A French traditionalist who “gets” liberalism

I went to Galliawatch and saw Tiberge quote a fantastic passage by someone who understands modern liberalism. He’s a Frenchman, named Le Conservateur, and he writes:

… Tolerance is a non-value, a void erected as a keystone of modern civilization. Tolerance is the refusal to affirm and defend what one believes in, what is true, just and good in our eyes. In the name of tolerance, one can no longer say what MUST be, which is nonetheless the foundation of freedom: freedom is not what CAN be (an anarchistic-Californian and idiotic-libertarian vision), but what MUST be (for the good).

The tolerance imposed, first on the Catholics by the Revolution, then on the West, is a machine that kills all our values; it is a black hole of values. It’s the most terrifying weapon of the machine that is killing the West from within, founded on a triptych: stigmatization of whites, demands for repentance, imposed tolerance….

I wrote Tiberge:

People are GETTING it! Modern liberalism destroys civilization, destroys all true values.

She replied:

I’m glad you like the post. He is usually very good. A traditional Catholic and a nationalist who is NOT anti-Semitic. When the bodies of the two Israeli soldiers were returned in exchange for living hostages, he noted it was an example of the difference between the civilized man and the barbarian. He also noted that France has abandoned her men killed in Beirut and has allowed the French cemeteries in Algeria to be trashed.

I replied:

While his heart may be in the right place vis a vis his support for the Israelis, unfortunately he chose the wrong act for which to praise them. Trading two live and mortally dangerous enemies for two dead Israelis wasn’t an act of civilization but of supreme Eloihood.

- end of initial entry -

Paul K. writes:

You wrote: “Trading two live and mortally dangerous enemies for two dead Israelis …”

Unfortunately, it was even worse: for the remains of two of their soldiers, the Israelis traded FIVE terrorists and the remains of nearly 200 Hezbollah and Palestinian fighters.

This is exceptionally poor judgment and very hard to understand.

LA replies:

Yes. In any case, in the very moment of praising Le Conservateur, I turned around and criticized him. I felt a little ungracious doing that, but I felt I had no choice. That’s the way it often seems to go with me.

It reminds me of a remark of Abraham Lincoln’s, made in a speech in Illinois in 1854, in which he was explaining why he allied with the abolitionists on one issue, and opposed them on another:

Stand with anybody that stands right. Stand with him while he is right and part with him when he goes wrong.

Paul K. writes:

“I felt a little ungracious doing that, but I felt I had no choice.”

It would have struck me as odd if you hadn’t commented on that point. The fact that you don’t mince words is one of your admirable traits. From what I’ve heard the terms of this exchange did not go over well with the Israeli public, but I admit I haven’t read that much about it.

Tiberge writes:

I can’t really defend him on that point, but he did say in the article that he was aware of the accusations (by many Israelis) against Israel of having sold out to the enemy. But he (and another Catholic website, Le Salon Beige) were thinking primarily of the act of getting the bodies back compared with the indifference of the French government toward the bodies of Frenchmen still in Algeria.

He’s still a breath of fresh air compared to other websites, that are on many levels excellent sources, except when it comes to Jews, Israel, and America. Then their bitterness knows no bounds.

You would also take issue with his pro-American stand, since no matter how bad the Republican candidate (or President) is, he still sees them as better than the French president, even though he is very disappointed in Bush, for example. He seems to regard us as a light, however dim, in the darkness. Also, the Republicans tend to espouse some of the traditional Catholic positions on bioethics and abortion, and this is very important to many French Catholic websites.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 27, 2008 09:10 PM | Send