Suicide or Homicide?
Zemmour vs. Soral on the Decline of France

4,089 words

Part 2 of 2

Éric Zemmour
Le Suicide français
Paris: Albin Michel, 2014

Zemmour vs. Soral: Abetz vs. De Gaulle?

In Le Suicide français, Éric Zemmour’s major concern with immigration appears to be Islam. He makes no explicit mention of race-replacement beyond a few cryptic references[1] and calling attention to disproportionate African criminality and welfare use. Alain Soral has been very critical of Zemmour’s focus on Islam, arguing during a conversation with Dieudonné:

[There is] the incredible promotion and the incredible current and promised success of Zemmour’s book, and the content of Zemmour’s book. Eighty percent of Zemmour’s book is Comprendre l’Empire.[2] There is only the conclusion which differs where he says the problem is Islam and the Muslims, and basically that we won’t avoid a civil war in France, which is a way of calling for civil war.

This does not strike me as a fair characterization (I do not know if Soral has actually read the book). Zemmour certainly predicts civil war, but he does not exclusively blame Islam, and indeed Islam, while a major issue, is not even the primary focus. He explicitly recognizes that ethnocentric and left-wing Jewish groups played a major role. Zemmour’s conclusion calls on all communities, except perhaps the native French,[3] to refrain from engaging in ethnic activism. He also calls for the destruction of “Islamic La Rochelles”[4] and of Jewish “States within the State” like the CRIF.

Soral is correct in highlighting a certain hypocrisy in Zemmour’s treatment of Muslims and Jews. Zemmour writes:

To “integrate” Islam, France would need to renounce a thousand years of history, to renounce Philip the Fair, Richelieu, Louis XIV, Napoleon, De Gaulle; we would steadily go from a multiethnic society to a multicultural society, which would become multiconfessional on the Lebanese model. (330)

Islam, Zemmour argues, cannot be integrated. But if Islam cannot be integrated, can Judaism – or its postwar secular manifestation, the Shoah world-religion which animates and even fanaticizes organized Jewry, and terrorizes guilt-stricken goyim – be integrated? There is, as Soral points out, a double standard and perhaps Soral feels motivated by this to condemn Zemmour, particularly to remain credible with the Maghrebi portion of his base.

I tend to think both writers are useful. The Zemmour/Soral tangent resembles, albeit imperfectly, that of German Ambassador to France Otto Abetz and Free French leader Charles de Gaulle during the Second World War. After the war, Abetz regretted that Hitler had rejected – either out of wartime wariness of potentially unreliable partners or lack of common European feeling – the Vichy Regime’s overtures for greater wartime collaboration in exchange for French independence. So does Zemmour, a member of the establishment, plead with it to stop abolishing the French state and Balkanizing the French nation, our nation-state being a rare socio-political masterpiece, the fruit of over a millennium of work since the coming to power of the Frankish kings. Zemmour remarks: “[The nationalist Charles] Maurras once exalted the forty kings who made France; we must now tell the tale of the forty years which have undone France” (16).

De Gaulle in contrast collaborated with the Anglo-Americans to destroy what he saw as the greater threat to France, the Third Reich. So Soral, a native Frenchman, seeks to ally with all those who have as their common enemy the “Americano-Zionist Empire” which is working to destroy or render impotent all of the world’s nations which might contest its power, including Blacks and Muslims, hoping that some revolutionary upheaval or divine surprise would, like Joan of Arc, liberate France before it is too late. Each of us obeys his destiny.

Neoliberalism and Globalism: France’s Assisted Suicide

Soral also objected to Zemmour’s choice of the word “suicide” in the title: “It’s not a suicide, it’s an attempt at murder!” One can see Soral’s point. However I think Zemmour shows the expression to be somewhat accurate because many of the worst policies were largely passed by France’s indigenous center-right conservative/liberal elite put in charge after 1945. As ever, it remains extremely difficult to isolate the impact of Jewish activism as against indigenous European and bourgeois propensities; both have clearly played a role. No doubt Matthew Heimbach’s expression of “assisted suicide” is appropriate. Zemmour summarizes the French situation thus: “Our ‘BHL-ized’ elites are returning to the old aristocratic cosmopolitanism of the eighteenth century and of Coblenz”[5] (194).

This is evident in the 1970s, when many of the most demographically-damaging liberal measures were taken. Between 1970 and 1975, the laws recognizing bastardy and patriarchy were abolished, while divorce was simplified. The 1975 Veil Act[6] decriminalizing abortion was passed under the center-right liberal President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and his conservative Prime Minister Jacques Chirac (“8 million French lives lost” to this, Zemmour notes [139]). The creation in 1976 of family reunification under this same government paved the way for the mass Afro-Islamic settlement of the country.

To those on the far-left and right concerned with international high finance, Zemmour praises the merits of financing the government through citizens’ savings and the national bank, as opposed to reliance on financial markets. He mentions the 1973 Pompidou-Giscard-Rothschild Act,[7] which is alleged to have banned the Banque de France from lending to the state,[8] making the government vulnerable to international speculation and usurious debt slavery. This “deprived French citizens of the mastery of their national debt by ceding it to international financiers. In a few decades, they would explain that the ‘markets’ have a veto on France’s policies and that her citizens can no longer decide alone” (236-7).

More generally, Zemmour presents an eloquent account of the rise, through neoliberal borderlessness, of a deracinated, globalized economic elite hostile to nationhood.[9] This is in effect a postnational version of the bourgeoisie. The French invented the bourgeoisie, and the bourgeoisie is the name of that rationalizing, deracinated group whose interests ever-tends to grow distinct from the population.

The global bourgeoisie – including plutocrats, high finance, and multinational corporations – wants a world without national borders hindering the free movement of capital, goods, services, and people. It wants to maximize its wealth and power by squeezing the working and middle classes through low-wage immigrant labor, offshoring, too-big-to-fail banks (heads I profit, tails you bailout), privatizing and internationalizing public entities, and organizing tax evasion through offshore accounts and siphoning profits through tax havens. National governments are to be reduced to impotence, constrained by the Golden Cage. In this supposed “post-political” order, “[t]he administration of things will replace the government of men,” as Saint-Simon said.

As a result, says Zemmour: “In all countries, a new aristocracy (the famous 1%, or even 0.01%) was being reborn from its ashes, isolating itself from the rest of the population, living in areas reserved for it across the globe” (283). The global bourgeoisie is, today, centered upon the American Empire and is made up of those from national bourgeoisies who have been able to defect from the constraints of national solidarity to join the Euro-Atlantic constellation.[10] While there have always been Anglophiles in France, the degree of elite defection today is unprecedented, as Zemmour notes:

Bosses are leaving the Hexagon, following or preceding their children who are studying in London, New York, Montreal, Los Angeles, establish their companies in England, the Netherlands, America, Singapore or Shanghai, as though their future growth only depended on emerging countries, as though their past growth owed nothing to the dear old country. (518)

Zemmour, like Soral, shows how the nation is a necessary condition for the left-wing goals of social justice and well-being. Leftists have also identified the role of neoliberal borderleness in promoting this inequality, but with few exceptions, are utterly incapable of recognizing the nation’s contributions in tackling these problems (a small minority of left-wing civic nationalists will recognize the merits of the nation-state in this, a tinier minority still will recognize the ethnic factor at both the bottom and top of society in heightening this inequality, and become rightists).

Zemmour also shows how the French bourgeoisie spearheaded the entrenching of neoliberal principles into international law. He cites Rawi Abdelal’s Capital Rules describing the “Paris Consensus” in which the French promoted the idea of locked-in unlimited free movement of capital and free trade as goals in and of themselves. “Globalization was first financial,” Zemmour notes (236).

French diplomats, starting with the corrupt parliamentarians of the Fourth Republic to today, have inscribed similar bourgeois principles in the European treaties.[11] France has produced many of the leading functionaries – many of them “Socialists” – establishing and running the new order: Jean Monnet at the founding of the European Communities, Jacques Delors at the European Commission, Pascal Lamy[12] at the World Trade Organization, Jean-Claude Trichet at the European Central Bank (who declared in English upon taking office: “I am not French.”), Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Christine Lagarde at the International Monetary Fund, and the French-speaking judges at the European Court of Justice . . .

The role of these economic trends in European dispossession should not be underestimated. Members of the global bourgeoisie[13] – a deracinated, mobile, Anglophone elite – have little vested interested in preserving either their nation of origin or of residence, and have a strong interest in reducing any cohesion or organization in the masses which could challenge their power.

The Importance of Culture: Americanization and Judeocentrism

Zemmour’s approach has the great merit of showing how elements of apparently apolitical everyday life – sports and pop culture – have accentuated or reflected France’s decline. The story is much the same as in America, with a more brutal shift from a significantly Marxoid culture which lionized the proletarian martyr-class, to a demonization of the racist, chauvinist, misogynistic working White male (Georges Lajoie of the 1975 film Dupont Lajoie standing in for Archie Bunker). Instead of Sumner Redstone and MTV, we have Léo Scheer creating Canal+, a satellite TV channel featuring Le petit journal (France’s even-more-puerile answer to The Daily Show).

Zemmour highlights the role of moral signaling in European self-dispossession. Celebrities appealed to humanitarian openness to the immigrant as in Daniel Balavoine’s 1985 hit song L’Aziza (“the beauty” in Arabic, dedicated to his Moroccan Jewish wife): “The Aziza, your yellow star is your skin [. . .] I want you if you want me” (189, the song naturally won the “SOS Racisme prize”). Following the culture they had imbibed, students backed illegal immigrant children on moral grounds:

[F]or all the high school students who protested against the deportation of their “classmates” in the same schools, the “undocumented person” turned out to be an unhoped for blessing, an ideal “Jew” which allowed them to take upon the prestigious air of the “Righteous” without risking falling to the bullets of the SS or of the Milice.[14] (415)

Indeed, Zemmour notes, “bobos” today want both the pleasures of privilege and the moral smugness of playacting “fighting the power” . . .

France’s cultural decline is a terribly sad, tragic story going to the heart to the most intimate and casual aspects of life. The forenames “Pierre” and “Marie” give way to “Mohammed” and “Jennifer.” Petty thugs in court, having watched American TV, refer to the judge as “Votre honneur” (it should be “Monsieur le juge”). European judges imposed the removal of quotas of local players from football clubs as a “barrier to free trade,” cutting off clubs from any affiliation with their city and turning football into the deracinated, gaudy business it is today. The victorious “black-blanc-beur” football team of the 1998 world cup – touted as overcoming France’s racial divisions – gives way to a majority-minority team dominated, to the nation’s horror, by the ruffian culture of the banlieues.

Zemmour calls the American TV show Dallas “a formidable weapon of the colonization of the minds, which the Americans called soft power” and an “Americanization of minds” (198). “French society, impregnated with a triple catholic, revolutionary, and communist culture, bent the knee before Texan cowboys,” he says. The influence of American elite and pop culture over Europe is difficult to overestimate, as the German hard rock band Rammstein has pointed out: “We’re all living in America.”

A particularly disgusting piece of obscenity has been the promotion by the French government (namely the Jewish Minister of Culture Jack Lang) and media of explicitly anti-French rappers, such as Doc Gynéco and the group NTM (short for “Nique Ta Mère,” “Fuck Your Mom,” hard to think of a more hostile and antisocial role model). It may seem too poetic to be true, but the leading purveyor of this Satanic anti-culture, the rap-focused radio station Skyrock, has been heavily invested in by Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank. The Socialists in particular have continued to sink ever-lower in their degeneracy. During his presidential campaign, François Hollande released an ad targeting Blacks and Muslims using Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “Niggers in Paris” as the soundtrack, apparently thinking the best approach was a symbolic and subliminal appeal to the Underman to race war:

Slogan: “Change is now.”

West: “I got my niggers in Paris, and they going gorillas.”

Hollande: “If some are richer than you, you outnumber them.”

Surely a sign of the end-times.

At elite level there was much the same, namely with the transformation of Sciences Po into a globalized institution: Massive increase in students fees, massive expansion and internationalization of the student body, some token affirmative action for French Blacks and Muslims. This was done under the apparently cocaine-addicted homosexual Richard Descoings. The latter nonetheless had a pro forma marriage with a woman, whom he conveniently made vice president of the university.  Zemmour describes Descoings’ work:

But Descoings’ model was this America of the West and East Coasts, liberal and libertarian, individualist, inegalitarian, multiculturalist, and feminist (and gay friendly), following a relaxed (cool) and festive protestantism, where the cult of money has destroy the old morality of the founding fathers and the former ethnic solidarities.[15] (406)

Descoings once had Alain Soral forcefully evicted from Science Po’s book fair by the police, despite the writer having been invited by students, his presence displeasing the Zionist lobby. The resulting video of the incident contributed to Soral’s growing notoriety. Descoings died in a New York hotel at the age of 53 – he was there to attend a “Global Colloquium of University Presidents” – stricken by a heart attack (probably related to drug abuse) and abandoned by the two male prostitutes he had hired. The new French elite.

Zemmour writes at length on “the rise of the Shoah as the official religion of the French Republic” and a general Judeo-centrism, which need not be described further here.[16]

Petty-Frenchness: Europe reduced to “France, but bigger”

There is much to be said for the nation-state, indeed, I personally believe this constructive vision of progressive harmony, both within the population and between the population and the polity, remains unsurpassed. But Zemmour also appears to be representative of a strain of French petty-nationalism which is unhelpful insofar as it is indifferent or even hostile to Europe.

Zemmour is very strong in his critique of the EU[17] and hilariously quotes innumerable French politicians vaunting the benefits for employment and growth of the neoliberal 1992 Maastricht treaty.[18] He is an admirable wielder of the French nationalist theodicy. These French concerns are often lost on our European brothers and many French nationalists enter the struggle not through concerns on immigration – which may still seem manageable – but from the already-accomplished castration of the French state (despite the French people’s manifest objection to this process as embodied in the 2005 rejection of the EU “constitutional treaty” by referendum) and neoliberalization of our economy. In destroying France’s sovereignty, the French elite has, in Zemmour’s words, broken a “millennial pact” with the people (520). The French, living in “the reflection of the prince,” cannot but be alarmed at having the agitated Sarkozy and the pathetic Hollande as the highest representatives of the nation.

But Zemmour has very little to say on Europe as such. He laments that French leaders declined to celebrate the two-hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Austerlitz because “[w]e do not celebrate a victory over our European friends” (504). He is wedded to the absurd notion that the only worthwhile European construction would be one under French domination:

French elites have given up on dominating Europe, and the rest of the continent now refuses any hegemony, even cultural or ideological, of the former “Grande Nation.” But the combination of these refusals is leading the European project to its ruin. As though the death of French Europe dragged all of Europe to its downfall. The historian Pierre Gaxotte understood this well: “Europe existed. It is behind us. It was a community of civilization and this civilization was French.” (519)

This is of course nonsense. The problem is not that the current French regime is no longer strong enough to bully its partners into granting more substantial agricultural subsidies or that European Commission officials no longer draft documents in la langue de Molière. Furthermore, it is absurd to imagine Europe as merely “la France en grand.” European civilization is the fruit of all our peoples, shaped, after the collapse of the Roman Empire, most significantly by the Roman Catholic Church and the Frankish aristocracy (to which, lest we forget, France owes her name). In addition this largely Latin and Germanic foundation in the West, there are of course other contributions – Hellenic, Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Viking, Slavic, etc. The French period was admittedly long, stretching for six centuries from the reign of Saint Louis to the fall of Napoleon, but it is hardly synonymous with Europe as a whole (or even Carolingian Europe). (Perhaps a hegemonic nation is necessary to keep any European polity together, but that may well be an argument against such an entity, and in any event Germany has comfortably filled any vacancy.)

Zemmour then is also affected by a certain parochialism which was so powerful it convinced millions of Europeans to kill their kin, often enlisting Africans and Asians in the process, in the terrible Bruderkrieg of 1914-1918. He jokes on French officials presenting “Europe as a grail which is won through innumerable sacrifices” (521). But if by “Europe” we mean our “Europe,” that of our blood and spirit (and not some transient political organization), we could only rejoice at joining such a quest!

Zemmour’s attitude may be explained partly by the fact that his English, like Soral’s, seems to be rather poor (at times, one has the impression both writers are making a point of misspelling the occasional English words they use).[19] They are of that generation of French writers, raised under De Gaulle, for whom France and the Francophonie were enough.[20] France being a great nation, there is no question that a Frenchman should be required to know a foreign language to operate freely in the world. This is the splendid parochialism of a once psychologically self-confident and culturally self-sufficient nation. It has its charms and has helped preserve France’s specificity for a time, making it unusually pugnacious in its independence vis-à-vis the Anglo-Zionist world.[21] Today still, the French singularity lives on in the unique contributions to the world of a Soral, a Dieudonné, a Houellebecq, or indeed a Le Pen père. But we cannot afford political parochialism today. Whatever political organization we dream of for Europe, and I believe the nations are fundamental building blocks, we cannot think of our nationhood outside of a European consciousness.

Zemmour then has given us a highly interesting work, a veritable panorama of French decadence over the past half-century and an implicit offer, no doubt insufficient, for renewal. He provides an eloquent defense of the homogeneous French nation-state, with its strengths and weaknesses, and a critique of Jewish activism remarkable for a mainstream publication. The book marks a significant milestone in Jewish elites and the French regime’s changing and highly ambiguous attitudes towards the Front National and Islam. How significant? Time will tell. As Zemmour writes: “We have forgotten that history is a succession of strategic surprises” (402).

Notes

1. Zemmour writes: “It is not structures which forge superstructures; it’s the population – and the changes of population – which shape the environment” (95). And: “‘Demography is destiny,’ the Americans rightly say: Territorial conquest always precedes ideological, political, cultural conquest. Civilizational” (212). (In fact, “demography is destiny” appears to be from Auguste Comte.) He also quotes President Georges Pompidou at length on the futility of attempting to Americanize France: “The changing of a society would require full blood transfusion, that we expel 50 million Frenchmen and replace them with 50 million Anglo-Saxons! The French are as they are, and they will remain so. Doctors do not tell their patient: ‘Sir, you have a sanguine temperament. That is no good for me. I would heal you more easily if you had a bilious temperament.’ They take him with the temperament he has, without trying to change it, and they try to heal him, if they can” (128).

2. Soral’s masterwork, a political essay.

3. Zemmour does not mention the Identitarians and scarcely criticizes the Front National.

4. The city of La Rochelle served as major Protestant citadel during the sixteenth century Wars of Religion in France. Zemmour believes Islam’s growing presence in many French cities, splitting the country religiously along Islamic and secular-Christian lines, will lead to similar political fragmentation and civil war.

5. BHL refers to Bernard-Henri Lévy. Coblenz was a major center for aristocratic émigrés during the French Revolution, plotting to retake power with the support of foreign powers.

6. Named for the Jewish then-health minister, Simone Veil.

7. Georges Pompidou worked as the director-general of the Rothschild Bank before serving as President de Gaulle’s chief of staff and then Prime Minister, before becoming President himself in 1969.

8. The subject is too technical for me to confirm or not. In any event, the 1992 Maastricht treaty banned the new European Central Bank from directly financing states and the current situation in the Eurozone can be fairly described as usurious.

9. In France, Zemmour reports, 40-50% of French stock exchange (CAC40) shares are held by foreigners, while 85% of profit are made abroad. The “French company” decreasingly exists.

10. In this schema, all Western European oligarchies have largely defected – thinking of themselves collectively as minor appendages and collaborators of the American Empire, rather than genuinely independent actors, and individually as free-moving, selfish atoms in the Euro-Atlantic constellation – while those of Russia and China have yet to.

11. Zemmour notes that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher imposed neoliberalism by wrapping it in Anglo-American patriotism. Mitterrand in contrast “preferred to hide his abandonment of socialism and of the State behind the façade of a European mythology” (238).

12. Lamy is typical of this deracinated, apatride technocratic elite, recently declaring – shades of Barbara Spectre – on the EU’s proposal of imposing refugee quotas upon the 28 member nations: “Europe does not have this culture of immigration [of the United States, Australia, and Canada] [. . .] The negotiations are going to be difficult but [refugee quotas] are a necessary step in this transformation towards of a culture of immigration, which seems inevitable, principally for demographic reasons. The European Union will lose 20 million people of working age in the next 10 years [. . .] this transformation towards a culture of immigration quotas seems to me inevitable within 10 or 20 years.” There is a special place in hell . . .

13. Whose goy members include Rupert Murdoch, Pierre Bergé, Carlos Slim . . .

14. The Vichy Regime’s militia.

15. Italicized words in English in the original.

16. See my translations on The Occidental Observer as well as an upcoming book review of Anne Kling’s work on Jewish ethnic lobbies in France. http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/author/guillaume-durocher/

17. Zemmour describes French leaders as “sticking to the [Deutsch-]Mark like a little boy hides behind his big brother in the playground, to guarantee his protection in exchange for submission.” He also quotes in extenso Jacques Chirac’s remarkable 1978 Le Pen-like critique of European integration: “[B]ehind the mask of the technocrats’ words and jargon, they are preparing the vassalization of France [. . .]. [A] federal Europe could not avoid being dominated by American interests. [. . .]  It is a fact that today this [European Economic] Community – outside of agricultural policy, which is also threatened – is tending towards being, today, nothing more than a free trade area favoring perhaps the most powerful foreign interests, but which condemns entire sectors of our industry to dismantlement, left without protection against unequal, wild competition or who decline to grant us reciprocity. [. . .] We want, as much as the others, that Europe be built. But a European Europe, where France leaders her destiny of a great nation. We say no to this vassal-France in an empire of merchants, no to a France who would abdicate today to disappear tomorrow. As always, when it comes to lessening France, the foreigners’ party is at work” (165-7).

18. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a Socialist Freemason who later joined the far-left, sold the treaty at the time saying: “It’s the advent of the European nation, bringing peace, civilization and solidarity” (362). One can almost hear Sir Oswald Mosley! Observers do not often enough recognize the extent to which the EU has been sold to the public with implicit appeals to White identity and European ethnocentrism.

19. Zemmour writes of “racist, macho red skins,” clearly thinking of rednecks (63).

20. Practically, it also means that Zemmour and Soral’s audiences are thoroughly constrained within the French-speaking world. They cannot dream of shifting their loyalty, like so many, to Brussels, London, New York, Jerusalem, or some other part of the Euro-Atlantic constellation. They will fight for France or go down with it. This may also explain, in the case of Soral, a certain complacency and sense of kinship regarding the non-White parts of the French-speaking world.

21.  I hope I will not be accused of petty-French chauvinism if I confess that I cannot think of a better hope for Europe today than to saw off the gangrenous Anglo-Saxon world as soon as possible. Not as part of that centuries-long struggle between the English and French oligarchies (eighteenth century naval and colonial wars, Napoleon’s Continental System, De Gaulle’s excluding Britain from the European Community, Mitterrand’s European currency . . .), but to emancipate Continental Europeans from the toxic cultural influence and false sense of security provided by America, a necessary step before any restoration of hard thinking and real sovereignty in Europe.