The French Exception

Macron provides much-needed cope to a certain segment of the international right, including a British right which pays more attention to what goes on across the Channel than some people seem to believe.

Macron talks tough about ‘terrorism’ and ‘extremism’. He wants to dedicate swathes of the state to addressing these issues. This appeals to neocons, neocon-adjacents, and others who are interested in ‘tackling extremism’ (which may also include tackling scribbling anons like you or me by the way, this is not always entirely clear). Of course this never gets to the heart of the problem. An environment of terror, an environment in which freedom of speech is de facto compromised on specific issues to do with Islam, exists because of mass immigration. A campaign to tackle extremism or separatism would require the aggressive spiritual deracination of a huge – and by all accounts, growing – segment of the population.

Why must a country like France insist on this fool’s errand? Why not just call a moratorium on all immigration from outside of Europe? Why not engage in a programme of large-scale deportations too? This would literally solve the problem. Instead, France insists on making life difficult. Even if this bizarre insistence on stopping Muslims from practising their beliefs and holding their communal identities is semi-successful, you just end up with a population that is on the whole less competent and less capable of participating in a modern economy and civilised, law-abiding society.

It is not reasonable to insist that the French people put up with this, just as it is unreasonable to demand of millions of these hostile foreigners of little utility that they spit on their heritage and religious values in the name of the Fifth Republic. China is aggressively deracinating the Uighurs, but those people were already settled on the western fringes of the Chinese empire. They are also, demographically, a drop in the Han ocean. The situation on a very practical level does not compare, except insofar as it offers a glimpse of what France might ultimately need to do. This still doesn't change the absurd situation we have, in which the regime is creating the conditions for this entirely unnecessary issue in the first place.

Macron and his political vision is simply an alternative, French form of globalism. It's the idea that Mother Marianne will make declarations of universal human brotherhood while suckling all the world's people at the breast of Reason. This is at odds with reality, but as I said, it provides a nice cope for people who cannot let themselves let go of the bluepill of human equality.

The shadow of WWII and subsequent American world hegemony has obscured people's ability to see the characteristically French-Revolutionary origins of notions that haunt contemporary politics like human rights, human equality. The egalitarian strand of Enlightenment thought was, if I wish to be charitable, a dialogue across the core nations of northwest Europe (and their settler-colonies) which created the modern world.

Instead, we see this insistence that Macron’s form of French globalism is somehow ‘based’, from various nations in Europe and elsewhere as well as from Anglo-Saxons who should know better. A meme is fed that Anglo-Saxons are uniquely responsible for everything wrong with the world – all the while, the beret-hatted Frenchman rubs his hands with glee as he travels between his various civilising missions in international institutions in Brussels and Geneva.