with Raspail, that the big mistake which allows such a fatal tragedy to happen, is the embrace by Western political, intellectual, and religious leaders of  a “perverse logic” that “throws into sharp  relief the nihilism of guilt”.  The guilt is for Europe’s erstwhile imperialism, its colonizing and alleged oppressive exploitation of Third World countries. It arises, even in “Catholic Christianity”, out of an enchantment with  “humanitarian universalism”. That, Pinkoski tells us, is a “religion of humanity” and “a Christian heresy”.

The expression “humanitarian universalism” is no doubt intended to imply Marxism, but also more than that: global brotherhood, the family of man, humanism; an ideology of moral values, but essentially secular, and so “heretical” because it omits God. To the Christian mind, such an ideology is invalid because morals can only be decreed by God.

In reality, humanism, which purports to be concerned with individuals, is a very unlikely source of guilt and shame for a communal “sin”. The “sin” in this story is so bad that it calls for extreme punishment – nothing less than the destruction of our entire civilization, the peak achievement of humankind. The notion that humanism, or “humanitarianism”, is the source of such a shame could only arise in the religious mind – a mind furnished with inherited antiques: sin, guilt, atonement, penance, redemption through suffering, subordination of one’s own interests, apocalypse. And only one Western religion demands atonement by self-abasement, self-sacrifice, annihilation of achievement, willing submission to suffering.

Humanism began its resurrection with the anthropocentrism of  the Renaissance, and rose to its full height when Reason dethroned Faith at last in the Enlightenment. After a millennium of Christian oppression, Reason set Western man free to think, explore, experiment, discover, invent, hypothesize, be right and wrong; and be free to choose law instead of mystic revelation as a setter of ethical rules. (It is unfortunate – worse, it is disastrous – that most humanists have by now embraced the secular religion of socialism which again is inimical to freedom.)

The Enlightenment broke the power of the churches to terrify and oppress, but it did not change the essence of Christianity, which is masochistic. Doctrinally self-accusing. An ideology of  guilt, shame, abasement, and morbid reverence for martyrdom. For as long as its institutions were  powerful enough, it was an oppressive, torturing, property-confiscating, murdering tyranny; as totalitarian as it could be in the ages in which it ruled – no matter whether in the name of Catholicism or Protestantism. The secular heir to its tyranny is Marxism-Leninism-Maoism-Wokeism – no matter which of those labels it wears.

Christian faith, far from being the cure for the West’s sickness unto death, is its cause.

***

*Kierkegaard’s works are fascinating and often intentionally funny. He was witty and dryly humorous. His wit and humor are on fullest display in his book Either/Or.

… in compliance with the doctrine of Wokeism.

And to prove the French judiciary’s abject submission to Islam. 

Sarah Halimi was tortured to death and thrown from the balcony of her Paris apartment by a Muslim assailant chanting Koranic verses on April 4, 2017.

Michel Gurfinkiel writes at Middle East Forum:

The Sarah Halimi case—a brutal antisemitic assassination followed by an ongoing denial of justice—may be construed as the “original sin” of the current French centrist administration headed by President Emmanuel Macron.

Sarah Attal Halimi, a 65-year-old Orthodox Jewish retired physician and a mother of three, lived alone in a modest apartment on Vaucouleurs Street, in Paris’s 11th arrondissement, a middle- and lower-middle-class neighborhood stretching from Republic Square and Bastille Circle to Nation Circle in the center of the city. On April 4, 2017, she was attacked in the middle of the night, beaten to death, and defenestrated by a 27-year-old Malian Muslim neighbor, Kobili Traore.

The murder took place in between the two ballots of the 2017 presidential election, when Macron was already poised to be the next president but not yet elected; and the ensuing legal and political injustices are not so much a matter of individual guilt as a systemic flaw. The president has been undoubtedly shocked by the murder and subsequent denial of justice, and has attempted to correct it. He was not able, however, to do so effectively, and that may be held against him next year when he will run for reelection.

Kobili Traore

The 11th arrondissement, once celebrated as a place of social, ethnic, and religious diversity, was turning, at the time Halimi was murdered, into a more sinister place. Some even called it “Paris’s death triangle”—for good reasons.

In January 2006, Ilan Halimi (no relation to Sarah), the 23-year-old Jewish manager of a watchmaking shop in the 11th arrondissement, was kidnapped and tortured to death by the Barbarians, a multiracial gang of thugs led by Youssef Fofana, a second-generation Muslim immigrant from Cote d’Ivoire.

In July 2014, in the wake of the second Israel-Gaza war, pro-Palestinian rioters attempted to take over a synagogue on Rue de la Roquette, in the same area. Large numbers of worshippers, including the chief rabbi of Paris, were exfiltrated under heavy police protection.

In January 2015, two French jihadists stormed the premises of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo on Rue Nicolas Appert in the 11th arrondissement. The magazine had published caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed. Using automatic weapons, the jihadists killed 12 people (most of the editorial staff, including two 80-year-old illustrators) and wounded 11 additional people.

The 11th arrondissement of Paris, once celebrated for its social, ethnic, and religious diversity, has transformed into a more sinister place.

In November 2015, the Bataclan Theatre, also in the 11th, was the epicenter of large-scale jihadist attacks, in which 130 people were killed and 430 injured.

More jihad-related or antisemitic crimes took place in the area after Sarah Halimi’s murder. In March 2018, another Jewish woman, the 85-year-old Holocaust survivor Mireille Knoll, was stabbed to death and burned at her home on Avenue Philippe-Auguste by young Muslim neighbors.

In September 2020, as the terrorists who decimated Charlie Hebdo were being tried by the Paris Criminal Court, a Pakistani migrant attacked and wounded passers-by with a machete at the weekly’s former premises on Rue Nicolas Appert. Apparently, he was not aware that the publication had moved elsewhere after the 2015 massacre.

For all that, the circumstances of Sarah Halimi’s assassination were quite particular and should have led to a trial much more swiftly than in most other cases. As Halimi’s brother William Attal later explained on the French TV channel LCI, “no murder has been perpetrated in front of so many witnesses”. The beating went on for at least thirty minutes. Many neighbors were awakened by the knocking, the shouting, and the screaming, and were able to identify both the attacker and the victim. Muslim neighbors distinctly heard Kobili Traore chanting Koranic verses, vilifying the helpless woman for being Jewish, and charging her to be a Sheytan (a Satanic creature). No doubt can be entertained about Traore’s murderous intentions and about his deviant religious motivation.

Moreover, the murder took place in front of many police personnel. Diara Traore, a distant relative of the murderer who was living in the same house, called the police. A unit of the Anti-Crime Brigade (BAC) that happened to be patrolling the neighborhood came almost immediately. Reinforcements arrived within minutes. This large police force failed to rescue Sarah Halimi in time. The police were apparently convinced, until she was defenestrated, that she was still alive and that a rash intervention might be fatal to her. Still, they were by the same token additional witnesses in a criminal investigation.

What happened next was all the more surprising. Instead of prompt justice, a process of cover-up and procrastination set in. While the murder was instantly reported by Agence France-Press (AFP) and within the Jewish community, the mainstream media ignored it for two full days and then barely mentioned it for seven weeks. As a result, a protest march on Rue Vaucouleurs initiated by Halimi’s relatives and neighbors attracted only one thousand people, very low numbers considering the nature of the crime.

It took a press conference by Halimi’s lawyers on May 22, 2017, and a collective statement in Le Figaro by seventeen public intellectuals on June 1 for the story to spread to the public. Axel Roux of Le Journal du Dimanche admitted on June 4 that, as a journalist, he was “stunned” by the “minimalist” approach hitherto taken by his profession on this issue. Arnaud Benedetti, an assistant professor at Paris-Sorbonne University, wondered on June 6 in Le Figaro how “the dominant media” had determined that the Halimi case was not worth their attention.

The judicial investigation and prosecution was equally troubling. Kobili Traore was not sent to jail on a preventive basis, which is almost automatically the rule in France for all manner of crimes, but rather to psychiatric hospitals. On April 7, François Molins, the public prosecutor in charge of the case, declined “for the time being” to characterize it as “antisemitic”. On July 11, investigative judge Anne Ihuelu charged Traore with murder and kidnapping but noted that he claimed to have acted under the influence of cannabis taken the previous day and of “Satanic forces”.

Psychiatric experts were consulted over and over again, as if the prosecuting judiciary would not be content with anything less than an exonerating opinion, which they finally obtained. The use of a substance, the experts conceded, might have “momentarily” altered Traore’s mental perceptions, thus rendering him unaccountable in court. By contrast, the fact that Traore had spent the same preceding day praying at a local salafist mosque was not taken into consideration. Likewise, no crime reconstruction—again, a quasi-automatic practice in France—was done.

The Halimi family’s lawyers were bewildered, and so was President Macron, who demanded “full justice” on July 16, 2017, and later. In spite of claims to the contrary, the French judiciary has frequently been accused of being subservient toward the executive. In this case it overplayed its independence: The issue was submitted to an Indictment Chamber that both conceded that Traore had antisemitic motivations and determined that he was not legally accountable—some of the most convoluted legal reasoning ever heard of. The family’s lawyers applied to the nation’s court of last resort, the Cour de Cassation. On April 14, 2021, this court upheld the Indictment Chamber’s decision as technically valid.

This time, the uproar reached unprecedented heights. Many legal experts disavowed the High Court’s decision as inconsistent with well-established jurisprudence regarding the use of alcohol or substances as an aggravating circumstance rather than as an alleviating one. Many politicians and public intellectuals observed that any admission that a substance-induced “momentary mental lapse” rendered a murderer unaccountable amounted to a blank check for murder.

Macron vented his dismay. Considering that the Cour de Cassation’s ruling is final and cannot be reversed, he ordered Eric Dupond-Moretti, the minister of justice, to draft a new law that would preclude a similar situation in the future. Francis Szpiner (one of the Halimi family’s lawyers and a conservative deputy mayor of Paris for the 16th arrondissement) and Gilles William Goldnadel (another lawyer of the family and an eloquent public intellectual) retorted that they would rather apply to an Israeli court in order to keep the file open.

On April 25, 2021, more than 20,000 people demonstrated at the majestic Rights of Man Plaza in Paris, in front of the Eiffel Tower, at Szpiner’s call. The socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, and the conservative president of the Greater Paris Region, Valérie Pécresse, attended as well. More than 10,000 additional protesters demonstrated in several other major cities—a far cry from the aborted march on Rue Vaucouleurs in 2017.

20,000 people gather at a “Justice for Sarah” rally in Paris on April 25, 2021.

One motto of the protest was “No Justice? No Republic!” While Sarah Halimi’s tragic fate is eliciting much grief and compassion, and while concern about antisemitic crimes is very real, the emphasis has been shifting—precisely because of the inept prosecution—to the broader issue of a failing judicial system that is closely linked, in turn, to a decline in governance.

The French used to be extremely proud of their public administration—arguably one of the most comprehensive, efficient, and honest in the world—as well as of their police force and their judiciary. But over the past four decades, they have perceived a steep decline in these institutions. The decline is the result of various factors, including the transfer of governmental jurisdictions to either poorly organized local powers or to the European Union; the advent of the euro and its corollary, budget cuts; mass immigration; the decay of public education; and the descent into a post-industrial, two-tiered society.

The breakdown of public safety, as witnessed in Paris’s 11th arrondissement and in many other places, or more recently by a returning wave of jihadist-inspired assassinations, has been more deeply resented than anything else. However, the French people do not blame the police, who on the whole bravely stick to older standards, but rather a politicized judiciary

The extent to which the French magistracy has succumbed to woke ideologies was disclosed in 2013, when a French TV journalist found a “Wall of Bums” displayed at the main judiciary union’s headquarters. This was a list of “bums”, or citizens demanding justice for themselves or their relatives in cases that the union deemed to be “politically incorrect”. As a matter of fact, many of the offenders or criminals now arrested by the police are released by the prosecutors or the courts on such pretexts as age, inconclusive evidence, or “ethical” leniency.

Political correctness may have been no less crucial in the Sarah Halimi case. As noted earlier, the murder took place in between the presidential election’s two ballots. While Macron stood well ahead of his only challenger, Marine Le Pen, in every opinion poll, some people may have been afraid that the brutal assassination of an elderly Jewish lady by a young African Muslim would vindicate Le Pen’s anti-immigration platform. Hence, perhaps, a move to sweep the news under the carpet, at least until the second ballot.

This media manipulation may have subsequently comforted the judiciary in their wokeish prejudice and inspired them to shelter Traore from the full consequences of his act. Then, by an all-too-natural process, the more that public opinion—or the head of state, for that matter—insisted on justice, the more the judiciary fought back. Until justice was entirely denied.

The due process of justice means that innocents should be protected against arbitrary charges and that everything should be done to avert judicial errors or unfair sentences. However, it means also that criminals should be eventually punished. Short of that, growing numbers of citizens may be induced to think that there is no Republic and no government anymore. Shortly after the Cour de Cassation issued its highly contested final decision on the Sarah Halimi case, a number of retired generals published a petition asking the president and the government to restore order, law, and patriotic values. According to a Harris Interactive/LCI poll, it was approved by 58 percent of the French.

In this festive season, though joy is confined by government diktat …

We heartily wish a Merry Christmas to all our atheist conservative readers, highly valued commenters, visitors, and critics.

Next, civilly, we wish the same to our religious friends.

And finally, to our political enemies … well, alright then, fine, sure, okay … of course.

In this video – issued April 5, 2020, by the Middle East Forum – the leading expert on “Islamism”, Sam Westrop, explains how the citizens of the West are paying with their taxes to be the victims of Islamic aggression.

And how the Left-biased media help the aggressors.

He describes the mistakes European and British governments have made in dealing with their Muslim populations. At the 14 minute mark he starts speaking of America, how US governments are making the same mistakes. His most shocking revelation is that “Islamists are getting more money under the Trump administration than under the Obama administration”.

That, of course, is The Swamp in action. If the revelation reaches the President, we expect and hope that government funding of radical Muslim groups will stop.

Whatever Canada may once have been and whatever the talking heads may incessantly proclaim, Canada is no longer a viable political construct. It is a dead country walking.

So writes the Canadian writer David Solway at PJ Media.

Canada is presently in the throes of social and political disintegration. A left-leaning electorate has once again empowered a socialist government promoting all the lunatic ideological shibboleths of the day: global warming or “climate change,” radical feminism, indigenous [people’s] sovereignty, expansionary government, environmental strangulation of energy production, and the presumed efficiency of totalitarian legislation. Industry and manufacturing are abandoning the country in droves and heading south.

The link leads to another article of his, at American Thinker (February17, 2020), in which he gives details of the totalitarian legislation:

Bill C-25 seeking to impose “diversity” on all corporations; financial penalties against organizations that do not comply with government programs; a teeming brigade of government surveillance “inspectors” — that is, spies: wage spies, speech spies, feminist spies, pay equity spies, Human Rights spies; paralegal bodies known as Human Rights Tribunals with the power to levy crippling fines, bankrupt families, and shut down businesses, impose prison time for contempt of court, and compel conformity via “re-education”.  …

Bill C-16 prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender identity and gender expression …  The bill effectively mandates that citizens address others by their preferred pronouns and transgender fantasies — or else! It’s “zir,” “ze,” “zem,” or “zeir,” or you’re done for.  …  There are other laws on the books, bills such as C-59,  C-75, and C-76, that reduce and even criminalize freedom of expression, infringe on privacy rights, compromise due process, and render government transparency a thing of the past.

The assault against normalcy, common sense, civil rights, and charter freedoms gives no indication of relenting.  Bill S-202, an act to amend the Criminal Code now before Parliament, would outlaw what the government misleadingly calls “Conversion Therapy” — that is, by criminalizing parents, lawyers, physicians, and church leaders who object to state-compelled hormone-drugging and genital mutilation procedures, the bill would effectively prevent minor children [who are] undergoing forced transgender operations, surgical and hormonal, from receiving the help they need. “This whole agenda to sterilize and mutilate children,” write the editors of Action4Canada, “is pure evil and in violation of … the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as well as a physician’s ethical commitment promising to ‘First, do no harm'”. …

Not satisfied with … conducting dodgy prosecutorial attacks on individuals whom the party wishes to intimidate, silence, or arrest, Trudeau’s Liberals are considering a motion requiring all news content–creators to procure a government license for approved content, thus controlling public access to information. …

Not content with such despotic measures, the CRTC (Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission) proposes to identify news sites that are “accurate, trusted, and reliable” with the intent to enhance the “diversity of voices”.  Truth be told, there are precious few “accurate, trusted, and reliable” news sites in Canada. … Moreover, we know that emphasizing “diversity of voices” is equivalent to the imposition of the grievance-driven identity-group and social justice model on public broadcasting while constraining factual reporting and bridling the dissemination of genuine news.  It is … tantamount to a government monopoly on information …

All of Canada’s political parties signed on to Bill C-76, which … imposes further restrictions on third-party speech during extended election periods. …  Every political party steers to the Left, including, as noted, the Conservatives, who are essentially Liberal Lite.  Trudeau is simply the most visible embodiment and effective bellwether of the political virus infecting the country. …

He cites the case of Omar Khadr (see our post and the video here) as an example of the inverted values of the governing elite.

He characterizes the form of government as “soft totalitarianism”:

Soft totalitarianism is a considerable way from hard totalitarianism.  …

But the soft leads to the hard, and is doing so:

To say it can’t happen here … is an expression of overweening confidence and lack of historical awareness.  One does not have to think back to the demise of the Weimar Republic in Germany.  A mere glance at the European Union’s unelected, bureaucratic authoritarianism, or a recognition of what the Democrat Party is demonstrably planning for the United States, should awaken us to the danger.  To be awakened, we might remark, is the opposite of being woke.  Canada stands as a vivid illustration of what would be in store for the U.S. under a Democrat administration.

It can happen here, and it is happening right now, right here, in Canada.

He continues in his PJ Media article (written on February 24, 2020 – one week after his American Thinker column):

Canada is now reaping the whirlwind. The Red-Green Axis consisting of social justice warriors, hereditary band chiefs, renewable energy cronies, cultural Marxists, and their political and media enablers have effectively shut down the country. The economy is at a standstill, legislatures and City Halls have been barricaded, blockades dot the landscape, roads and bridges have been sabotaged, trains have been derailed (three crude-by-rail spillages in the last two months), goods are rotting in warehouses, heating supplies remain undelivered, violent protests and demonstrations continue to wreak havoc—and the hapless Prime Minister, who spent a week swanning around Africa as the crisis unfolded, is clearly out of his depth and has no idea how to control the mayhem. No surprise here. A wock pupper [? – woke puppet?] politico in thrall to the Marxist project and corporate financial interests, Justin Trudeau is generally baffed out when it comes to any serious or demanding concerns involving the welfare of the people and the economic vitality of the nation. Little is to be expected of him in the current emergency apart from boilerplate clichés and vague exhalations of roseate sentiment.

Still, Trudeau may have been right about one thing when he told The New York Times that Canada had no core identity—although this is not what a Prime Minister should say in public. Canada was always two “nations”, based on two founding peoples, the French and the English …  But it may be closer to the truth to portray Canada as an imaginary nation which comprises three territories and ten provinces, two of which, Quebec and Newfoundland, cherish a near-majoritarian conception of themselves as independent countries in their own right. Newfoundland narrowly joined Confederation only in 1949 and Quebec held two successive sovereignty referenda that came a hair’s breadth from breaking up the country.

The latest entry in the exit sweepstakes is oil-rich but hard-done-by Alberta, a province which suffered under the National Energy Program introduced in 1980 by the current PM’s father Pierre Trudeau, and is currently struggling under a concerted left-wing campaign, sponsored by Green-progressivist foundations (American consortiums masking via proxies as Canadian coalitions), clueless Nobel laureates at their virtue-signaling best, and a Liberal government ideologically aligned with the NDP (New Democratic Party) and the Greens, to prevent the development of its vast oil reserves. Alberta has always resented the indifference to and domination of the Canadian West by the so-called Laurentian Elite comprising “the political, academic, cultural, media and business elites” of central Canada. There is now a Wexit movement gathering momentum.

It might just as plausibly be argued that Canada is composed of a veritable congeries of competing, self-identified mini-nations—English, French, Islamic, Chinese, Sikh, native tribes with multiple patrimonies and unpronounceable names, and sundry political constituencies affiliated with the global left. Contributing factors like indiscriminate immigration from dysfunctional countries, metastasizing socialist doctrine verging on nascent totalitarianism, a state-funded national broadcaster and a deeply compromised print media subsidized by the Liberal government added to the destabilizing brew. Meanwhile, to quote lawyer and former philosophy professor Grant Brown, “the education system invites Extinction Rebellionkooks into the classroom to terrify the children”. … An army of little Gretas will carry the country-killing revolution even further.

It is often noted that America is a nation evenly divided between progressivist and conservative populations, a civil dilemma not easily resolved. But Canada is divided approximately 65-35 by these constituencies, and if one considers that the federal Conservative Party in its present manifestation can fairly be described as Liberal Lite, the breakdown is more like 95-5. This means there is no chance of reconciliation between our political disparities, such as they are, and Canada is doomed to plummet down the esker of every failed socialist experiment that preceded it and, indeed, that is presently on display in various foundering nations around the globe—North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and counting.

Trudeau père invoked the War Measures Act in 1970 to quell the Quebec separatist movement, the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ), after a series of bombings and murders. It is obvious that the son has neither the political smarts nor the strength of character to act decisively against those who are busy reducing an already patchwork country into a heap of shards and rubble.

Nor, it would seem, the will. Is Justin Trudeau not the leading  destroyer of the country which he believes never had a “core identity” anyway?  

And there we find the proof that, whatever Canada may once have been and whatever the talking heads may incessantly proclaim, Canada is no longer a viable political construct. It is a dead country walking.

What hope have the remaining good Canadians? Perhaps they could hope that President Trump will make an offer on behalf of the US to buy the remains of Canada from the Queen, at the bargain price the corpse is now worth, and resurrect the nation as Canadian North Americans, annexed to the Republic, happy, prosperous, and free.

Is America in the throes of a revolution? Are we sliding unstoppably into totalitarian communism?

Angelo Codevilla writes at American Greatness:

Some conservatives, rejoicing that impeachment turned into yet another of #TheResistance’s political train wrecks and that President Trump is likely to be reelected by a bigger margin than in 2016, expect that a chastened ruling class will return to respecting the rest of us. They are mistaken.

Trump’s reelection, by itself, cannot protect us. The ruling class’s intolerance of the 2016 election’s results was intolerance of us.

Nor was their intolerance so much a choice as it was the expression of its growing sense of its own separate identity, of power and of entitlement to power. The halfhearted defenses with which the offensives of the ruling class have been met already advertise the fact that it need not and will not accept the outcome of any presidential election it does not win. Trump notwithstanding, this class will rule henceforth as it has in the past three years. So long as its hold on American institutions continues to grow, and they retain millions of clients, elections won’t really matter.

Our country is in a state of revolution, irreversibly, because society’s most influential people have retreated into moral autarchy, …

Autarchy, or autocracy, is rule by a dictator. Has any Democrat proclaimed a desire for a dictator, or to be a dictator? If so, we missed it. The Democrats want absolute power in their own hands, but have’t yet wished up a Stalin or a Mao. It’s highly likely that Bernie Sanders would like to be an American Stalin, but has he admitted it?

Besides which, there is not a single Democratic candidate for the presidency of the United States who could run a poll in Iowa, let alone the country. 

Moral autarchy? Not sure what that means. But okay, let’s accept the term in order to follow the writer’s argument.

… have seceded from America’s constitutional order, and because they browbeat their socio-political adversaries instead of trying to persuade them. Theirs is not a choice that can be reversed. It is a change in the character of millions of people.

Does character change? Does the character of a people – a nation – change? What characterizes any nation must by definition be what does not change about it. For a country to change its character it would have to have its population replaced by a different population – as is happening rapidly in Sweden, France, Spain, and Germany.  The Democrats seem to like the idea of America becoming more “Hispanic” than “Anglo”, but it hasn’t happened yet, and might never happen.

There has been a change in America over the last 70 years or so. It is not a change of character. In all their variety, Americans are recognizably the same as they were 100 years ago. What has changed in America are ideas about values and morals, about what matters and what doesn’t.

And that is what the article under discussion is really about.

The sooner conservatives realize that the Republic established between 1776 and 1789—the America we knew and loved—cannot return, the more fruitfully we will be able to manage the revolution’s clear and present challenges to ourselves. How are we to deal with a ruling class that insists on ruling—elections and generally applicable rules notwithstanding—because it regards us as lesser beings?

The resistance that reached its public peaks in the Brett Kavanaugh hearings and the impeachment imbroglio should have left no doubt about the socio-political arbitrariness that flows from the ruling class’s moral autarchy, about the socio-political power of the ruling class we’re forced to confront, or of its immediate threat to our freedom of speech.

Chief Justice John Roberts, presiding over the Senate’s impeachment trial, was as clear an example as any of that moral autarchy and its grip on institutions.

Pursuant to Senate rules, Senator Rand Paul sent a written question through Roberts to House Manager Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) regarding the extent of collaboration between Schiff’s staffer Sean Misko and his longtime fellow partisan, CIA officer Eric Ciaramella in starting the charges that led to impeachment. Roberts, having read the question to himself, declared: “The presiding officer declines to read the question as submitted.”

The chief justice of the United States, freedom of speech’s guardian-in-chief, gave no reason for declining to read Paul’s question. The question was relevant to the proceedings. It violated no laws, no regulations. The names of the two persons were known to every member of the House and Senate, as well as to everyone around the globe who had followed news reports over the previous months. But the Democratic Party had been campaigning to drive from public discussion that this impeachment stemmed from the partisan collaboration between a CIA officer and a Democratic staffer.

“Collaboration” is the polite term for it; “conspiracy” the more accurate one.

Accordingly, the mainstream media had informally but totally banned discussion of this fact, supremely relevant but supremely embarrassing to Schiff in particular and to Democrats in general. Now, Paul was asking Schiff officially to comment on the relationship. Schiff could have explained it, or refused to explain it. But Roberts saved him the embarrassment and trouble—and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) spared senators the problem of voting on a challenge to Roberts’s  ruling. The curtain of official concealment, what the Mafia calls the omertà, remained intact. Why no reason?

Just as no dog wags his tail without a reason, neither did Roberts wag his without reason. Neither the laws of the United States nor the rules of the Senate told the presiding officer to suppress the senator’s question. Why was Roberts pleased to please those he pleased and to displease those he displeased? In short, why did this impartial presiding officer act as a man partial to one side against the other?

This professional judge could hardly have been impressed by the ruling class’s chosen instrument, Adam Schiff, or by Schiff’s superior regard for legal procedure. Since Schiff’s prosecution featured hiding the identity of the original accuser—after promising to feature his testimony—and since it featured secret depositions, blocked any cross-examination of its own witnesses, and prevented the defense from calling any of their own, it would have been strange if Chief Justice Roberts’s bias was a professional one.

Is it possible that Roberts favored the substance of the ruling class claim that neither President Trump nor any of his defenders have any right to focus public attention on the Biden family’s use of public office to obtain money in exchange for influence? That, after all, is what Washington is largely about. Could Roberts also love corruption so much as to help conceal it? No.

Roberts’s professional and ethical instincts incline him the other way. Nevertheless, he sustained the ruling class’s arbitrariness. Whose side did he take? His dinner companions’ side? The media’s? His wife’s? Roberts’s behavior—contrary as it was to his profession, to his morals, and to his political provenance—shows how great is the ruling class’s centripetal force.

The sad but inescapable consequence of this force is that conservatives have no choice but to follow the partisan logic of revolution—fully conscious of the danger that partisanship can make us as ridiculously dishonest as Adam Schiff or CNN’s talking heads, into rank-pullers like John Roberts, and into profiteers as much as any member of the Biden family.

Do conservatives have no choice but to go along with “the revolution”, with the abandonment of the values that inspired the Constitution, with corruption as a matter of indisputable but unchangeable fact?

The writer then seems to change his mind. He suggests there is a choice:

And yet, revolution is war, the proximate objective of which is to hurt the other side until it loses the capacity and the will to do us harm. That means treating institutions and people from the standpoint of our own adversarial interest: controlling what we can either for our own use or for bargaining purposes, discrediting and abandoning what we cannot take from our enemies.

Opposing them by the means they choose, the weapons they use? That – so the writer suggests – is our best recourse?

Unlike our enemies, our ultimate objective is, as Lincoln said, “peace among ourselves and with all nations”. But what kind of peace we may get depends on the extent to which we may compel our enemies to leave us in peace. And for that, we must do unto them more and before they do unto us.

Which is true? Do we have no choice but to join “the revolution” – a change from a free open society of self-reliant individuals into a government-controlled, race and sex obsessed, doom prophesying, totally organized community? Or are we still in control of our destiny? And if we fight our revolutionary enemy, must it be with their weapons, or ours? On their terms, or ours?

We do not see that there has been a revolution – though the Obama administration tried to make one. We do not think the only way to save America from totalitarian one-party rule is by following the rules laid down by the Gramsci-Alinsky school of sedition and the Cloward-Piven blueprint for chaos. (See here and here and here and here.)

By great good luck we have President Trump leading us in another direction, showing us another way, prioritizing better (characteristic) values: freedom, individual enterprise, innovation, industry, competence, patriotism, strength, ambition, self-confidence, prosperity. For a few more years at least. During which the Left revolutionaries may, in the fury of their frustration, stamp themselves into the ground.

France is submitting to Islam.

“Voltaire fades before Muhammad, the Enlightenment before Submission.”

 – Giulio Meotti quotes and comments in his article at Gatestone:

“Five years after the killings at Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher, France has learned to live with the Islamist threat,” wrote Yves Thréard, deputy editor at the daily newspaper Le Figaro.

Not a month goes by… without a murderous attack with the cry of “Allahu Akbar” taking place on our soil…. But what is the point of fighting the effects of Islamism if we do not tackle the origins of this ideology of death? On that front, however, denial continues to compete with naiveté. Nothing has changed in the last five years. On the contrary.

In the name of diversity, non-discrimination and human rights, France has accepted a number of blows to its culture and history… Islamists are a hot-button issue. They continue the fight which, even without weapons, has all the allure of a war of civilizations. Is the famous “Charlie spirit”, which some people thought was blowing after the January 2015 attacks, just an illusion?

France has been marking the fifth anniversary of the deadly jihadist attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which took place on January 7, 2015. Last month, French Senator Nathalie Goulet warned that more attacks were likely. “In France we have a serious problem and we need to do more to prevent extremists from acting. As it stands, there will be more attacks,” Goulet said. There are believed to be 12,000 radical Islamists on France’s terror watch-list, “however only a dozen are thought to be under 24-hour surveillance”.

This week was marked by yet a new string of Islamist terror attacks: police injured a knife-wielding man on a street in the northeastern city of Metz, two days after a suspected Islamist radical in the Paris suburb of Villejuif stabbed a man to death, an act that prosecutors are treating as a terror attack. In both incidents, the assailants shouted “Allahu Akbar.” This type of attack was dubbed “ordinary jihad” in a Le Figaro editorial this week.

On January 7, 2015, the cartoonists and journalists Cabu, Charb, Honoré, Tignous and Wolinski, the psychoanalyst Elsa Cayat, the economist Bernard Maris and the policeman Franck Brinsolaro fell under the bullets of the jihadist brothers Chérif and Saïd Kouachi. Charlie Hebdo‘s 2020 anniversary issue commemorated the massacre and slammed the “new gurus of monolithic thinking” who are trying to impose politically correct censorship.

The outburst of indignation of the French people, gathered in Paris for a massive demonstration on January 11, 2015, was not enough to awaken the spirit of resistance of the French leaders and elites against Islamism and its collaborators. “The seriousness of the Islamist political fact in France is strongly underestimated,” says the lawyer Thibault de Montbrial, president France’s Center for Internal Security Studies.

In a country that used to stand for freedom of expression, self-censorship is soaring. “For the humorists in France, it’s always easy to make fun of the Pope and the Catholics, it’s always easy to make fun of Jews, it’s always easy to make fun of Protestants,” confesses a long-time Charlie Hebdo columnist, Patrick Pelloux. For Islam, it is not easy. “We feel that this religion is scary. The word Islam is scary, and on that, the terrorists have won.”

While French prisons have become a breeding ground for jihadists, the Islamization of the cities’ suburbs, the banlieues, is proceeding full tilt. The weekly Le Point recently devoted a cover story to the “territories conquered by the Islamists”. In many of these areas, violence rages; 1,500 cars were torched there on New Year’s Eve. In recently published book, “Les territoires conquis de l’islamisme” (“The Territories Conquered by Islamism”), by Bernard Rougier, a professor at the University Sorbonne-Nouvelle and director of the Center for Arab and Oriental Studies, he explains that Islamism is an “hegemonic project”, splintering working-class neighborhoods. These “ecosystems”, he states, work on a “logic of rupture” of the French society, its values and institutions, and are built on mosques, bookstores, sport clubs and halal restaurants. …

“Today,” said the president of the Ministry of Education’s Conseil supérieur des programmes, Souâd Ayada, “the visibility of Islam in France is saturated by the veil and the jihad.”

Souad Ayada is a Muslim, a spécialiste de la spiritualité et de philosophie islamiques, so it’s doubtful that she was complaining. (If those in charge of education in France all think so badly, no wonder the nation is fading away. “Visibility” cannot be”saturated”. Veils cannot saturate anything. Nor can “the jihad”. )

While Islamist preachers and recruiters are out on the streets, seeking out the weak minds that will form the first line of their holy war, political Islam also forms electoral lists in France’s suburbs.

French President Emmanuel Macron opposed banning these political groups.

“France is a budding Islamic republic,” noted the Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal. In those “territories”, he said, live many of the terrorists who attack France, from the Kouachi brothers of Charlie Hebdo to the jihadists who murdered [and tortured – ed] scores of people at the Bataclan Theater. …

Islamists have, in addition, recruited dozens of French soldiers and ex-servicemen who have converted to Islam. Many have come from commando units with expertise in handling weapons and explosives.

France is turning into a “society of vigilance” in its fight against the “Hydra” of Islamist militancy, as Macron said. …

He said that? But will do nothing to stop the influx of Muslims whose holy duty it is to wage jihad? Or even ban known “political groups”? “Vigilance” may not be quite enough.

Last October, an Islamist struck in one of France’s most secure buildings: the monumental Paris Police headquarters near Notre Dame cathedral, where he murdered four of his colleagues. … “It is hard to believe that the police on which we rely to protect us and which is supposed to be our last rampart against terrorism, can itself be the victim of terrorism, with throats slit in the holy of holies of the Police Prefecture.” 

In the wake of the attack, seven police officers, “suspected of radicalization”, had their guns confiscated.

And without their guns they can do no harm? Their brother jihadists in London could teach them how to use knives and mechetes to inflict death and injury. But come to think of it, they know how. They used knives in the Bataclan Theater. “The French Parliamentary report contains details of how victims’ bodies had been mutilated, such as by eye-gouging, disemboweling, castration, and beheading,” Wikipedia reports.

“I have the impression that our immune defenses have collapsed and that Islamism is winning,” says the French writer Pascal Bruckner.

There’s an observant citizen!

He is quoted further:

[Islam’s] main demands have been met: nobody dares to publish caricatures of Mohammed anymore. Self-censorship prevails…. Hate is directed against those who resist obscuring information rather than against those who obscure it. Not to mention the psychiatrization of terrorism, in order better to exonerate Islam. If we had been told in the early 2000s that in 2020, around 20 French cartoonists and intellectuals would be under police protection, no one would have believed it. The threshold of servitude has increased.

“Sunk” is what he means: the threshold has been lowered, made easier to get over. To enter into servitude. The easy choice for the French now is to submit to Islam.

Five years after the terrorist murders at Charlie Hebdo, free speech is less free [read “gone” – ed] in France. “No one today would publish the cartoons of Muhammad,” said Philippe Val, the former editor of Charlie Hebdo, recently.

“For the past five years, I’ve been going to the police station every month or so to file a complaint about death threats, not insults, death threats,” says Marika Bret, a journalist at Charlie Hebdo today.

In Paris, five years after the murders at Charlie Hebdo, there was a big march to protest not terrorism, but “Islamophobia”.

“Voltaire fades before Muhammad, and the Enlightenment before the Submission,” wrote the author Éric Zemmour. …

In 2017 … a Jewish woman, Sarah Halimi, was tortured and murdered in her Paris apartment by her neighbor, Kobili Traoré, who was yelling “Allahu Akbar”.  A court of appeals recently ruled that Traoré, because he had smoked cannabis, was “not criminally responsible” for his actions.

And so he was acquitted.

Which means that anti-Semitism, even when it results in murder, is licensed in France.

Actually, anti-Semitism is a grand old French tradition. But now it is not merely tolerated and quietly practiced in the land of “liberty, equality and fraternity”, it is an aim, a cause, a duty. Because it was commanded – and an example of the mass murder of Jews set – by Muhammad himself.

France has capitulated to Islam. The EU has capitulated to Islam. In all the countries of western Europe, the peoples are condemning themselves to live in fear. In subjection. And in  sorrow. For in Islam there is no laughter, and no singing and dancing. And no wine, mon frère, no wine. No beer, mein Bruder, no beer.

Standing almost alone in the Western World against this retreat from the Enlightenment is America. At least for as long as Donald Trump is president.

The defeat suffered by the far-left Labour Party in a recent general election in Britain was so decisive, it forces left-wing parties on both sides of the Atlantic to reconsider their policies, and encourages conservatives to hope it is symptomatic of a decline and fall of the Left everywhere.

When we were in the grip of that wild hope, an article in Areo by Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay titled The Left is Having an Identity Crisis drew our close attention.

The title is ironic, intentionally or not, because the Left has been primarily concerned with “identity” ever since Karl Marx drew rigid lines between the classes of the Western world. Your identity in the Marxian view was defined by your class. You were either bourgeois which was bad because you supported the status quo, or you were proletarian which was good because you were destined to make violent revolution. (In his personal life Marx was a social snob, always putting his wife’s aristocratic name and title on his visiting card.) When the proletariats of Europe disappointed the Left after the Second World War, becoming well-off, indistinguishable in their outlook from the bourgeoisie and plainly uninterested in making revolution, a New Left arose with a revised ethic of identity. Henceforth it was the Lumpenproletariat, a vagabond underclass that Marx had despised, that must play the revolutionary role. Their class, the “unemployed and unemployable” (as Herbert Marcuse wrote) was augmented by les misérables of the Third World (Frantz Fanon’s “wretched of the earth”) and others who were powerless and exploited by the bourgeois patriarchy; notably women and the sexually deviant, and even (sotto voce why not?) felons. These “sections” of society would unite under the red banner of socialist revolution, which no longer had to be violent. Instead the Left would advance to power by taking control over the institutions of the Western democracies – or where that proved impossible, by discrediting them. The author of the plan, Antonio Gramsci, described it as “the long march through the institutions”.The sections, united in purpose throughout the world, would get the levers of power in their hands and then change our world that has evolved over millennia, our world of many nation-states, of European and male supremacy, of capitalism and private ownership and unequal wealth, into One World of material equality and moral beauty.

In this drama, your identity according to the categories of the New Left is what matters about you. You are black, female, homosexual, or in the nostalgia of the theorists a worker, so you are expected to take part in, or at least assist, the long march. You are expected to be on the Left.

And now the Left itself is having a crisis of identity? What is it about its Leftness that is troubling it?

Pluckrose and Lindsay, who declare themselves to be liberal and not socialist or “identitarian”, reflect on what is happening in and to the Left in Britain and America, and set about defining, diagnosing, and prescribing a cure for the problem:

The Left is in crisis. We no longer present a cohesive movement, and we no longer form coherent political parties. We are a fractured and ill-defined mess, our goals are diffuse and scattered, and we are hemorrhaging supporters from what should be our base—the working class, liberals, and racial and sexual minorities. It is not clear that left-wing parties and movements are currently listening to that base or have its best interests at heart.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the recent British election, which was disastrous for the left. Labour lost key seats, including in areas that have voted left for close to a century, and experienced its worst drubbing in four decades. An outright majority was won by surely the least credible Tory Prime Minister in living memory.

That’s Boris Johnson they’re talking about. A man who was born to be Prime Minister of England, very possibly a good one. He has sworn to take Britain out of the European Union which is  a corrupt and undemocratic political darling of the Left, so of course the Left abominates him. To persons on the Left, he is almost as bad as our great President Trump.

It seems uncomfortably likely that this disaster is soon to be mirrored in the US by the re-election of Donald Trump for a second term, despite the fact that the American public has had four years—beginning with his 2015 campaign—to notice how manifestly unfit he is to be the leader of the western world. The pressing questions at the moment are, what’s going on? and what, if anything, can we do to stop it?

They do some quite credible analysis of what’s going wrong on their side:

Let’s start with what isn’t going to work. It simply will not do to blame these electoral results on the idea that the majority of the population is ignorant, hateful, or unaware of their own best interests. This is the attitude—made popular throughout the educated left by a growing commitment to elitism and critical theories—that got us into this mess in the first place. This attitude is particularly worrying because it leads leftist activists to double down on exactly those things that are killing the left.

If left-leaning parties around the world hope to have any future electoral success, they need to ditch both elitism and identity-based theory and develop some self-awareness. They need to start listening to the people they are supposed to represent so that they can understand what people actually want from a left-wing party. Only in this way can the left heal its fractures and form a strong and principled movement, with political parties that the general public can trust and respect.

The policies of left-wing parties need to come from the people—not represent revolutionary ideologies most do not share or appreciate having imposed upon them for their own good. The public will not stand for this—nor should they. It is absolutely right to reject the social engineering projects of theorists, activists, and the privileged elite who, like self-appointed philosopher kings, want to order society according to their ideological vision of how things should be rather than how they are or realistically could be.

People who reject the ideologues’ vision are not all racist, sexist, and xenophobic bigots or radical capitalist absolutists. Liberals and working people, who form an overlapping majority, generally have strong opinions on what will make their lives better and society fairer, and they are increasingly deciding that right-wing parties are closer to providing this. Barely electable as those might be, that’s still miles better than being totally unelectable. This is a point our left-wing parties seem utterly unable to grasp—as our elections keep demonstrating. This calls for humility and introspection from the left, rather than doubling down and denigrating the masses for their wrongthink.

Ah, yes. It seems that whenever the workers are given a chance to express their political preference, they choose wicked but rewarding capitalist conservatism over morally beautiful but materially deficient socialism.

But Pluckrose and Lindsay, and probably all Leftists, assume that “most people” really want a left-wing government. One that is not too radical.

So Left-wing parties must strive to keep themselves from becoming too radical. But it’s not easy for them:

Left-wing parties and movements generally have a harder job maintaining consistency and cohesion than conservative ones because of their progressive nature. Progress requires change, moving with the times, and finding new directions. It requires fighting for certain advances and then, when these are achieved, fighting for new ones. Conservatives generally have an easier time with continuity because they seek to conserve aspects of society that they see as good, as well as upholding consistent principles, rooted in consistent moral intuitions of individual responsibility, respect for tradition and authority, cultural cohesion, and family. While differences do exist within conservatism—especially between libertarian fiscal conservatives and religious and/or social conservatives—there are natural limits as to how much principles can change and evolve when they are firmly rooted in the drive to conserve.

Progressives, on the other hand, are always trying to move forward and address new injustices and inequalities. The drive to progress necessarily manifests in many different directions at the same time and these can even contradict each other. One good example of this is the vitriolic conflict between the radical feminists, whose rejection of gender is rooted in an adaptation of Marxist class struggle, and the self-ID trans activists, whose conception of gender is rooted in postmodern queer theory. These groups are both decidedly left-wing and yet they do not agree.

Another such conflict came to light when Goldsmith University’s Feminist Society endorsed the Islamic Society’s protests against communist feminist, Maryam Namazie, due to her criticism of Islamism. For progressives to make progress, their competing aims therefore need to be balanced within a consistent ethical framework—a liberal framework—that can prevent the left from repeatedly fracturing because of incompatible aims and conceptions of the world.

… [There is a] current deadlock between the three main elements of the left [which are]: the radical (or socialist), identitarian (“Social Justice”), and liberal left. She argues that the  liberal left must strongly champion liberalism, as an overarching principle by which the valid concerns of the other strands of the left can be judged. Neither socialism nor identity politics can win back the voters who have gone over to the right because most people support regulated capitalism and universal principles of fairness and reciprocity, regardless of identity. This is perfectly compatible with profound concern about the disadvantages people face because of their class, race, sex, or sexuality.

The socialists—who prioritise the material realities of economic and class issues—and the identitarians—with their myopic and obsessive focus on race, gender, and sexuality as social constructs perpetuated in language—cannot easily cooperate with each other, without a broader framework that is neither socialist nor identitarian. The left needs to focus on both economic and identity issues. … [R]ight now most people want a combination of center-left economics and center-right stability. We can achieve this by restoring liberalism to the heart of left-wing politics and rejecting the lure of illiberal alternatives.

Liberalism, in its essence, seeks incremental reform to address social injustices, and it does so on the level of the individual and the universal. That is, liberalism seeks to produce a society in which every individual has access, in principle, to everything society has to offer, regardless of economic background, race, gender or sexuality. Liberalism is not (as its socialist and Social Justice critics claim) a belief that society has already achieved that aim and a corresponding denial of any continuing disadvantages caused by economic inequalities or prejudice.

On the contrary, by insisting on the rights of the individual and universal principles of non-discrimination we can oppose the barriers impeding any social group. This is the approach taken by the Civil Rights Movement, liberal feminism, and gay pride—with great success. … Critics of liberalism are right to warn us that focusing only on the individual and the universal can lead us to overlook issues disadvantaging specific groups. But we can address these criticisms most effectively by appealing to a broader liberal framework, not by attempting to overthrow it.

We have moved into a new stage of history. The battles the left fought over the past half-century have largely been won. We cannot go back to focusing on miners’ rights and trade unions, or on securing equal pay for women, outlawing racial discrimination, or legalizing homosexuality: we have won those wars. In fact, much of the right supports these advances now too.

So far, not much to make us feel irresistibly compelled to argue.

But next they explain what liberalism means to them:

We have new battles to fight. These include combating climate change, securing our place on the world stage and within the global economy, and fostering a cohesive multiculturalism, free from moral relativism and enforced conformity. The left now finds itself pulled in many directions at once. This is the source of its profound identity crisis.

The intractability of the problem facing the left was made abundantly clear by the recent UK election. Constituencies such as Grimsby and Blyth voted Conservative after decades of being staunchly Labour. As Aditya Chakrabortty points out, this is largely due to changes in working class political identity:

While the party bigwigs threw their weight about, the mines and the manufacturers, the steel and the shipbuilding were snuffed out. With them went the culture of Labourism: the bolshy union stewards, the self-organised societies, most of the local newspapers. Practically any institution that might incubate a working-class provincial political identity was bulldozed.

Workers have other concerns now, and it seems they did not feel that Labour was addressing them. In areas that were long-term Labour strongholds—and which have now turned Tory—a majority of working people also voted Leave in the Brexit referendum. This points to a deep and fundamental rift that cannot easily be ignored—and some of the responses to this division highlight many of the same issues that triggered working-class support for Leave in the first place.

[Jeremy] Corbyn’s Labour Party was torn between honoring the wishes of the many working people who wanted to leave the European Union and those of its liberal and cosmopolitan supporters, who strongly supported Remain. After dithering on the issue for a couple of years, Labour finally compromised by calling for a second referendum, a solution that, by calling Mulligan on the results of the first Brexit referendum, seems not to have mollified its working class base in the least. Since then, a YouGov survey found that Labour voters were more likely to think the next Labour leader needed to be more centrist and that the general population overwhelmingly did not care for identity politics, at least in the realm of gender.

The Economist has described Labour as out of touch with the working class, particularly in the north. …

While the issue of Brexit is far more complicated than a simple left-right divide, it highlights a profound disconnect between the old, class-conscious left and the new identity-conscious (read: identity-obsessed) left. By attempting to satisfy both of them at the same time, Labour is tearing itself apart. We can also see this in the anti-Semitism that now plagues the party, which is a consequence of attempting to come to terms with postcolonial guilt by acknowledging Britain’s role in the current tensions across the Muslim world. As a result, Labour often supports conservative Muslims over liberal ones, and condones—or actively endorses—the sexism, homophobia, and antisemitism that comes along with that position, leaving British Jews in a very vulnerable position. These deep inconsistencies have led many centrist and liberal voters in the UK to believe that the Tories better represent their interests than can Labour.

These political challenges are not confined to the UK. In the US, the Democratic Party is flailing, as it attempts to satisfy both its economic and identitarian wings, in the run-up to the 2020 elections. While the majority of the left and center—and a significant part of the right—hope that a reasonable, electable presidential candidate will emerge from within the Democratic Party, they’re forced to stare wild-eyed as the vast majority of the current and past hopefuls catalogue their pronouns in their Twitter bios and declare that “the future is female” and “the future is intersectional”.

Meanwhile, the activist base—the only ones interested in these displays—write articles fixated on the identity politics surrounding these candidates. Joe Biden is just one more old, white man who needs to step aside (even though he has tremendous support among black Americans, as does that other old white man, Bernie Sanders, who is polling in second place). If you don’t support Elizabeth Warren, even as she panders endlessly to the far-left fringe, it’s because you’ve bought into systemic misogyny (or condone Trump’s allegedly racist mockery of her as “Pocahontas”). Pete Buttigieg, who would be America’s first openly gay president if he were elected, isn’t gay enough. He may be married to a man but, we’re told, he isn’t really gay because he’s straight-passing and not a queer activist. …

Note of possible relevance: Pete Buttigieg’s father, Joseph Buttigieg, translated into English the works of no less a Communist Superhero than Antonio Gramsci himself.

This leaves left-wing parties in a quandary. They need to move with the times but are currently unsure where those times are going.

“The times”, aka History, is seen by theLeft as an agent with a purposeful will. It – not human thought and action – shapes events. Human beings are the tools of History – though its ultimate purpose is their perfection. A Marxian thesis which still lingers with the Left.

Marx believed his envisioned revolution was inevitable – though also in need of action by the “revolutionary class”.

A contemporary Labour MP, Jess Phillips, believes the working class needs a Labour government, even if it is not revolutionary. She writes in the Guardian:

The truth is, there are corners of our party that have become too intolerant of challenge and debate. The truth is, there is a clique who don’t care if our appeal has narrowed, as long as they have control of the institutions and ideas of the party.

We’ve all got to discover the courage to ask the difficult questions about the future of our party and the future of the working-class communities who need a Labour government. Because the alternative is that the working-class voters who, in despair, lent the Tories their votes on Thursday, never take them back.

It is time for the left to acknowledge this wake-up call. If the election of Donald Trump in the US and the catastrophic collapse of Labour in the UK haven’t made it obvious that we have a problem, it is unclear what will. The left cannot continue to try to impose a set of ideological values held by only a tiny minority of the left-leaning public and then blame that public for not electing a left-wing government. While trying to find its footing in today’s society and address the injustices and concerns of most of its natural base, the left has fallen into the trap of listening to noisy ideologues rather than average liberal and leftist working people. How much more evidence do we need that this does not work? When will we start listening to what people overwhelmingly want—a society that meets their material needs and feels fair and ethical? When will the left commit to being liberal again?

We ask: for what do “working class communities need a Labour government”? If the (somewhat) right-wing governments elected in the United States and Britain meet their material needs – and in the US at present the Trump administration is amply doing so – and if that seems “fair and ethical” to the voters, what can a reformed right-shifted left-wing government do for them? Can such a government, with redistributionist welfare policies designed by “noisy ideologues” to achieve fairness as an ethical ideal, meet material needs more amply?  No. That’s the whole point. Planned economies do not work. Equality of wealth, equality of power, equality of talent, equality of achievement, all that is meant by “social justice”, will never be brought about by History, nor can it be made to happen by ideologues, whether noisily by revolution or silently by their gaining control of the institutions of democracies.

The Left is failing because Leftism as such, whether “liberal” in the contemporary sense (“combating climate change, securing our place on the world stage and within the global economy, and fostering a cohesive multiculturalism … meeting material needs and feeling fair and ethical”), or uncompromisingly socialist, or defiantly “identitarian”, cannot succeed.

The law, by treating all sane adults equally, may sometimes be “fair”; but nature will not be, nor History, nor any political party.

“Progressivism” – which is to say, Leftism – is a secular ideology, hostile to religion.

Doctrinaire and intolerant as it is, it can reasonably be classed as a religion itself – but essentially godless. (Which accounts for its superficial appeal to many atheists.)

Yet in recent years the Left has been in alliance with Islam. How can this be explained? How do the theoreticians of the Left condone it? How do the theologists of Islam excuse it?

In an important article for City Journal, republished in an expanded form for the Middle East Forum, Sam Westrop, Director of Islam Watch, discusses this weird phenomenon of political cognitive dissonance, examining it from the Muslim side of the illogical equation:

In 2018, the first two Muslim women elected to Congress – Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib – did so with the help of both Islamist and progressivist bases. For years, critics have thought the collaboration between Islamist groups and sections of the Left to be a cautious, temporary ideological alliance. In fact, a growing section of American Islamism has sincerely embraced progressivist politics, despite its clear contradictions with theocratic ideals.

Writing recently in the New York Times, Cato Institute fellow Mustafa Akyol argues that America’s “Muslim community”, far from campaigning for theocracy (as claimed by “Islamophobes”), is in fact being swarmed by a powerful, welcome “creeping liberalism”.

Liberalism now embraced by Muslims in America?

On the face of it, it seems he has a point. Prominent Muslim voices lead Women’s Marches in cities across America and argue for “intersectional feminism”. Groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) – just 10 years ago named by federal prosecutors as part of an enormous terror finance network – now spend a great deal of time publishing social media items about Black Lives Matter while also campaigning for “social justice”, prison reform and higher minimum wages. Leading Muslim clerics are to be found praising Malcolm X as “our prince”, and protesting Trump’s immigration plans at the southern border. And a few Muslim campaigners even express solidarity with transgender and “queer” activists, and publicly dream, as the prominent Islamist-linked activist Linda Sarsour puts it, of “a world free of anti-black racism, islamophobia, xenophobia, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, ageism, sexism, and misogyny.”

All of which would seem to be listed hypocritically. Is this a display of taqiyya – the lying that is permitted to Muslims if it benefits their faith? So merely a ruse, an expedient ploy?

If Sarsour is still a believing Muslim – and as she always appears in a hijab she surely wants us to know that she is – the hypocrisy is glaring. In Africa, blacks – even if they’re Muslims – are intensely despised by Arabs. Their anti-black racism  is enshrined in their language, the word for a black, “abd”, being also their word for a slave. “Islamophobia” – irrational fear of islam – does not exist, since fear of Islam is entirely rational. Islam, not America, is xenophonic. And Islam is doctrinally antisemitic. So homophobic is Islam, that Islamic law requires homosexuals to be killed. As women are subordinate – virtual slaves – in Islam, it is systemically misogynistic, quintessentially sexist. And its homophobia and sexism implies intolerance of “transphobia”. As for “ableism” and “ageism”, they are probably thrown in to accentuate how totally tolerant these deeply intolerant liars are.

Sam Westrop considers the question of Sarsour’s sincerity – at least in wanting to sing the same song as the Left. (Which is itself intensely hypocritical – for instance when it claims to be against antisemitism).

This is not, however, a broad creeping liberalism; it is, more specifically, a creeping progressivist narrative – and it is changing the face of American Islamism.

But is this genuine progressivism? Or is this just part of the perennial debate among Islamists living in the West: in the effort to advance a theocratic agenda using lawful means, to what extent should Islamists dilute their message to fit Western political narratives?

The conversion, or concession, of some American Muslims active in politics to the “progressivist narrative” is opposed by some outspoken imams. Do they represent only a minority opinion?

Standing against the march of progress, Akyol observes, is a minority group of “conservative” Muslim clerics. He quotes a few from extreme Salafi circles, but there is in fact a much broader array of contending ideas among America’s Sunni Muslims – and its Islamists – on the question of whether progressivist politics pose a threat or afford an opportunity.

Many of those who oppose the progressive trend are not bearded Wahhabis in Arab dress. Ismail Royer, for instance, is a former jihadist who claims to have moderated and now works for the multi-faith Religious Freedom Institute in D.C. Although he claims to regard Islam as a “vehicle for social justice”, he firmly rejects progressivism, and urges an Islamic alliance with conservative Christian movements – even writing pieces in Christian publications in support of the evangelical opposition to gay marriage.

Islamists will, however, find a limited supply of sympathy from American evangelicals.

Sections of the Left, meanwhile, have a long history of welcoming Islamist activists into their tent. But it is the very eagerness of the Left to co-opt American Islam that concerns certain leading Islamists.

Traditional, purist Salafi and Wahhabi clerics condemn those modernist Salafis trying to “westernise Islam” by appealing to progressivist impressions of Islam. The modernist Salafis use progressive rhetoric about Islamophobia and the Black Lives Matter movement, but also warn about the dangers of support for feminism and homosexuality within Muslim Students Associations, which are supported and funded by organizations tied to the Muslim Brotherhood. Meanwhile, the Muslim Student Associations (when taking a break from those intersectional solidarity marches) debate fractiously whether to “de-platform” either the “regressive” Salafi clerics, or those extra-progressive Muslims who seem just a little too committed to working with Jewish groups or advocating for gay rights.

There is no doubt that some of the more ascetic Islamists reject all ideological alliances. Some may engage in some barebones interfaith activities, but they do so while warning against accepting the “validity” of other religions and preaching that “Islam in the West is a resistance movement against totalitarian liberal ideology”. …

But there are many, especially within modernist Salafi networks, who have observed the growth of political activist Islamist movements in America, such as the Muslim Brotherhood or Jamaat-e-Islami, and partly ascribe their success to the adoption of modish political trends. Much of the progressivist rhetoric that emanates from these modernist Salafis, however, is manifestly deceitful.

In their private sermons before Muslim audiences, modernist Salafi clerics rail against the evils of apostate ideologies. Yasir Qadhi, a leading cleric of the AlMaghrib Institute, for instance, denounces the theology of Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam (NOI) as heretical and “perverted’. In public, however, Qadhi’s clerical colleagues eulogize Malcom X – a progressivist darling — and praise NOI leader Louis Farrakhan as a great radical hero. This may be ideologically incoherent, but it is tactically shrewd.

Other duplicity is more plainly apparent. The Texas-based imam Omar Suleiman, for instance, has been an active voice in the protests against the Trump administration’s immigration. In March 2018, he was arrested at the Capitol after “civil disobedience” to demand “protection for young immigrant Dreamers”. And yet before a Muslim audience, Suleiman has warned young girls, without condemnation, that if they are “promiscuous” they may be killed by a family member.

Or look at Islamist media: Al Jazeera’s social media channel AJ+ broadcasts documentaries on transgender rights and the wickedness of misogyny, homophobia and other bigotries; while its Arabic parent station broadcasts sermons by Muslim Brotherhood clerics advocating the killing of gays, and offering husbands permission to beat their wives.

Some Islamists have sought to explain American Islamist institutions’ partial-embrace of progressivism as a response to “Islamophobia”. Shariq Siddiqui, an official of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), has written that “Islamophobia makes it difficult for ISNA and Muslim Americans to determine which positions are centered on their religious values and which positions are based on political necessity. … For example, in 2003, ISNA was opposed to gay marriages, but now ISNA is part of a coalition working in favor of gay marriage.”

Others have made it clear that non-Muslim progressivists are dispensable partners. As Counter Islamist Grid director Kyle Shideler recently discovered: newly-elected Virginia General Assembly Member Ibraheem Samirah (who was recently exposed as a virulent anti-Semite) has explicitly compared the Islamist alliance with progressivists to the decision of the Islamic prophet Muhammad “to form treaties with his enemies. He had to form alliances with people who weren’t necessarily believers of his message, who would later on become people who would be his enemies.” (Samirah also served as a senior campaign official for freshman Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib.)

So expediency is indeed a motive for Muslims echoing progressive – and essentially un-Islamic – ideas. And imams are not comfortable with the tactic.

… [A]n increasing number of clerics and Muslim thinkers have begun to regret their forays into progressivist politics. Leading modernist Salafi clerics such as Yasir Qadhi now appear deeply shocked that Muslim students have moved from carefully taking advantage of progressivist trends to openly supporting “LGBTQ” campaigns on campuses.

They can accept going along with the progressive Left hypocritically, but not sincerely.

And indeed, at one end of the spectrum, there is a rising group of activists from Islamist circles who seem to believe in this fused progressivist-Islamist creed. Across America, branches of the Council on American-Islamic Relations are today staffed with young hijab-wearing graduates of Muslim Students Associations, who appear to have reconciled working for terror-linked extremists while also publishing transgender rights petitions on their social media accounts. …

Such as Linda Sarsour:

Sarsour is a harbinger of a broader trend. Whether American Islamist movements intended to embrace progressivism authentically or not, many Islamist groups are now so firmly entrenched in the progressive movement that a generation of young American Muslims is growing up convinced that the progressivist social justice and sexual identity narratives are intrinsic components of the Islamist agenda.

No wonder some traditional Islamists speak out so forcefully against “liberal ideology”, or caution against too tight an embrace of progressivist allies – their own radicalism is being supplanted.

American Islamists are conflicted. Some reject the embrace of left-wing politics entirely. Others clearly exploit progressivist organizations to advance their cause. And then there are some, a new generation of intersectional Islamists, who seem to have found a genuine way to advocate for, or warily justify, “queer”-friendly politics. It looks like the progressivist rhetoric of Islamist activists such as Sarsour, or politicians such as Ilhan Omar, is sincere – even if it seems patently confused and inconsistent to any rational observer.

This poses a new sort of threat. These intersectional Islamists – these theo-progressives – are part of a broader radical undertaking that has a much greater chance of imposing extremist ideas on American society than the Muslim Brotherhood or Wahhabis ever did.

On their side, the Progressives have made concessions to Islam to secure the alliance – by, for instance, refusing to censure its misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and racism. The international Left in general supports the Muslim demand that criticism of Islam be banned, and the UN is working on it. (See here and here.)  Finding fault with Islam must be deemed “hate speech”. To protect Islam from it, freedom of speech can be – must be – sacrificed. The American Left endorses the demand.

But there is no hypocrisy in that. The American Left is in any case unhappy with the First Amendment.

At least on this issue Progressivism and Islam are in genuine accord: freedom is not to be tolerated.

There are NO benefits to Europe (or America, or Canada, or anywhere) from mass Muslim immigration.

Mass Muslim immigration brings terrorism, death, destruction, decay, injustice and despair.

“Diversity is our strength” is a  fatuous slogan.

Paul Joseph Watson dares to say so: