Deep State Nine: A Shlep to the Far Side of European Politics
How superior is Western civilization? Only the world's most vulnerable could take it down.
Europe’s most persecuted people gathered in Brussels this week, convening a two-day conference focused on freely expressing how repressed their free expression is.
Make no mistake, it’s shots fired in the aptly named “Battle for the Soul of Europe.” On one side of the line, there’s a fever dream’s worth of Muslim hordes, public media gone rogue, young people with “blue hair,” and political elites who are somehow both liberals and Marxists.
On the other side, it’s non-elites such as members of the UK House of Lords, current and former elected officials, their senior advisors and consultants, well-read columnists, and scholars and researchers of the “independent” type.
It was a does-his-own-research-just-asking-questions kind of vibe. Plus, the woman in the back, who might have gotten lost looking for the local Rotary Club meeting, snoring while the guy who resigned as Frontex director over pushback allegations talked about “civilizational chaos.”
The conference-goers’ fear of losing out is understandable. In the battle for soul, we know which side brings the big guns of groove.
If past is prologue, there is plenty to worry about. When the organizer, a Viktor Orbán-backed think tank of Europe’s leading right-wing populists, tried to do this last year, some Brussels districts took the cordon sanitaire a little too literally by trying to block the conference.
Sometimes, the Deep State is as surface-level as the mayor of Saint-Josse-ten-Noode, population 27,258, calling the police.
Thankfully, the far-right organizers were able to turn to the Deep(er) State courts that are out to get them, which dutifully demonstrated their liberal bias by ruling in the organizers’ favor.
Who knows how things would have turned out had the judiciary already been successfully dismantled.
Talk about lawfare. Game on.
For nudniks who excel at projecting their Christian fundamentalist psychodrama onto everyone else, the optics of oppression were excellent. So, this year, even a task as banal as announcing the conference location became a weapon of resistance against the spectre of omnipotent technocratic overreach.
An email sent out ahead of the conference promised a big “reveal” of the “secret venue.” Turns out, the real secret to the secret venue was that it was the same venue as last year.
Some bupkes that is.
Critics of the MEGA1 crowd say it is transphobic, homophobic, xenophobic, and Islamophobic. But, they might simply be aquaphobic. It would explain all the “flood,” “flow,” and “deluge” imagery used to talk about migration.
Speakers and Q&A audience members alike described their sociopolitical traumas in watery terms — an apartment flooding, a ship sinking. With a modicum of dread in his voice, the moderator asked an MEP from Portugal’s right-wing Chega party about the long coastline his country has to defend from migrant invasion.
(Futile, he replied. These migrants are superhuman; they can fly.)
With Christmas coming up, perhaps we can all pitch in to get these folks a swim lesson. That way, from the river to the sea, they too can float free.
Concerned citizens of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your anxiety!
Unfortunately, we’ve just been informed that the Muslim Brotherhood now runs Europe and cancelled Christmas.
Christmas markets, the Portuguese MEP said, apparently after watching a Fox News rerun from more than a decade ago, are now “winter markets.” Christmas trees have become “seasonal trees.”
(No word yet if Chanukah is still intact; if so, we can at least still get them socks.)
If you’re keen to uphold Christian tradition, detest regulation as the enemy of freedom, and worry about economic stagnation, it’s a real dilemma. In Weihnachtsmarktabendland Germany, at least, opening before the first Advent can make you more money, but then you can’t call yourself a Christmas market. You can repeal that rule, but then Nikolaus might have a word with you.
This is getting complicated. Easier to just say they’re coming for our souls:
Some say there is no diversity in the far-right. That could not be further from the truth.
Worldviews are as divergent as whether all migration is illegal as such; if asylum should remain theoretically possible as long as it is in practice not; if deportations should be in the mere thousands or the more ambitious millions (trick question: the MEP said mass deportation isn’t really financially possible, anyway); and if and how those already “here” can be encouraged to “go home” — possibly taking their native-born next-of-kin with them.
One helpful suggestion from the audience was to distinguish countries from which migration would be OK — say, Thailand or Singapore — and those from which it would not be, like Pakistan; at the very least, this would prove that you’re not racist. Merely practical.
Like, what even is “remigration”? We’re just asking questions here.
Given their ire for multicultural-loving liberals, it’s odd no one seemed worried about the threat of an influx of foreigners from MAGA America. Talk about evading the Maginot Line of migration.
One thing everyone present seemed to agree on: Western civilization is as superior as it is “weak.” Christian Europe, great that it is, stands no chance against imported “bloodlines” of “power and vitality.”
What else explains winning modernity and still being a victim of it? Call it nativist dialectics — the same logic that makes refugees responsible for all the crime including the crime committed against them.
They were asking for it: Asylum centers can’t be arsoned if there are no asylum centers to arson to begin with. Think about it.
It was around this time that the event moderator made an insightful intervention: “So many questions,” he gushed.
We couldn’t agree more.
Of course, migration is only the most salient issue through which social isolation, economic resentments, and the fundamentalism of secularized religiosity fuse to reassert neo-imperial forms of racialized hierarchies.
If the other side would just stop shoving identity politics down our throat, we would be free to exercise identity politics.
As you can see, the prescription is totally different from the description.
Finally! It was a shlep to get there, but we might have landed on the real trauma lurking under all the rage-baiting pretense. Like any therapy treatment, breakthrough takes time.
With begrudging admiration, the ex-Frontex guy had to credit social democrats for the “Danish model” of migration. The British baroness bemoaned the need to oppose UK Labour’s proscribing Palestine Action as a terrorist organization.
Anything less would be hypocritical.
Intellectual honesty is a real drag, especially when the state’s authoritarian impulses that you’re sure are targeting you — arrests for holding signs and police raids for Instagram posts — are really targeting the people you would also like to ban.
You have no one to blame but yourselves for this predicament. As more than one speaker said, without firmly connecting the platitude to a concrete idea, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
It really is, isn’t it.
Until someone embraces a better idea, most everyone’s just trying to out-you you.
Gazing out at a history of Western liberalism’s sponsorship of race science quackery, which begot neoliberalism’s atomizing death march to market freedom, and bearing witness to the acceleration of centrists’ attacks on a so-called rules-based order they claim to defend, it’s no wonder the populist right is mired in a volatile identity crisis.
These selective libertarian identitarians must grapple with the possibility that the urge to storm the Bastille derives not from a vehement opposition to those occupying it, but the queasy suspicion that it may be mere degrees of ideology differentiating between the two.
Make Europe Great Again