The French Election and Europe’s Post-Historical Collapse

“While I was always a philosopher, I was originally a fairly apolitical one, and it was my first year in France that awoke the political part of my being, for I saw all around me where socialism, oikophobia, and multiculturalism were leading.”

Having lived in Paris for many years on and off from 2001 to 2014, I have been privy to that city’s gradual decline. The first time I arrived there, as a young student nurtured by a both Anglo- and Francophile upbringing, it was like entering into a room full of men I had been taught to revere since before I could remember, an experience that since then has been matched, and indeed superseded, only by my ascent onto the Acropolis in Athens.

Two weeks after my arrival in Paris, the September 11th attacks happened, and overnight there were French soldiers patrolling the Paris metro and RER systems, reminding me during my daily commute to university that France was already well acquainted with Islamic terrorism and did not want to take any chances. Already then it was common to hear anti-Semitic and anti-French remarks from the city’s Arab population and to see anti-Semitic graffiti on walls outside the main tourist areas. And yet, as so much else in French politics, the new measure was more cosmetic than a genuine attempt to get to the root of the problem—just like the later French ban on the burka, in 2010, which changed absolutely nothing. While I was always a philosopher, I was originally a fairly apolitical one, and it was my first year in France that awoke the political part of my being, for I saw all around me where socialism, oikophobia, and multiculturalism were leading.

The unwillingness to understand what is really at stake has now played itself out once again in France, in the recent election. We were constantly warned that the Rassemblement National party would constitute the first far-right government since World War II. Even though it is true that France allowed increases in immigration after that conflict in order to replenish depleted labor markets, this is an example of how the media repeat each other’s assertions without thinking of the meaning of what they are actually saying, since these words are tantamount to claiming that a potential government today that wants to restrict immigration in order to reduce street crime and to preserve a semblance of French culture is actually more right-wing than the French government that poured troops into Indochina in the late 1940s in order to uphold its colony there, and more right-wing than the French government that displaced millions of people in Algeria in the 1950s. Those governments were generally not called far-right, however, because people at that time still remembered what the actual far right was like. But the media today no longer understand what they say, if they ever did.