The Fright of the Generals

A funny thing happened on the way to the Great Reset.

A couple of weeks ago, members of the french army—about 20 generals, a hundred high-ranking officers and more than a thousand various ranks—some retired, some near retirement, and some still in active duty, signed an open letter addressed to the rabble of civil society parasites1 at the highest levels of the french government and parliament.

I brought down the emphasis on still in active duty, as I find this detail quite remarkable.

While most armies in any liberal democracy avoid wading in political waters—and rightly so—the French army was dubbed la Grande Muette (the Great Mute) under the IIIrd republic, owing to the fact that its members were deprived of the right to vote—typical of the French classist mindset requiring that men should go and fight, and sometimes die, for their country without having a say in who sends them there.

The infamous de Gaulle restored their voting rights under the IVth republic, yet the moniker and the behavior stuck. The army at large observes a strict attitude of keeping extremely quiet on just about any “secular” subject—their near invisibility in public life compounded by the Left’s hold over XXth and XXIst century France and their systemic hatred of any display of patriotism and nationalism.

We’re talking monastic level of quiet, mind you. They’re a bit like monks. You know they exist, you just hardly ever see or hear any.2

In other words, such a letter, worded as you will see in such unambiguous terms, is a big deal.

And long overdue.

The brood

I translated the letter from the French as literally as possible without throwing readability out of the window. If anything sounds weird or doesn’t make sense, it’s my fault—In which case: comment, inquire, contest.

Mister President,
Ladies and gentlemen of the Government,
Ladies and gentlemen of Parliament,

The hour is grave, France is in peril, several lethal dangers are threatening her. We who, even retired, are still soldiers of France, cannot under these circumstances remain indifferent to the fate of our beautiful country.

Our tricolor flags are not mere sheets of fabric; they represent the tradition, through the ages, of those who no matter their skin color or their creed, served France and gave their lives for her. On these flags, we find in gold letters the words “Honneur et Patrie” (Honor and Homeland). Thus, our honor today holds us to denounce the dismantling that strikes our homeland.

Dismantling that, through a certain kind of anti-racism, only pursues one goal: to create on our soil a feeling of uneasiness, and even hatred between the communities. Today, some speak of racialism, nativism and decolonization theories, but through these words, those fanatical and hateful partisans seek only racial war. They despise our country, its tradition, its culture and wish to see it collapse by tearing apart its past and history. And so they attack, by vandalizing statues, ancient civilian and military glories by pointing at centuries old remarks.

Dismantling that, through Islamism and suburban hordes, results in the severance of multiple areas of the nation, turning them into territories under dogmas that directly contradict our Constitution. Yet every French, no matter his beliefs, is at home everywhere in the Hexagon; (a topical name for France—DF) there cannot and must not exist any city, any neighborhood where the laws of the Republic have no hold.

Dismantling as hatred overcomes fraternity in civic protests where the government uses law enforcement officers as both auxiliaries and scapegoats, opposing them to desperate French citizens donning yellow vests. This, even as the masked seditious individuals—who infiltrate their movement—destroy businesses and threaten the same law enforcement officers. Even though these officers only enforce the orders, at times inconsistent, that you, rulers, gave them.

Danger is rising, violence increases on a daily basis. Who could have predicted only ten years ago, that a teacher would be one day beheaded on the doorway of his school? We, the Nation’s servants who were always committed to put our own skin on the line—as required by our military service—cannot watch such behaviors passively.

And so, those who govern our country must find forthwith the courage to eradicate these dangers. To do so, one most often merely has to apply existing laws resolutely. Do not forget that, just like us, a vast majority of our fellow citizens is incensed by your duplicity and your guilty silences.

Cardinal Mercier, Primate of Belgium, said “When caution is everywhere, courage is nowhere.” Ladies, gentlemen: enough delaying, the hour is grim, the task is herculean; do not waste any time and know that we are eager to support those politicians willing to consider the protection of the nation.

If nothing is done however, laxity will proliferate inexorably, resulting in a final conflagration and the intervention of our comrades in the active service, in a perilous mission of protection of our civilization’s values and the safeguard of our compatriots on our nation’s soil.

Clearly there is no time for prevarication any more, otherwise, tomorrow, civil war will bring an end to the rising chaos, and the dead—for whom you will be liable—will number in the thousands.

Signatories to the letter (generals only): Général de Corps d’Armée (ER) Christian PIQUEMAL (Légion Étrangère), général de Corps d’Armée (2S) Gilles BARRIE (Infanterie), général de Division (2S) François GAUBERT ancien Gouverneur militaire de Lille, général de Division (2S) Emmanuel de RICHOUFFTZ (Infanterie), général de Division (2S) Michel JOSLIN DE NORAY (Troupes de Marine), général de Brigade (2S) André COUSTOU (Infanterie), général de Brigade (2S) Philippe DESROUSSEAUX de MEDRANO (Train), général de Brigade Aérienne (2S) Antoine MARTINEZ (Armée de l’air), général de Brigade Aérienne (2S) Daniel GROSMAIRE (Armée de l’air), général de Brigade (2S) Robert JEANNEROD (Cavalerie), général de Brigade (2S) Pierre Dominique AIGUEPERSE (Infanterie), général de Brigade (2S) Roland DUBOIS (Transmissions), général de Brigade (2S) Dominique DELAWARDE (Infanterie), général de Brigade (2S) Jean Claude GROLIER (Artillerie), général de Brigade (2S) Norbert de CACQUERAY (Direction Générale de l’Armement), général de Brigade (2S) Roger PRIGENT (ALAT), général de Brigade (2S) Alfred LEBRETON (CAT), médecin Général (2S) Guy DURAND (Service de Santé des Armées), contre-amiral (2S) Gérard BALASTRE (Marine Nationale).

The daft

Valeurs Actuelles magazine, who published the letter “with permission” from the signatories, fancies itself a “right-wing conservative” outfit, even though they march at the same drum as Marine Le Pen’s National Front—or whatever their new name is: big government authoritarians wrapped in a fanatical anti-individualist ethos; in other words, practically undistinguishable from the same bullies supposedly on the Left side of the spectrum3.

As such, the apparatchiks to whom it is addressed—and their lackeys in the media and other Parisian circles—had it way too easy to label the signatories as “Far-Right” would-be Nazi putschists, and call for their heads; unaware that such reaction confirms both the concerns that prompted this military missive, and the observations of incompetence and malfeasance it denounces.

Apart from Auntie le Pen jumping on the opportunity to score extra electoral points by answering the letter’s offer to support those politicians willing to consider the protection of the nation (not realizing, inept as she is, that it’s just giving extra ammo to the other side), the riposte from the government, their cronies and sycophants is the standard fare of invectives: les militaires are Far/Ultra/Extreme Right Wing conservative cum reactionaries, calling for an insurrection wrapped in an insurgency against the benevolent progressive French political class.

Fascism raising its ugly head at noon, naked attack on Democracy at teatime, threat to La République for supper, Coup d’État six and even seven ways from Sunday… You know the song, the chorus and the encore: if you’re anywhere in “the West”, you have the same foul clots yelping in the same megaphones.

Extra Dolt Stars to one of said clots for informing Anybody Who Thinks Permitted Thinkage, in a little screed on Mediapart—a “news” site that is to the French Bobo Left what an unclaimed turd is to the wandering coprophile—that these horrible men and their horrible letter are, wouldn’t you know, seditious.

Typical of these pseudo-intellectuals, spewing words as Bomber Harris dropped ordnance4, the Mediaprat is calling “seditious” the kind of men who:

  1. choose a career in the one and only institution that exists to defend the nation, at the risk of losing life, limbs or liberty,
  2. reached a point where seeing the homeland in clear and escalating danger5 prompted them to remind the government that they intend to do their job if the politicians won’t do theirs,
  3. demand specifically that the people in charge restore the authority of the State, uphold the respect of the Constitution, and enforce the Law of the Land to avoid civil war.

Some sedition, Shamus.

That idiot probably “feels” that seditious must be a scary word, and decided to use it whether or not its meaning fits the context. Semantics being a tool of the white patriarchy oppressors, or something.

Yet it’s like calling a prostitute virtuous or a politician honest: unless you come up with a hilarious punchline, people will rank you a 10 on the Plonker Scale. And then you can go and be a “journalist” at Mediapart rather than a great stand-up comedian.

The squiggly

Macron and his clique will now try to wiggle their way out of this, much like they always did: ignore the message, smear and silence the messengers, pretend there never was a problem to start with yet they solved it anyway, and fabricate 6 or hope for some distraction like, say, a Chinese Communist engineered snot bug.

That worked against the popular revolt in Yellow, they’ll tell you.

Except it didn’t7.You may sweep the dung under the rug and pretend everything is spick and span, but what the French political class ignores—and the wandering coprophile always knew—is that the hidden stool is always revealed by its stench.

In this instance, Young Jupiter could parrot Claudius; O, my offence is rank: it smells to heaven.

And what a whiff, Horatio! Anybody with empirical or even fleeting knowledge of the evolution and behavior of Mohammedan “immigrants” and the concomitant appeasement and accommodation by the “authorities”, has warned of Balkanization for at least two decades—only to be dismissed by the can’t-happen-here experts and smeared as “racist” by the naive cosmopolitan xenophiles who are now coming into contact with the consequences of their electoral choices.

In 2016, Patrick Calvar, as boss of the DGSI (France’s internal security agency), warned that:

(the country is) on the verge of civil war.

That’s the assessment by the guy running, at the time, the national agency in charge of “counter-espionage, counter-terrorism, countering cybercrime and surveillance of potentially threatening groups, organisations, and social phenomena.” France being a country where populations and communications are extensively monitored, you’d think such a man wouldn’t make such a statement on a whim or just for kicks.

General Pierre de Villiers—Macron’s former Chief of Defence Staff who famously clashed with the arrogant little bankster and resigned—warned in no uncertain terms:

If the suburbs give rise to further and even more violent uprisings, we will have no way to face them: we lack the means, we lack the men. This is the reality of the French political situation.

That’s the country’s military top dog speaking, and telling you that the national army doesn’t have the means and the men to overcome the “suburban hordes”. Do you really believe that such a man would worry about uprisings in the homeland if there wasn’t any risk of that ever happening here?

Then you have the boss of France’s police forces, Interior Minister Gérard Collomb—a Socialist—who warned that based on the police reports he read every morning he concluded that:

relationships between people are very difficult, people do not want to live together, (…) from now to 5 years the situation could become irreversible. Yes, we have 5 years to avoid the worst.

Collomb then dropped his cushy top cabinet position resolutely: submitting a second resignation letter when Macron refused the first. Even taking into account a politician’s natural cowardice and lack of responsibility, it is obvious that the man had a pressing urge to not be in charge of public order when la merde hits the fan. Makes you wonder what else he knows.

His five years countdown started in 2018 by the way. Things do seem to evolve in the direction he—and so many others—predicted.

And today, we can add a second group of high-ranking officers (mostly generals, two of whom are also signatories of the letter, although they deny any relation between the two initiatives), known as members of the study group Cercle de Réflexion Interarmées, who sent last month a 21 pages memorandum to all the political factions in Parliament proposing a battle plan against Islamism, immigration, dual nationality and the loss of (moral and civic) bearings among the youth.

And it doesn’t read like good tidings either:

(…) an hybrid war has been declared upon us; it is multiform and will end, at best, with civil war, or at worst, on a cruel defeat without tomorrow.

But hey, everything’s spotless in the house of France. Sure, there’s something a bit noxious in the air, but no worries: just keep your mask on.

Not the ugliest of things

Nothing in the generals’ letter is unknown, incongruous or unexpected. It is not its content that makes it significant, or indeed what is causing such an uproar. It’s because it reads like a final warning by the nation’s armed forces—its last line of defense once politics has run its course and failed or proved incompetent or unwilling to perform its duty.

In a major Western european country.

If none of the people pretending to be in charge can concern themselves now with the terrible message contained in the letter’s last two paragraphs, then they’re either incompetent or rooting for it. Either way, they cannot be trusted with running our affairs.

Politicians are not smart; they are narcissists and sociopaths, which helps fostering the appearance of intelligence but often has the side effect of blinding them even to their own self-interest—a defect further reinforced by the fact that, in France at least, they rarely suffer the consequences of their errors and transgressions.

Easy prediction: this time, as they did in previous occasions (from 1789 to 1939 and beyond), they will sleepwalk—or even charge—into the crisis, hoping either for personal gains (Marine le Pen or her portside doppelgänger Melenchon) or manoeuvering to keep or regain their position while somebody else picks up the pieces, does the dying, and bears the blame.

For now, and in the usual French fashion, retaliation is afoot; dissent in Le Pays des Droits de l’Homme (the Land of Human Rights, as France likes to call itself) is not tolerated, and for the current crop of rulers, that sorry mix of smug Gen X’ers and Millennials, the sting is felt even worse and made even less tolerable by their own unprecedented superiority complex8—being put like that on notice by the military is something that’s only supposed to happen to the South American despot of the week, or in shitholes like Turkey.

Not to “progressive” European urban “elite” with Roman deities delusions.

And so these men, we are told, failed their Devoir de reserve (their “duty to restrain” from expressing opinions—again, the same “shut up and die when your betters tell you to”), they shall be identified by proper and thorough civilian authorities, and sanctions against them are forthcoming. Purges are in the plan.

The Macronistas shall save La République from this Damoclean junta.

And the path to war will be the only way out.

Cross-posted from the dissident frogman: The fright of the Generals

  1. My own words, not the generals’. ↩︎
  2. Well, up to the point where France’s Muslim population reached critical mass and felt confident enough to upgrade the country’s rating from dar al-sulh to dar al-harb. Now we do see some green men here and there. Protecting the “elite” that spits on them, and what few tourists remain, mostly. ↩︎
  3. The main difference being that they pretend to be all tingly in the wiggly bits whenever they spot some blue, white and red. Exclusively in that order, as they hate one rather famous nation that makes use of the same colors, and where a successful putsch did take place recently.↩︎
  4. A lot and haphazardly on target. ↩︎
  5. Like the majority of the French, civilian or not, by the way.↩︎
  6. Well what do you know: relying on a rhetoric that’s always been a recipe for success in French politics ever since the Vichy collaboration regime popularized it—and that’s guaranteed to win him nods of reluctant approval from the le Pen outfit—young Jupiter is going after les Anglo-Saxons, accusing them of hoarding vaccines. Jacobinism 101: when you ineluctably mess things up, try to redirect the populace’s anger towards a foreign enemy, real or imagined, before your head falls off.↩︎
  7. The anger is still there, and gets worse every day, fuelled in large part by the situations denounced in the generals’ letter. ↩︎
  8. And in the country that took the knee before a self-described “Sun King”, that’s saying something, let me tell you. ↩︎

11 thoughts on “The Fright of the Generals”

  1. Curious to know what Houellebecq thinks at the moment, though he’s always thinking several years ahead…You’ve got the “secular” French government now *mandating* face masks, who would have thought it? Le Pen must know she can never win, the question always has been whether there was some plan to keep losing long enough for some sort of collapse to happen that would then allow someone else from the French “Right” to actually win…

  2. Mark Steyn, who pays attention to demographic trends, commented some time ago that France was approaching the situation where the majority of fighting-age males would be offspring of Muslim immigrants. It makes one wonder about the composition of France’s current military forces.

    A scene from the old movie “Doctor Zhivago” comes to mind. The Russian army facing German forces is cracking, with Communists in the army encouraging desertion in the face of the enemy. A Czarist officer leaps onto a barrel and harangues the troops, telling them to “Fight for your Country”. A Communist agitator in the ranks shoots the officer, saying “You mean fight for YOUR country, officer”.

    Well, that’s from memory — could be distorted. But perhaps the movie could be prescient. There is nothing new under the Sun, and this has all happened before.

  3. Ahhhhh. First, the Germans (WW1). Second, the Germans (WW2). Third…the Arab deluge. Makes me wonder if (and how many) French people will decide to move to French Canada.

  4. }}} Makes me wonder if (and how many) French people will decide to move to French Canada.

    Well, just like Californians, they’ll be just as fucking stupid in their new home as they were in the old place…

  5. The French brought this all on themselves. They spent decades declaring themselves allies of “musselmen” and pretending Algeria was part of Metropolitan France.

  6. They aren’t wrong and some of it could apply here as well.

    The problematic aspect of French history in relation to the French Army is that a number of their most memorable battles have been fought in Paris against other Frenchmen.

    Then there’s the question of whether they have enough manpower to make much of a show. The coming purge won’t help that situation.

  7. Well, not exactly on this topic, but this recent essay from Houellebecq is sure bracing…
    https://unherd.com/2021/04/how-france-lost-her-dignity/
    The honour of a civilisation is not exactly nothing. But really something else is at stake; from the anthropological point of view. It is a question of life and death. And on this point I am going to have to be very explicit: when a country — a society, a civilisation — gets to the point of legalising euthanasia, it loses in my eyes all right to respect. It becomes henceforth not only legitimate, but desirable, to destroy it; so that something else — another country, another society, another civilisation — might have a chance to arise.

  8. I would analyze this in terms of the French discovering that their long experiment with the elitist technocracy created by the grande école mentality has not worked out to the greater benefit of France or Frenchmen.

    You’d have thought they would have figured that out about 1918, after the same set of well-educated and exquisitely credentialed idiots got them the set of casualty rosters they did, or after the defeats of 1940, but some people just won’t learn. And, the well-educated traitor class of clerks can be damned persuasive.

    Fact is, however? All of our elites across the Western world have turned out to be similarly incompetent and corrupt. Most of them are not actually in our service, and hold “the rest of us” in utter contempt.

    What needs to happen? Purge the lot of them, and burn the academy. Nothing of virtue has come forth from any of them since at least the end of the 19th Century, and much of our current set of troubles stems from the things that did emanate from them. We are in the throes of a civilization-wide La Trahison Des Clercs, and very badly need to deal with the realities and consequences thereof.

  9. Looks like the French inspired some Americans:
    https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/05/12/retired-military-brass-raise-the-alarm-about-joe-bidens-threat-to-national-security-n1446554
    “On Tuesday, 124 retired military leaders released an open letter warning about key threats to America, from China to the border crisis to the ideologies undermining American freedoms. They also proved willing to address a major elephant in the room: President Joe Biden’s mental capacity and how Democrats’ concerns about nuclear codes undermine the chain of command.”

    On the one hand, I prefer the previous consensus that retired senior military don’t do this. On the other hand, we’re way past that, and it’s not acceptable to let retired lefties speak up while the sane ones have to sit quietly.

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