Baudet wants the rebirth of a civilisation. It is just a question of which one. (But actually we already know)

It was just missing the heavy music and gothic storm imagery in the Game of Thrones trailer whose lyrics were spoken by Thierry Baudet on the night of Wednesday 20 to Thursday 21 March 2019.

'And so here we stand, at the eleventh hour, among the fragments of what was once the greatest and most beautiful civilisation the world has known. A civilisation that covered every corner of the globe. And which produced the finest architecture, the finest music and the finest painting that ever existed under the stars.'

The leader of the provincial council winner stood, while describing these 'debris', in the foyer of hotel and theatre complex Figi in Zeist. it will be told to you as a hotel manager. But he actually had a point to make. For years, Figi was a languishing piece of decaying art deco glory in a wealthy neighbour of the thriving city of Utrecht. Recently, however, Figi has been renovated, architecturally updated and surprisingly programmes a lot of modern and subsidised theatre: Orkater, Conny Jansen Danst. And Maarten van Rossem. 

Which civilisation?

What is fascinating is the civilisation the visionary politician is talking about. Indeed, as far as we know, there has been no civilisation that has all corners of the world covered. The Hellenic Empire, under Alexander the Great, just made it to the Indus, but did not amount to much in present-day Europe. The Romans, on the other hand, were mainly in Europe, but never made it across the Rhine. And that is where Baudet now stands. Among the debris.

So he must be referring to the Germanic tribes, who indeed bullied away Romans in the Zeist area. Their architecture? Something with dolmens, bell cups and bog bodies. A world empire? Well no. 

'Boreal world'

'But like all these other countries in our boreal world, we are being destroyed by the very people who should be protecting us. We are being undermined by our universities, our journalists, by the people who receive our art grants and who design our buildings.'

Here our Leiden former student makes a statement that is not very Thorbeckian. First of all, we now know for sure which civilisation he means. Not the Mediterranean civilisations of the Greeks and Romans, but the 'northern' ones. That is what the dogwhistle-word 'Boreal', which Baudet adopted for the occasion from the open-minded French politician Jean Marie Le Pen.

He then argues that journalists, universities and people who receive art subsidies should actually protect the Dutch. This is quite remarkable. Journalists are there to search for 'the truth of the matter', universities are places where 'enlargement and deepening of knowledge' is sought, and the people who receive art subsidies ensure that Zeist can maintain a place like Figi. That all these places and professions are there to protect anyone or anything is a novelty.

Faith

'People no longer believe in the Netherlands, that's for sure. No longer in Western civilisation either. No longer in our language, which has now been abolished in our universities. One no longer believes in our arts, in our past. People no longer believe in our holidays, our heroes, traditional urbanism.'

Who the 'one' is that Baudet is referring to here is a bit unclear, but apparently it includes everyone currently holding a position in journalism, science or art. And of course it is quite unfortunate that the VU discontinued the study of Dutch Language and Literature, but there are still plenty of departments in the rest of the country. The fact that education is now mainly in English is to give our students a better chance in the international labour market, where Dutch has not been the language of communication for some time. Students ask for this themselves.

Hegel

'On this day, then, Minerva's owl took off after all.' Nice that Baudet quotes the German philosopher Hegel here, although it is not entirely clear what exactly he is doing here. Indeed, Hegelian philosophy is extraordinarily left and revolutionary. But then he explains, quoting poet Menno Wigman, who died last year: 'The sun would never have struck me, if it had not gone down all the time', wrote Menno Wigman‘.

According to all his friends, Menno Wigman would be have seriously objected against an intellectual bigwig like Thierry Baudet, but the dead poet is sadly no longer able to seek redress.

Streetscape

'If all this had not happened, this uncontrolled immigration that so distorts our street scene, all this leftist indoctrination in education, all this ugly architecture... I would never have entered politics. But we have been called to the front, because we have to.'

Here, the Forum for Democracy frontman argues that immigration "distorts our street scene". So here he is talking about something outwardly, and since immigration is about people, not things, he thus argues here that new people by their arrival with their appearance distort our street scene. Read that again.

Had he been talking about ugly architecture, there would have been little issue, tastes differ. Now that he is talking about people's appearance, it is no longer about taste but about something else. There is, I think, something about that in our constitution.

Highlight

Then the speech - and the speaker, whose gender is now almost visibly thumping against the lectern - approaches its climax: ‘We are the product of 300,000 years of evolution. We survived ice ages, we floored mammoths. We are bearers, inheritors of the greatest civilisation that has ever existed. We carry a unique power and several decades of leftist indoctrination by education and the media can never bury that. Something that is in us can never be taken away.'

Again, the question of that "greatest civilisation" of which "we" are heirs cannot be answered with Greeks or Romans, but with people who hunted mammoths in our regions. As Frank Westerman says, already quoted elsewhere on this site: these were people who hunted dwarf ponies at the bottom of the present-day North Sea before climate change caused sea levels to rise to their present levels (and counting): Homo Sapiens, mixed with Neanderthals. Precursors of the indigenous population that later settled near Zeist to bully the Romans across the Rhine.

Decades

Then it becomes a bit difficult to interpret. The decline Baudet is so afraid of is "only going on for a few decades". He doesn't mention how many decades. Is it 2, 3, or 4? By all Baudettian standards, the leftists were already in power in art, architecture and science by then. More, then? 8 tens? Then again, what was 'heir to the greatest civilisation that ever existed'? Not anything Greek or Roman. There was only one empire that called itself that, but of course it is inconceivable that Baudet wants to call himself heir. 

Fortunately, voters of Baudet's Forum for Democracy are not seeking a restoration or rebirth of the dictatorship of the white, 'boreal' kind of people. After all, he is keen to cooperate, he concludes: 'We are the flagship of the Renaissance fleet, and other ships can join us.'

Good to know

The entire speech is here view.