France and her biased media kept Israel in the headlines for THREE YEARS. So we, at The World’s Intelligent Journal, will keep The Frantifada in the headlines. They should have supported Israel against barbarism. They didn’t. They have brought this on themselves.
Previous articles in the symposium at the bottom. SPREAD THIS ARTICLE. Failure to do so is Whataboutism.
The fightback begins now. No more will we accept the unfacting of history, the trashing of science and the postmodernist insurrection. Words will say what they mean and mean what they say. The world will be reinverted so we come upon re-enlightenment.
The demeaningification of words has been insidious. We sat idly by while non-colonialism has meant colonialism, non-apartheid has meant apartheid, and non-genocide has meant genocide. We have allowed the beautiful story of Western progress to be reinterpreted as racism. It stops now. It stops today.
“Genocide” may be the word that woke me up, but the crisis started long before. If it hadn’t been for October the 7th, I and the remnant of Western civilisation may have fallen asleep on the job. We would have let the postlinguists re-educate our children for ill. Yet the inevitable reaction to that day was like a fire alarm in the midst of slumber: the owners had no choice but to lift their weary bodies and fight for the future of civilisation itself.
We discovered that long before “genocide,” there was another word: progressivism. Once upon a time, that word actually meant something: progress, advance, the hope for a better world built on science and reason. It wasn’t the watchword of the far left; far from it. It was the standard of liberalism flown on the French revolutionary barricades.
In the feudal era, hope was dead. All were born into their caste. All were doomed to a fate of certain and unchanging drudgery. Even for the few privileged, it was a life scarcely worthy of envy, for you knew that nothing could change and life was a programme of rinse and repeat. All that had been would be, and neither health nor wealth nor happiness would improve for the better.
Liberalism offered a different story, and for once, it wasn’t based on fiction. Capitalism delivered wealth, medicine delivered health, freedom delivered happiness, and technology delivered standards of living. It didn’t produce a utopia. It never promised to. It just stated, with reason, that everything was moving in a positive direction.
Each and every one of Karl Marx’s predictions was proved wrong. There in England and beyond, the poor class reduced, the middle class expanded, and the rich swelled their ranks. Capitalism brought opportunities. Marxism brought Stalinist terror.
It was into this vacuum called reality that trauma lurked. Intellectuals weaned on Marxism could no longer deny the failure of their cause. So they mutated elements of pragmatism, existentialism and behaviourism and combined them with the “spirit of Marxism” to create a Frankenstein’s monster.
Instead of objective truth came subjectivity. In place of universalism crawled relativism. Individualism, liberty, justice and equality were no more. They were replaced, unevidentially, with collectivism, power, conflict and inequality.
Worst of all, progress was replaced by cynicism. In a world supposedly without objective truth, socialism remained, but only as a “regulatory ideal” and not in the hope of a better tomorrow. It was a preference to be imposed by power, along with the declarative imago-reality of group conflict.
Inside these condensed paragraphs, it would have been easy to miss the fate of progress. The postlinguists abolished it. Unable to process their post-Stalinist trauma, grand narratives were finally abolished, and with them, the possibility of genuine change.
They were right to distrust the grand narratives of religions that brought the Inquisition and secular replacements that brought the gulag. Yet the promise of liberalism was not a lie; not a panacea, to be sure, but a genuine arrow flung in the right direction.
Burkean conservatives and truly progressive religious groups adapted their beliefs to this empirical reality. They argued with liberals about speed, caution, respect for tradition and the dangers of (French revolutionary) hubris. Their points were often well made. Yet, from all sides of the spectrum, the fact of progress, to a lesser or greater extent, was accepted, along with a need to accommodate it in one’s own thinking.
Yet postlinguists binned our shared liberal-conservative heritage. They destroyed it in a dustbin marked extreme scepticism. They were the vanguard of today’s France. For distrust has its place, scepticism too, but not where evidence clearly disproves it. Not for the first time, postlinguists buried inconvenient proof.
Yet they came upon a trick which was most disturbing: language inversion. Realising that a future of non-progress would have been a hard sell even in medieval times, they adopted the form and linguistic terms of progressivism. Despite setting their face against progress on principle, they claimed politically to be acting in its name. They dressed as the King while hoping for his abdication.
And their chutzpah worked. To this day, far-left anarchists and Stalinists, along with statist soft leftists, have the absolute barefaced cheek to call themselves, and be called, “progressives”. They are not progressives. It is the liberals and the Burkean conservatives, buttressed by science, technology, freedom, democratic debate and, above all, progress, who are the progressives. It’s obvious. It’s in the name.
And this is not the professorial rebuttal of a grammar-obsessed pedant. For it is only by wearing the clothes of the Enlightenment that the far-left, and all those who stand in the face of our civilisation, are able to get away with it. We let them get away with it.
The liberals championed religious tolerance and are insulted as racists.
The liberals championed economic freedom for all and are insulted as classists.
The liberals championed universalism and are insulted as parochial.
It is a lie. An evil lie. It is a lie that continues in greater force today through the Great Genocide Blood Libel. Liberals are progressives, and “progressives” are insurrectionists. They must be defeated.
So what we see today in France is not only a question of multiculturalism, integration, secularism, French institutions, statism, economic malaise, youth unemployment and the generalised penchant for French demonstrations. It’s much worse. It’s the fruits of French intellectualism: those who were coddled by the state they sought to destroy; those who laid the seeds for the burning of Limoges.
And today—let us be in no doubt—it is being destroyed, led by the horrific Satan that is Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the man who incarnates postlingualism in its political form.
Yet it the political elites - their blindness, their Macronian ignorance - that escorted Mélanchon to his target:
The French rejected Israel; now they have the intifada.
The French rejected civilization; now they have Palestine.
The French rejected progress; now they have anarchism.
The French rejected words; now they are seeing what true “progress” means.
So what is the impact of the French Revolution—that which promised equality, liberty and progress? When some real progressives are in power, we will see. Until then, it’s still too early to tell.
Previously entries in the Frintifada Symposium:
Jens Heycke on the French economy, youth unemployment and multiculturalism:
Daniel Clarke-Serret on the two nations inside France:
Khaled Salih on the contradictions implicit in the French Open Society:
Richard Neat on how statism is reducing creativity:
More reflections on France to come. Continue to submit your articles!