Controversial French author and philosopher, Renaud Camus, has been convicted and sentenced for “public incitement to hatred or violence by reason of origin, ethnicity, nation, race or religion through words, writings, images or public media by electronic means”.
Judges gave Camus a two-month suspended prison sentence as well as ordering him to compensate two anti-racist organisations to the tune of 1800 euros.
The conviction is the result of a speech Camus made to the National Council of European Resistance in November 2017, where he declared that:
“Immigration has become an invasion[..] The irreversible colonisation is demographic colonisation, by the replacement of the population. The ethnic substitution, the great replacement, is the most important event in the history of our nation since it has existed; as with other people, if the story continues, it will not be that of France.”
Camus, who is decidedly against all forms of violence, has been punished for criticising immigration.
There is no longer any commitment to freedom of speech in France. The nation is subject to such intrusive hate speech laws that to speak one’s mind about anything pertaining to humans is dangerous, for all of us are part of some group identity which falls within the wide definitions of “origin, ethnicity, nation, race, religion or sexuality.”
The list of people in France who have had similar legal charges brought down upon their heads is long, but here’s just a few well-known cases:
- Filmmaker Costa Gravas for insulting Catholics in a poster advertising his film Amen
- Oriana Fallaci for insulting Muslims in her book The Rage and the Pride
- Bob Dylan and Rolling Stone magazine for insulting Croats
- Philippe Val of Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine for insulting Islamic terrorists
- Brigitte Bardot, who received no less than five convictions for insulting Muslims while campaigning against the cruelty of halal animal slaughter practices in France.
Voltaire’s famously liberal-minded attitude: I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it, no longer applies to French citizens, as it won’t apply to New Zealand citizens if PM Jacinda Ardern and Justice Minister Andrew Little get their way.
The Labour government of New Zealand seeks to bring in new hate speech legislation soon and have been clear that this is their intent, hence Little’s fast-tracking a review of our laws as they now stand.
Little said last year about our existing laws which he wants “updated”:
“If your hateful expressions and hateful actions are directed at somebody’s religion, or other prohibited grounds of discrimination other than race then actually it doesn’t cover that, there’s no offence at that point.”
This is exactly why this government needs to be stopped from touching our current laws; as his comment clearly shows, Little makes no distinction between hateful expressions and hateful actions – they’re one and the same thing to his fickle mind.
If a justice minister does not understand the difference between words and actions, then there is no hope that what will potentially be enacted will be in any way just.
Free speech traditionally exists as a principle of Western liberty in order to protect speech that is disagreeable, disharmonious, offensive, insulting or otherwise controversial. Only hate speech which overtly calls for acts of violence to be committed against a person, or group of people, should be illegal – and in our country, already is.
In an interview with Sarah Wildman of Vox, Renaud Camus claims that his Great Replacement theory does not just rail against ethnic population replacement, but also against many aspects which modernity itself replaces:
“It applies to all contexts in the world, I think. Replacement is the very essence of modernity that things are being replaced [by industry]. Objects are being replaced, landscapes are being replaced. Everything is being replaced. It is the very character of what it is to be alive today.”
Providing what can only be described as a deeply conservative view, Camus goes on:
“The refusal to be replaced is a very strong feeling in man. It doesn’t really need to be put into hearts and into minds. The will not to be replaced was at the centre of resistance to colonialism. The refusal of being a colony in India or in Africa is very much part of anti-replacism. People don’t want other people to come in their territory, in their country, and change their cultures and their religions, their way of living, their way of eating, their way of dressing. It is a worry that is central to the very essence of being human. Being human is being not replaceable. That is, not being an object, not being a thing.”
Camus is aware that his Great Replacement viewpoint is the resulting pushback of decisions made by the global political elites who have been in power for the last three decades – and he is correct.
It was exactly against this indiscriminate replacement that, when in 2016 Trump ran to become president his powerful message resonated so strongly with the “forgotten men and women of America,” those whose jobs had been xeroxed en masse overseas, as they themselves hit the poverty line in dying towns and cities which had once been vibrant centres of manufacturing, like Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin. These folks jumped at the chance to vote for a president who consistently acknowledged what they had gone through and who could see how casually they had been cast aside; replaced.
Trump’s America First policies are turning this replacement around in the U.S, but what of France and Europe?
No such luck.
Instead, people such as Camus, who have well thought out views worth dissecting through discussion are shut-down, fined and imprisoned by a court system hell-bent on never acknowledging that unprecedented levels of immigration from the third world will eventually transform any first-world nation into third-world status – and Europe’s hate speech laws now prove this to be a fact.
Observe that the liberty to speak openly about any topic whatsoever was always the hallmark of a first world, civilised country which valued freedom. To muzzle freedom of speech and punish people for their views has always been the scourge of third world shitholes.
Are we Kiwis going to let Ardern’s backward government do this to our precious Godzone?