Culture going up in flames
THE fear as the Notre Dame Cathedral burned was telling. So was the Ave Maria sung by crowds of Parisians, praying on their knees as they watched the flames roar up the spire.
What burned in Paris this week wasn’t just a building, easily replaced.
It was a culture being torched, just when the anxious West – from Finland to Australia – feels its civilisation is being thrown on to the fire.
I am not surprised that even Labor leader Bill Shorten suggested Australia help rebuild this 856-year-old cathedral, despite the fact it’s in France and used by a Catholic Church that fellow “progressives” treat as evil.
Shorten seems in his secret heart a cultural conservative, or at least a man who knows there’s no real country that has no deep roots.
So does French president Emanuel Macron, who tweeted: “Like all of my fellow citizens, I am sad to see this part of us burn tonight.” Who is his “us”?
I assume it’s the French for whom this building represents a shared history – a great Gothic splendour where kings
prayed, where Napoleon was crowned, and where St Joan of Arc was made a saint.
But does it also represent the many new French today who don’t feel this past represents them, and whose feared presence has triggered support for the anti-immigrant National Front?
Does it represent whoever last month torched Paris’s second-biggest church, the beautiful Saint Sulpice? Or the people behind the attacks on other French churches this year – about two a day, 25 per cent up on last year, according to the Observatory of Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe?
Victor Hugo, whose The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1831 helped to rescue the cathedral from neglect, understood perfectly what the cathedral represents.
“Great edifices, like great mountains, are the work of centuries,” he wrote in his equally great novel. “The man, the artist, the individual, is effaced in these great masses, which lack the name of their author; human intelligence is there summed up and totalised. Time is the architect, the nation is the builder.” The nation. The culture. That’s why so many revolutionaries destroy such edifices when they try to create a new society from ground zero. They hate them as reminders of past giants – bigger men and women than themselves – and they fear them for the old loyalties they inspire.
Mao Zedong’s Red Guards vandalised the cemetery of Confucius in Mao’s war on the “Four Olds”. The Taliban blew up the giant Buddhist statues of Bamyan. The Islamic State destroyed monuments in the historic city of Palmyra, and the pro-ISIS Muntasir Media declared the burning of the Notre Dame was “a good day!”
Now our own new revolutionaries attack statues of explorers, benefactors or soldiers which remind them of a past they denounce as racist – whether of Captain Cook in Australia, Cecil Rhodes in Oxford or Confederate soldiers in the US.
The past must be destroyed to make their Jerusalem.
“F--- Australia, hope it f----g burns to the ground,” cried Tarneen Onus-Williams, a taxpayer-supported organiser of an “Invasion Day” protest.
“Burn this place to the ground! … Sovereignty was never ceded,” shouted a “comedian” on the ABC’s Get Krack!n this month, in rage at reminders of Western civilisation.
But this burning of the West goes far beyond even the Notre Dame, the centre of France’s Catholic faith.
The Christianity that preached the West’s key values – not least the dignity of the individual – is under savage attack, with lynch mobs of reporters persecuting even innocent priests.
Academics and students at Sydney University and the Australian National University meanwhile denounce Western civilisation as too racist and oppressive to be taught as a separate subject – at least if sponsored by the Ramsay Foundation.
In Europe, politicians even let down their borders and then criminalised the speech of citizens who objected to the changing of their civilisation by huge waves of newcomers.
Here, too, immigration is at absurd levels – 240,000 people a year – while academics recklessly trash this country’s past and traditions.
They dismiss Anzac Day as mere “Anzackery”, invent a “genocide” of Aborigines and this month sidelined a Griffith University professor who dared to teach that some Lutheran missionaries actually helped Aboriginal children.
As anxiety grows about the survival of our civilisation, no wonder the Right is on the rise in the West.
And no wonder there was that fear as the West watched flames roar from the roof of the once-mighty Notre Dame. Watch Andrew Bolt on The Bolt Report LIVE 7pm week nights