Eclectic Collections of Demonstrators

A pattern of protest is emerging in Europe and the United States.

When foreign correspondent William L. Shirer was covering European politics back in the pre and early war days, he was surprised at the news of a non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. He jotted in his diary:

“Stalin’s step should kill world Communism. Will a French Communist, say, who has been taught for six years to hate Nazism above all else, swallow Moscow’s embracing of Hitler?”

Well, as we know now, that’s exactly what they did.

Shirer missed one of Soviet Communism’s primary doctrines – democratic centralism – which the eloquent and perceptive Daniel Patrick Moynihan once described as “mindless obedience.” The French Communists and others would quickly get in line because the central goal was always power and that meant compliance with Moscow.

Fast forward to the current newscasts and you’ll find some very strange combinations. Queers for Palestine? German leftists siding with Hamas? Campus intellectuals downplaying (or worse) the October 7 atrocities?

A key to understanding these mixtures is to recognize that there can be an odd mixture of motives.

If people are antisemitic and/or anti-American, then any group opposing Israel and the United States will gain their support.

If the protesters possess more than a touch of anarchism, then any actions which might hasten the fall of Western Civilization will be appealing, adverse consequences be damned.

In other words, don’t automatically assume that people want to make the world better. There is a sizable bunch out there which longs to see the world burn.

With that in mind, Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission, in which the French Socialists form an alliance with a Muslim Brotherhood party in order to keep the Right from gaining power in France doesn’t seem far-fetched at all.

And Houellebecq isn’t the only person issuing that warning.

In The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age, James Kirchick notes that although Houellebecq’s book was denounced as xenophobic, it actually was more critical of “a bourgeois Western nihilism willing to make an accommodation with religious fundamentalists.”

The sophisticated European elites have embraced that nihilism. They have abandoned spiritual identity and patriotism and, in doing so, have sapped their own strength.

They are creating wimpish societies that offer little resistance to the Islamist fundamentalists. The fanatics give restless youths a Something as opposed to a Whatever.

Kirchick makes a damning observation:

“Fourteen hundred sexually abused children in Rotherham, 1,200 sexually assaulted women across Germany, vast Muslim ghettoes dotting the continent – these are not the only consequences of Europe’s moral equivalence, cultural self-abnegation, and outright cowardice on the question of Islam. What ought to be of utmost concern for those entrusted with high office are the effects that such a massive act of social engineering will have on the continent’s long-term future.”

If disaster descends, a lot of Europeans will be recalling the German decision to admit massive numbers of immigrants. Thank you, Chancellor Merkel and her oh-so-sophisticated advisors.

After my first reading of Houellebecq’s novel, I still possessed some skepticism as to whether the political Left, with its advocacy of women’s issues and gay rights, would even consider a political alliance with a well-funded Islamist party that opposes such issues.

Repeated viewing of the odd bedfellow protests in Europe and the United States has changed my mind. It is easy to see the modern Left making that switch.

Why? Because it has done so in the past.

You may recall days in the United States when Senator Walter Mondale, Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, and United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez protested illegal immigration and President Bill Clinton spoke of the need to control borders.

Imagine a similar scenario today.

There has been a similar shift in France.

In 1980, the French Communists protested immigration. Their slogan was “One and a half million unemployed is one and a half million immigrants too many.” Most of the immigrants were being placed in working class, Communist-voting, neighborhoods.

The government and non-Communist Leftists attacked the French Communists by invoking the magic word: racist. There soon was a drift of Communist support toward Socialist François Mitterrand.

In short time, the French Communist leader, Georges Marchais, was besieged and the Party began to reverse its immigration stance.

French journalist and former presidential candidate Éric Zemmour in his book The Suicide of France: The Quiet Revolution That Destroyed a Nation, quotes from one of Marchais’s books on what has happened to France:

“History gives us material and lessons to reflect on and to transform the present. This is what [French President] Giscard d’Estaing fears when he claims that we have entered a ‘world without memory’ and does everything he can to weaken the teaching of French History in schools. This History is very dear to us. It teaches that France is one of the oldest nations on Earth. It was formed here, in the west of the European continent, at the crossroads of great human currents, in a movement that has lasted for centuries.”

The patriotism revealed by the Communist leader would be regarded as hopelessly racist and colonialist by the Far Left of today, perhaps especially in France.

The number of immigrants in European nations is far greater now than it was when Marchais was grumbling. Europe civilization is likely to pay a very heavy price for a craven submission to an epidemic of white guilt.

Unless there is a significant turnaround, unusual coalitions may be in the making.

And when they form, remember the novel’s title: Submission.

Recommended Reading:

Michel Houellebecq, Submission: A Novel.

James Kirchick, The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age.

William L. Shirer, Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941.

Éric Zemmour, The Suicide of France: The Quiet Revolution That Destroyed a Nation.

[My book, Pilate’s Magician: A Novel of the Resurrection, is available at Amazon.]