It’s Globalist Or Nationalist

My sister, to put it mildly, is well traveled.  Throw a dart at the globe, and there’s a good chance that, on one trip or another, she’s been there.  Or, at least, on that continent.

While I’ve been out of the country a few times, I’m pretty much a home body.  That gives us a different perspective on things.

It’s also true that, politically speaking, she comes down to the left of me.  Which isn’t too surprising, since I fall somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun.  Our political  discussions can be contentious.  On more than one occasion, I’ve stated my resolve that “We just shouldn’t talk politics.”  She responds, “You’re right.”  And, don’t you know, next time we’re together, we’re back at it.

One of the issues that has been a regular bone of contention is immigration.  We’ve emailed articles and links to websites back and forth trying to drive home our points.  All to little avail.

But she gave me an article from a recent edition of The New Yorker during our last visit that made an impression on me.  It’s entitled, “You Will Not Replace Us.” The European thinkers behind the white-nationalist rallying cry” by Thomas Chatterton Williams.  I’ve got to hand it to my sister, it’s definitely worth a read.  And, I must confess, goes a good way toward proving her contention that she’s more open minded than I am.  Which, again, isn’t too surprising, since when it comes to immigration, I can pretty much look through a knot hole with both eyes open.

The line in the article that really jumped out at me appears near the end when the author turns his attention from Europe to the United States:  “And yet the country has nonetheless arrived at a moment when once unmentionable ideas have gone mainstream, and the most important political division is no longer between left and right but between globalist and nationalist.”

Coming from an historically leftist publication that’s produced in a city that has represented the belly of the leftist beast, this is a remarkable concession.  Politically speaking, it’s the equivalent of a tectonic shift in earth’s crust in the blink of an eye.

But consider.  Running on a decidedly nationalistic platform, Trump’s resounding victory confounded everyone:  the Republican establishment; Hillary still hasn’t resigned herself to it; the mainstream media remains in a state of dazed disbelief; the pollsters missed it by a mile.

The Brexit vote was equally unexpected.  And, basically, was also a show down between globalism and nationalism.  And the resentment in the European Union over the heavy handed, “right thinking” globalist bureaucrats in Brussels doesn’t stop with Britain.  A majority of citizens in many European countries support a ban on further immigration from Muslim majority countries: they want their nations back.  In this, they are following the lead of the globalists’ favorite bête noire, Donald Trump.

The article quotes at length a leading French philosophe, Bernard-Henri Lévy, who, according to Thomas, “has long embodied elite thinking on the French left.”  With respect to the hordes of impoverished Syrian refugees washing over Europe, Lévy has written, “They are applicants for freedom, lovers of our promised land, our social model, and our values.  They are people who cry out ‘Europe! Europe!'”

At this, Thomas charges Lévy with “blithe cosmopolitanism” when, from his impeccable apartment in an exclusive Parisian neighborhood, the multi-millionaire Lévy dismisses the concerns of average Europeans about the hordes of Muslim refugees descending on the continent.  This callus attitude, continues Thomas, “can fuel resentment toward both intellectuals and immigrants.”  To which I can only add this suggestion for Monsieur Lévy: “Keep it up.”  And so he does; further on in the article, he flatly declares that France “has no refugees.”

The central theme of the article is one originally suggested by the French writer and member of the alt-right, Renaud Camus:  “The Great Replacement is very simple.  You have one people and, in the space of a generation, you have a different people.”  Explains Camus, the replacement is the result of mass immigration and low birth rates among native French people-and other Western countries and peoples.  (Here, by the way, is a thoughtful, non-boogieman manifesto of the alt-right coauthored by a gay, Jewish prankster/bomb thrower and a writer for Breitbart.)

When asked why the notion of the great replacement resonates so widely in so many places, Lévy dismisses it as a “junk idea.”  “The Roman conquest of Gaul,” asserts Lévy, “was a real modification of the population in France.  There was never something like an ethnic French people.”

It’s ironic that Lévy is so dismissive of the possibility of French ethnicity.  Because, as a Jew and a strident proponent of Zionism, he certainly seems to believe that Jewish ethnicity is no “junk idea.”  And, for that matter, that Jewish blood is sufficiently pure to be inextricably linked to the soil of Israel.

In January, 2015 Lévy addressed a meeting of the UN General Assembly on antisemitism in these terms:  “The Jews are detestable because they are supposed to support an evil illegitimate state-this is the anti-Zionist delirium of the merciless adversaries of the reestablishment of the Jews in their historical fatherland.”

This is intriguing language.  Imagine his “delirious” outrage if a member of the alt-right, on the basis of ethnic “purity,” attempted to claim an “historical fatherland” in front of an august body like the UN.  Lévy would be calling for their heads on a platter.  Evidently, only a Zionist is entitled to argue for an “historical fatherland” on the grounds of ethnic purity.  And only Jewish blood is sufficiently pure to save it from being a “junk idea.”

But Lévy, no more than any other disciple of identity politics, can’t have it both ways.  If Jews can press their case on the basis of race or ethnicity, so can blacks, and Hispanics, and Asians.  They do.  And they are.  As the article asserts, this is the new way of the world.  So, why not whites?

Lévy might not like the fact that it’s “no longer left and right, but globalist and nationalist.”  At least, when it comes to Europe and France.  But he, apparently, is perfectly content with the notion that Israel and Zionism and Judiasm represent a near apotheosis of blood and soil.  He better get used to the idea of other groups practicing what he really preaches.  Because it’s coming.