RUTHFULLY YOURS

Asked once whether he believed in God, French president Emmanuel Macron replied, “That’s a real question, a complex question. I undoubtedly believe in a transcendence. I am not sure any more that I believe in a God. Yes, I believe in transcendence.”

Another real and complex question for him to answer is that regarding the relationship of the French Republic with Islam. France is a militantly secular country whose militancy has seemed only to grow stronger as the Church grows weaker. France rejects all connection between religion and state; in the mouth of a French intellectual, the words très catho (very Catholic) sound more like an accusation than a description. The ghost of Marshal Pétain—who replaced “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” with “Work, Family, Fatherland”—still rides.

Islam is perhaps about to be made an exception to French laïcité, or the complete separation of church and state. In 2003, then-president Nicolas Sarkozy set up the Conseil français du culte musulman—the French Council of the Muslim Religion. The CFCM was supposed to represent French Muslims, though two-thirds of them have never heard of it. Delegates are elected in proportion to the surface areas of their mosques; the elections are said to be influenced by the various countries that make financial contributions to the respective mosques.

Macron seeks something different. He wants to “structure” French Islam, with a view to undermining extremism and foreign influence. It is said that North African and Persian Gulf states pay some 300 imams in France; they also pay for the construction of new mosques (which is illegal). However, the financing of mosques is very murky: the mosques do not render very clear accounts, hiding behind financial regulations for non-profitmaking organizations that are much less stringent than those for religious organizations.

Patriotism is one of the biggest strengths of a nation. Waving the national flag is so much more than bringing a tribute to successful athletes. It also links us to a heritage and a tradition. Our national flag symbolizes ancient loyalties embodying the legacy of our fathers, which we want to bestow on our children.

A few weeks ago, I lodged an official complaint against the Prime Minister for discrimination on behalf of thousands of my Dutch compatriots. This week, the Public Prosecutor announced that he will not prosecute Mr Rutte because the government policy is one of “positive discrimination,” which the Public Prosecutor considers permissible. I will now take the case directly to the court. A government that is positively discriminating in favor of foreigners is negatively discriminating against its own people.

Just as the millions of Dutch, who are currently watching the Olympics on their television sets, are cheering their own athletes, governments should be the cheerleaders of their own people. We need to bring the spirit of the Olympics to politics, the spirit of patriotism. The nation-state has the duty to positively discriminate in favor of its own people. It has to cheer them on, encourage them, be proud of them, as we now are of our athletes. And always will be.

My country, the Netherlands, is doing extremely well in the 2018 Winter Olympics. It is great to see how the Dutch successes are reinforcing feelings of national pride and patriotism. Thank God for the Olympics! Cheering one’s own athletes over foreigners has nothing to do with discrimination, racism or jingoism. Sporting events are one of the few occasions where people can still unabashedly display feelings of national pride without being judged for it by the leftist cosmopolitan elites.

National pride is fantastic. In his farewell address as president, Ronald Reagan said that one of the achievements he was most proud of was “the resurgence of national pride.” Reagan called it “the new patriotism.” Patriotism is one of the biggest strengths of a nation. Waving the national flag is so much more than bringing a tribute to successful athletes. It also links us to a heritage and a tradition. Our national flag symbolizes ancient loyalties embodying the legacy of our fathers, which we want to bestow on our children.

If the Axis had won, would we have seen rampaging mobs? But wait, we have those now, except we call them ‘protesters’. Politically they combine the Tweedledum of Hitlerian thuggery with the Tweedledee of Marxist groupthink and, to our so-called leaders’ shame, our publicly funded and thoroughly colonised institutions urge them on.

I had been putting off seeing the film The Darkest Hour for suspicion that it would be just another revisionist hatchet job and anachronistically present Winston Churchill as a climate-change denier, transphobe, uninvited toucher of female thighs or any of the other things the purveyors of contemporary culture dislike. I saw it only when I was told that it’s not and it doesn’t. But if, rather courageously on the part of the producers, the film concedes no ground to contemporary historical revisionism and instead presents Churchill as a somewhat Hamletian hero, neither does it draw a veil over certain elements of the Great Man’s persona that would indeed provoke disapproval in certain circles today.

It shows him as portly enough that, had they lived in the same era, ‘iconic’ comedienne Magda Szubanski in her role of fat-shamer could have signed him up for a slimming course. Magda, it will be remembered, was a somewhat improbable Jenny Craig weight-loss spruiker before she reinvented herself as the Boadicea of gay love. The film reveals his alcohol consumption, starting with whisky at breakfast, to have been such as to send today’s ‘safe drinking’ campaigners into a decline, with their two units a month or whatever they grudgingly allow; while the Quit lobby would demand that its taxpayer funding be tripled to propagandise against Churchill’s marathon cigar-smoking, which must have kept the Cuban export balance in the black for decades.

Britain’s darkest hour, as every schoolboy probably no longer knows, was precipitated by resistance to Hitler’s attempt to impose a prototype European Union with himself as a one-man Brussels. His blitzkrieg, he boasted, would bomb Britain into submission and burn its cities to the ground. All at once I remembered – but what a coincidence! – that exactly the same incendiary aspiration had been expressed for our own country a few weeks before I saw the film, and expressed not by a foreign belligerent but from within the ranks of the publicly subsidised Aboriginal grievance industry. Readers might recall – or not, since she had her flicker of fame and hasn’t been heard of since – that our very own scorched-earth advocate was one Tarneen Onus-Williams, or Dtarneen as she later decided her name was. Tarneen (let’s stick with that to avoid consonant cluster) is a volunteer with that esteemed body the Koorie Youth Council of Victoria and an employee of Oxfam, the snootiest moraliser in the crowded field of global charity self-righteousness (whose sanctimony has lately being fully stretched coping with allegations of sex abuse among its ‘aid workers’). You can refresh your memory about Tarneen at ‘Happy Invasion Day II’ at Quadrant Online.