Eric Zemmour’s Blockbuster Speech
Rod Dreher, The American Conservative, October 4, 2019
[American Renaissance Editor’s Note: Best-selling author Eric Zemmour, an Algerian Jew, is one of the most popular and controversial figures on the French Right. Accused of racism, sexism, and xenophobia for his open criticism of progressivism, Islam, the dissolution of French identity and the impending demographic replacement that will proceed it, Mr. Zemmour is regularly censored by the media, and is currently facing several lawsuits from “anti-racist” organizations.
Undeterred, Mr. Zemmour delivered a powerful keynote address at Marion Maréchal’s Convention Of The Right in Paris. The full text of his speech can be found here. Our snipped version of the speech is below.]
“Hello. Ah, I see there are quite a few of you! I… I didn’t expect that. {snip}
{snip}
{snip} I’ve read over the theme of this Convention: “How to find an alternative to progressivism?” But how and why would you seek an alternative to progressivism? {snip}
{snip} There’s nothing more important to our era than progress, it’s our great religion. Better than Jesus Christ or Moses. And do you realize it’s been two centuries? How can you refuse the outstretched hand of progress? How can you not praise the magnificent industrial revolution that paved the way for the slaughter of Verdun? How can you not praise the science that gave us the atomic bomb? How can you not go into raptures over the sublime French Revolution, which gave us the Terror, and the bright future of communism, which gave us the gulag? Come on, really, how can you not be progressive?
It must be admitted we long hesitated. And there was ample reason. Alongside these massacres, so very progressive, there were also antibiotics, penicillin, social security and cortisone shots for your voice.
But in the last few decades, the least hesitation has become impossible. Progressivism can no longer be debated. The reign of the free individual has brought down ancient prejudices and the old barriers between humans. The patriarchy is dead and women are freed from thousands of years of oppression. The slaves have been released from their shackles, Caroline de Haas [feminist activist] and Rokhaya Diallo [anti-racist activist] are queens of the world. It’s a far cry from Bonaparte and Victor Hugo.
{snip}
The beauties of the most recent progress leave me each day more astounded. How can you resist the charm of this wind of freedom now blowing across France and the West? How can you not approve all these laws that punish thought and speech since one is much freer when one thinks correctly and silences bad thoughts?
{snip}
No, you really aren’t very reasonable. But since I’m already here and there are so many of you, I may as well try to help you out.
{snip}
Progressivism is a form of deified materialism that sees men as undifferentiated and interchangeable beings without sex or origin, beings that, like so many Legos, have been entirely constructed and may thus be deconstructed at will.
{snip}
Progressivism is a revolution. Indeed, you may recall that our dear President titled his campaign book, Révolution. A revolution that can tolerate no obstacle, no delay, no qualms. Robespierre taught us that the wicked must be killed. For Lenin and Stalin. the good were to be killed, too.
The progressive society that values freedom is deadly to freedom. {snip} it’s always been the same progressivism: freedom is for them, not for the others. They alone can appreciate and exercise freedom. They alone are worthy of freedom.
We believe we’ve escaped this deadly spiral when in fact we’ve reentered it. This is because our dictatorship clothes itself in unfamiliar garb and our masters have had the cleverness to retain the forms of democracy so as to all the better empty them from the inside.
{snip} .
Progressivism is the omnipresence of so-called free speech served by a technology with a historically unprecedented power of diffusion but which at the same time, as they like to say, doubles as an ever more sophisticated repressive apparatus to channel and censor [that speech].
On the one hand, the liberals and the market have opened up our country to the high winds of globalized free trade, pulling down borders and corner stores, transforming those who were once citizens into individualistic and quasi-hysterical consumers subject to the edicts of advertising agencies and large corporations.
On the other hand, the far left has swapped Marxism and its holy bible of class struggle for the saintly cause of minorities, whether sexual or ethnic, and replaced the street and the barricades with the courts.
Conditioned by the left’s propaganda starting at the School of Magistrates, judges have become the conduits and often the accomplices of various associations, serving as their enforcers to bully dissidents and terrorize the once silent, now paralyzed, majority.
All those who felt cramped in the old society governed by Catholicism and the common law, {snip} , they were all the useful idiots of a war of extermination against the heterosexual white male.
{snip}
He is the only one made to carry the weight of the mortal sin of colonization, of slavery, of pedophilia, of capitalism, of destroying the planet, the only one forbidden what since the dawn of time have been the most natural masculine behaviors, the only one from whom the role of father has been torn, the only one who is turned, at best, into a second mother, at worst, into a gamete, the only one accused of domestic violence, the only one to get #metooed [le seul qu’on balance comme un porc].
{snip}
I suggest you read the prose of indigenists, of racialized women, of intersectional struggles that blight our colleges after having corrupted the greatest American universities. What do they say? That they are above all black or Arab or Muslim. That they belong to their race – yes, yes, they have the right to use the word – to their religion – Islam – to their country or in any case that of their parents. {snip} That their men are as they are, with their flaws, their huge gender prejudices and even their violence. But that they’re that way, not because they are men, but because they had been dominated and enslaved by the white male. That their only enemy is the white male.
And that they need their men to destroy him.
{snip}
One must thus go for the kill, put down the wounded beast. Cioran had warned us: “As long as a nation is aware of its superiority, it is fierce and respected. As soon as it no longer is, it becomes more human and no longer matters.”
{snip}
We are thus trapped between the anvil and hammer of two universalisms that crush our nations, our peoples, our territories, our traditions, our ways of life, our cultures: on the one hand, the market universalism that, in the name of human rights, enslaves our brains to turn them into deracinated zombies; on the other, the Islamic universalism that very cleverly takes advantage of our religion of human rights to protect its operation to occupy and colonize portions of French territory, which it is gradually transforming, by the sheer force of numbers and religious law, into foreign enclaves, into what the Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, who saw the Islamists in Algeria operate in this way in the 1980s, calls “Islamic Republics in the making”.
{snip}
These two universalisms are at once rivals and accomplices. The market can adapt to anything as long as there’s a profit to be had from it. It has put men at the head of the state to use its monopoly of legitimate violence as an enforcer. Thus, the French state {snip} became, by an astonishing reversal, the arm of the nation’s destruction and the enslavement of its people, of that people’s replacement by another people, another civilization.
These two universalisms, these two globalizations, are two totalitarianisms. {snip}
{snip}
What our progressives are incapable of understanding is that the future is not governed by economic curves but by demographic ones. The latter are relentless.
Africa, which was an empty land of 100 million inhabitants in 1900, will be overflowing with 2 billion and more by 2050. Europe, which was a land full of 400 million inhabitants – four times more – has only risen to 500 million – one for four. The relationship has been precisely inverted.
{snip}
“We have today reached the time of consequences and the irreparable,” said Drieu la Rochelle in the 1930s. In France as elsewhere in Europe, all our problems are worsened – I do not say “created” but “worsened” – by immigration {snip} . And all our problems worsened by immigration are worsened by Islam. It’s double jeopardy.
{snip}
The question that arises for us is thus as follows: will young French people be willing to live as a minority on the land of their ancestors? If so, they deserve to be colonized. If not, they will have to fight for their liberation.
{snip}
Formerly, immigration meant coming from a foreign country to give one’s children a French future. Today, immigrants come to France to continue living as in their country of origin. They keep their history, their heroes, their mores, their first names, their wives they have brought from over there, their laws that they impose whether they like it or not on native stock French people, who must submit or go elsewhere – that is, live under the domination of Islamic mores and halal or flee.
{snip}
In the street, veiled women and men wearing jellabas are de facto propaganda, an Islamization of the street, just as an army of occupation’s uniforms remind the defeated of their submission. For the bygone triptych of “immigration, integration, assimilation” has been substituted “invasion, colonization, occupation”.
I like Renaud Camus’ way of putting it: “one must choose between living and together” [a play on words on the slogan “vivre ensemble”]. The question today is thus that of the people. The people can remake a nation. The French people against the universalisms, whether market or Islamic. {snip}
We need to put everything back on its feet.
We need to free ourselves from the religion of human rights since it has forgotten that it is also meant for citizens. {snip}
We must free ourselves from the powers of our masters: media, universities, judges. We must restore democracy, which is the power of the people against liberal democracy, which, in the name of the rule of law, is now used to impede the will of the people.
We must abolish the laws that kill freedom and that, in the name of non-discrimination, make us strangers in our own land.
We must to the contrary everywhere restore to its proper place the principle of national preference, which is nothing other than the foundation of a nation which has no reason to exist unless it favors its own to the detriment of others.
We must accept our conception of ecology, an ecology that first defends the beauty of ourcountryside, of our sites, of our art de vivre, of our culture, of our civilization.
We must of course be conservative and conserve our identity but what can we conserve since everything has been destroyed? Our task is more immense, nearly hopeless: we must restore.
I do not say that the question of identity is the only question that arises for us. {snip}
I only claim that the question of the French people’s identity precedes them all, that it preexists them all, even that of sovereignty. It’s a question of life or death. {snip}
{snip}
We must understand that the question of the French people is existential while the others are means of subsistence. Will young French people be a majority in the land of their ancestors? I repeat this question for never has it been so sharply posed. In the past, France was threatened with being broken up, with what was called Polonization in reference to the partition of Poland. It was occupied, ransomed, enslaved but its people were never threatened with being replaced on their own soil.
Don’t believe those who have been lying to you for fifty years. {snip} When you hear that our immigration policy must be at once firm and human, you can be sure that it will not be firm and that it will be human for immigrants but not for the French.
Don’t believe the demographers and the good news of their media spokesmen. Remember Churchill’s remark that: “The only statistics you can trust are the ones you have falsified yourself.”
Don’t believe the optimists who tell you that you’re wrong to be afraid. You’re right to be afraid: it’s your life as a people that is at stake.
{snip}
{snip} Recite the famous words of Bernanos, which many of you already know: “Optimism is the false hope of cowards and fools; true hope is despair overcome.”
But I know that, if you are here today, you have already overcome..