In Dublin on Thursday, a middle-aged man, a naturalized citizen said to be from an Islamic country, went on a stabbing spree outside an elementary school. Before passersby brought him down, three small children and two adults lay bleeding from their wounds. Within hours, parts of Dublin were burning. Why? “The far right,” said an Irish police official—a claim dutifully magnified by the nation’s woke media.
Don’t you believe it. Brian Kaller, a Dublin friend and independent journalist who went onto the streets to see what the ruckus was about, wrote me to say the people he interviewed leaving the riot area said the initial protest had been peaceful, but it turned violent when the police tried to break it up. The looters, the people told Kaller, didn’t look Irish. Kaller added that Ireland, which doesn’t even have a conservative political party, has no ‘far right’ to his knowledge, “but this is the way to create one.”
Well, don’t you worry, friends: the Irish state will stop at nothing to fight this Far-Right Menace. Leo Varadkar, the prime minister, announced that the government would tighten “laws against incitement to hatred and hatred in general.” Because the problem here is not mass migration, you see; the problem is having negative opinions about all this ‘diversity,’ which one is only supposed to notice if one is celebrating it.
Varadkar’s response is entirely in keeping with the fact that the Irish are governed by a ruling class (including the media) that hates the country, its traditions, and its people. A headline in Friday’s Irish Times: “It’s hard to overstate the European Union’s positive influence on Ireland’s economy.”
The mentality of Ireland’s ruling class holds that Ireland needs a better class of Irishman—and if he comes from abroad, has brown or black skin, and is entirely alien to the once-insular island’s traditions and way of life, well, hooray for that. The mentality of the ruling class in most European countries is what Sir Roger Scruton called oikophobic: hatred of one’s own people. They combine this with a crass materialism, as seen in the Irish Times headline, that frames abandoning one’s own culture as a good way to get rich.
What has happened in Ireland, with the importation in recent years of vast numbers of migrants under a government scheme, is a vivid example of what French thinker Rénaud Camus calls “the Great Replacement.”
In just the last 20 years, the population of Ireland has increased from four million to almost 5.3 million—a 30% increase in less than a single generation. Most of that is due to migration. For comparison, imagine if France in the same amount of time had added 20 million people to its population, or the United States welcomed 100 million to its shores. That would have been the equivalent of adding two and a half Californias, or almost three Texases, in only two decades.
That’s what Ireland is dealing with. In September, Alan Barrett, an Irish statistician, told the Irish Times that this “huge” population increase has something to do with both the housing crisis and the struggle of the country’s healthcare system.
“It’s very difficult for an economy to be building and absorbing that number of people in terms of housing, the bits of the economy that are difficult to throw up overnight,” Prof. Barrett said.
But see, it’s the phantom ‘far right’ that’s the problem here. Not the government, which has made the lives of ordinary Irish people much worse by taking in far more foreigners than Ireland can handle, especially foreigners whose cultural backgrounds make them far less able to assimilate. Not the media, who have minimized the problems caused by mass migration, and stigmatized those who complain as ‘racists.’ The ruling class in Ireland, as elsewhere in Europe, chooses to deflect blame for the problems its own migration policies have caused by faulting the so-called far right for noticing, and slamming complaints as ‘conspiracy theories.’
Renaud Camus says the Great Replacement is not a conspiracy theory, but a simple fact. Radical transformation of European societies via mass migration did not require a conspiracy, he says. It’s what happened over the past six decades as a succession of governments, of both the Left and the Right, for reasons both of culture and economy, opened the floodgates to the Third World.
Elites have enforced the Great Replacement in part by stigmatizing any objection to it as ‘racist’ or otherwise bigoted. In an essay published in Enemy of the Disaster, a new English translation of his political essays, Camus likens the contemporary ideology of “antiracism” to the way communism worked in the 20th century:
In one case as in the other, this is a crucial aspect: for it allows them to have, not adversaries with whom one may calmly debate, but only irreconcilable enemies whom one can only hope to destroy. One unexpected consequence of this is to confer upon them—but once again upon antiracism much more so than upon defunct communism—a sort of monopoly on hatred, an exclusive right to vomitory execration, a joyous duty to abominate; passions that, as a matter of internal tradition, they incessantly denounce in their opponents (or in those whom they consider such), but that, with time, wreak havoc upon them much more so than they do upon the latter. It is those who talk most of hatred who feel it most intensely. They reproach you for yours with a face and language ravaged by theirs.
Thus the Irish prime minister, speaking for his country’s elites, denouncing Irish people who wish not to be replaced as ‘far right,’ and vowing to pass laws criminalizing their protests as ‘hate speech.’ The politically potent hatred is the spite that Ireland’s ruling class have for their non-compliant countrymen.
Similarly in Britain, the Conservative Party has overseen immense levels of migration—especially, in the last few years, from outside the European Union. Incredibly, migration into the UK has increased since Brexit, the point of which was to give the British more control over who can move into their country. It was a sham. The left-wing ideological capture of British institutions—including the Tory Party and the police force—has left dissident Britons feeling like maligned outsiders in their own country.
The housing crisis in Britain is the worst in Europe, as an entire generation of Britons face the prospect of never being able to own their own home. This is not solely the fault of migrants, of course, but adding between a half-million and one million new people each year into a society where native British people can’t afford houses is making a bad situation worse.
Dutch voters went to the polls in the Netherlands this week with their country’s housing crisis as their most important issue. They shocked political analysts by putting the anti-immigrant Freedom party, led by bad-boy Geert Wilders, ahead of all the more established parties in voting. It’s not only about housing—Wilders has for many years pointed out the harsh fact that Moroccan migrants lead criminal statistics there—but the hard material fact of not having a roof over one’s head tends to focus the mind on the government’s migration policies.
As we have seen, the horrified response by Dutch politicians and media, both in the country and across the West, has been to frame the Wilders victory as a victory for the—you guessed it—’far right,’ a deplorable pack of bigoted rabble. Never mind that Wilders is on every social issue besides migration and Islam a bog-standard secular progressive. The ruling class understands that if they can convince voters that opposition to migration and multiculturalism is entirely a matter of bigotry and culture war waged from the right, they will neutralize substantial numbers of those otherwise aggrieved that they are losing their culture, and their children are unable to find houses in which to live and start families.
English-language media coverage of the Dublin riots have so far focused not on the trigger for the riots—a migrant stabbing children—but on the destruction the alleged far-right thugs caused. Don’t expect this to change. Americans know from our own experience with media that its mission is not really to report on and to explain the world as accurately and as fairly as it can, but rather to manage an ideological Narrative. When people have to depend on their national media to learn about events in foreign countries, they are at the mercy of journalists who regard themselves as culture warriors for the left. True to form, the Washington Post blamed the ‘far right’ for the riots, with The New York Times following suit. To be fair, both papers quoted Irish officials taking this line, but they offered not a single paragraph of contrary information or context giving even the slightest hint of why the violence happened.
We can now expect a full-court press from the mainstream media to demonize both Dutch voters for Wilders and the Irish who, however peaceful, object to the peaceful colonization of their country, overseen by an oikophobic ruling class. We expatriates living in Hungary, a country despised by the bien-pensants of Brussels and elsewhere, know well the feeling of trying to convince friends and family back home that life here is free, fun, and very safe. They have been led by politicians and the media to believe that Hungary must surely be a fascist hellhole.
An American reader of my Substack newsletter, the wife of a Dutchman and a Netherlands resident, commented:
After Wilders’ victory, many ‘liberal’ American friends wrote to ask me about the ‘scary’ situation in Holland. I briefly explained but know it will do no good … it’s almost like they want to be frightened.
Yes—but more importantly, it’s like they want to justify their own impotence by telling themselves that things must be far worse in countries where people actually vote for politicians who are unafraid to speak the truth, and to pursue policies that actually address the problems. If you refuse mass migration, as Viktor Orban’s Hungary does, sure, you might keep your streets safe and reduce social friction, but (they believe) at the cost of becoming fascist. True, by voting for Geert Wilders, the Dutch might have selected the only major politician in the country brave enough to speak the truth about the connection between crime and migration, and about the terrible things mass migration are doing to Dutch life—but (they believe) at the cost of aligning with the far right!
You see how this works. People are desperate to believe the media’s propaganda because it relieves them of their shame at their own impotence. The Soviet Union’s propagandists made a point of highlighting and exaggerating crime and other social problems in the West, because it was necessary to distract the Soviet people from both the failures of their own government, and their own inability to change things. The same kind of thing is happening now, throughout the West.
What would happen, though, if enough people stopped believing the narratives promulgated by the ruling class’s politicians, and its media?
What if they woke up and realized that they are governed by people who hate them, and who want to train them to hate themselves?
What if they came to understand that hating themselves implies that they should accept that they have no right to prefer and defend their own culture, their own traditions, and their own perceived self-interest, in the face of contrary demands by foreigners?
And what if they came to understand that the ruling class’s panic over the threat to ‘liberal democracy’ when voters choose a non-approved politician in a free and fair election is a sign that the elites believe ‘liberal democracy’ is what you have when democratic peoples vote the way the ruling class expect them to. This CNN analysis of the “populist problem” embodied by the Wilders election is a startling example of the media saying the quiet part out loud: that the European Union’s job is “containing” democratically elected leaders who reject the elite consensus.
There just might be a revolution. One hopes it will be a velvet one, driven by peaceful but sustained protest. But a ruling class that refuses to see the political and social reality, and that blames suffering people for objecting to their own steady ruin by elite policies, and therefore declines to act with accountability – these fools bring about their own demise, and the demise of the system that empowered them.
After all, if ‘liberal democracy’ means that people have no choice but to consent to their own replacement by foreigners selected by ruling elites, and are catechized to believe that complaining about this makes them deplorable people, then ‘liberal democracy’ will sooner or later be abandoned. And when the mere act of not standing by silent and ashamed when your country is overrun by migrants, including those who despise you and attack your women and children, gets you denounced by the great and the good as ‘far right,’ well, then ‘far right’ overnight becomes not such a bad thing to be.
The Leo Varadkars of the world, in their arrogance and self-righteousness, have no idea what demons they are unleashing. They will blame everything that follows on the ‘far right,’ all the way to the grave of their careers, and, if nothing stops the decline, of liberal democracy itself.
