“Let Them Eat Kebab” — The New Marie Antoinettes

The noted blogger Fjordman is filing this report via Gates of Vienna.


Admiral Horatio Nelson may have guided the British naval fleet to a famous victory at the Battle of Trafalgar, but he faced a far tougher foe during celebrations to mark its 200th anniversary. Organizers of a re-enactment of the sea battle in 2005 decided to bill it as between a “Red Fleet” and a “Blue Fleet”, rather than Britain and its French and Spanish adversaries, describing it as a re-enactment of “an early 19th century sea battle.”

Trafalgar, in which the British Royal Navy saw off a combined Franco-Spanish fleet off the southern coast of Spain, marked a crucial defeat for Napoleon’s sea power. Nelson himself fell during the battle. Apparently, we now live in the age of the Borderless Utopia and the Brotherhood of Man, and shouldn’t be too hung up on Spain, England, France or other irrelevant historical details. It’s just rude. Maybe soon, we will hear that WW1 or even WW2 was fought between the Yellow Team and the Blue Team. We wouldn’t want to insult anybody, would we?

The incident is part of a broader trend of re-writing history. Partly because of immigration, the British government appointed a commission on the future of multiethnic Britain. It concluded that “Britishness” had “systematic, largely unspoken, racial connotations.” The report said Britain should be formally “recognized as a multicultural society” whose history must be “revised, rethought, or jettisoned.”

In the European Parliament, the German Christian Democrat Hans-Gert Pöttering stated that school textbooks should be reviewed for intolerant depictions of Islam by experts overseen by the European Union and Islamic leaders. He said textbooks should be checked to ensure they promoted European values without propagating religious stereotypes or prejudice. He also suggested that the EU could co-operate with the 56-nation Organisation of the Islamic Conference to create a textbook review committee.

Timothy Garton Ash is considered a world-class expert on Europe’s future, and he refers frequently to his participation in glamorous-sounding international conferences. Bruce Bawer notes that Europe’s political élite has become extremely insulated from the people, and unwilling to address the problems that people are worried about. He thinks Garton Ash is typical of this élite. He distrusts national patriotism but adores the EU, writing about the need for a factitious European patriotism (“flags, symbols, a European anthem we can sing”) to encourage “emotional identification with European institutions.” Why does Europe need an EU? Garton Ash’s answer: “To prevent our falling back into the bad old ways of war and European barbarism.” Among his suggestions is that Europe encourage “the formation of an Arab Union.” He makes no mention of Arab democracy. Imagining “Europe in 2025 at its possible best,” he pictures it as a “partnership” with Arab countries and Russia that would extend “from Marrakesh, via Cairo, Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Tbilisi, all the way to Vladivostok.” But still, people claim that Eurabia is a conspiracy theory…

Mr. Carl I. Hagen of the right-wing Progress Party criticized the choice of a foreign citizen to head Norway’s immigration agency. “There should be no doubt about the loyalty to the native country and the connection with the Norwegian people, such as history and traditions, or the fact that you should look after this country’s interests. If you’re an immigrant from another country, with family and roots elsewhere, this could during conflicts raise questions about where your loyalty lies,” said Mr. Hagen.

Jonas Gahr Støre, Foreign Minister from the Labor Party, said Hagen’s statements were “bordering on racism.” Eva Joly, Norwegian born French magistrate, known in France for her tireless crusade against corruption, is now working as special adviser to the government in Norway. “To assume that nationality or citizenship have anything to do with being suitable [for a job] is a very old-fashioned way of thinking. We are no longer thinking in national terms, but in European or global terms. It is a duty to employ people from other countries,” said Joly. She has got both Norwegian and French citizenships, but considers herself European.

The director of Norway’s immigration agency, Manuela Ramin-Osmundsen, arrived in the country in the 1990s. Upon accepting the job as heading the country’s day-to-day handling of immigration, she vowed that it would become more open with those seeking residence permission in the country. As it turned out later, the agency (UDI) was in fact so “open” that it had been virtually running its own, private immigration policy. UDI violated both the law and political directives when it granted residency permits to nearly 200 Iraqi Kurds during the fall of 2005, even though not all their identities could be confirmed and some had criminal records. A commission that probed the controversial permits blasted the former head of UDI, and his successor, Ramin-Osmundsen, resigned.

Is it “xenophobia” if Norwegians, who make up less than a tenth of a percentage point of the world’s population, worry about being overwhelmed by immigration? As American writer Gore Vidal said in a lecture: “Liberal tradition requires that borders must always be open to those in search of safety or even the pursuit of happiness. But now with so many millions of people on the move, even the great-hearted are becoming edgy. Norway is large enough and empty enough to take in 40 to 50 million homeless Bengalis. If the Norwegians say that, all in all, they would rather not take them in, is this to be considered racism? I think not. It is simply self-preservation, the first law of species.”

Jonathan Friedman, an American living in Sweden, mentions that the so-called Integration Act of 1997 proclaimed that “Sweden is a Multicultural society.” Notes to the Act also stated that “Since a large group of people have their origins in another country, the Swedish population lacks a common history. The relationship to Sweden and the support given to the fundamental values of society thus carry greater significance for integration than a common historical origin.”

The Act thus implicitly states that the country of Sweden doesn’t have a history, only the various ethnic groups that live there. Native Swedes, who have shaped the country for centuries, have thus been reduced to just another ethnic group in Sweden, with no more claim to the country than the Kurds or the Somalis who arrived there last Thursday. The political authorities of the country have thus erased their own people’s history, without staging any public debate about this. I have read that Muslim immigrants in Sweden say that Sweden doesn’t have a common cultural or religious heritage; it’s just made up of different groups tied together by the use of a common language. It is thus “racist” to even talk about how “we” should integrate “them,” since there is no “we” to begin with.

Jens Orback, Democracy Minister in the Social Democratic Swedish government, is worried about “the public’s lack of faith in politicians.” Yet the same Orback said during a radio debate that: “We must be open and tolerant towards Islam and Muslims because when we become a minority, they will be so towards us.” It sounded almost too crazy even for Sweden that a minister could say something like this in public, so I checked with several independent sources, and apparently, he really did say this.

This is a government that knows perfectly well that their people will become a minority in their own country, and yet, is doing nothing to stop this. On the contrary, they are actively working to achieve this result. Has this ever happened before in human history, that the leaders of a nation are working to erase their own people and their history, and present this as an act of tolerance? No wonder some Swedes say that there is a war against Swedes going on: A physical war waged by Muslim immigrants, and a cultural and legal war waged by their own political élites.

Following threats from Muslim hardliners, some of the largest companies in England were afraid to display the English national flag during the football World Cup. In Sweden, a man was attacked and nearly killed for the crime of wearing clothes with his own national flag while Sweden was participating in the World Cup. Sweden, of course, has the same Christian cross in its flag as does England, and apparently, some “Multicultural youths” found this to be an intolerable provocation. The 24-year-old man was run down by a car in the city of Malmö. According to the police, he was wearing some clothes with Swedish national symbols on them, and this “provoked some emotions.”

Malmö, Sweden’s third largest city, is set to become the first major Scandinavian city with a Muslim majority. The wave of robberies the city has witnessed is part of a “war against Swedes.” This is the explanation given by young robbers with immigrant backgrounds on why they are only robbing native Swedes. “When we are in the city and robbing, we are waging a war, waging a war against the Swedes.” “Power for me means that Swedes shall look at me, lie down on the ground and kiss my feet.”

In Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, a Mr. Hans Hauge wrote an essay about Multiculturalism. “We are being told every day that Denmark has become a Multicultural society. This is a fact, it is said, and there is nothing we can do about it.” “It is not a question of something that the population has decided politically, it just happened. It is a bit like the industrialization or the modernization. It happens while we are asleep.” “We have to get used to it.” “Nobody could predict when the [Berlin] Wall fell. Nobody could predict the Muhammad [cartoons] crisis.”

According to Hauge, one thing we do know from history “is that it always moves from “multi” to “mono.” A Multicultural society is a sign of the last days before a new “mono” sets in. Multi is always a sign of destruction.” “We can thus be sure of the fact that we are moving from a multi-religious to a mono-religious society. The movement is always from many to one, but we don’t know which one.”

I agree with Mr. Hauge on the second part. A Multicultural society is only temporary. Sooner or later, we will return to a new mono-cultural society. This will happen either through the division of the previously coherent territory into new, mono-cultural enclaves or through the takeover by society as a whole of the most forceful and aggressive of these competing cultures.

The Multicultural ideology is malignant because it fragments society into separate, cultural ghettos, a kind of apartheid. We’re living in an age dominated on one hand by cultural relativism in the West, and on the other hand by aggressive Islamic intolerance, No Truths vs. One Truth. Is this just a coincidence, or is it possible that the vacuum of nihilism and moral indifference is provoking an aggressive counter-reaction? If so, Multiculturalism promotes totalitarianism rather than tolerance.

Of course, it is possible that Multiculturalism never was about tolerance to begin with. For some, it was about vanity. “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s most open-minded of them all?” It’s a beauty contest for bored, Western intellectuals who use immigrants as a mirror to reflect their own inflated egos, a sport where they can nurse their vanity in the mistaken belief that denigrating your own cultural heritage is a sign of goodness and lack of prejudice.

However, there are others who understand perfectly well that Multiculturalism is only temporary, and use it as a means to further their own ideological ends. They use Multiculturalism and massive immigration as a battering ram to smash the Old Order of Judeo-Christian nation states to pave way for a New Order, be that a pan-European super-state or the global dictatorship of the proletariat. Creative destruction, in other words. And this is where I strongly disagree with Mr. Hauge, who thinks Multiculturalism “just happened,” an accident of nature. I don’t know; much of it sounds pretty man-made to me.

It is true that the traditional system of nation-states will be challenged in the 21st century. Part of the challenge is indeed posed by impersonal forces of technological globalization. However, Multiculturalism is probably more a deliberate result of ideology than an accidental result of technology. The settlement slash invasion by millions of Muslims in major European cities was a direct result of secret behind-the-scenes agreements made by EU authorities, as documented in Bat Ye’or’s work on Eurabia, and it was widely cheered by Leftist intellectuals.

The Internet makes borderless communication easier, yes, but that’s not the major problem. The major problem is that millions of people are moving physically across the borders due to an intentional government policy of erasing the borders of Western nations.

If massive immigration is the inevitable result of technological globalization, how come Japan hasn’t been overrun by millions of Muslims the way Western Europe has, or how come a country such as Finland has received a lot fewer immigrants than neighboring Sweden? Why is Multiculturalism “inevitable” in Sweden or Britain but perfectly avoidable in Japan? Could it be that it has been decided by certain powerful groups, and that this Project is hidden from public discussion by saying that it is “inevitable” and that all those who oppose it are “racists,” anyway?

The political élites are involved in a Project — for it is a deliberate, organized project — to dissolve the nation states of the West. It is a coalition of several groups: Leftists, who hate the capitalist, Christian West in general and are influenced by Marxist ideas about the nation state being an obstacle to international liberation. However, there are also centrist and even so-called conservative groups participating in this. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the author of the awful EU Constitution, is considered a conservative politician, who however has an enormous contempt for the intelligence of ordinary people and never cares to hide this fact.

There is another group, whose members are convinced that the nation state is the cause only of wars and trouble. I suspect former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl belongs to this group. And finally, we have perhaps the largest group: Opportunists who just mind their own business and follow the lead of the other groups. They have good jobs on an international basis and no longer feel any close attachment to the nation states they are supposed to represent.


I call them The New Marie Antoinettes. The old Marie Antoinette, 18th century Queen of France, was famous for the quote “If the people have no bread, then let them eat cake,” although some claim she never actually said this The New Marie Antoinettes would probably have said “Let them eat kebab.” They think cries for national sovereignty is an old superstition among common people, and are actively dismantling the nation states of Europe through massive immigration, Multiculturalism and supranational institutions, primarily the EU.

They never asked for permission to do this, and have never even mentioned this Project in public. The creation of this new entity, Eurabia, is the greatest act of treason in the last two thousand years of Western history, and has almost brought Europe to its knees. Western political élites seem to think that we now live in the “global” age, and that any sense of attachment to your nation state or even your civilization is silly and “old-fashioned.” This is now creating an unprecedented gap of trust between the people and their leaders, which in Europe in particular is now so large that it could soon threaten the foundations of our democratic society. Can our countries survive when the people who are supposed to protect and serve them no longer believe in the very institutions they are supposed to represent?

One blogger suggested naming this Project The Great Deconstruction, a name I like. Earlier generations lived in the Age of Reason, we live in the Age of Deconstruction, where our Universities and institutions are more interested in deconstructing and breaking down all of our cultural heritage than in defending it and passing it on to our children.

It is noteworthy that Marie Antoinette, more than 200 years after she was guillotined at the height of the French Revolution in 1793, has become a national obsession, the subject of books, magazine articles, films, even chocolates and perfumes. “I love my country but we’re in a terrible mess,” said Claude Dufresne, a historian, referring to the rioting in the immigrant suburbs, the economic stagnation and the seeming inability of French politicians to offer solutions. “Under the circumstances, the past seems all the more glorious and brilliant.” The fascination with Marie Antoinette also reflected “nostalgia for what we have destroyed”, he added. In a similar vein, Evelyne Lever, author of a biography of Marie Antoinette, said the public related to her because of the extraordinary tragedy that she suffered: “She went from being almost a goddess in the palace to being dragged on to the scaffold.” At the same time, Marie Antoinette represents the end of an era, “and that is exactly what we are living through now, the death throes of a particular system”, said Lever, referring to suggestions that the institutions of France’s so-called Fifth Republic are exhausted and in need of renewal.

Roger Scruton, in a speech given in Belgium, noted that “buying and selling of citizenship, often to people who think of it purely as a right and never as a duty, is common throughout Europe. The political élite sees nothing wrong in people collecting passports as they might collect memberships of clubs.” “Members of our liberal élite may be immune to xenophobia, but there is an equal fault which they exhibit in abundance, which is the repudiation of, and aversion to, home.” This, attitude, which he calls oikophobia, is “the disposition, in any conflict, to side with ‘them’ against ‘us’, and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ‘ours’.”

The person who suffers from this state of mind repudiates national loyalties and “defines his goals and ideals against the nation, promoting transnational institutions over national governments, accepting and endorsing laws that are imposed from on high by the EU or the UN, and defining his political vision in terms of cosmopolitan values that have been purified of all reference to the particular attachments of a real historical community. The oikophobe is, in his own eyes, a defender of enlightened universalism against local chauvinism. And it is the rise of oikophobia that has led to the growing crisis of legitimacy in the nation states of Europe.”

“The ordinary people of Europe are now deeply anxious about their future. And when people are in a state of anxiety they pose a threat, both to themselves and to those whom they fear.” “If the liberal élite will not discuss the matter, and continue to put all blame for the growing anxiety on the xenophobia of the indigenous population while ignoring the oikophobia which is an equal contributory cause, then the likely long-term effect will be a popular explosion, and one from which no-one will benefit, least of all the immigrant communities.”

Serge Trifkovic, author of Defeating Jihad: How the War on Terrorism Can Be Won — in Spite of Ourselves, puts it this way: “At the root of the domestic malaise is the notion that countries do not belong to the people who have inhabited them for generations, but to whoever happens to be within their boundaries at any given moment — regardless of his culture, attitude, or intentions.” “A further evil fallacy is the dictum that we should not feel a special bond for any particular country, nation, race, or culture, but transfer our preferences on the whole world, “the Humanity,” equally.” “Those Americans and Europeans who love their lands more than any others, and who put their families and their neighborhoods before all others, are normal people. Those who tell them that their attachments should be global and that their lands and neighborhoods belong to the whole world are sick and evil.” “The refusal of the elite class to protect Western nations from Islamic terrorism is the biggest betrayal in history.”

I have noted before that the European Union is a throwback of to the pre-democratic era, the creation of a new aristocracy. It looks like this new aristocracy has the same grip on reality as Marie Antoinette and the pre-revolutionary French élites. Never mind the gang rapes, the embassy burning or the suicide bombings. Think of all the good things Muslim immigration is bringing us, the culture, the food. If the people don’t like sharia, let them eat kebab.

It’s easy to crack jokes about this, but the situation is in fact quite serious. Europe is being overrun by barbarians, and Europe’s political élites are spending all their efforts implementing a Frankenstein’s monster Constitution in the face of popular resistance. I smell a pre-revolutionary era that’s about to end. Let’s hope we can avoid Robespierre and the Reign of Terror this time.

Now, we have the blogosphere, the virtual guillotine. We don’t chop the heads off stupid people, we just chop the heads off stupid people’s ideas. Maybe the world is making progress after all.

The problem is that if, or rather when, we get civil wars in Western Europe due to Muslim immigration, the front lines will not necessarily be between Muslims vs. Infidels or even Natives vs. Immigrants. There is a cultural and ideological civil war going on in the West that, combined with some Islamic fanaticism, could lead to physical civil wars. The battle is between those who believe in traditional Western values and nation states and those who believe in Multiculturalism, the UN, international law etc. The last group, which is especially dominant on the Left but which has penetrated deep into the Right, thinks that national sovereignty is at best redundant, at worst evil and “racist.” Many of them will genuinely believe that those who reject Muslim immigration are evil, racist bigots, and some of them may side with Muslims to fight for their own ideological project. There is no call for unity against the Islamic threat because our leaders no longer believe in childish notions such as “civilizations” or “nations.”

Global warming is man-made and must be fought at all costs. Multiculturalism, however, and the settlement of millions of Muslims in our largest cities “just happened,” a bit like a hurricane. Still, the fact that the very same people who have eagerly championed Multiculturalism are now distancing themselves from the Project and claim that “it just happened” is an indication that they know the experiment has failed and is about to collapse.

So far, our liberal élites have been more effective in breaking down the Old Order than in making a New Order. Their “creative destruction” could turn out to be much more destructive than creative. Instead of a new pan-European identity we will see a temporary return to some very old tribalism. I hope I’m wrong, but I fear that I’m not.