Guillaume du Rocher shares his experience of being in the immediate aftermath of the attacks in Brussels and Cologne, and how it changed the way he looked at the world and the way we think about terrorism. He also talks about the impact of the 9/11 attacks on the United States and how they have changed our perception of reality.
00:00:06.700Well, as we said before we started the recording, we're just in this new normal where we're no longer really shocked by terrorist attacks as we were previously.
00:00:19.260It's just, it's something that seems to happen every few months, and it's something we're getting inured to, which is, I guess, kind of sad in a way.
00:00:30.620But before we dive into all this stuff, why don't you give us your personal experience, because you were very close to the action.
00:00:42.400That I was. I happened to be visiting Brussels during the terrorist attack.
00:00:48.400I saw the news in the morning. I thought that there had been an explosion at the airport.
00:00:54.740I thought that maybe it had been an accident.
00:00:58.280And then, as it emerged during the day, they shut down all the transportation.
00:01:03.400They shut down the trains, the metro, and we learned that there had also been the bomb attack in the tram station.
00:01:11.980I actually know some people who work for the EU and have to commute through that station, and it was at peak time, more or less.
00:01:24.200So no one I knew was killed, but it certainly could have happened.
00:01:27.340And in terms of the scenes, it was sort of this frantic activity of the police, the military, and the ambulances.
00:01:40.220Not really a feeling of fear or terror, because I'm sort of blasé about this stuff.
00:01:47.800And there had been the attacks in Paris before, which were even bigger.
00:01:54.300But maybe there's an element of things not seeming completely real.
00:01:59.120You know, we write about these things, and we talk about them, and yet it is somewhat – it's still very abstract.
00:02:08.300And so even when it happens, you're not even really reacting to it.
00:02:13.680Yeah, I think there is a surreality to it.
00:02:16.280I think I mentioned this before in previous podcasts, but I was actually in New York City during 9-11.
00:02:55.960And then as I kept walking, it got realer and realer, and then I remember this – I remember this really vividly, but a black lady grabbed me, and she said,
00:03:07.540they've hit the Twin Towers, they've hit Washington, like, we're at war.
00:03:12.040And, you know, it was one of those things where it's like you have all this kind of commonality with everyone around you,
00:03:19.860maybe for the first time, because these cities are so anonymous and atomizing.
00:03:23.300But you're kind of like, oh, my – you know, you want to talk to someone.
00:03:26.340I also noticed that people certainly were shocked.
00:04:05.080And I even think the Cologne incident might have been more shocking just because – despite the fact that no one died, just because it was more symbolic.
00:04:14.800It was like let's rape these women in the – literally in the shadow of a Gothic cathedral.
00:04:20.320I thought that in a way affected me more.
00:04:22.780But in terms of these terror attacks and airports and trams and metros and so on, I think we've got into this point when any reasonable person just has to say, like, this is the new normal.
00:04:36.420We're going to have to – we're going to be living with this kind of stuff for the foreseeable future.
00:04:41.900Well, that's what the economists said immediately afterwards.
00:07:07.140There are over 400 Belgians, Belgian citizens who have gone to the Islamic State and may or may not have come back.
00:07:18.440That's the highest figure per capita in Western Europe, really by a substantial margin.
00:07:23.620Belgium has had a significant amount of Muslim immigration, especially Moroccan and Turkish Muslims.
00:07:34.000You know, it's always horrible in Europe.
00:07:35.340We never actually have hard statistics to really be able to tell what is going on.
00:07:40.420But the estimate is that one-quarter of the population of Brussels is Muslim, so 250,000 people.
00:07:48.060And there's a very high unemployment rate in Brussels, a shocking rate, about 20 percent.
00:07:55.620And that gets even higher in these communities.
00:07:58.480So, you're thinking of communities where they could have unemployment of up to 40 percent.
00:08:03.500So, you know, I'm sure that's pretty lame.
00:08:05.900You can look at the pattern of these attacks.
00:08:09.840And this is – I wouldn't say this is a scientific account.
00:08:12.520And again, you know, we don't really know the details of what just happened.
00:08:15.780But this is based on the previous attacks and the – sort of the – there are ISIS supporters in Belgium.
00:08:23.960You know, they've done demonstrations in the center of the city and they take video of themselves and they're wearing masks and they, you know, they parade.
00:08:34.100There's actually some similarities, I dare say, between your average ISIS supporter and to some – or an Islamist and a nationalist.
00:08:44.900And it tends to be disaffected young men.
00:08:49.280And with the ISIS people, it tends to be really disaffected people.
00:08:53.960They tend to – you know, they even tend to look nerdy.
00:08:59.000They tend to look, you know, dysfunctional in some way.
00:09:03.340And so I think you have this big body of, you know, alienated, you know, young Muslims whose community is obviously, you know, a loser community in the European country that they're in.
00:09:17.060And they come from a proud, patriarchal, macho, tribal, religious culture.
00:09:25.300And they're in Europe and they're losers.
00:09:27.760And that's a big body of those people.
00:09:31.400And in addition, they have the Islamic State in the Middle East, which is willing to come, give meaning to their lives, give them struggle against the, you know, Judeo-American empire against Israel and who can give them resources to commit these terrorist attacks.
00:09:51.500And I think that's what's happening is that you're finding – you have this combination of these – the Muslims in the West, disaffected young Muslims, and then the actual – you know, I mean, I don't even know what the Islamic State is like.
00:10:06.980My impression is, you know, it's medieval, fanatical, you know, organization.
00:10:13.580And so these two extremely different cultures.
00:10:15.820I mean, you really get this impression from the fact that the attackers themselves often don't really seem like they're willing to go all the way with it and that they hesitate at the last minute, that they didn't – you know, that they wanted meaning in their lives but didn't necessarily really want to kill themselves.
00:10:31.680And you get this – you know, during the Paris attacks, there was a – you know, one of the young lady terrorists, you know, who had made a ridiculous statement before blowing herself up because the police were yelling at her, where's your boyfriend?
00:11:29.000I mean, like, as you point out, it is a medieval – to use that word in kind of like the – not like an historical sense, but in the colloquial sense of just being backward and ridiculous and brutal and extreme.
00:11:45.620There is a medieval aspect to it, but then there's a very postmodern aspect to it.
00:12:13.540But bin Laden would send these videotapes out.
00:12:16.600But ISIS, they're on Twitter, and they're using the irony of Twitter.
00:12:21.780I remember one of them compared a beheaded head to a soccer ball and all this kind of stuff.
00:12:29.300In a way, they're picking up on that snark and silliness of Twitter.
00:12:34.100And also, like al-Qaeda, it's a postmodern organization in the sense that it's not an institution.
00:12:42.080You know, it's – I mean, it is and it isn't.
00:12:44.980There might very well be leaders and there might very well be nodes, but it actually is this amorphous group.
00:12:51.740And in a way, you can say that you're part of al-Qaeda or I'm part of ISIS.
00:12:55.340And, you know, it's – that doesn't mean – it's not like you're being higher up in the Soviet Union or something where there's like, you know, an institutional structure.
00:13:06.440It's a nation state more or less and so on.
00:13:10.480It really is this amorphous blob that you can't really attack.
00:13:22.340I mean, it's just this – I think this is kind of, you know, also kind of how we just don't understand it and we don't want to understand it.
00:13:30.100I mean, this is really my take on this whole thing is I've seen some images of candlelight vigils and a lot of people who are basically saying we're going to stay calm and carry on.
00:13:44.460You know, we're not going to let this affect us.
00:13:46.100We're all Belgians and people put on a Belgian flag on their Facebook profile or so on.
00:13:52.060And, you know, I think there's something admirable about that in the sense of not freaking out, not, you know, keep – you keep on keeping on kind of thing.
00:14:03.880There is something admirable about that.
00:14:05.400However, I think there's also something not admirable about that in the sense that it's a bunch of people who are in total denial and they're basically just accepting the situation.
00:14:17.640They're accepting that there's going to be these attacks frequently and they don't want to, A, do anything substantial about it.
00:14:24.900And they also don't really want to look at the fundamental causes of this.
00:14:31.760And, you know, you hear this even among so-called conservatives.
00:14:34.460I was listening to a conservative podcast before this just to kind of get my mind working.
00:14:38.900And, you know, they were saying, oh, Britain's been much more successful at combating this because we – Britain MI5, you know, seeks out the decent Muslims.
00:14:49.340And they hire them and use them as embedded spies, you know.
00:14:54.340It kind of – you know, let's engage in espionage against all the bad Muslims, whatever.
00:15:00.260Again, this is just all denial, denial, denial.
00:15:05.500Like, you know, really, at the end of the day, this is about race or ethnicity to a large degree.
00:15:14.580But it is really deeply about Islam and Islamic immigration.
00:15:19.620And the fact is a tremendous amount of Muslims are kind of, you could say, fellow travelers to this whole thing.
00:15:30.560Within that – you know, I'm drawing concentric circles here.
00:15:33.460Within that circle of fellow travelers, there are a lot of people who will openly sympathize.
00:15:38.620And within that circle, there's a very small circle of people.
00:15:42.280It might even just be dozens, actually, who are really willing to go all the way.
00:15:47.520And so, again, I agree with liberals that obviously not all – most Muslims are not terrorists.
00:15:55.600Of course, that's a stupid thing to say.
00:15:58.280But that doesn't mean that there isn't this deep connection between all Muslims in Europe and terrorism.
00:16:06.620And it's just like I'm in a way kind of sick of people keeping calm and carrying on.
00:16:13.020Like, let's actually look at the causes of this and let's actually change.
00:17:22.240It's not a race, obviously, but it has racial components.
00:17:24.840It's – and it is something that is profoundly not part of Europe.
00:17:31.140And, you know, it's like, in a way, Trump has been one of the very few people and one of the very, very few public people to recognize this.
00:17:41.420I think Trump had a wonderful reaction to the attacks.
00:20:19.680They don't – certainly don't – they don't become Belgian and they don't mix with Maghrebis on a day-to-day basis.
00:20:26.760I mean to be a little bit more nuanced, I think Maghrebis in particular are not nowhere near as bad in terms of educational performance as, say, Africans are.
00:20:39.040And so you are more likely to get a smart Maghreb who has his life together, so to speak,
00:20:44.920and works at an engineering company or works at a decent communications company, it's easier to get your token Maghreb and then think, okay, well then, what's the problem?
00:20:56.480And I do think in general there is a huge difference between, say, Eurasians and Sub-Saharan Africans in terms of cognitive performance and behavior.
00:21:16.320Which is that we have a very easy case to make when it comes to terrorism and Islam in the sense that Islam is not indigenous to Europe.
00:21:28.000And 90 percent of the deaths due to terrorism over the last 10 years have been due to Islamism.
00:21:35.140So all those people who are dead would not be dead today if we had prevented the immigration.
00:21:42.200So that's a very simple argument to make and most people – a lot of people will find it fairly compelling.
00:21:51.140On the other hand, the number of deaths from these terrorist attacks are still negligible in the grand scheme of things if you consider other sorts of death or real wars.
00:22:01.660And the liberals can say, well, look, all we need to do is improve their economic standard of living, to destroy their religious ideology, to denature Islam.
00:22:18.440And this has been a long-term project.
00:22:20.140I mean I remember many years ago the head of the American Jewish Committee was bragging – I think it was in 2001 – in an article saying,
00:22:28.200you know, we really need to be careful about the Muslims coming over because they really don't like us.
00:22:32.760But in the long run, I'm pretty sure that MTV will get a better hold on them than their imams will.
00:22:40.220And so he was really gloating that he would destroy their traditional culture and spirituality.
00:22:46.140And I think there's a strong case for that.
00:22:48.660Yeah, in a way that has happened to a degree.
00:23:18.020And maybe I can take a more meta view of the Islamism phenomenon and I think also, for that matter, the identitarianism phenomenon because I actually think they're related.
00:23:32.860At the risk of – I think Heidegger said events are just – historical events are manifestations of more deep-seated historical forces.
00:23:43.600And I think a way of thinking about that is to say that in particular, historical human events are often reflections of the human soul in a way.
00:23:56.260The humans – you know, different aspects of the human personality affirming itself or giving way and taking particular human and institutional forms.
00:24:07.060To make that a little bit more concrete, I think that Islam – as you were saying, the terrorist attacks are related to race and to religion.
00:24:18.420It's related to race in the sense that people find the religion emotionally compelling if it serves their ethnic group or if it assuages their ethnic pride.
00:24:31.140So if you're an Arab who is a loser in Brussels, you feel bad about that and you try to affirm yourself in a tribal way.
00:24:41.440And I believe that Islam and Islamism are rationalizations of that because you put yourself into a bigger community, which is credible.
00:24:51.300You know, because if you're just an Arab, you're a Moroccan, you know, you're not – that's not great.
00:25:02.780But if you're a Muslim, then you are part of a global community which is growing and which on current trends will eventually absorb Europe actually.
00:25:13.080And which kind of freaks people out as well.
00:26:19.580But if you're part of Islam, that's – you know, that's a powerful force.
00:26:25.260And I think you could say – you can make a similar statement about European identitarianism is that it is us today asserting our ethnocentrism and finding an outlet to it which we find emotionally compelling and intellectually compelling.
00:26:45.540And because we're European and not Semites, this leads to different conclusions.
00:26:50.940And you see that these two forces, Islamism and identitarianism, have both been suppressed in the West.
00:27:03.200Islamism because it leads to terrorism and identitarianism because, you know, it would lead us to being free and having our own countries.
00:27:09.640Well, real quick, I really like this comparison because I – you know, and I'm sure a lot of our listeners might not like it because they're like, oh, I don't care if it compares to Muslims.
00:27:19.160But, yeah, I mean there's something also to be said of the person who, you know, is on Twitter and it has an anonymous Twitter handle.
00:27:51.480Yes, and I was really struck by the comparison because there are a lot of ISIS Twitter accounts which are not run from Syria.
00:28:01.360They are people – they are, you know, French people or people in France or they are people in Belgium or people in the UK.
00:28:09.280So it's young Muslims in those countries who just have their Twitter account and they're pro-ISIS.
00:28:15.580And, you know, it's a lot like somebody who is LARPing as a Nazi, you know, and posts, you know, Third Reich stuff because it's something – and I think it's two things.
00:28:27.620It's one, it's identifying with a great cause.
00:28:30.100But it's also rationalizing your marginality in the society, you know, because it's self-marginalizing.
00:28:37.360And, you know, if you do this, you're going to be pushed to the margins even more and become even more, you know, I don't know, irrelevant.
00:28:52.860You know, there's a psychological similarity there.
00:28:54.460And I think that with the internet, this sort of abstract force, which could be – you could say one would be European ethnocentrism and the other one would be Arab, Turkish or, you know, this sort of brown ethnocentrism of different groups but which like Islam or find – rationalize their greatness with Islam.
00:29:15.300That these two suppressed historic instincts can't only get embodied on the internet, you know, because now they're free.
00:29:43.840And so we're less likely to, you know, go blow ourselves up or murder people.
00:29:49.140And we don't have the institutional support, so to speak, of something like the Islamic State to do so.
00:29:55.740And so we only have one Bravik, but they have, you know, a lot.
00:30:00.700And considering, you know, that Muslims are only maybe 10 percent of the Western European population, they've done 90 percent of the terrorism.
00:30:08.160So, you know, that probably explains that disparity.
00:30:13.100I think it's – again, I think a lot of us might resist this comparison when we first hear it, but I think there actually is a lot to that.
00:30:22.340I think Romain Bernard, in a podcast I did with him a couple years ago, I think he expressed it well when he said that, you know, Islam is the black flag of the underman.
00:30:35.060And that, you know, it's a way for a lumpenprol or an underman to be bigger than himself.
00:30:45.240And it's a way for him to achieve a kind of horrible nobility.
00:30:51.860But, you know, so again, it's not – I think a lot of people kind of miss the point when they – you know, the kind of kosher neocons who criticize Islam by quoting various, you know, various sentences from the Koran.
00:31:24.460And in that sense, it really is functioning as something that gives meaning to the life of someone who has no meaning and has no future and has no rootedness as well.
00:31:38.080So a kind of person who's a prole or maybe even saying a proletariat is not even correct.
00:31:46.400You know, someone who's just this lost soul in the postmodern world, it gives meaning to their lives.
00:31:56.620Yeah, I think that's a good assessment.
00:31:59.980I mean, I'm really not sure why Belgium provides so many compared to other Western European countries.
00:32:06.300It could be that there's also a weakness to the national identity here because there are two – Belgium is split between Flemish and Walloon, so Dutch speakers and French speakers.
00:32:20.120And if I compare this to, say, France, there, it is not actually impossible for a Maghrebian France to identify to a certain extent with the French nation-state or the French national project because there's a history of French colonialism and there's the francophonie.
00:32:41.420And I think in particular – and that can seem very strange to identitarians, and I don't think it's ideal.
00:32:46.840But you do – but a lot of the people who maybe would have been attracted to Islamism in France could be attracted to some of the civic nationalism there like Egalité et Réconciliation, where those energies get channeled into an anti-Zionist, anti-Judaic alliance, multiracial anti-Zionist, anti-Judaic alliance.
00:33:10.960But that's not really going on in Belgium.
00:33:29.020What do you think – do you think anything is going to change of any significance in the EU, with a national security of the EU, such as this, and with national security?
00:33:44.300Or, again, is this – I think the conclusion I would kind of come to is that we've just – we've been inured to all this to such a degree that nothing much is going to change.
00:33:53.820I've seen no real indications that anything is going to change.
00:33:59.280They might make a token effort to make an EU security agency or to heighten their cooperation.
00:34:08.180But in practice, these things don't really lead to very much.
00:34:13.380I saw that the Polish government said – well, use the attack to say that it won't take in any refugees.
00:34:21.320Then again, I thought they had already said they wouldn't.
00:34:23.260But in any case, this sort of – there's another – a good occasion for the Visigrad countries actually to come together and say no immigration, no Muslims.
00:34:35.780They all came out and said that, all of them.
00:34:40.160Orban in Hungary, Simon in Czech, FICO in Slovakia, and then Poland saying no refugees.
00:34:46.720So we are seeing this Visigrad block consolidating, and one thing's for sure.
00:34:53.280They're not going to have many Muslim terrorist attacks.
00:35:38.560The Visigrad alliance, this kind of central European – I guess all of those countries are Catholic, too.
00:35:46.440That probably is – there's probably a connection there as well.
00:35:50.700But the Czech Republic and Slovakia and Poland and Hungary, they really are – I wouldn't say that they're – I wouldn't say they're identitarian maybe in the way that you and I want them to be identitarian.
00:36:05.000They're kind of conservative, and maybe they kind of don't get it at some level.
00:37:42.500I will say the American, the European-American role in the liberation of Europe, I more and more think will be critical.
00:37:53.700And this is because of the American, the hegemony of American or Judeo-American culture in Europe.
00:37:58.680And so if the Americans discredit that, you know, and show that to be hollow or false or uncool, you know, it can be uncool, then that will liberate European minds too.
00:38:13.420And, you know, in this recent massacre, you know, you see the memes that came out of it, you know, because we always have our memes.
00:38:20.860What came out, Je suis Bruxelles, you know, these cartoons of, you know, usually they had one of Tintin crying.
00:38:29.820They had one of Tintin, they had one of the pissing boy of Brussels called the mannequin crying.
00:38:37.160One of the mannequin peeing on a terrorist.
00:38:44.200And I think it's lost all emotional resonance.
00:38:47.620You know, I think the first I think the first time when it was the Charlie Hebdo massacre, I think there, you know, people were sort of feeling it was all sort of artificially stoked and managed by the government, to be sure.
00:38:57.660But, you know, it resonated with people.
00:40:11.400Remember, after World War I, I was, just as a side note, I'm actually rereading Pat Buchanan's excellent book on Churchill, Hitler, and the unnecessary war.
00:40:21.760And one interesting, which I recommend to everyone, it's a really, it's a good kind of like starter book on thinking about the world wars.
00:40:30.120But, you know, one aspect of that is that after World War I, the British Empire was riding high.
00:40:44.040They, you know, a lot of Americans actually who were kind of anti-war Americans were saying, you know, Wilson told us that we fought this war for, to make the world safe for democracy.
00:40:54.300But we really made it safe for the British Empire.
00:40:57.300So, but again, what they didn't recognize is that we were actually at the very end of British hegemony and that it was about to all come crashing down.
00:41:07.440I think we might very well be at that point with American hegemony.
00:41:10.960But nevertheless, it really is, I think it is maybe, it's really incumbent upon us, you know, as English speakers and as Americans to kind of like attack this from the inside.
00:41:37.000And it really shows Churchill to be, I mean, I haven't read enough on him to have a full assessment like I might have of, say, Charles de Gaulle.
00:41:47.180But the thing with Churchill is that he knew what communism was, and he said so in an article called Bolshevism versus Zionism, where he notes that Jews were leading many of the movements.
00:41:58.720He said he wanted the British Empire to last for 1,000 years.
00:42:04.960And he said after the war as prime minister that, no, indeed, really, people always quoting Hitler on that.
00:42:18.560And Churchill also said as prime minister after the war to his cabinet on his preferred immigration policy, keep England white.
00:42:30.740Now, is Churchill stupid or is he short-sighted or is he disingenuous?
00:42:37.680I don't know which, but in any case, he allied with forces in a Faustian pact, which could only destroy the empire and race that he held dear, or claimed to hold dear anyway.
00:44:39.220I mean, because he basically made Britain safe.
00:44:41.740He made the world safe for multiculturalism, seems to be what he ultimately accomplished.
00:44:46.500Even though he was, again, his goals were to, like, fight off German advances out of some, you know, 19th century-style rivalry and to protect the British Empire.
00:44:59.280But what he ended up doing was creating cool Britannia and...
00:50:26.840So that's also, I think, probably part of it, that if he were raised with that, then he would – then they love alt-right because they can understand it.
00:50:34.360You know, I met with Julien Rojdy, this French identitarian.
00:50:40.300And, you know, he spoke a bit, but his English isn't so hot.
00:50:47.300And that's already a barrier, you know.
00:50:50.300Though he's wonderful with his own memes and I – anybody who speaks French, I recommend you check out his Twitter account.
00:50:55.960But it's not going to resonate to a certain extent, you know, when you're not really socialized and even socialized at a young age to imprint, you know, that identity.
00:51:07.340If you're watching American TV between the ages of 5 and 15, you're going to imprint on that as part of your tribe, actually.
00:51:19.220Well, it's – this is – yeah, this is very interesting stuff.
00:51:22.600And I think what we're in a way saying, like, what we want to do is turn a lot of these things that seem bad, like Americanization or the Englishization, and turn it into something that's good.
00:51:38.020And, I mean, that's what we can do, as opposed to, like, opposing everything and being like, oh, no, let's all speak different languages and blah, blah, blah.
00:51:46.600You know, we're actually able to turn something that could be bad into something good.
00:51:51.500And I think that's definitely how our movement should operate.
00:53:15.600I mean, you know, all these Sanders supporters have to see their socialist champion who's going to give them, you know, the Daily Show in real life fail because of all these blacks and Mexicans voting for Hillary Clinton.
00:53:29.960And, you know, so he was just gloating about that and thinking, well, you guys have some things to think about.
00:53:34.760Maybe we'll see – maybe we'll catch up with you in a couple of years once you figure out what's going on.
00:53:41.860No, this is actually a fascinating thing.
00:53:44.700Like if we – if only whites were voting in this country, we would basically have a Donald Trump v. Bernie Sanders, you know, confrontation.
00:53:55.640Like Bernie would be dominating if blacks were not voting.
00:54:17.820But, I mean, it's simply to highlight, you know, there are these guys who were, you know, really working on this for decades, you know, against the whole tide of the society.
00:54:33.640And now – I mean we'll see what this leads to.
00:54:36.680But I'm thinking this is a sign that we're starting to really have a change in the culture and in the – certainly in the online debate.
00:55:24.320You know, like – and what he's reacting to is just like you can't deny that there's this huge culture of, you know, the alt-right or identitarianism, whatever you want to call it.