Translation: Egor Kholmogorov – Europe’s Week of Human Sacrifice

Russian conservative Egor Holmogorov argues that Muslim immigrants in Europe and Russia can’t have their cake and eat it too: Either they take responsibility for “lone wolf” terrorists, or they stop demanding privileges as a community.

Human Sacrifices

Europe has just undergone a week of human sacrifices.

1

The French writer Dominique Venner committed suicide at the altar of Notre Dame de Paris.

At first, it was suggested it was a protest against the legalization of gay marriage in France. But the note Venner left behind – who was, incidentally, a specialist on Russia and the history of our Civil War – allows us to place his action in a wider context: This was not so much a protest against a specific law, as against the cultural, civilizational, religious, and moral suicide of Europe. Let me acquaint the reader with the full text:

“I am healthy in body and mind, and I am filled with love for my wife and children. I love life and expect nothing beyond, if not the perpetuation of my race and my mind. However, in the evening of my life, facing immense dangers to my French and European homeland, I feel the duty to act as long as I still have strength. I believe it necessary to sacrifice myself to break the lethargy that plagues us. I give up what life remains to me in order to protest and to found. I chose a highly symbolic place, the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris, which I respect and admire: she was built by the genius of my ancestors on the site of cults still more ancient, recalling our immemorial origins.

While many men are slaves of their lives, my gesture embodies an ethic of will. I give myself over to death to awaken slumbering consciences. I rebel against fate. I protest against poisons of the soul and the desires of invasive individuals to destroy the anchors of our identity, including the family, the intimate basis of our multi-millennial civilization. While I defend the identity of all peoples in their homes, I also rebel against the crime of the replacement of our people.

The dominant discourse cannot leave behind its toxic ambiguities, and Europeans must bear the consequences. Lacking an identitarian religion to moor us, we share a common memory going back to Homer, a repository of all the values ​​on which our future rebirth will be founded once we break with the metaphysics of the unlimited, the baleful source of all modern excesses.

I apologize in advance to anyone who will suffer due to my death, first and foremost to my wife, my children, and my grandchildren, as well as my friends and followers. But once the pain and shock fade, I do not doubt that they will understand the meaning of my gesture and transcend their sorrow with pride. I hope that they shall endure together. They will find in my recent writings intimations and explanations of my actions.”

Despite the blasphemy implicit in suicide, Venner acted, nonetheless, as a man of the Christian faith. In this sense, his action was the opposite of that of another “hero” of the contemporary European resistance, Anders Breivik. Breivik carried out a massacre in protest, killing people who for the most part had nothing to do with Norway’s immigration policy.

He acted like his Viking forebears, who, if one was to believe the sagas, bestowed the title of “Child Lover” on those rare warriors who refused to impale babies on the end of a spear. Breivik, by the way, behaved honorably in court, and was fully prepared to face the death penalty if he was sentenced to it; and in the end, he achieved a moral victory in his case – a most astounding outcome, considering the sheer ghastliness of his crime.

Venner took an entirely different road.

Under the formal cover of a pagan sacrifice, worthy of the heights of Roman valor, he demonstrated a Christian soul – taking not other lives, but his own, all for the sake of awakening the human spirit. That this splendid action incited hysteria on the part of the FEMEN stripper troupe, who didn’t hesitate to carry out another of their “actions” at the place where Venner died, testifies to the impotent rage of the demons of both the pagan and Christian worlds.

Speaking of FEMEN, it’s quite a fascinating story; full of impudence in Russia and Ukraine, they have suffered a crushing moral defeat in Europe within less than a year. First, the Archbishop of Brussels Andre-Joseph Leonard reacted to their shrieking delirium with Christian patience and humility; now, they have brought eternal contempt on themselves through their dancing on a person’s place of death.

There remains only one question: Why are these ladies so free to violate social order in ostensibly law-based states? How are they able to break into Notre Dame and create a pigsty there for the second time in 6 months? It would seem that the French Ministry of Internal Affairs has no answer to this question.

Anyway, continuing. Dominique Venner didn’t so much carry out his action to ban homosexuals from adopting children – that is but one of the many facets of Europe’s suicide – as to finally end this epoch, in which a soldier of a European army – living in his own country, and his own city – could just have his head cut on the streets.

2

After two Muslim fanatics cut off the head of one of Her Majesty’s soldiers in London, the British authorities advised servicemen not to go out in the streets in their uniforms, or best of all to not to leave their barracks at all. But isn’t this how hostile troops behave themselves in occupied territories? “Achtung! Partisanen!” The last time London experienced occupation was nearly a thousands years back, and it must be a new feeling for the Brits, especially considering that the occupying isn’t done by them, but to them – with the full agreement and support of Her Majesty’s government and parliament, which are now preoccupied with far weightier issues – say, the legalization of gay marriage.

“Islam has no responsibility for what just happened, and Muslims make great contributions to British society,” British leaders rush to proclaim, as always. Doing anything possible to avoid offending Muslims is evidently given a higher priority than expressing sympathy to the family and close ones of the deceased, or to soothe British society.

Is it really the case that Islam as a religion has no relation to the terrorist actions of so-called “Islamic fanatics”? The scoundrel who cut off that soldier’s head; the scoundrel Syrian rebel who ate the lungs of one of Assad’s soldiers to shouts of “Allahu Akbar!”; the scoundrels-in-training crawling out from Stockholm’s attics under that same slogan, cleansing the city of the remaining Carlsons and then posting their exploits on YouTube – all these soldiers in Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals, fighting in an incipient war of civilizations and races (enjoy the word while you still, before it’s banned like it was in France) – can we really say that all this “has no relation to Islam”?

In my opinion, we can’t say that for several reasons.

3

First, there are many murderers and arsonists who do their deeds “in the name of Allah,” and they didn’t all appear in just the past decade. If you do a head count of murderers, who killed unarmed people while calling on Mohammed, their numbers would have long since stretched into the thousands. Second, these same killers genuinely believe that they good Muslims, fulfilling the the commandments of the Prophet; their atrocities are part of jihad, and they consider themselves deserving of a martyr’s glory and ascension to heaven.

No doubt there are quite a lot of people in the world who consider themselves Napoleons, messengers from space, and channelers of extra-terrestrial wisdom. But the majority of such people are sitting in mental hospitals soon after writing their first “manifesto,” not holding discussions with major politicians and social forces; they are not sought after or used by intelligence services; their delusional ravings are not the subject of any dissertation, except for those to do with psychiatry.

But let’s assume that one fine day not just one patient were to fancy himself a Napoleon, but that a thousand patients were to start imagining someone as a Napoleon, another – as a Murat, and a third – as a Davout, and – swapping their antique cannons for grenade-launchers and armored vehicles – they were to set off to conquer Egypt. At that point, it would be difficult to continue speaking of this as just some banal insanity.

It’s perfectly obvious that these people’s “Napoleonism” would become a mass social cult. Insanity takes people one by one, whereas a collective fleeing from reason is something else entirely. The facts remain facts: That collective insanity that cuts off the head of soldiers, devours lungs, or simply burns down the foundations of Swedish socialism goes under one particular name – “Islam.”

We can, of course, pretend that they are all impostors; that all these scoundrels are simply trying to associate themselves with the religion, while having nothing in common with the real Islam. This is unlikely, but theoretically possible.

But consider this fantasy scenario: Some person appears takes your name, copies your physical appearance and habits, and memorizes all your speech patterns and ideas. Then your impostor commits all the horrific crimes mentioned above, as if in your name. What would you do? Most likely, you would spend all of your time, energy, and nerves on unmasking, stopping, and perhaps destroying the usurper.

It would be logical to expect analogous actions on the part of official representatives of Islam as regards the tens of thousand of “individual maniacs and crazies, who bring shame on the good name of Islam.” But we don’t see any evidence of such actions. All we get in response to crimes committed in the name of Allah are meandering official expressions of condolence, as well as slightly less official rationalizations of the “boys will be boys” kind.

From one murder to another, there is no evidence of any real battle with Islam’s supposed “evil twin” in the official pronouncements of the majority of Muslim public figures throughout the world. So there appears an entirely reasonable question: Maybe there is no twin after all?

If anything, the reactions of Muslim community leaders in answer to these questions only serve to reinforce fears. As a rule, they begin to insult the questioners, accusing them of Islamophobia and threatening them with violence. If we are talking about Islamic impostors – that is, the supposed worst enemies of Islam – then it would make sense for Muslim leaders to see allies in those who combat them. But that is not so.

The nature of the reaction to a pointed rejection of aggressive Islamism can be described in detail by the religious expert Roman Silantyev, or the Senior Archedeacon Andrei Kuraev. (Daniel Sysoyev can no longer do that – he was shot in the head by a killer, in the name of Allah, on 20 November 2009). {Translator: Silantyev was threatened from some quarters after publishing a history of Islam in Russia; here is Wikipedia on Sysoev}.

Quite recently, on 27 April, there erupted a remarkable exchange on our program with Anatoly Wasserman, “Wasserman’s Reaction,” between Andrei Kuraev and the prominent mufti Nafigulla Ashirov. In response to Kuraev’s theses, which were essentially the same as mine above, the mufti began to make practically open threats against the Archdeacon, saying, “I would not want hot-tempered youth to get mad at him and for something to happen to him.”

Consequently, the official position of Muslim public figures isn’t so much that “killers don’t have any relation to Islam,” but that there are “hot-tempered youths, who take things a bit too literally.” At least, this is how we are compelled to understand things in practice. There is no true and peaceful Islam, standing against a cruel and barbarian False Islam of fanatics. But there is an “Islam of youths,” which is neither afraid to kill nor to die, or to commit any manner of atrocities in the name of God. And there is an “Islam of elders,” which consists of the understanding that going too far against the grain could get you killed, and that life is preferable.

4

I think there is value in recognizing all this, at least as regards our immigration policy. There is no need for Christian European countries to allow in immigrants from Muslim countries, whose countries could come to be interpreted as little more than “youthful pranks.”

And since much of the case for immigration from these countries is made on the basis of Europe’s demand for labor (there really isn’t any such demand – it is just a typical case of “labor spam,” which I wrote about quite recently), there is no reason to allow in the representatives of the “Islam of the elders” either.

We can also formulate another principle, which is pointedly ignored by politically correct politikany in Europe, and those who follow in their footsteps in Russia (although the racial-confessional resistance against political correctness here is so great that our bureaucrats can at times, from the simplicity of their souls, even blurt out something that the majority agrees with).

If large numbers of Muslims arrive, settle in enclaves, and demand that their rights be taken into account and recognized – the wearing of the hijab, forbidding “insults to religious feelings” – which typically lead to the banning of crosses, Christmas trees, etc., then the least we could expect is that they should not commit religiously motivated crimes.

If such crimes are committed, then responsibility has to be shared by the entire religious community. They can’t present themselves as one community, demanding privileges and concessions, but then transform into a medley of individuals that don’t speak for each other the moment there appears an acrid smell smell in the air. Either there is a Muslim community in front of the European countries – in which case that community can talk of its rights only if it is prepared to carry responsibility for the actions of its members; or it is a collection of individuals, in which case the phrase “the Muslims of Britain, Belgium, Moscow demand…” should have no meaning.

Thus far, the actions of the official Muslim representatives as regards terrorists most resembles the famous parable about the liberals and terrorists during the campaign of the People’s Will to assassinate Alexander II.

Paraphrasing for our times, we can say that today the main difference between “terrorist” and “official” Islam amount to the following: The terrorist says, “Surrender, or I’ll cut someone’s head off,” while some officious mufti echoes, “Our youth is hot-tempered, prone to take offense. Surrender, or it will cut someone’s head off.”

Reader comments

The comments below are drawn from Vzglyad, where the article was reposted.

Lena M: For Russia to cool down the Muslim wars, it needs another Stalin. We do not have such a one… a pity. Chechnya is confident in that it holds Russia on its knees. It’s like in a zoo: The wolves think that man feeds them, because he is afraid of them. The wolves don’t consider that a man could destroy them just like that, because there’s no need to feed them. Cursed democracy)) Two nice bombs – and we lose our Gold Olympic medals in wrestling))

дядь Леша: And after all is said and done… Islam has a centuries-long record of peaceful and accomplished life in Russia. And it continues to exist like that today, despite the new arrivals. So I consider Kuraev’s generalizations to be a form of gaponstvo – and the reaction of the mufti to his “theses” to be entirely appropriate.

Translator notes

The translation of Dominique Venner’s farewell letter was done by Greg Johnson blogging at Counter-Currents. I copied it from there directly so that the text would not have to go through two rounds of translation.

Apart from that, it would probably be a good idea to remind readers that Russian Spectrum translations do not necessarily reflect editorial opinion.