As The European Right Surges, Britlibs Most Affected

On British liberals seeing their fantasy of liberal Europe turn fash

To highlight the astounding hypocrisy of Britain’s liberals seems almost redundant at this point; it’s like complaining those digitised self-service scanners in supermarkets are crap. Everyone gets it, no need to “go on about it”. Yet, to think in such broad brushstrokes is to miss the curious and obviously fantastical stories they tell themselves to make sense of the world. With populism and nationalism seemingly on the rise once more, both on the Continent and in Britain, the convenient lies and narrative falsehoods Britain’s odious FBPE (Follow Back Pro EU) progressives have told themselves are once again painfully apparent.

During the Brexit campaign, much was made of Polly Toynbee's (prominent Guardian writer and weapons-grade liberal) second home in Tuscany. Toynbee typified the well-heeled, bourgeois leftist who was completely unconcerned with the plight of Brits in less scenic locales such as Hull or Bradford. The pro-remain camp devoted a massive amount of their time to extolling the virtues of free movement between the European Union and the UK.

To be pro-EU equated to being socially mobile, high-status, forward-thinking, open-minded, and accustomed to the finer things in life, such as Italian dried sausage and French cheese. To be in favour of Brexit meant you were an ignorant racist who wanted to wallow in baked beans, Gregg’s pasties, and watery lager. An aesthetic duality emerged of England’s working-class “Gammon” in their grotty Wetherspoon’s pubs in post-industrial gloom, railing incoherently at the European Union and foreigners. Meanwhile, the European Union signaled slick governance, not sclerotic bureaucracy, but access to grand vistas of Alpine bliss, bucolic holiday homes in the French countryside, and short city-hopper flights to mythical German castles and Dutch canals. It was beautiful, too beautiful for retards like Baz and Dave standing on sticky carpets down the Red Lion to appreciate.

The assumption was that the Europeans themselves, by virtue of being ruled by a managerial leviathan that crushed their wishes, were as progressive as Britlibs. That, when it came down to it, Chelsea, Brighton, and Bristol were spirit kin to Maastricht, Salzburg, and Cagliari. Europeans were sophisticated, and being sophisticated meant embracing multiculturalism, gay marriage, transsexualism, and abortion on demand. It was inconceivable that regions of Europe that were still under Fascistic or Communist regimes into the 1970s and or had deeply held Catholic traditions wedded to their identities would be anything less than metropolitan Blairites. The outlier to what was essentially a vision of Globalism perfected could only ever be the useless Little Englander filth dreaming of bygone glories, getting the foreigners out and eating fish and chips uninterrupted by the march of progress.

Brexit was a calamity for British liberals because it was a symbolic sundering between them and the idealistic fantasy they had told themselves about their brethren on the Continent. The practical effect was simply that they had to queue at a different line in the airport. However, the rending of the dream meant they were no longer within the high-status, metropolitan club.

Worst of all, it was those pig-ignorant, Carling-swilling, white-van-man bastards who had snatched it all away.

It was not collapsing economic or trade agreements that broke their hearts, nor was it leaving the bloated managerial monstrosity of Brussels governance; it was that the people they despised the most had dragged them kicking and screaming back into their perception of a low-status inward-looking reactionary.

The problem is their understanding of Europe and Europeans was always paradoxical bollocks.

Consider this Guardian article, a typical representation of how the British liberal conceptualized Europe.

French hikers, birdwatchers, foodies – and those looking for a break in Provence away from the crowds – head to Les Alpilles, a chain of low, limestone mountains dotted with 10 charming villages. St-Rémy and Les Baux get day-trip crowds, but Maussane, Moures and Paradou remain charmingly unspoilt, with an excellent network of walking routes fanning out across the slopes. Splash out on a stay at Domaine du Manville, a gorgeously converted farm surrounded by olive groves and a 100-acre estate, with a lovely spa.

Doubles from £327 room-only

It perfectly encapsulates everything the British liberal desires in a European break. There’s only one problem: Les Alpilles is a Marine Le Pen heartland and has been for years. By the standards of the English advocate for the European Union, the people of Les Alpilles are fascists. Indeed, their values and sense of identity are far further to the right than those of the Little Englanders who wanted to leave the EU.

Liberal and progressive Paradou?

It isn’t merely a matter of progressives seeking out areas with less diversity but that such regions of Europe are distinctly illiberal in their fabric and identity.

The Guardian article considers French villages that are “unspoiled” by tourists to be objectively good. Such places are more valuable because they offer an “authentic” experience. A place that has been commodified and reduced to a mere postcard or Disneyfied experience loses its soul and character, so the search begins for the next authentic place so it too can be reduced to a touristic parody of its former self. There is at least a recognition in the liberal mind and media that places have their own distinct character - unless they’re in Britain, in which case it is far right and dumb even to posit such an argument.

Seen from the perspective of a Frenchman in Paradou, the arrival of the Britlib must be similar to a caterpillar spotting the first scout-ant that’s about to give away his location to the rest of the hive. Of course, mephistophelian financial incentives will be whispered into his ears, though, under the auspices of the European Union and its guiding neoliberal principles, he has no means by which to resist anyway. Once again, to resist would make him “far right” or some hue of populist reactionary, like Marine Le Pen’s National Rally.

The liberal Briton, who wails incessantly about Brexit, has a profoundly Janus-faced psychology, but both directions they face facilitate the neoliberal consensus and commodification of everything. They reject the idea that anywhere in Britain can have an aura of authenticity, and even if it does, the wholesale changing of its ethnic make-up is irrelevant. At the same time, Europe is a collage of pretty postcards containing a distinct feeling that must be experienced until they’ve been wrung dry, and then they can move on.

We can distinguish between people rooted in place and a feeling of home and the mechanisms of commodification, neoliberalism, and the EU. The Britlib assumes, quite incorrectly, that the EU and the neoliberal consensus emerged organically out of continental Europeans, so they’re intrinsically progressive and aligned with themselves. Their instrumentalised psychology only serves to advance Power's goals, hence the paradoxical Janus-faced attitude.

The surging popularity of nationalist and populist parties across the Continent threatens to bring about a second crisis, like Brexit. Namely, the realisation that they have always been the outliers and never the normative position. The “Remainers” have long obsessed with rejoining the European Union and shuttling straight back over to the warm metropolitan embrace of Tuscany and Arnhem, only to discover now that 30% of the population has fallen to, as they would see it, fascism. Meanwhile, back in Britain, we’re looking at ten years of Hard Labour on what will likely be known as “Woke Island” a few years hence.

There’s a horrible, tragic irony to the captured intellect, which seeks out authenticity while entirely ignorant of the technocratic monstrosity that drags along behind them like a plough, churning up and dislocating the settled and real. Under the current paradigm, the destiny of every Paradou is to become Paris, complete with its mosques, McDonald's, and murder rate. Once, long ago, Paris was dubbed the city of love; it is now debatable whether it is even a first-world city because it has been so progressive and liberal.

Across the Continent, we see something akin to trench warfare being waged by globalist technocrats and the European people. At the same time, liberals dither about blind and deaf in no-mans-land with a head full of paradoxical gibberish.

I’m not hopeful. I do not think they will free their intellects and rejoin the living. I just wish they would get out of the line of fire.