Mr Dreher has been condemned by the usual suspects for his on Jean Raspail's 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints. To be fair, he strongly criticized the novel's use of derogatory language to describe non-Westerners and called the book bad, both aesthetically and morally. But he also referred to the "valuable" and "prophetic" lessons that can be drawn from the work, including from Raspail's argument, which Dreher presents as potentially correct, that "the only way to defend Western civilization from these invaders [non-Western immigrants] is to be willing to shed their blood."
He refers again to M Raspail's book in his diary entry published October 12th, headed Role Of Church Elites In Europe's Suicide. The subhead: "Christians Cannot Afford To Trust Ecclesial Leaders To Defend The Faith". A big thank-you to BCF for directing us to the Substack post, from which we take this excerpt:
...we all heard a speech by Thibault de Montbrial...[who] has a new book coming out in France next week, about what he regards as his country's "emergency" situation.... He warned that western Europeans should prepare themselves for mass violence at the level the continent...hasn’t seen since the end of World War II. That is to say (though he didn’t use this term), civil wars....
He explained that Islamists have managed to infiltrate both public and private institutions all over Europe, and are using it to their advantage.
How did all this happen?
De Montbrial, a practicing Catholic, said that the core of the problem is cultural — namely, that France (and Europe) has lost all sense of who and what it is. It has forgotten its past, and any sense of connection to it, and has lost its identity. (This is what Renaud Camus calls “The Great Deculturation”).
How do you expect young people to resist people (Muslims) who are hostile to Western civilization, and who have a strong culture, if you have produced a generation, or generations, of people who have no culture?
[De Montbrial] said that in France, Muslim activists are even succeeding in winning over the hearts and minds of no small number of native-born French, by telling them, basically: "Look around you at what a nihilistic, pornified disaster modern Europe has become. Is that really what you want? Convert, join the ummah, and gain a story. Become part of the glorious march through history of the sons and daughters of the Prophet." It works, he said....
This, he went on, is why though France and other European countries have to use legal, political, and law enforcement means to fight this stuff, the core of the struggle is cultural. If Europe doesn’t recover its sense of history and culture, and in a meaningful way, such that its people are willing to fight to defend it, all will be lost.
A subsequent speaker made the point more explicit: at the heart of culture is cult, or religion. Either Europe re-Christianizes, or it Islamizes. There is no stable third option.
Worth reading: Suicide of the West, by James Burnham. The John Day Company, New York, 1964. An essay on the meaning and destiny of liberalism, even more relevant 60 years later than it was when published. You don't believe me? Look around you!
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