L’enl?vement de la France, ou, l’envelope de la Brasserie Lipp
By Hugh Fitzgerald (Sept. 2006)
As France steadily islamizes, what should the governments of the rest of the Western world, in those generals seconded to NATO, for example, begin to plan for? What should the peoples of the West worry about? The last time I saw Paris, in 2000, I had been shaken by what I saw. And, shaken and stirred, I sat down at the famous Brasserie Lipp, famous because of the kidnapping decades before of the Moroccan general Ben Barka by agents of the Moroccan secret services (for a time, in the late 1960s, not only “Le Parisien” carried stories about “l’enlèvement de Ben Barka,” though only “Le Parisien” juxtaposed those stories to those about the passionate vicissitudes of Johnny and Sylvie), and wrote out nearly twenty items in a half-hour. I had only an envelope to write on, and jotted down first on its smooth front, and then, with the ever-so-slight awkwardness that comes from writing on the back of an envelope, topologically distinct from a flat piece of paper, with that flap waving that distinction in your face, and offering a surface tantalizingly close to being flat, but annoyingly marred by that flap which, no matter how flat you force it to attempt to lie, never lies quite flat enough for pen or pencil not to notice. I filled up both sides of the envelope, with a list of the things that came to mind as representing France, a personal and idiosyncratic France, one that had existed, that still in part existed, and that could not possibly exist if things continued in the same way, at the same pace, met with the same indifference or incomprehension or confusion or panic.
Each item on the list was a dot, and all the dots, once connected, would reveal a hexagon, and that hexagon’s history, its illuminated distant past, its enlightened recent past, its confused and hedonistic and despairing present, and its imperiled future. France, land of the Dictée and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, seemed to be succumbing to the defenders and adherents, in many cases even the submissive slaves, of a primitive belief-system that had nothing to do with what made France France, and any list of celebrated Frenchmen, artists and scientists and thinkers, would quickly reveal that not one of them could possibly have been produced by, or lived within, the world of that belief-system, the world of Islam.
The same could be said for England, or Holland, or Italy, for all the countries of Western Europe, similarly threatened, though few of their citizens realize it or realize it in a useful way, threatened by the gangrene from the self-inflicted wound, the wound represented by the permitting, within these countries, an ever larger and ever more demanding and threatening Muslim presence, and by offering every assistance, in the vain hope of somehow winning hearts and minds, and not daring, for example, to limit the carefully targeted campaigns of Da’wa that have been so successful among certain populations – such as prisoners, such as some racial or ethnic minorities – as well as among the psychically marginal or vulnerable who exist in every society, and who may find in Islam the very thing which supplies that Total Regulation of Life, and that Instant Umma or Community of Believers, and that Complete Explanation of the Universe, that the john-walker-lindhs, richard-reids, and adam-gadahns, the lost or resentful souls of this world, find so compelling.
The ruling classes, the same classes responsible for allowing in such large numbers of Muslims, and for continuing to deceive Western publics, partly by encouraging ignorance, partly by refusing to remedy their own ignorance (it is not difficult to read the texts of Islam, nor to study enough history to understand what Jihad-conquest, and what dominance by Muslims, meant for non-Muslims from Spain to East Asia, over 1350 years of history), partly by engaging in a collective refusal to believe the evidence of their senses. Apparently there is little to stop the Three Horseman of the Esdrujula Apocalypse — Cupidity, Stupidity, Timidity – who come on their midnight ride not to warn us, but to lullaby us, should we anxiously awake, and to send us back to bed. The publics of Western Europe have over the past three decades been steadily fed by their elites, in their governments (especially in the upper ranks of the E.U.) and by members of the media (whose bias, by now, should be clear to all), a steady diet of nonsense and lies, positive nonsense and flattering lies about Islam and the Arabs, negative nonsense and slanderous lies about the United States, about Israel, and about the history and achievements of the West, of Western man, of Western rationality, of Western art, of Western encouragement of free and skeptical inquiry – of everything that is not found, and cannot possibly ever be found, in the world of Islam.
I scribbled that list on that envelope back in 2000 because it was clear to anyone visiting France who had come from outside, and who saw afresh what had been happening so slowly as not to alarm the natives, who tried for example merely to visit the tombs of the Kings of France at St. Denis, that the city of Paris was quite different from what it had been in 1980, or in 1970, or in 1966, when first visited. It was clear that the large-scale presence of Muslims in France, as everywhere in the Lands of the Infidels, the Bilad al-kufr, has created for those indigenous Infidels, and for those Infidels who have come from elsewhere to settle, a situation that is far more unpleasant, expensive, and physically dangerous, for all those varied Infidels, than it would be without that large-scale Muslim presence. This realization did not depend upon, did not require, spectacular acts of terrorism. Terrorism was the least of it.
The other day I found that messy envelope, paperclipped to other envelopes, all in a manila folder. Perhaps that old-fashioned papeterie, where I bought those trombones and chemises, somewhere on the rue de Rennes, still exists. But how could it, how could it survive in the Iron Age of chains and Chinese imports? That, however, is another matter, for a different Complaint Book. I managed to decipher most of my own scrawled mess, and transcribed the contents onto the smooth surface offered by a computer’s non-existent paper, and added a few more items so as to make the list consist of an even twenty-five items, an aliquot of one hundred, in the future, to be added to in three successive equal increments, until the set goal — one hundred fears of dhimmitude — are reached.
The very first item, however, is not about the culture of France. It is about the arms of France. The arms it possesses, and the arms that Muslims within France might come to possess, might appropriate, might manage to gain control of, not in a million years, but in a few decades. This past month one was treated to the spectacle of those black-balaclavaed Kalashnikov-clutching bezonians marching in Beirut, the forces of Hezbollah, just as we still possess on captured tapes the recruits of Al-Qaeda going through their training in camps in Afghanistan — same masked men-in-black menacing get -up, same goose-stepping, same invisible promptings from passages in Qur’an and Hadith, same emulation of Muhammad as the Perfect Man, uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil. Some things remain the same. Islamic terrorists do not differ, from group to group, in the Qur’anic passages, and Hadith stories, that inspire and motivate them, and their ultimate goals do not differ, even if Lashkar-e-Taiba focuses on Kashmir and India, or Jemaa Islamiya on attacking Infidels for the moment only in Indonesia, or Hamas concentrates on concducting the Lesser Jihad against Israel. For Western consumption, of course, the fiction is maintained that these are entirely different groups, motivated entirely by local nationalist resentments. The evidence of their identity of rhetoric and belief, and their ready willingness to support each other to the hilt, is too great for that pretense to be maintained – or at least, for it to be accepted by Infidels. They share the same motivations, hold to the same tenets, reflect the same attitudes, whether they goose-step and massacre civilians on behalf Hamas, or Islamic Jihad, or Jaish-e-Muhammad, or Jemaah Islmaiyah, or Sunnah al-Islam, or any of another hundred groups whose titles include at least one of the following: Sunna, Tawhid, Jaish, Laskar, Jemaaa, Hezb, Huzb, Hizb, Allah, Allah, Allah, Islamiya, Islamiya, Islamiya. .
A new Party Game for Infidels suggests itself. When you were a child, especially if you were an American child, you may have flipped through a succession of possible mouths to go with possible chins to go with possible foreheads, to form a brand-new face for smiling Mr. Potato Head. In the same way, you can find new combinatorial possibilities for “hizb” and “sunna” and “allah” and “tawhid”and “jemaah” and “jihad” and “mujahid” and so on. You will be able to mix-n’-match Arabic words so as to invent new names for groups hellbent on the murder of Infidels, and mayhem in their countries, and every conceivable kind of miching mallecho..
The first item on the list is not about the artifacts of France, and the spirit which was required to create them, but about the arms of France. What weaponry those Islamic groups, or states, or groupuscules, are able to possess, matters most.. Kalashnikovs are one thing, 15,000 rockets and missiles supplied by Syria and behind Syria, Iran, quite another. And so too would even one rocket or missile or plane that carried a nuclear load, or some kind of biological weapon. Those weapons, all such weapons, have to be prevented from falling into the hands of any adherent of a belief-system that uncompromisingly divides the world between Believer and Infidel, between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-harb, keeping always in mind that there is no bright line between those who are “moderate” (often a comforting fiction for Infidels) and those who are “immoderate” in their Islam. In 1942, at a campus rally held at Wellesley College, Vladimir Nabokov, who had experience of both the Bolsheviks and the Nazis, in the midst of all the sentimentality about democracy at the rally “Why We Fight” most unsentimentally said: “Morally, democracy is invincible. Physically, that side will win which has the better guns.” And that is why, in any list of the things that one must worry about, it is not the loss of what is in the museums and in the schools and in the universities of France, but the loss of French control of French weapons. For it is likely that a goal of some Muslims in and out of Western Europe would be to infiltrate, perhaps even by answering the call of those in the French government who with criminal naivete might, in a policy of “integration,” allow and even encourage local Muslims to join the army, the air force, and the security services of France, and to rise in those services and that military, some of them no doubt biding their time, until they judge that their time has come.
So, the envelope, please. Or rather, what that envelope de la Brasserie Lipp became:
1. The Force de Frappe and the rest of France’s advanced armory – the planes, the ships, the submarines, the missiles, and the secrets of how to make those bombs, and to use those planes, those ships, those submarines, that technology intended to be used against enemies of France, and now appropriated by enemies of France that France itself proved unable to properly protect itself from, until it was too painfully late.
2,. The entire contents of:
The Louvre, the Orangerie, the Palais-Royale, the Chateau of Versailles, the Musee Guimet, the Musee d’Orsay, the Musee Rodin, the Musee de Cluny, the Palais de la Decourete, the Musee de l’Histoire Naturelle, and of the following as well:.
Maison de Jeanne d’Arc (Orléans)
Musée de l’Absinthe (Auvers-sur-Oise)
Musée Américain (Giverny)
Musée de l’Annonciade (St-Tropez)
Musée des Antiquités Nationales (St-Germain-en-Laye)
Musée des Archives (Thoiry)
Musée d’Art et Archéologie (Senlis)
Musée d’Art et d’Histoire de Provence (Provence)
Musée d’Art Moderne (Céret)
Musée d’Arts Décoratifs (Lyon)
Musée d’Arts Décoratifs (Saumur)
Musée Balzac (Saché)
Musée Basque (Bayonne)
Musée des Beaux-Arts (Angers)
Musée des Beaux-Arts (Blois)
Musée des Beaux-Arts (Chartres)
Musée des Beaux-Arts (Lille)
Musée des Beaux-Arts (Nancy)
Musée des Beaux-Arts (Nantes)
Musée des Beaux-Arts (Orléans)
Musée des Beaux-Arts (Quimper)
Musée des Beaux-Arts (Rennes)
Musée des Beaux-Arts (Rouen)
Musée des Beaux-Arts (Tours)
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon (Lyon)
Musée Bossuet (Meaux)
Musée des Carosses (Versailles)
Musée du Champignon (Saumur)
Musée du Cheval (Saumur)
Musée des Cires (Chenonceaux)
Musée du Compagnonnage (Tours)
Musée Condé (Chantilly)
Musée Daubigny (Auvers-sur-Oise)
Musée David d’Angers (Angers)
Musée Débarquement (Arromanches)
Musée Dobrée (Nantes)
Musée de l’Ecole de Barbizon (Barbizon)
Musée Equipages (Vaux-le-Vicomte)
Musée de la Faïence (Quimper)
Musée de la Faïencerie (Gien)
Musée Fesch (Ajaccio)
Musée de la Figurine-Jouet (Saumur)
Musée de la Gastronomie (Thoiry)
Musée de Gemmail (Tours)
Musée de la Guerre 1914-18 (Artois)
Musée Historique (Orléans)
Musée Historique d’Art Populaire (Dol-de-Bretagne)
Musée de l’Huître (Cancale)
Musée Ingres (Montauban)
Musée International de la Chasse (Gien)
Musée des Jacobins (Morlaix)
Musée Jeanne d’Arc (Chinon)
Musée Lambinet (Versailles)
Musée Louis-Senlecq (L’Isle-Adam)
Musée de la Marine (Châteauneuf-sur-Loire)
Musée Matisse (Le Cateau)
Musée de la Mer (Dinard)
Musée Napoléon (Fontainebleau)
Musée de l’Oeuvre Notre-Dame (Strasbourg)
Musée de la Pêche (Concarneau)
Musée Pissarro (Pontoise)
Musée Poulain (Vernon)
Musée du Prieuré (St-Germain-en-Laye)
Musée Rambolitrain (Rambouillet)
Musée Ravel (Montfort-L’Amaury)
Musée de la Renaissance (Chantilly)
Musée le Secq des Tournelles (Rouen)
Musée Tavet-Delacour (Pontoise)
Musée d’Unterlinden (Colmar)
Musée de la Vénerie (Senlis)
Musée la Villéon (Fougères)
Musée du Vin (Chinon)
Musée du Vin (Tours)
Musée Vivant du Cheval (Chantilly)
Net Museum (all France)
Nouveau Musée – Institut d’Art Contemporain (Provence)
Paris Museums
Toy Museum (Alsace)
3. Jardins du Luxembourg. Jardin des Plantes.
4. The folly of Retz.
5. Ile Saint-Louis.
6. Saint-Louis.
7. Le bon roi René. Le cours Mirabeau. Mirabeau.
8. Trenet, Mistinguett, Jean Sablon.
9. Lully. Berlioz. Satie. The premiere of “Le Sacre du Printemps.”
10. Pierre Mendès-France with his “Got Milk?” campaign.
11. Jean Moulin. Martine Aubriac. Boris Vilde. Le réseau Gallia.
12. Lafayette.
13.François-René de Chateaubriand.
14. “Les Regrets.”
15. The Journals of the Goncourt brothers.
16. Les Lais de Marie de France. Les Romans de Chrétien de Troyes.
17. Emile Littré.
18. “Le Testament français” by Andrei Makine.
19.” Fables de La Fontaine” with illustrations by Jean-Jacques Grandville, my copy, bearing a bookplate that reads: “Lycée Imperial Saint-Louis (Ancien College d’Harcourt), Classe de 2-1, Prix d’Exemptions accordé a l’eleve GOURDIER, Paris, le 9 juillet 1870, le Proviseur. .”Histoires Naturelles” of Buffon, or somebody, with illustrations by Bonnard.
20. P’s and Q’s that must be minded: Georges Perec and Raymond Queneau. Proust and Quatremère de Quincy. Pauline au plage, and Que sçais-je? Pont-Aven and Quimper.
21. A copy of “Génie de la France” by Louis Horticq (Presses Universitaires de France, 1945), with an inscription to the original owner: “A ma chère Maria/En souvenir de son année passée au pays de la “douce France.”
22. Raymond Aron. Henri Focillon (died New York, 1943). Wladimir Weidle, auteur de “Les abeilles d’Aristée: essai sur le destin actuel des arts et des lettres,” awarded the Rivarol Prize. Paul Bénichou.
23. Charles Du Bos. La Comtesse de Noailles.
24. La Carte du Tendre. La tendresse. “Je préfère au costance, à l’opium, au nuits, l’elixir de ta bouche ou l’amour se pavane.”
25. Odile.
Once you have read the list above, you may perhaps be prompted, even involuntarily, to compile your own list of things, about France, or about another Infidel land, England say, in which you will list those threatened monumental brasses, the whole Pevsner-and-Betjeman physical plant, and then start worrying about all those silly subjects some Englishmen think might still be important: the Common Law, the unwritten Constitution, the study of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Joyce, and everyone before and behind and beside in both directions, not excluding Lewis Carroll and all other unique specimens. And of course no Swift or other satirists, unless there is no chance that their savage indignation can never be interpreted as being directed at Muslim beliefs, Muslim ideals, Muslim Total Regulation of Life and Muslim claims to dominance (perhaps England has already attained that happy state). What does Shakespeare, what does Edward Coke, what does Macaulay or Maitland or Newton or Newman, have to do with Islam, and therefore with the only thing that really matters?
In Turkey, “secularist” Turkey, after 80 years of supposed Kemalism, Turkish publishers are now producing versions of Western children’s books in which the heroes and the whole story — from Huck Finn to Pinnochio—have been Islamized. Why should the rewriting of literature for adults be any different? Does it really matter if, at least for Muslim students and then, in a spirit that would certainly help to win Muslim hearts and win Muslim minds, for non-Muslim students as well, certain required texts were changed so as not to give offense, in the same way that “Oliver Twist” and “The Merchant of Venice” have been subject to a total ban ever since they first appeared? Would it be so terribly much to ask, would Keats himself be offended, if the last lines of one of his odes were to be changed ever so slightly, so as now to read: “Islam is Islam, and Islam Islam. That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
Everyone can make his own dots to be connected, so as to delineate the outline of this or that Infidel land, now threatened by islamisation, swift or slow. At this point that conquest, through demography and Da’wa, can be halted, can even be reversed. But how long that remains a possibility, is unclear. It is not something that can wait. And it does not take the formation of a vast army, shipped to distant lands, there to squander men, money, and materiel. All it takes is for threatened Infidels, and their governments whose first duty it is to protect them, to wiggle out of those mind-forged manacles, to shake off those grim lendings. One need not be as agile as Houdini; one need only retain, or regain, and then act upon, what is called common sense.
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