Counter-Currents
3,001 words
Every European nationalist should learn one and ideally one-and-a-half foreign languages. There are several reasons for this.
The first benefit is a selfish one: Knowing multiple languages appears to increase cognitive abilities, the brain, man’s most erotic muscle, flexing in new and unusual ways through practicing an alien tongue.[1]
Secondly, for the foreseeable future mass nationalist activism will necessarily be in the native language of a given country.
Thirdly, Greater Europe cannot be reduced to an English-speaking Whitemanistan, and, on the contrary, much of European civilization’s explosive dynamism is related to its diversity, to the endless inter-penetrations and fecund interactions between different nations and states.
Whenever I write, I ask myself: What has France got that les Anglo-Saxons could learn from? Conversely I think, what Anglo-American thing would the French benefit from?[2]
Now, as a humble representative of France and agent of her rayonnement,[3] I will make the case and present the tools for learning French, although other European languages of course have their own merits and specific genius.
Why learn the language of Céline?[4] A first reason is that the French have been perfecting the art of trolling for a long time. Jean-Marie Le Pen is still at it at a sprightly 87 and we could all learn from his bon mots. As he told a radio station after the Charlie Hebdo attacks:
- Le Pen: I am not Charlie Hebdo, I am Charlie Martel, yes.
- Interviewer: Do you understand that these statements could shock people?
- Le Pen: No, and by the way I don’t give a damn. But sir, shock whom? The only ones shocked will be idiots!
- Interviewer: Even in a period of mourning, you understand that . . .
- Le Pen: Oh yes, a period of mourning, all that doesn’t impress me, sir! There are many people who found it very droll![5]
The equally-sprightly Faurisson and the Righteous Mulatto Dieudonné are two other Maîtres quenelliers (Master Trolls).
Humor will save us, and papa Le Pen will help get you there.
A second reason is the European Revolution may well begin as a French one. No doubt a few will be motivated by the recent Paris attacks – with 129 dead in the streets at the hands of Islamists – to join the French in their struggle for life, freedom, and justice against those responsible. Today still, the Front National and the Identitaires are the largest nationalist organizations in Western Europe, quite possibly since 1945. Is Marine Le Pen too compromised, or could she yet be our Evita?
There are of course other promising places – Hungary is almost there already, Russia may choose to go it alone, Sweden and Greece may turn nationalist if only by a dialectical reaction to their extreme cuckoldry – but a nationalist France, as the linchpin with Germany of all Western Europe, would almost certainly prove transformative for the entire continent.
Then again France has been promising for a long time indeed.
A third reason is the prominence of French-speaking nationalist and identitarian thinkers, too numerous to cite, but who include Degrelle, de Benoist, Faye, Venner, Soral . . . Venner in particular is a very clear writer and a distinctly European one. The French, having lived for so long with the Jews, have also produced many of the most notorious critics of the Shoah narrative (Faurisson) and of Jewish/Zionist power (Drumont, Soral, Dieudonné, Kling, Blanrue, Ryssen . . .).
There is no sense reinventing the wheel; we must all learn from each other. Only some of these works have been translated into English and, in any event, is the original not always better?
Jean-Marie once retorted to a disrespectful young whippersnapper, lecturing him on the 1930s, etc: “He was not yet a twinkle of desire in the eye of his grandfather . . .”[6]
Also, you will be able to read in French the works of major dissident thinkers who your American Jews have not deemed worth publishing, but which our French Jews for some reason have allowed to be published in our language (e.g. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Two Hundred Years Together and Thilo Sarrazin’s Germany Abolishes Itself).
So-called pick-up artists (more artfully called dragueurs in French) will read Casanova’s critique of the French Revolution.
But the last and main motivation for the Anglo and indeed the European to learn French is that most foundational wisdom: Know thyself.
For the French language is inseparable from Anglo-American and wider European history. Four centuries of French-speaking monarchs after William’s Conquest have enriched, or scarred, the English language with martial, political, legal, literary, and culinary French. Yes, the Frenchified Nordic lords ate their beof while the miserable Anglo-Saxon peasant raised their Cū.[7] Clearly this hierarchic order was a just one and in line with Evolian Tradition. Honi soit qui mal y pense.
As a result, English has an unusually high number of words through dual Anglo-Saxon and Norman-French variations each with their own specific connotations, allowing for great nuance and precision in expression.[8] The Norman-French variations are generally stiffer, more formal, and give the legal-bureaucratic American English of the United States Government its imperial and almost Roman airs.[9] The Anglo-Saxon is generally more earthy, more alive, often archaic (owndom, thede, atheling . . .), with a hint of the Pagan freedom of the Germanic forests . . . (Possibly for this reason some Englishmen have sought to purge their language of Latin impurities.)
Paradoxically given the mainstream American contempt for French military prowess since the Second World War, French influence is most obviously evident in the North American vernacular in the field of war: Lieutenant (literally: “holder of a place”), esprit de corps, maneuver, materiel, personnel, reconnoiter, reconnaissance, rendezvous (recent addition?), etc. The metric system is also French. The power and terror of the Norman yoke, of Louis XIV’s soldiery ravaging the Low Countries and the Palatinate, and of Napoléon’s awesome columns of grenadiers born of the levée en masse have all been seared into the English and German languages. Yes, to learn French is to learn them, to feel in one’s soul a magnificent tradition of pen and sword.
But already there were the signs of disintegration. Why discuss esprit de corps unless it is lacking? Soon the commanders were obsessed with élan and the French in general were less concerned with power than with éclat, the mere appearance of it. The natural grandeur of power gave way to the vainglory of unhappy decline . . .
The entire decadence of the French nation is summed up by the choice of ever-less-manly words the English and Germans have pilfered from us (first military and diplomatic, through etiquette and frivolous mode (fashion), and finally overt fecklessness): The bourgeois plays his rôle at the soirée with a perfect façade of de rigueur and chics accoutrements, shares a bon mot, ultimately embraces laissez-faire, but cannot help but betray some fin-de-siècle ennui . . .
That is why France is on her knees today.
So many Frenchmen, Malraux is perhaps the most striking example, have frivolously and consciously estheticized nihilism (“l’absurde”) and decadence.
The roots of French decline were evident in the eighteenth-century expression: Travailler pour le roi de Prusse, to work for the king of Prussia, meaning to work hard for little reward. The citizens of la Grande Nation were good bons vivants while the subjects of little Prussia worked hard, ever disciplined, frugal, self-sacrificial . . . and admittedly a bit neurotic. Slow and steady wins the race. And before you knew it Prussia/Germany had beaten France once, twice, thrice one-on-one and the French had to bring in the even-more-corrupted Anglos to save/doom the day.
Really it’s amazing that Napoléon – Hegel’s Weltseele zu Pferde,[10] Nietzsche’s Übermensch[11]– accomplished as much as he did at all.
The Germans to this day use the term la Grande Nation to refer to France, but almost always in a sarcastic way.
The point is over half of English words are French or Latin in origin. English then is, among other things and to a significant degree, poorly pronounced French. This will make it easier to learn.
But let us not get ahead of ourselves.
Fichte said “die Sprache eines Volkes ist seine Seele.”[12] This is probably an overstatement: If the demi-spiritual mind is rooted in the biological brain then the soul ultimately stems from the blood. But language certainly is the primary means by which the soul becomes of aware of itself and expresses itself.
And in this, French, like Latin and perhaps English, has had a rare privilege: To be the language of Europe. Yes, between Saint Louis and Napoléon I, all the great and good of Europe spoke French, be they English monarchs, German princes, or Russian noblemen. Emperor Charles V is supposed to have said: “I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse” (i.e. French is for serious business). Frederick the Great famously preferred to French to German, corresponded at length with Voltaire in the language (I’ve never read such dreadful mutual arse-licking), and founded the Pour le Mérite, later awarded to Bismarck and Rommel (Hitler was never graced with one).
To learn French is to then hear and feel the soul Europe as she spoke for the better part of the last one thousand years.
French is also particularly relevant for the Anglo’s self-knowledge through knowing his own political tradition. The English state really is a Norman construct and has the same centralization and advantages/defects as the Parisian one (this is why the English, though massively outnumbered by the Spanish or French, have never seen their island conquered since 1066). The Plantagenets were basically French. Pound claimed Chaucer’s founding English was “part of Europe” (unlike Shakespeare’s) and very firmly rooted in the Latin, French, and Provençal traditions.
There’s also a degree to which the Anglo-Saxons and French are responsible for everything that has gone wrong with Western civilization. There is much good in the Enlightenment and in the classical liberal tradition,[13] which is basically an Anglo-French project. Montesquieu and Voltaire’s model was England. The American Founding Fathers cited Montesquieu above all (along with the Ancients). Franklin loved Paris. I believe Jefferson did too, and read too much Rousseau. Lafayette won your war, and L’Enfant designed your capital. Tocqueville’s analysis and critique of American democracy remains unsurpassed.
The point is, we broke it, we bought it.
Once you learn words, and where they came from, and proverbs, you’ll learn the suffering and hard lessons and joys of your virile ancestors. (They were virile, or you wouldn’t be here.) I can’t pronounce the word “frostbite” without thinking of some hapless Briton in the Scottish highlands, after a bitter journey in a frozen blizzard, warming his hands by the fire and then watching in hapless horror as his fingers drop off one by one.
Even the French Republican tradition is not as PC as is often made out. Voltaire was extremely racist and anti-Semitic (“cette nation est, à bien des égards, la plus détestable qui ait jamais souillé la terre”). The Revolution was in some respects a strange race war against a part-Germanic nobility (“Qu’un sang impur abreuve nos sillons !”) and the Third Republic (the first one to last any duration of time) indoctrinated generations of little French children with the slogan “Nos ancêtres les Gaulois” (admittedly only in order to stoke conflict with the Hunnish Germans, rather than keep Africans out, unfathomably stupid and disastrous). Victor Hugo, that legendary bien pensant, spoke of the European race and based his appeal for European unity on “la consanguinité franco-allemande.”
The French also naturally had their role to play in the epic and tragic story of the collapse of Europe over the last century from world-wide hegemony to American colony programmed for Afro-Islamization. De Gaulle’s Le fil de l’épée really is a brilliant little masterpiece[14] of youthful Nietzschean vigor,[15] enthusiastically read by Richard Nixon.[16]
France has also provided a huge contingent of collaborateurs to serve as senior cadres in (often French-designed) globalist institutions, whether the United Nations (Cassin), the European Union (Monnet, Schuman, Mitterrand, Delors), the European Central Bank (Trichet), the World Trade Organization (Lamy), or the International Monetary Fund (Strauss-Kahn, Lagarde). Some will want to know their enemy. But none wrote anything that wasn’t indigeste, so I wouldn’t bother.
The French make a big deal about the EU institutions speaking French, and indeed Eurocratic English is marked by French bureaucratese and Latin legalese: Directorates-General, acquis communautaire, “actors,” ex ante, rapporteurs, stagiaires, cabinets. Nowadays you only need French in Brussels to speak with the (Congolese) security guard, the (Moroccan) cleaning lady, and the (((French))) commissioner.
The government has also fought hard to defend the exception culturelle to slightly limit the importation of Jewish-American film, TV, and radio to forestall foreign spiritual hegemony. Simultaneously, this same government is oddly happy to let Afro-Muslims become the physical “majority culture” in France. Stupid, vainglorious French. Travailler pour le roi de Prusse ! This expression can also mean: To work counter-productively, to make efforts that ultimately go against one’s goals. This is also a very apt summary of the the bulk of the French state’s activities for the past 200 years.
OK, OK, now that I’ve whittled away the stragglers who surely do not have the necessary will and attention span, I will answer the question: How do I learn French?
A few simple steps:
- Listen to Michel Thomas MP3s during your daily walk, the amiable old Jew will expound on how English is damaged French and how this means even the lazy can learn.
- Then listen to Pimsleur MP3s and speak out loud so you get the pronunciation right (but do keep an endearing foreign accent) and French grammar’s alien logic seeps into your subconscious.
- Get a French grammar book, do exercises.
- Possibly go to a class, which will have the benefit of camaraderie.
- Get a jolie Française for a girlfriend. She will inevitably be classier than your average Angless and will not necessary be snooty, and could even be quite cool. Her broken English will probably be better than your French, which will be another reason for her to speak less (two birds with one stone).
- Read a French article or two a day (perhaps from Fdesouche or Égalité & Réconciliation).
- Go to France for a vacation, meet some comrades.
- Watch Soral videos with English subtitles.
- Watch Dieudonné videos with subs (Les Pygmées is legendary).
- Watch Faye’s videos speaking franglais.
Congratulations, you are now ready for la Révolution européenne. Perhaps President Marine will hire you for something.
Of course the Revolution might not happen right away and things indeed might get very, very bad. If and when the Afro-Islamic hordes – you know, the excess on the 4 billion – come storming across Spain for the Re-reconquista in an orgy of Congo-Liberio-Levantine violence (♫“Imagine all the leftists . . .”♫) led by Mahdi Kony-al-Baghdadi, I am sure countless European brothers will volunteer to relive the glories of Leonidas, Charles Martel, and Aragorn by holding the line at the Pyrénées. Perhaps one will be worthy enough to win the favors of the damsel Marion Maréchal-Le Pen (or whichever new Le-Penette is around). But it’s better if you speak a smattering of French before you become an honorary Gaulois par le sang versé.
Jean-Marie Le Pen will be proud of you.
Worse comes to worse there will be a Negro-Islamic Republic of France. This will be a mixed bag. There will be considerably more freedom of speech than in the old republic or indeed in the Federal Republic of Germany. Like the hideous Houellebecq, you will be able to take many wives (one for cooking, one for saving the race, one for pleasure . . .). Pedophilia will of course be rampant, as will random tribal violence. There will be no more feminists, no more Afro-Jewish pop songs, no more degeneracy, no more faggotry, and, most strikingly, NO MORE JEWS.[17] After 100,000 years, perhaps after an umpteenth Ice Age, the population of France will presumably be pale and de-retardized again.
Goyishe kop!
Notes
1. Anne Merritt, “Why learn a foreign language? Benefits of bilingualism,” The Daily Telegraph, June 19, 2013. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationopinion/10126883/Why-learn-a-foreign-language-Benefits-of-bilingualism.html
2. The most obvious thing would be DARWIN, a revolutionary scientist whose work apparently no Frenchman since Alexis Carrel has really taken seriously.
3. Influence and prestige, usually cultural, literally meaning “shining.”
4. Dominique Venner, “Céline: Literary Giant & Racial Nationalist,” October 15, 2015. https://counter-currents.com/2015/10/celine-literary-giant-and-racial-nationalist/
5.
- Le Pen : Je ne suis pas Charlie Hebdo. Je suis Charlie Martel.
- Journalope : Vous comprenez que ces propos puissent choquer ?
- Le Pen : Non, et je m’en fous d’ailleurs. Mais choquer qui monsieur ? Ça ne choquera que les cons.
- Journalope : Même dans une période de deuil vous comprenez que ce…
- Le Pen : Oh oui, la période de deuil, tout ça ne m’impressionne pas monsieur. Y’a beaucoup de gens qui ont trouvé que c’était très drôle !
Watch Marion Maréchal-Le Pen semi-disown her own grandfather on the subject: http://video.lefigaro.fr/figaro/video/je-suis-charlie-martel-marion-marechal-le-pen-reagit-aux-propos-de-son-grand-pere/3985758332001/
6. Witness la haine of la bête immonde (the foul beast) yourself: http://www.egaliteetreconciliation.fr/Virile-irreverence-31940.html
7. The cow breathes, the beef is eaten, and the same true of pig/pork, sheep/mutton, lamb/veal, etc.
8. “List of English words with dual French and Anglo-Saxon variations,” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_with_dual_French_and_Anglo-Saxon_variations
9. For instance, President Barack Hussein Obama II’s Executive Order 13567 on the conditions for imprisoning and torturing Muslims is entitled: “Periodic Review of Individuals Detained at Guantánamo Bay Naval Station Pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force.” All words besides “of,” “at,” and “the” stem from Old French and Latin. The same is true of his treasonous Executive Action to “Revise Removal Priorities” concerning “Policies for the Apprehension, Detention and Removal of Undocumented Immigrants.” http://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/14_1120_memo_prosecutorial_discretion_0.pdf
10. L’âme du monde à cheval.
11. Le Surhomme.
12. La langue d’un peuple, c’est son âme.
13. Reason slayed Christianity but did not replace it with a healthy new religion: Americanism failed, Communism and Holocaustianity are evil, and Fascism/National Socialism were smothered. Thus we wallow in nihilism and l’absurde.
14. Chef-d’œuvre
15. General de Gaulle, who had amply collaborated with Jews, famously deemed them to be “an elite people, self-confident, and dominating.” https://counter-currents.com/2014/12/charles-de-gaulle-on-the-jews/
16. President Nixon, who had also worked extensively with Jews, agreed with evangelical pastor Billy Graham that “This [Jewish media] stranglehold has got to be broken or this country’s going down the drain.”
17. Actually, if they are lucky, there will be some Iran-style Jews who will be intimidated enough by the Islamic Republic to be very cautious and circumspect indeed.
9 comments
Footnote 7 reminds me of the National Lampoon’s ‘White Pride” or “White History” issue back in the 70s, (not militant, just a parody of then-new “Black History” etc.) which had a “List of Words White People Contributed to the English Language”: List, of, words, white, people, contributed, to, the, English and language.
As for the French as critics (or critiques?) of modernity, since they invented it and forced it on the rest of us, it’s a bit of a wash, non? Perhaps, as Alan Watts suggested in a different context, we need to learn languages with entirely different mentalities, such as Chinese or even Sanskrit (the ultimate Indo-European language).
Hilarious. Durocher is swinging on a pendulum from shore to shore. As many know, Bukowski said that “Céline was the best writer ever.” My understanding is that Céline was a Breton and loved the sea. It’s hypnotic rhythms. It’s raging storms. It’s in Céline’s blood and in his tempestuous prose.
Also, Céline identified as a Celt and a terribly irrational rascal. Like Rabelais, he attacked the formality of Upper Class French and wrote in the language of gossip, fish-tales and ecstatic bullshit. But unlike Rabelais, Céline didn’t go high and low. He didn’t go high Frankish Overlord and low Celtic peasant. Rabelais remains the master. He wrote with the artistic freedom that comes from knowing both stratified languages, let’s say academese/legalese along with gutter patois, within the French Language.
Villon is something else again. A noble spirit trapped in a dirty-rotten fornicator’s body. In any case, I don’t think that the French language gets its rugged hybrid-vigor and/or neurotic drive towards over-refinement from the Frankish and Celtic rift. Not totally. Because the Latin influence is essential to its flexibility and flair.
I wonder if there’s a French equivalent for Black-American Ebonics. Without National Revolution, French Ebonics could be more useful in, let’s say, 20 years from now.
Why learn the language of Céline? Because if you read him in any other you are not really reading Céline!
Other great French authors whose complete works are unlikely to be translated soon: Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Louis Rougier, Henry de Montherlant, Antoine de Rivarol.
For those whose mother tongue is English, the following are generally considered the ‘easiest’ to learn: Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Afrikaans, Spanish, Italian, French, Romanian.
Someone who hasn’t at least started to learn a second language should not be considered fully human.
Plus it’s important to know more than one language so you can upbraid the help in their own heathen gibberish.
“Listen to Michel Thomas […], the amiable old Jew”
You mean Moshe Kroskof? The one who “engineered a post-war undercover sting operation that resulted in the arrest of several former S.S. officers”?
No thanks.
It seems exceedingly doubtful that “Michel Thomas” was any kind of “Nazi hunter.” The promotional blurb for Christopher Robbins’ Test of Courage: The Michel Thomas Story (New York: Free Press, 2000) should make it clear to anyone with a functioning brain that he was just another Jewish fantasist. Here it is:
“The story of Michel Thomas reads like a thriller in which adventure and heartbreak combine to produce a unique form of wisdom. Boldly escaping Vienna after the Anschluss, having refused to make accommodations for being Jewish, he arrived stateless in France one week before Kristallnacht. But rather than let this most precarious of positions defeat him, Thomas began to fight what was to become a fantastic and ultimately heroic personal war against the forces of barbarism that engulfed his world.
“Arrested by Vichy France, Thomas was starved for two years in a concentration camp at the foot of the Pyrénées and forced into slave labor in a coal mine in Provence. He avoided being sent to Auschwitz by hiding within the confines of a deportation camp for six weeks as its infuriated masters took increasingly dramatic action to capture him at all costs — and ultimately to no avail. He then joined the secret army of the Resistance and during one mission was captured and interrogated by Klaus Barbie, Butcher of Lyons, whom he barely deceived into releasing him. Re-arrested by the French Milice (Gestapo) and tortured, Thomas held out by entering a psychological state in which he no longer registered pain, and after six and a half hours his defeated tormentors threw him into a cell. He survived and promptly rejoined the fight. After the Allies liberated France, he joined the American forces, fought his way into Germany in active service and was with the troops that liberated Dachau. There he caught, interrogated and obtained the handwritten confession of the head of the camp’s crematoria, known as the ‘Hangman of Dachau.’
“At the end of the war Thomas became a highly unorthodox and extraordinarily effective Nazi hunter. As an officer with American counterintelligence, but largely as an unprecedented independent force, he masterminded and executed an ingenious scheme to infiltrate and expose underground networks of diehard SS men by posing as a mythical Nazi purportedly hand-chosen by Martin Bormann to organize the rise of a Fourth Reich.
“Though his entire family had been slaughtered in Auschwitz, and many close friends killed in combat, at the cessation of hostilities Thomas staged a Reconciliation Concert. Using German musicians, and in direct defiance of strict Allied non-fraternization laws, he brought friend and foe together in a belief that there had to be a different and better future — and that individuals had the power to make it happen.
“Christopher Robbins has dug deep to explore and substantiate the details of the Michel Thomas story. He has authenticated every episode through camp records, Vichy documents, Resistance papers and U.S. Army reports as well as with hundreds of hours of interviews with the man himself. Today, Michel Thomas teaches languages to inner-city kids, movie stars and heads of industry, succeeding in a matter of days even with people who consider themselves hopeless as linguists. To those who have been taught by him, he seems to have a magical gift for unlocking the secret powers of the mind. In Test of Courage we are led through the extraordinary experiences that have shaped the profound insight of this most fascinating and complex man, whose story is one of the most inspirational of the century.”
Jews really like to tax the credulity of goyim to the utmost, n’est-ce pas?
Download the torrents and rip the guy off, then. They’re a great resource.
Brilliant. Chapeau bas.
I choked when it comes to getting a French girlfriend. This is notoriously difficult, especially in Paris. Most Parisian girls are arrogant, entitled and expert in attention whoring. Yet, if one speaks a “broken French”, has some répartie and stories to tell, he might have some successes in Parisian bars. Good luck with that.
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