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March 3, 2016 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
55:48
Islamitarianism

Guillaume Durocher joins Richard to discuss the attacks in Brussels and Muslim identity in Europe. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe

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Guillaume du Rocher, welcome back to the program.
How are you?
Very good, thanks.
Great to be here.
Well, as we said before we started the recording, we're just in this new normal where we're no longer really shocked by terrorist attacks as we were previously.
It's something that seems to happen every few months.
And it's something we're getting inured to, which is, I guess, kind of sad in a way.
But before we dive into all this stuff, why don't you give us your personal experience?
Because you were very close to the action.
That I was.
I happened to be visiting Brussels during the terrorist attack.
I saw the news in the morning.
I thought that there had been an explosion at the airport.
I thought that maybe it had been an accident.
And then as it emerged during the day, they shut down all the transportation.
They shut down the trains, the metro.
And we learned that there had also been the bomb attack in the tram station.
I actually know some people who...
I work for the EU and have to commute through that station.
And it was at peak time, more or less.
So no one I knew was killed, but it certainly could have happened.
And in terms of the scenes, it was sort of this frantic activity of the police, the military, and the ambulances.
Not really a feeling of fear or terror because...
I'm sort of blasé about this stuff, and there had been the attacks in Paris before, which were even bigger.
But maybe there's an element of things not seeming completely real.
We write about these things, and we talk about them, and yet it's still very abstract.
So even when it happens, you're not even really reacting to it.
Yeah, I think there is a surreality to it.
I think I mentioned this before in previous podcasts, but I was actually in New York City during 9-11.
I was in Brooklyn.
I was living in Brooklyn, and then I was working in an internship pretty close, actually, to Lower Manhattan and the Towers.
And there was a surreality because, again, I think I've told this story before.
I remember I was walking to work, which is around a mile or so walk, and I remember people were opening their car doors and playing the radio, and there was this report on a plane hitting the towers, and I thought this was just bizarre.
And then as...
I kept walking, it got realer and realer, and then I remember this really vividly, but a black lady grabbed me and she said, they've hit the Twin Towers, they've hit Washington, we're at war.
And, you know, it was one of those things where it's like you have all this kind of commonality with everyone around you, maybe for the first time, because these cities are so anonymous and adamant.
I also noticed that people certainly were shocked.
I mean, it affected everyone, but then it's not like everyone was running around like a chicken with its head cut off.
No one was going nuts like you think they might be when such a radically shocking event occurs.
But I think in a way now, I mean, that was 2001, and that...
That really was something new at that point.
I think by 26, by the current year, I think there's almost like another layer of irony to this where we're becoming inert to it.
I mean, this really is the new normal.
You can't be shocked by it.
And I even think the Cologne incident might have been more shocking just because, despite the fact that no one died, just because it was more symbolic.
It was like, let's rape these women literally in the shadow of a Gothic cathedral.
I thought that in a way affected me more.
But in terms of these terror attacks and airports and trams and metros and so on, I think we've got into this point when any reasonable person just has to say, like, this is the new normal.
We're going to be living with this kind of stuff for the foreseeable future.
Well, that's what the economists said immediately afterwards.
And, I mean, it's amazing.
They just think, oh, there's nothing we can do about this.
It's just a force of nature which happens, and that's it.
It's like a car accident.
There's going to be a plane crash every couple of years by the nature of it all.
The risk that you take is negligible, so you don't really think about it.
I think that's basically the way of seeing it.
What is going on in Brussels, though?
I was doing some research, and again, we're recording this on Thursday.
Thursday evening over in Europe and then Thursday morning here in the U.S. And so, obviously, things might change.
They most likely will.
But at the moment, we have these two brothers, who is Khalid and Ibrahim El-Bakuri.
And then actually, there is a person who is suspected, who I think there's a manhunt for right now, named Najim Lakarawi.
I'm sure I'm mispronouncing those names.
But actually, interestingly, and I'll just throw out a few facts here, and then you can run with them.
First off, Najim Lakarawi is also suspected of being connected with the Paris attacks.
And he's a young person, I think he's like 24 or something, but he's a master bomb maker.
And so, first off, there's these connections between these attacks.
These aren't just some random Muslim who decides to blow stuff up.
There's clearly coordination going on.
There's clearly a kind of postmodern army living within Europe.
And the other thing, which I don't think could ever be underestimated, is that these people are not foreigners, they're not aliens, and they are not even refugees.
They are European-born.
Citizens of Belgium.
So, I guess we have to ask, you know, obviously you can run with those in whatever direction you want, but also, what's going on with Belgium?
Belgium seems to be a real hot spot for ISIS warriors.
It really is.
I was just looking at the stats.
There are over 400 Belgians, Belgian citizens who have gone to the Islamic State and may or may not have come back.
That's the highest figure per capita in Western Europe, really by a substantial margin.
Belgium has had a significant amount of Muslim immigration, especially Moroccan and Turkish.
Muslims, you know, it's always horrible in Europe.
We never actually have hard statistics to really be able to tell what is going on.
That one quarter of the population of Brussels is Muslim, so 250,000 people.
And there's a very high unemployment rate in Brussels, a shocking rate, about 20%.
And that gets even higher in these communities.
So you're thinking of communities where they could have unemployment of up to 40%.
So I'm sure that's pretty lame.
You can look at the pattern of these attacks.
I wouldn't say this is a scientific account, and again, we don't really know the details of what just happened, but this is based on the previous attacks.
There are ISIS supporters in Belgium.
They've done demonstrations in the center of the city, and they take video of themselves, and they're wearing masks, and they parade.
There's actually some similarities, I dare say, between your...
I think you have this big body of...
You know, alienated young Muslims whose community is obviously a loser community in the European country that they're in.
They come from a proud, patriarchal, macho, tribal, religious culture.
And they're in Europe and they're losers.
And that's a big body of those people.
And in addition, they have the Islamic State in Europe.
I think that's what's happening.
is that you're finding you have this combination of these, the Muslims in the West, disaffected young Muslims, and then the actual, you know, I don't even know what the Islamic State is like, but my impression is it's a medieval, fanatical organization.
These two extremely different cultures.
You really get this impression from the fact that the attackers themselves often don't really seem like they're willing to go all the way with it.
That they hesitate at the last minute.
That they wanted meaning in their lives, but didn't necessarily really want to kill themselves.
And you get this, you know, during the Paris attacks, there was a, you know, one of the young lady terrorists, you know, who had made a ridiculous statement before blowing herself up, because the police were yelling at her, where's your boyfriend?
Where's your boyfriend?
You know, who is your collaborator?
And her response was, he's not my boyfriend!
And then she blew herself up.
Sorry to laugh.
We have video and audio of this happening.
I can just imagine.
I dated him once or twice!
He's not really my boyfriend!
Sorry.
I'm just really in bad taste.
Sometimes you have to laugh.
There's a tragicomic aspect to all of this.
I think with ISIS as well, as you point out, it is a medieval, to use that word in kind of like the, not like an historical sense, but in the colloquial sense of just being backward and ridiculous and brutal and extreme.
There is a medieval aspect to it, but then there's a very postmodern aspect to it.
And in a couple of ways, I mean, first off, ISIS is a master of social media.
You know, bin Laden would send these videotapes out that were almost like him, you know.
Kind of strange.
I remember one of the later ones in 2004 was him almost at a news desk or something.
It was very strange.
But bin Laden would send these videotapes out, but ISIS, they're on Twitter, and they're using the irony of Twitter.
I remember one of them compared a beheaded head to a soccer ball and all this kind of stuff.
In a way, they're picking up on that snark.
silliness of Twitter.
And also, like Al-Qaeda, it's a postmodern organization in the sense that it's not an institution.
I mean, it is and it isn't.
There might very well be leaders and there might very well be nodes, but it actually is this amorphous group.
And in a way, you can say that you're part of Al-Qaeda or I'm part of ISIS.
And that doesn't mean it's not like you're being a Higher up in the Soviet Union or something, where there's an institutional structure, it's a nation-state, more or less, and so on.
It really is this amorphous blob that you can't really attack.
It's very difficult to attack.
Oh no, you can't attack it.
Yeah, and so, I don't know.
I think this is also how we just don't understand it, and we don't want to understand it.
This is really my take on this whole thing.
I've seen some images of candlelight vigils and a lot of people who are basically saying we're going to stay calm and carry on.
We're not going to let this affect us.
We're all Belgians and people put on a Belgian flag on their Facebook profile or so on.
And I think there's something admirable about that in the sense of...
Not freaking out.
You keep on keeping on kind of thing.
There is something about that.
However, I think there's also something not admirable about that in the sense that it's a bunch of people who are in total denial.
And they're basically just accepting the situation.
They're accepting that there's going to be these attacks frequently.
And they don't want to, A, do anything substantial about it.
And they also don't really want to look at the fundamental causes of this.
And you hear this even among so-called conservatives.
I was listening to a conservative podcast before this just to kind of get my mind working.
And they were saying, oh, Britain's been much more successful at combating this because Britain MI5 seeks out the decent Muslims and they hire them and use them as embedded spies.
You know, let's engage in espionage against all the bad Muslims, whatever.
Again, this is just all denial, denial, denial.
Like, really, at the end of the day, this is about race or ethnicity to a large degree, but it is really deeply about Islam and Islamic immigration.
And the fact is, a tremendous amount of Muslims are kind of, you could say, fellow travelers to this whole thing.
I'm drawing concentric circles here.
Within that circle of fellow travelers, there are a lot of people who will openly sympathize.
And within that circle, there's a very small circle of people, it might even just be dozens, actually, who are really willing to go all the way.
And so, again, I agree with liberals that obviously most Muslims are not terrorists.
Of course, that's a stupid thing to say.
But that doesn't mean that there isn't this deep connection between all Muslims in Europe and terrorism.
And it's just like, I'm in a way kind of sick of people keeping calm and carrying on.
Like, let's actually look at...
The causes of this and let's actually change.
And I don't know.
I mean, I think that's my ultimate conclusion.
And again, I think Donald Trump is kind of a, you know, he's clownish in many ways.
And, you know, I never, I think his whole run is kind of miraculous.
But just this basic thing.
Ban all Muslims.
You can say, oh, that's stupid.
We need more nuance or whatever.
Well, maybe we don't, actually.
Maybe actually he's getting at something very real, and maybe actually he's getting at this civilizational divide between...
It's not a race, obviously, but it has racial components.
And it is something that is profoundly not part of Europe.
And, you know, it's like, in a way, Trump has been one of the very few people and one of the very, very few public people to recognize this.
I think Trump had a wonderful reaction to the attacks.
It was very comforting to me.
He tweeted, Do you all remember how beautiful and safe a place Brussels was?
Not anymore.
It is from a different world.
The U.S. must be vigilant and smart.
So it's these sort of very simple, almost toutological statements that really get it done.
Yeah, yeah.
No, I mean, these cities have been really dramatically changed.
And actually, maybe you can talk about that, because I know you've spent a lot of time in Brussels.
I mean, I've spent certainly time in Paris, and I mean...
Paris itself, there's definitely posh neighborhoods where you can go to, and it feels like the Paris of 10 years ago and 20 years ago and 30 years ago, or at least presumably for me.
But there are also neighborhoods that you can visit that are just shockingly out of place.
It's like through teleportation or something, we've taken part of...
You know, Islamabad and put it right down in Paris.
I mean, it's amazing.
What is Brussels like?
I have been to Brussels.
I've spent a lot less time there.
But what is it like for a Westerner?
Is it kind of that same thing where there's like a checkerboard of civilizations?
It really is.
Brussels is a city where Belgians are a minority.
Now, it's not quite as bad as that makes it sound.
They're already a minority, but it's not quite as bad as that makes it sound because there's been a huge amount of European immigration.
So you have lots of French, lots of Italians, lots of Romanians, Polish, and that has made it...
So I don't really know what the racial breakdown is, but you'll be hard-pressed to find that many native Belgians, actually.
Then when it comes to the...
There's been a huge amount of Maghreb, Congolese, and Turkish immigration.
And it's what you would expect.
I mean, it's totally non-integrated.
The neighborhoods are poor.
The Congolese district has drugs, and it has poverty and just general dirt.
I mean, it's dirty.
And people don't really talk to each other.
The communities just sort of live side by side.
Because famously, you have European institutions there.
So, the Eurocrats are there.
You know, they stay among themselves, too.
They don't become Belgian, and they don't mix with Magrebis on a day-to-day basis.
I mean, to be a little bit more nuanced, I think Magrebis in particular are not nowhere near as bad in terms of educational performance as, say, Africans are.
And so, you are more likely to get a smart Magrebi who, He has his life together, so to speak, and works at an engineering company or works at a decent communications company.
It's easier to get your token Maghreb and then think, okay, well then, what's the problem?
And I do think, in general, there is a huge difference between, say, Eurasians and Sub-Saharan Africans in terms of cognitive performance and behavior.
So that's one thing.
Another thing...
Maybe I can riff on some of the stuff you were saying earlier.
Yeah, sure.
Which is that we have a very easy case to make when it comes to terrorism and Islam in the sense that Islam is not indigenous to Europe.
And 90% of the deaths due to terrorism over the last 10 years have been due to Islamism.
So all those people who are dead would not be dead today if we had prevented the immigration.
So that's a very simple argument to make, and most people, a lot of people will find it fairly compelling.
On the other hand, the number of deaths from these terrorist attacks are still negligible in the grand scheme of things, if you consider other sorts of death or real wars.
And the liberals can say, well, look, all we need to do is improve their economic standard of living.
To destroy their religious ideology, you know, to denature Islam.
And this has been a long-term project.
I mean, I remember many years ago, the head of the American Jewish Committee was bragging, I think it was in 2001, in an article saying, you know, we really need to be careful about the Muslims coming over because they really don't like us.
But in the long run, I'm pretty sure that MTV will...
You know, get a better hold on them than their imams will.
And so he was really gloating that he would destroy their traditional culture and spirituality.
And I think there's a strong case for that.
In a way, that has happened, to a degree.
Who said that?
That's such a great quote.
Because he seems to have articulated what so many have kind of assumed or thought.
I believe the last name was Steinleit.
Uh-huh.
Gosh, Steinleit.
I wonder what kind of name is that?
The Jewish Steak in America's Changing Demography.
I think that's the article.
Okay.
Yeah, here it is.
And maybe I can take a more meta view of the Islamism phenomenon, and I think also, for that matter, the identitarianism phenomenon, because I actually think they're related.
At the risk of, I think Heidegger said, historical events are manifestations of more deep-seated historical forces.
And I think a way of thinking about that is to say that, in particular, historical human events are often reflections of the human soul, in a way.
Different aspects of the human personality affirming itself.
Or giving way and taking particular human and institutional forms.
To make that a little bit more concrete, I think that Islam, as you were saying, the terrorist attacks are related to race and to religion.
It's related to race in the sense that people find the religion emotionally compelling if it serves their ethnic group or if it assuages their ethnic pride.
So if you're an Arab who is a loser in Brussels, you feel bad about that and you try to affirm yourself in a tribal way.
And I believe that Islam and Islamism are rationalizations of that because you put yourself into a bigger community, which is credible.
Because if you're just an Arab, you're a Moroccan, that's not great.
Morocco...
Sucks, on the whole.
Being an Arab in Brussels sucks.
But if you're a Muslim, then you are part of a global community which is growing.
And which, on current trends, will eventually absorb Europe, actually.
And which kind of freaks people out, as well.
You know what I mean?
You're part of something that's waving the black flag.
That's badass.
I don't think anyone should underestimate that attraction for people.
I work at a convenience store, a little kiosk or whatever.
I sell magazines and cigarettes.
This sucks.
But, you know, one day we're going to turn Europe black.
You know, there's something, you know, and I understand that, actually.
Yeah, and I've noticed this also with, say, black British people.
Like, there's a surprising number of Jamaican Brits who have converted to Islam and become, you know, preachers.
And I'm convinced it's the same thing.
Or for that matter, why Malcolm X. X would choose Islam.
Being black, what do black people have to be proud of?
Well, go look.
But if you're part of Islam, that's a powerful force.
And I think you could make a similar statement about European identitarianism.
It is us today...
Asserting our ethnocentrism and finding an outlet to it which we find emotionally compelling and intellectually compelling.
Because we're European and not Semites, this leads to different conclusions.
And you see that these two forces, Islamism and Identitarianism, have both been suppressed in the West.
Islamism because it leads to terrorism and Identitarianism because You know, it would lead us to being free and having our own countries.
Well, real quick, I really like this comparison because I, you know, and I'm sure a lot of our listeners might not like it because they're like, oh, I don't care in comparison to Muslims.
But yeah, I mean, there's something also to be said of the person who, you know, is on Twitter and it has an anonymous Twitter handle.
Exactly, exactly.
And is tweeting, you know, images of like knights slaughtering Muslims and, you know, kind of this kind of thing.
I mean, granted, these people are not, you know, blowing up train stations, but they are indulging.
Like, there's a similar pull to both of those things about being something that's bigger than yourself, you know.
And it's actually a noble thing.
Yes, and I was really struck by the comparison because there are a lot of ISIS Twitter accounts which are not run from Thank you.
or people in France or they are people in Belgium or people in the UK.
So it's young Muslims in those countries who just have their Twitter account and they're pro-ISIS.
Thank you.
I think it's two things.
One, it's identifying with a great cause, but it's also rationalizing your marginality in the society because it's self-marginalizing.
If you do this, you're going to be pushed to the margins even more and become even more irrelevant.
And so I see that commonality.
You know, there's a psychological similarity there, and I think that with the Internet, this sort of abstract force, which could be, you could say, one would be European ethnocentrism, and the other one would be Arab, Turkish, or, you know, this sort of brown ethnocentrism of different groups, but which, like Islam, or find, rationalize their greatness with Islam.
These two suppressed historic instincts.
Can't only get embodied on the internet, you know, because they're free.
There you can actually express it.
And the only difference with the Muslims is that they are more marginal.
I mean, they have more lumpenproles, you know, people who don't have a stake in the system, whereas most of us are comfortable, we're fine, so we're less likely to, you know, go blow ourselves up or murder people.
And we don't have the institutional support, so to speak, of something like the Islamic State to do so.
And so we only have one Breivik, but they have a lot.
And considering that Muslims are only maybe 10% of the Western European population, they've done 90% of the terrorism.
So, you know, that probably explains that disparity.
Yeah, I agree.
I think it's, again, I think a lot of us might resist this comparison when we first hear it, but I think there actually is a lot to that.
I think Romain Bernard, in a podcast I did with him a couple years ago, I think he expressed it well when he said that, you know, Islam is the black flag of the underman.
You know, it's a way for a lumpenprol or an underman to be bigger than himself.
And it's a way for him to achieve a kind of horrible nobility.
But, you know, so again, I think a lot of people kind of miss the point when they...
You know, the kind of kosher neocons who criticize Islam by quoting various, you know, various sentences from the Quran and like, oh, look at that.
That explains all.
You know, I mean, first off, you can do that with the Bible.
You can do that with a lot of different texts.
You're not really proving much of anything.
You have to understand it as a phenomenon in the world.
What is it now?
How does it understand itself?
How is it functioning?
And in that sense, it really is functioning as something that gives meaning to the life of someone who has no meaning and has no future and has no rootedness as well.
So a kind of person who's a...
Maybe even saying a proletariat is not even correct.
Proletariat is the working class.
Someone who's just this lost soul in the postmodern world, it gives meaning to their lives.
Yeah, I think that's a good assessment.
I mean, I'm really not sure why Belgium provides so many compared to other Western European countries.
It could be that there's also a weakness to the national identity here because Belgium is split between Flemish and Walloon, so Dutch speakers and French speakers.
And if I compare this to, say, France, it is not actually impossible for a Maghrebian France to identify, to a certain extent, with the French nation-state or the French national project.
Because there's a history of French colonialism, and there's the francophonie.
And that can seem very strange to identitarians, and I don't think it's ideal.
But a lot of the people who maybe would have been attracted to Islamism in France could be attracted to some of the civic nationalism there, like Egalité et Réconciliation, where those energies get channeled into an anti-Zionist...
Anti-Judaic alliance, multiracial anti-Judaic alliance.
But that's not really going on in Belgium?
No, no.
To be fair, there's one local politician of that type, but I haven't followed him closely and he's a bit weird.
I'm speculating to a certain extent.
Do you think anything's going to change of any significance?
I mean, in the EU, with a national security of the EU, such as this, and with national security?
Or, again, I think the conclusion I would kind of come to is that we've been inured to all this to such a degree that nothing much is going to change.
I've seen no real indications that anything's going to change.
Might make a token effort to make an EU security agency or to heighten their cooperation.
But in practice, these things don't really lead to very much.
I saw that the Polish government said, well, use the attack to say that it won't take in any refugees.
Then again, I thought they had already said they wouldn't.
But in any case, this sort of does another...
A good occasion for the Visigrad countries actually to come together and say no immigration, no Muslims.
They all came out and said that, all of them.
Orban in Hungary, Simon in Czech, FICO in Slovakia, and then Poland saying no refugees.
So we are seeing this Visigrad block consolidating.
And one thing's for sure, they're not going to have many Muslim terrorist attacks.
Well, that's true.
Although, I mean, even Victor Orban, my dear friend, a man I do support, and I don't say that.
I'm not being ironical.
I do support him, despite our little history together.
But yeah, I mean, in a way, he can't even escape from it himself, just because, you know...
Whatever he wanted to do.
There was a tremendous amount of refugees in Budapest this summer, and I'm sure this is an ongoing thing.
But, no, I would say this, though.
The Visigrath Alliance, this kind of Central European, I guess, all of those countries are Catholic, too.
There's probably a connection there as well.
But the Czech Republic and Slovakia and Poland and Hungary, they really are, you know, I wouldn't say that they're...
I wouldn't say they're identitarian maybe in the way that you and I want them to be identitarian.
They're kind of conservative, and maybe they kind of don't get it at some level.
I think that's true.
But they are pushing for a different path, and I think that's a very good thing.
And maybe they're kind of starting us down the path towards an identitarian Europe.
It's something I'm very curious about.
I think most of them are just conservative and maybe even opportunistic.
Simply their populations were raised under communism.
They're still relatively poor.
And that stokes your ethnocentric instincts.
That makes you more ethnocentric.
And they haven't had 60 years of Western prop brainwashing.
Communism attacks the body.
Liberalism rots the soul.
As Jonathan Bowden memorably said.
Absolutely.
And so, you know, there's this fear that, you know, this is nice, but maybe it won't really change the trajectory.
And then after 20, 30 years, a new generation will come to power and then that will fall apart.
Then again, if I look at, say, Hungary, I mean, I think some of Orban's advisors really do get it and are really quite edgy.
I agree.
I was surprised.
Again, I am certainly not an expert on this matter, and there's this huge language barrier.
But yes, from what I've seen from some of his advisors, they seem to be reading the alt-right.
And I'm not just saying that to be narcissistic or something.
I think they're clearly doing that.
So I think that is a good thing.
Keep it up.
I will say...
The European-American role in the liberation of Europe, I more and more think, will be critical.
And this is because of the hegemony of American or Judeo-American culture in Europe.
And so if the Americans discredit that, you know, and show that to be hollow or false or uncool, you know, it can be uncool, then that will liberate European minds too.
And, you know, in this recent massacre, you see the memes that came out of it, you know, because we always have our memes.
What came out?
Je suis Bruxelles.
You know, these cartoons of, you know, usually they had one of Tintin crying.
They had one of Tintin.
They had one of the pissing boy of Brussels called the mannequin crying.
One of the mannequin peeing on a terrorist.
I mean, it's just lame.
It's just gay.
And I think it's lost all emotional resonance.
You know, I think the first time when it was the Charlie Hebdo massacre, I think there, you know, people were sort of feeling, it was all sort of artificially stoked and managed by the government to be sure, but, you know, it resonated with people.
And here, every time, you know, there's no sincerity left.
People go through the motions, you know, they project the Belgian flag on the national monuments in different places.
But I think these memes have no power.
And so that means our memes have power.
That's for sure.
Yeah, I agree.
I think what you said is actually powerful.
Because we still do live in this post-20th century world where American popular culture is hegemonic.
Certainly the Washington consensus...
Is still hegemonic.
Remember, we're still on effectively a dollar standard, which goes back to 1944 and Bretton Woods and all that kind of stuff.
I mean, we still are in an American...
And that doesn't mean that it isn't weakening and that it might actually be gone within our lifetime.
I think it probably will.
Remember, after World War I...
Just as a side note, I'm actually rereading Pat Buchanan's excellent book on Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, which I recommend to everyone.
It's a good kind of starter book on thinking about the World Wars.
But one aspect of that is that after World War I, the British Empire was riding high.
I mean, they increased territories, they increased power.
They took away some German colonies.
A lot of Americans, actually, who are kind of anti-war Americans, were saying, you know, Wilson told us that we fought this war to make the world safe for democracy, but we really made it safe for the British Empire.
But again, what they didn't recognize is that we were actually at the very end of British hegemony.
And that it was about to all come crashing down.
I think we might very well be at that point with American hegemony.
But nevertheless, it really is, I think it is maybe, it's really incumbent upon us, you know, as English speakers and as Americans to kind of like attack this from the inside.
Absolutely.
I've read that book too, and it's a wonderful book.
I highly recommend it.
It was part of my red pilling.
And it really shows Churchill to be...
I mean, I haven't read enough on him to have a full assessment like I might have of, say, Charles de Gaulle.
But the thing with Churchill is that he knew what communism was, and he said so in an article called Bolshevism vs.
Zionism, where he notes that Jews were leading many of the movements.
He said he wanted the British Empire to last for a thousand years.
And he said after the war as prime minister that, no, indeed, really, people are always quoting Hitler on that, but Churchill said it too.
Both were wrong.
Both were wrong.
And Churchill also said as prime minister after the war to his cabinet on his preferred immigration policy, keep England white.
Now, is Churchill stupid, or is he short-sighted, or is he disingenuous?
I don't know which, but in any case, he allied with forces in a Faustian pact.
Which could only destroy the empire and race that he held dear, or claimed to hold dear anyway.
Oh, I think you're absolutely true.
This is an interesting tangent, and I think it's worth pursuing.
Churchill, I think, is really one of the most ironic figures of the 20th century.
And it's interesting because here, particularly in America, there is just a Churchill cult.
And it's interesting.
I've noticed that a lot of, you know, we have these quotes like, You know, what is it?
First they make fun of you, then they attack you, then they follow you, or, you know, some of these kind of chestnuts that are apocryphal quotes, and they're sometimes attributed to Gandhi, or they're sometimes attributed to Churchill.
So I think it shows this, you know, devotion to the man that we, you know, attribute all this wisdom to him.
But actually, I think he was a deeply short-sighted person, and I think myopia was really his fundamental problem.
He was fighting Germany out of some kind of Victorian rivalry or something.
The fact is, if he had allowed Hitler to win the war, the British Empire might still exist.
Hitler explicitly did not want to dismantle the British Empire.
And yet he aligned himself with these forces that did.
And, yeah, I mean, he is one of these short-sighted and ironic figures where he's lionized by neoconservatives and so on.
But then everything he sought out to accomplish, he actually failed at.
I think he's the perfect neoconservative and cuckservative icon.
And I think George Bush was right to have his bust in the White House.
And I think Britain is going to have him on the pound bill soon.
That's the plan.
Interesting.
I mean, because he basically made Britain safe.
He made the world safe for multiculturalism.
Seems to be what he ultimately accomplished.
Even though he was, again, his goals were to fight off German advances out of some 19th century style rivalry and to protect the British Empire.
But what he ended up doing was creating cool Britannia and...
Tony Blair's...
Yeah.
It's a profound irony of history.
He's just like one of the most misunderstood people.
I have another thought on the Americanization of Europe, which has been a long-term process.
And I sort of get in two minds about this, and I actually more and more think in a way which maybe our friend Romain Bernard would approve of.
And that is that we have to roll to a certain extent with these trends.
They are long, deep-seated trends.
And I think, for instance, of...
The fact that today, 94% of kids in Europe are taught English in secondary school.
There's been an explosion in the number of university courses in continental Europe in English.
It's increased by about tenfold, a thousand percent in the last decade or so.
I have to say, the national fact is very stubborn, and we don't see this harmonious gelling of Europe, which would make it really a force on its own.
And the development of the European Union is so slow and so ineffectual that I've tended to disconsider notions of...
But the more I think about it, the more I think that if you had the right cultural policies, assuming this were desirable, because I think a certain amount of diversity within the European world would be a good thing.
But I think you could create a very high level of common identity through television.
And the thing that makes me realize this is that all of the countries where they have their television and English, usually with subtitles in the national language, are very sensitive to American culture.
So they're the ones who go on the alt-right and participate in it.
It's Dutch, it's Scandinavians, so smaller, more English-speaking countries.
I think this could be, if we wanted to create a pan-Western, pan-European identity, it could be done through television if we stopped dubbing things.
And as much as I love French culture, I don't think The Simpsons dubbed in French as much to French culture.
But if it were in English, it would add to an enormous extent to European and transatlantic identity.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's happening.
I think actually what you're saying is not even that speculative because I think it's actually happening.
And that we're really connecting in this way.
And English as a lingua franca is vitally important to that.
I've kind of been amazed by the amount of people who use the term alt-right.
And I think alt-right is kind of like Al-Qaeda or ISIS.
It's like, you know, there's some institutions within it.
And I would say MPI is one.
And, you know, M-Ren, so on.
All these, you know, Occidental Observer, Kevin MacDonald, like whatever.
But it's actually really amorphous and it's everywhere.
And I think it's okay if, you know, we don't need to be Puritans kicking everyone out of it.
I think it's okay if we have some different types of people in it adopting that term because it...
It's a general term.
It's like our black flag.
It's our saying no to the contemporary world, and I think that's good.
I made this joke actually at the last conference, the last NPI conference, but Ramsey Paul said that he was in Romania.
And he was at a bar, and someone approached him at the bar.
So it's not like they met up on Twitter and decided to meet.
This is a random guy who came up to Ramsey Paul the bar, and he goes, Oh, Paul, Ramsey Paul, let me introduce myself.
I am alt-right shitlord.
I'm an ignorant American, so I'm using a Russian accent for whatever.
Forgive me on that, but it's just kind of funny that A, he knew Ramsey Paul through his hilarious videos that he does, and then B, he said, I am alt-right shitlord.
It's such an American-style thing, and so you could say, oh, we're Americanizing them, but it's like, look...
We need a common language.
And if you say, I'm an alt-right shitlord, you immediately know where someone stands.
And so I think it's great.
It's like we actually are coming together and talking to each other.
I have been to Romania.
It is a wonderful country.
One interesting thing about it is that they're 20 million people, but they don't dub their TV.
They all leave it in the English.
So that's also, I think, probably part of it, that if he were raised with that, then they love alt-right, because they can understand it.
I met with Julien Rochedi, this French identitarian, and we spoke a bit, but his English isn't so hot, and that's already a barrier.
He's wonderful with his own memes and anybody who speaks French, I recommend you check out his Twitter account.
But it's not going to resonate to a certain extent when you're not really socialized and even socialized at a young age to imprint that identity.
If you're watching American TV between the ages of 5 and 15, you're going to imprint on that as part of your tribe, actually.
Well, this is very interesting stuff.
And I think what we're in a way saying, like what we want to do is turn a lot of these things that seem bad, like Americanization or the Englishization, and turn it into something that's good.
And, I mean, that's what we can do.
As opposed to, like, opposing everything and being like, oh, no, let's all speak different languages and blah, blah, blah.
You know, we're actually able to turn something that could be bad into something good.
And I think that's definitely how our movement should operate.
Let's do this.
Let's put a bookmark on this.
I promise that I won't.
I'll have you back on in a circumstance other than a violent terror attack.
We're making this a tradition.
But anyway, thank you, Guillaume, for being on.
And I certainly look forward to reading more of your great stuff.
I had one last thought on some of the old fighters that are in our movement.
And I'm thinking of Sam Dixon, Jared Taylor.
I think it was one other.
But I've never seen them so happy.
And I've never seen them so almost gloating.
Jared Taylor made that really funny video about the Black Lives Matter movement saying, keep doing what you're doing.
You're just stoking European-American identity, and we've never had it so good.
And Sam Dixon had an article about the intolerable whiteness of Bernie Sanders supporters.
Where was that article?
Well, that wasn't the title.
Oh, it was on Occidental Observer.
I missed that one, yeah.
I mean, all these Sanders supporters have to see their socialist champion who's going to give them the Daily Show in real life fail because of all these blacks and Mexicans voting for Hillary Clinton.
So he was just gloating about that and thinking, well, you guys have some things to think about.
Maybe we'll see.
This is actually a fascinating thing.
If only whites were voting in this country, we would basically have a Donald Trump v.
Bernie Sanders confrontation.
Bernie would be dominating if blacks were not voting.
America would be Sweden.
Basically.
It would be great.
It would be like right-wing nationalism versus social democracy and like kind of granola bar nationalism of white people.
But I mean, it's simply to highlight, you know, there are these guys who were really working on this for decades against the whole...
We'll see what this leads to, but I'm thinking this is a sign that we're starting to really have a change in the culture, and certainly in the online debate.
I completely agree.
I don't think being optimistic is unfounded at this point.
I just think that...
Yeah, the internet has been a godsend.
It's allowed for a tremendous amount of freedom.
And it's gotten to this point where people can't deny it.
I mean, it's like people are calling up the Rush Limbaugh show and saying, I'm all right.
And I remember someone, this guy named Jack Tapper of CNN, he did this tweet.
I retweeted it where he said, when did Twitter become Stormfront?
Like, you know, exclamation mark.
And what he's reacting to is just like, you can't deny that there's this huge culture of, you know, the alt-right or identitarianism, whatever you want to call it.
You just can't deny it.
And whereas 25 years ago, you could easily deny it.
You know, it's like, ah, a bunch of meaningless people, a bunch of Klansmen and terrorists or whatever.
Now you can't say that.
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