A Great Replacement – and a Great Disgrace Britain bans another truth-teller. Bruce Bawer
https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-great-replacement-and-a-great-disgrace/
It’s said that one reason why the British government is so reluctant to address the grooming-gangs horror, so hesitant to cut down on Islamic immigration, and so incapable of expelling even the most dangerous Muslim criminals, is that the government itself has been heavily infiltrated by Muslims. I’m not just talking about the people in high-profile posts, such as Shabana Mahmood, Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice; Humza Yousaf, First Minister of Scotland; Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London; the dozens of Muslims in Parliament; or the Muslim mayors of Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield, Blackburn, Oxford, Luton, Oldham, and Rochdale, among other cities. I’m also talking about Muslims in the Civil Service and Home Office, in the upper echelons of the police services, Crown Prosecution Services, and other such agencies. And let’s not forget the estimable Sir Hamid Patel, who just last month was named chair of the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted).
At first I was reluctant to believe that there are quite so many British Muslims in positions of power as some people maintain. Then something like the following happens, and it seems a hell of a lot easier to believe.
What happened is this: Renaud Camus, the 78-year-old French philosopher, author, and intellectual, was banned from entering the UK. Who, you may ask, is Renaud Camus? Well, back when the world was young, Camus was what the French call a ’68-er – a radical on the barricades, the Gallic equivalent of an American hippie, a bookish lad playing at revolution. He was also a leading figure in France’s gay-rights movement. His 1979 novel Tricks, a chronicle of intimate same-sex liaisons, was a bestseller and a critical sensation. The critic Roland Barthes gave it his imprimatur. Gore Vidal praised it in the New York Review of Books.
But no, Camus isn’t being kept out of Britain because of any of that. Tricks, and the civil unrest of May 1968, are, after all, long ago and far away. Nor is Camus (no relation, by the way, to Albert Camus, the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Stranger and The Plague) being punished for having been an active member of the Socialist Party in the 1970s and 80s. How many French intellectuals, after all, weren’t socialists in the 1970s and 80s? Nor is Camus – a man of wide and deep learning – being banned for having accumulated more diplomas than you can fit on a single wall, including degrees in French literature, philosophy, political science, and the history of law.
No, Camus’s offense is having published the 2011 book Le Grand Remplacement (The Great Replacement), which warned that Europe was undergoing, as the title put it, a great replacement – a massive influx of non-Western immigrants who, owing to early marriages and high reproductive rates, were gradually taking the place of native Europeans who were marrying late, if at all, and, in most cases, having no more than one or two children.
It’s curious, but not terribly surprising: when Camus was a callow student who preached a Marxist overthrow of French society, he was a youth hero, lionized in the intellectual press; when he grew older – and grew up – and realized that his eminently civilized country was in real danger of being overthrown by an appallingly uncivilized enemy within, and spoke out about it in an effort to preserve his society, he became widely anathematized as a xenophobe, a racist, and a white supremacist. As the Nation put it in the headline of a 2019 article by James Mcauley, “How Gay Icon Renaud Camus Became the Ideologue of White Supremacy.” In a conversation with Mcauley, Camus insisted that his views hadn’t really changed: in both Tricks and Le Grand Remplacement, he said, he was out to tell truths even though they might make some people uncomfortable.
Mcauley’s response to this statement was to assert, preposterously, that “le grand remplacement is not real: If demographic changes have been well-documented, the white utopia of his imagination has never existed in his lifetime. For the entirety of the 20th century, France has been home to one of the most ethnically diverse populations in Western Europe. Significant demographic changes occurred during decolonization in the 1960s and ’70s; the arrivals today are hardly unprecedented.” To which one can only reply that yes, France, being a major center of Western culture, had a more diverse population a century ago than, say, Poland or Denmark; and yes, the massive influx of Muslims began earlier in France than in most other European countries owing to the decolonization of the Maghreb and the end of the Algerian War in the early 1960s. But the process of Islamization has been essentially the same in France as in its neighbors; the ever-rising numbers don’t lie; and the end to which all of this is leading has been obvious for years to ordinary citizens without an ideological ax to grind.
To be sure, Mcauley’s chief objection to Camus’s picture of reality isn’t its purported untruthfulness but its vulgarity: “As a matter of aesthetics, Le Grand Remplacement is kitsch, a dime-store distortion, a false image accessible to all that arouses base sensations – mostly pangs of nostalgia but also fits of rage. In the end, its tackiness is its strength.” Tell that to the eleven people who were injured and the families of the fourteen who were killed in the January 7, 2015, jihadist attack on the offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. Tell it to the 368 wounded and the survivors of the 130 murdered in the jihadist attacks at the Bataclan theater and other sites in and around Paris on November 13, 2015. Tell it to the 434 harmed and the 86 slaughtered on Bastille Day 2016 by a jihadist who drove a truck along Nice’s Promenade des Anglais. I could go on. The list of these incidents is very long. And oh, how vulgar it all is!
Which brings us back to Camus’s problem with British authorities. Long story short: he was invited to speak about immigration to something called the Homeland Party. (The what? Until this story came along, I’d never heard of the Homeland Party. I’ve just read some things about it online that make it look, shall we say, problematic. Then again, there are things online that make Tommy Robinson, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and yours truly sound like servants of the Devil himself. What to believe?) In any event, the Home Office sent Camus an email telling him that it had decided to deny him permission to enter the country. “Your presence in the UK is not considered to be conducive to the public good,” he was told. Reporting on this story, the Telegraph noted that British police forces have of late been preoccupied with so-called “non-crime hate incidents,” one of which involved a post on X by Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson, and that people such as Lucy Connolly of Northampton have been jailed over social-media posts. Camus is, then, far from alone in being penalized for expressing unacceptable thoughts. (Nor, by the way, is Britain alone in punishing Camus: in 2014, a French court fined him for comments he made at a conference about Islamization; later trial on similar charges resulted in a suspended prison sentence and an acquittal.)
On Saturday night, Camus appeared on Britain’s GBNews channel. The host, Matt Goodwin, began the segment by pointing out that “earlier this year a convicted Syrian terrorist was allowed to stay in the UK.” In addition, he alluded to the great number of dubious characters from the Muslim world who for years now have been washing up every day on British shores in small boats, each time proving anew that Camus is not a “conspiracy theorist” (as his critics would have it) but, quite simply, an honest observer of contemporary reality. Prior to his interview with Campus, Goodwin welcomed two guests, both of them unknown to me. One of them suggested that Camus’s exclusion from the UK is curious, given that Islamic hate preachers who’ve been banned from various European countries have been allowed to stay – and preach – in Britain; the other approved wholeheartedly of Camus’s exclusion, calling him a racist and accusing him of inspiring violence.
When Goodwin interviewed Camus – who was in France, of course – the latter denied his detractors’ charge that he’s pushing a “conspiracy theory”; no, he contended, the Islamization of Europe is “plain fact.” Goodwin said that according to critics, Camus’s analysis of the European situation has been “debunked”; how, replied Camus, can it have been debunked “when it is evident in every street”? Camus accused his critics of “denialism” – denialism about “the most important thing” ever to have happened to Europe.
Again, I don’t know anything about the Homeland Party. But I know that Renaud Camus is correct about Europe’s self-destruction. Along with Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, and others, he’s been refused entry into Britain not because he’s a threat to “the public good” but because he’s a courageous messenger who has told the hard truth about the real threat to “the public good.” And the British government, as has been clear for a long time now, isn’t remotely interested in preserving “the public good”: it’s interested in keeping the natives from rocking the boat. Its immigration policies have steadily eroded “the public good,” setting that once great nation on a nightmarish path to ignominious subjugation, and at some point, it appears, both of its major parties decided that managing gradual conquest was better than the social disorder that would surely result from a serious attempt to reverse course. Plainly, a British government run by resolute, responsible-minded men and women in the mold of Churchill wouldn’t ban the likes of Camus in a million years – they’d invite him as their honored guest, present him with an award, and give him a respectful, hour-long interview on the BBC. But Churchill was long ago, and Westminster has already been heavily infiltrated by the sons of Allah, and the finalization of the great replacement is not as far off as one might imagine.
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