“Patriots make you mad (…), because you are in favor of a globalization under American boots.”
“Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations thesis was indeed right and accurate. Civilizations are rising through religions.”
The statements above belong to Éric Zemmour, one of the potential candidates for the presidential elections in France on April 2022.
Zemmour and Neo-nationalism
Zemmour has rapidly become one of the most important figures in both the French and European political sphere, after his career in journalism and television.
Zemmour has been advocating against the Atlantic and in favor of an “independent Europe”, a term brought up by the founder of the V. French Republic Charles de Gaulle. At the same time he is also trying to catch the increasing nationalist votes in France, with a fierce campaign against immigrants, against pro-immigrant policies and against Islam.
When we take a look his politics as a whole, we see that Zemmour is a figure representing the current stage of the neo-nationalist wave that rose in Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The Five Star Movement in Italy, the rise of AfD in Germany, the Le Pen family in France, and even Donald Trump from the other side of the Atlantic, are other political figures that came out of the same magician’s hat, as Zemmour also did.
We can summarize the basic thesis of the European neo-nationalist movement, to which Zemmour belongs to, with a few points;
1. The entirety of values represented by Europe and Europeans are based on Judeo-Christian belief. Nothing that is rooted outside of the Judeo-Christian belief, is and cannot be European or represent any European values.
2. The greatest danger Europe faces is globalization and the cosmopolitan socio-economic structure caused by it.
3. Muslims possessing European passports, Muslim immigrants in Europe and the religion of Islam, which they represent, simply threaten the cultural structure of Europe.
4. Immigrants who were brought to Europe as a source of cheap labor are stealing the jobs of Europeans themselves.
5. Globalization is a plot fabricated by the Atlantic, and the United States is the main responsible for it. Therefore, the United States and its ally the United Kingdom are the obstacles over an independent and united Europe.
6. The only way to resurrect Europe against the United States and the rising power of China, is to revive the Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis.
When you examine the main ideals of these populist, neo-nationalist movements rising all over Europe, you can find approximately the items we have listed above.
Zemmour and the curtains drawn by the capital owners
Such rhetoric continues to affect the millions of citizens who have been fed up with the European economic, cultural and political crises, and by the millions that were affected by the immigrant work force, which has been brought to this continent as a cheap source of labor. And figures like Zemmour rise up in such a political climates.
However, different realities lie behind these kinds of rhetoric. So that;
1. The demographic structure of Europe has become cosmopolitan today, as a result of the past colonialist policies of the Western civilization throughout Africa and Asia. The West and the Western capital owners continue their neo-colonial politics to this day with the conflicts they provoked, and new waves of immigrants to Europe occur as a result of that. (i.e. the conflicts provoked by Western politicians and oligarchs in Libya, Afghanistan, Mali, Sudan and other third world countries and the resulting waves of immigrants)
2. It is clear that common economic interests are more prominent for the unity of Europe, rather than a common Judeo-Christian culture holding Europe together. Accordingly, it is not possible to state a common religious heritage of the Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox Churches.
3. It is not the immigrants who employ immigrants as a cheap labor source, but the European capital owners, which have been trying to compensate their need for cheap labor in the name of “controlled immigration”. So the real enemy here would not be the immigrants themselves, but the capital owners.
4. Although the European neo-nationalists claim to oppose the US hegemony, they do not refrain to support Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations thesis, which is a complete load of baloney that American powerhouses want the whole world to gobble up, with all their policies that consider Islam and the Islamic civilization hostile.
5. Although all of these political structures appear to unite in a common opposition to the United States, a deeper examination reveals that almost all of them have very close ties to Israel, the United States’ closest ally in the region.
To sum up, the political agendas and the rhetoric of Zemmour and his European likes all serve to redirect the working classes’ reactions to the current order and the capital owners towards immigrants and foreigners.
The “Catholic capitalists”, the political group around the former President Nicolas Sarkozy, and the “nationalists” who have moved away from the Le Pen family, are all gathering around Zemmour, providing another concretion of this fact.
The television star Zemmour is the curtain that is meant to be drawn over the eyes of the French working classes, who are trying to show their reactions with movements like the Yellow Vests that have occupied Paris.
The rising popular movements in Europe must have intimidated the capital owners so much that they had to bring up the Zemmour and his likes, in order to prevent the any repeats of the year 1848 over the old continent.