On The Right to Live in Your Own Home and Live with Dignity

1 – During his recent speeches in Marseilles (September 2023), Pope Francis reminded us of the “right of migrants to remain in their homes and lead a dignified life.”

A “right” implies a relationship of exigibility, between the holder of that right and any person, physical or moral, obliged to recognize and respect it. In this context, the holder of the right is the migrant; the person obliged to guarantee it is primarily the state.

The Pope thus understands that the right to remain in one’s home is primary, antecedent to the right to leave one’s homeland. Migration from one country to another must be a free choice, rather than a constraint for many, provoked by violence of all kinds: hunger and thirst, war, misery, persecution, ideological madness. This notion deserves a closer look.

2 – In the expression “chez soi” (“in your own home”), the word “chez” comes from the Latin “casa” (“house”), which gave rise to “case” in French. It designates the fundamental dwelling, the “thatched farmhouse” of the song, which remains at the bottom of one’s heart wherever one goes, and whose intimacy and personal character is emphasized by the pronoun “soi” (“your own”).

The “chez-soi” is thus not just a legal domicile, nor a more or less ephemeral residence. It is the human, protective place, inscribed in a physical and spiritual space, where warm, living roots have taken root. The place of initial “little things” where, as in César Isella’s poem, everyone always returns, in one way or another, because it is the place “where they loved life.”

The “right to stay at your own home” is therefore the right to keep these roots, and to continue to live from them, where they were born. A rootedness that cannot, however, retain this vital virtue unless it is itself continually nourished and invigorated. No one settles near a dried-up tree or a dried-up spring without being forced, sooner or later, to migrate.

For a “home” to remain such, its roots must be nourished by a tradition, both cultural and religious, that is preserved and enriched, a tradition that is nothing other than the permanence of the identity of a “home” renewed over time.

3 – The purpose of the “right to remain in one’s own home” is therefore not limited to the physical maintenance of a place. The purpose assigned to it confirms this. The right to remain in one’s own home is “to lead a life of dignity.” The right to remain in one’s own home thus implies the right to a dignified life.

Dignified life” does not simply mean “feeding, growing and dying by oneself” (Aristotle, Treatise on the Soul, II 1, 412-414) in a chosen place, after having enjoyed it in a variety of ways. Nor does it simply mean living in conditions of material or economic sufficiency, as expressions such as “dignified housing” or “dignified working conditions” might suggest.

Dignity, in fact, is an essential and inalienable property of the person, insofar as he or she is rational and free. It is the radiance of “that which is most perfect in all nature; namely, that which subsists in a reasonable nature” (Thomas Aquinus, Summa theologica, Ia, q. 29, a. 3.). It follows that “dignified life” is that which enables everyone, according to their natural vocation, to live and grow to the height of humanity, the material conditions mentioned above being ordered to this vocation. Respect for natural law, which reflects divine wisdom, the promotion of the family as the original “home,” education in truth, love and transcendence, and the cultivation and practice of justice are the primary conditions for a dignified life.

4 – Thus founded on the principle of human dignity, which French law recognizes must be protected against any infringement (art. 16 of the French Civil Code), the “right to remain in one’s own home and lead a dignified life” reveals its true dimension: it is a fundamental right with, as such, universal value.

In this respect, it is not the privilege of the migrant. Its purpose is not simply to measure the freedom to come and go, to stay at home or go into exile. This right is the ultimate expression of every human being’s natural inclination to live in society, not only to find security there, but also—and above all—to find and keep that deep-rooted “home” that is destined to be the nurturing place, familial and social, for his or her total human, material and spiritual fulfillment.

The “right to stay at home and lead a dignified life” also belongs to citizens of host countries. Being universal, it is fundamentally equal for those who welcome migrants into their homes and for those who, having seen this right violated, are forced into exile.

Two conclusions, at least, can be drawn from this, which are rarely present in discourses on migration.

5 – The first is that the fundamental nature of the right being invoked conditions not only the political freedoms of those who hold it. It also sheds light on the state of health of societies that are, or are not, in a position to guarantee and promote it.

Societies that not only exhaust the economic capacities of their members, but also feed systemic lies and manipulation, moral and mental degradation, educational ruin, sanitized homicide or other forms of violence—physical, legal or ideological—contrary to the dignity of the human person, are certainly not the right setting for the creation or permanence of a “home” enabling its members to grow humanely.

So it is, of course, with the societies that migrants are forced to flee, precisely because of this. But the same is true of the societies they join, when these societies offer them nothing but their materialism, their self-hatred, their break with natural law and the degradation of their culture and mores. So, it is hardly surprising that these migrants cannot find a national “home” in which to integrate. Failing that, they prefer to try and rebuild the community they were forced to leave.

Nor are migrants the only victims of this decivilization. The first are the citizens of these societies, where the common good, in particular, is no longer the raison d’être of the law. Many of them are struggling against their own uprooting and that of their children. As a result, they are at risk of becoming exiles from within, forced to nurture a “home” against the grain, from family to workplace to school, that preserves their Christian identity, historical tradition, language and culture.

6 – The second conclusion is that if this “right to remain in one’s own home and lead a dignified life” is fundamental and universal, and thus equal for all, then it is particularly binding on the migrant himself. They are obliged to respect it in those who welcome them—or are unable to welcome them. For them, too, the right to “stay at home and live with dignity” and in peace is prior to the right to migrate. It is therefore prior to the rights of those who intend to migrate home. Indeed, it is even among those who do not migrate, by hypothesis, that the exercise of the right to remain at home to live with dignity and in peace is perfect.

It is therefore not without subversion of the natural order that we try, under the guise of charity, to make the citizens of host countries believe that their right to stay at home should take a back seat to the right to migrate of those who cross their borders. In the dialectic imposed by Pope Francis between the “culture of humanity and fraternity,” supposedly virtuous, and the “culture of indifference,” supposedly criminal (Pope Francis, Address, Palais du Pharo, Marseille, September 23, 2023), there is a legal and human space which is that of respect for the fundamental rights of all.

When the phenomenon of migration undermines or threatens the security, habitat, culture, way of life or religion of a host country, to the point where its citizens no longer feel at home and can no longer live there with dignity and security, and are sometimes forced to flee, it necessarily undermines what is, for them, a fundamental right. To this extent, the phenomenon is a grave social injustice, commensurate with the rights it violates, which cannot be ignored.

7 – That is why, between the right of some to migrate and the right of others to “stay at home” to live in peace and dignity, a measure is needed to determine the balance between them. This measure is that of the common good—or, if you like, the general interest. Each State, which is its natural guardian, just as it is the guardian of the fundamental rights of its citizens, has the right, and even the duty, to establish this measure, so that the rights of the former do not prevail over the rights of the latter.

This is the condition and limit of any migration policy. It requires the government to determine when it can welcome immigrants, and under what economic and social conditions, and when it cannot. It requires the government to know how to refuse immigration when it appears that it can no longer be integrated and infringes on citizens’ fundamental rights.

To see this as a “criminal indifference” contrary to charity is to be fooled by political fideism, whereas the demands of charity never erase those of nature. Yet for a long time now, we have been hearing the much-needed lesson of Saint Thomas, which no longer seems to be understood, but which must be repeated over and over again: “Divine right, which proceeds from grace, does not take away human right, which proceeds from natural reason” (Thomas Aquinus, Summa theologica, IIa IIae, q. 10 a. 10).

Patrick de Pontonx is a lawyer based in Paris, France.

Featured: Salon, anonymous, 1857.

The Treasures of Christ are Mine

“The treasures of Christ are mine,” said Saint Elizabeth of the Trinity. We must take the words of the saints literally. They know what they are talking about. Their intelligence, highly refined by faith and the gifts of the Holy Spirit, is of unparalleled sagacity.

The rest is perception, not reality. Certainly, their faith is not mine, nor perhaps yours. But what their faith says about the treasures of the Heart of God is true for them as it is for us. The fact that they see what we struggle to see does not change the matter; the sun shines no less brightly over the blind than over the seer, and they who speak to the former about what he does not see do not lie to him. Our blindness, more or less great, invites us rather to trust them, to be attentive to what they tell us with knowledge of the facts.

God’s treasures are therefore ours; the saints tell us so. Christ deserved them so that they could be ours. The wound in his side was opened so that the hands of our mind and heart could dip into it. The saints tell us, because Christ tells them—so that we may know it fully ourselves.

The charming Carmelite nun of Dijon, won over by the joy of this certainty, drew from the treasures of the adorable Heart of Jesus, treasures which had become HERS, armfuls of graces that she intended to spread with divine generosity on all those she loved, on the Church and the world.

The saints are bold, because they understand, through their closeness to the Heart of Christ, that they can be bold. And that they can be bold because Christ Himself expects them to be bold. So, the saints speak to us to ask us to share this audacity. To leave behind our worldly timidity and the servile fears that are the shadows of our sins. This call to boldness is itself drawn from THEIR treasure.

Why remind us of these things? Because we are submerged to the point of stinking nausea by the inexhaustible waves of turpitudes that are thrown upon this world every day. Because we have to keep reminding ourselves, in the face of these assaults, that we are Christians, and that the rise of evil is in proportion to the defect of quality that is in us. Because we must also remember that we have in OUR treasures of Christ enough to turn back this evil. No matter how wicked, mediocre or vulgar, what is the world and its rottenness in the end? An immense field of dark misery that a little charity and prayer is sufficient enough to reduce.

Emmanuel Mounier, writing to his wife about the infinitely painful loss of their child, encouraged her by evoking the sacrificial value of this terrible event which crucified them. He then reminded her of all the sufferings of the world, especially the unspeakable sufferings of innocent children, and told her that the countless victims of these sufferings were making this extraordinary prayer rise up to the two of them: “Say, you who have your love, you who have your hands full of light, will you willingly give this again for us?”

“The treasures of Christ are ours.” Much more than in the illusions, always disappointed by political calculations, it is there that the Christian, without fideism, “with hands full of light,” must seek his first weapons, for his own conversion and that of the world.

Patrick de Pontonx is a lawyer based in Paris, France.

Featured: The Parable of the Pearl of Great Price, by Andrei N. Mironov; painted in 2020.

The Destructive Underpinnings of the Social Debate on Euthanasia

I. The Engine of Progressive Ideology

Mr. Olivier Rey, professor of philosophy at Paris-I Panthéon-Sorbonne, recently observed in the columns of Le Figaro that “the more the crisis worsens, the more new rights have to be invented, in order to give the impression that we continue against all odds to move forward, ‘of going in the right direction.’”

The driving force behind this inventive obsession is progressivism, which, in the so-called West, is the dynamic of modernity. This, according to the Dictionary of the French Academy, expresses the search for “a new spirit, new tastes,” for that which “responds to the desires, the expectations of the moment.”

Progress, thus reduced to what is new and coveted, hic et nunc, is abstracted from any reference to good or evil. Modernity, in fact, is philosophically and historically based on nominalism, which denies the existence of natures common to men.

Thus, for progress there is neither true nor enduring good capable of being measured by a human nature, nor transcendent reference elsewhere than in legal positivism. The true, the good, are only what the laws or the media say about them, or what the subjectivism of each individual makes him glimpse.

Men, scattered individuals, are then united only by the meeting of their interests and their desires, which modernity makes a point of spurring on relentlessly, before consecrating their successive satisfactions by the law.

To strengthen this empire of the ephemeral and of desire, progressive ideology, served by a multitude of lobbies, imposes, in the name of modernity, what Richard Millet called an “angelic totalitarianism;” what others call a “soft totalitarianism.”

With the millenarian vocation that it has attributed to itself, which barely conceals, behind the mask of “political correctness,” its fight to the death with what remains of Judeo-Christian civilization, this ideology has become a war machine. It hides its violence under a permanent moralism and under the agreed language of benevolence, tolerance, sentimentalism or living together.

This war machine disqualifies and destroys what is presumed to be “old,” “out-moded,” “reactionary”: language, writing, education, history, families, people, identities and morals. It seeks to break all those who, focusing on what is the vital transmission of societies, are presented as the sole causes of the social evils that it itself causes.

“At the same time, it imposes, even through the violence of laws, uprooted substitution models. What is called “homosexual marriage” is not the least example of this; wokism is another. These models are proclaimed necessary by the mere fact that they are integrated into a new vision of man and the world.

In this respect, the progressivism of today is nothing other than the transformism of yesterday. Both confuse constructive evolution and destruction [True evolution is progress, not retreat. It is an act of edification, not of destruction. It implies a certain growth, a certain expansion and a vital renovation. It excludes that which is harmful, that which depreciates, demolishes, dissolves. In other words, it excludes the deadly transformation, which destroys vital elements under the pretext of replacing them with artificial novelties, as the false reformers have always tried to do (J. G. Arintero, Desenvolvimiento y vitalidad de la Iglesia, Vol. 1, Evolución orgánica, pp. 1ff)]—except that today’s progressivism, exploiting the collapse of Christianity, encounters practically no limits, in order to carry its destruction to the heart of humanity itself.

The progressive ideology anchors in people’s minds, by the powerful public instruments it has at its disposal, institutional and media, that there is no salvation except in its own movement, which is justified by itself, and thus in a permanent flight forward towards new “liberations,” without which “we do not advance.”

These are no longer limited to emancipating oneself from Christianity through reason, but from reason itself through the imperatives of insatiable desires. This explains, in particular, the increasingly pronounced emergence of psychopathic politicians who seem to prefer chaos to any questioning of their suicidal pursuits.

II. The Decline in the Dignity of the Human Person

The promotion of euthanasia has been part of the progressive ideological project for years, which presents it, like abortion, as an eminently therapeutic, even “ethical” act.

It is supposed to correspond to a social “progress” in the perception of human suffering and compassion, which the too famous Lambert affair did not precisely demonstrate. As for abortion, it is also argued that this act only concerns marginal cases, very much regulated by law.

Mr. Didier Sicard, president of the French National Ethics Committee, showed, however, in 2012, that “the practice of euthanasia develops its own dynamics, resisting any effective control and necessarily tends to widen, with a constantly shifting qualitative cursor that never goes back.”

Never going back—such is the intrinsic logic of progressivism, like that of cancer, as Michel Onfray observed. Today, it is ready to develop all possible arguments to distinguish “assisted suicide” from “euthanasia,” in order to hide this reality, which is nevertheless essential in both cases—it is a question of obtaining the legal recognition of a right to inflict death on innocent people by private persons, in violation of a dignity that no one can renounce, neither for oneself, nor for others.

[It should be remembered that under Article 16 of the French Civil Code, “the law ensures the primacy of the person, prohibits any violation of his dignity and guarantees respect for the human being from the beginning of his life.” In a famous case, known as the “dwarf-throwing” case, the Conseil d’Etat ruled that the very victim of a violation of his dignity, which is a component of public order, cannot legally consent to it (Recueil Lebon)].

Yet here again, progressivism has its answer: why should the very notion of “dignity” of the human person escape its transformist alchemy? One of the founders of the Austrian School, the highly respected libertarian economist Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), did not fail to reflect on this, writing: “Beings of human descent who, by birth or because of an acquired defect, lack the capacity to act (in the broadest sense of the word, and not just legally), in order to achieve practical effects, are not human beings. Even if laws and biology consider them as human beings, they lack, in fact, what specifically characterizes the human being. The newborn child is not an active being; it has not yet completed the entire trajectory from conception to the full development of its human qualities. It is only at the end of this development that he will become a subject of action.” The one who has not yet reached this stage is therefore not yet a “human;” the one who has accidentally or naturally exceeded it, is no longer one. “Dignity” does not therefore concern them.

[It is important to observe that while progressive currents work to undermine the foundations of society and of human nature itself, they do not disdain to search sometimes in the past for supposed sources of legitimacy. The liberal Austrian School of Economics, for example, claims to be heir to the Salamanca School that shone in the Spanish Golden Age, when in reality their fundamental principles are contradictory, as Daniel Marín Arribas has shown very well in his book, Destapando al liberalismo: La escuela austriaca, no nació en Salamanca—Uncovering Liberalism: The Austrian school was Not Born in Salamanca]

The influential Australian philosopher Peter Singer (1946), champion of animalism, intended to erase all moral distinctions between humans and other animals. In his book, Practical Ethics, he argues that it is necessary to distinguish, among humans themselves, those who are “persons,” i.e., who are “self-conscious,” from those who are not, since life, according to him, has no value in itself.

Whoever is not self-aware—a child in the womb, a mentally handicapped person, an accident victim in a comatose state, an old man with dementia or Alzheimer’s disease—is not, or is no longer, a “person.” Peter Singer considers the life of a healthy dog intrinsically more valuable than that of a sick man, because the dog is capable of positive experiences that the “human animal” no longer has because of its condition. There is therefore little reason not to apply to the sick man the same fate as for the sick dog.

These anthropological conceptions, patiently diluted in societies by these authors and so many others, with the active complicity of political teaching institutions, lobbies and the media, are directly linked, as one can easily see, to the problems of the legal infliction of death in our societies: abortion, euthanasia, even infanticide. Peter Singer calls this last one “post-natal abortion,” especially with regard to the handicapped. The circle is then closed and all moral objections are rendered futile. What cannot be qualified as a “person,” according to these criteria, cannot be recognized as having human dignity. Will the law ever enshrine these conceptions?

It is not unimportant to emphasize that the doctrinaires cited here are not Nazi or neo-Nazi theorists. They are recognized authorities in the liberal or neo-liberal world. They did not teach their theses in secret, in Buchenwald or Ravensbrück, sheltered by watchtowers and barbed wire—but in prestigious universities fully open to the public of the “free world.”

Singer holds the Chair of Ethics (sic) at the University of Princeton; Mises taught at New York University. Singer was recently awarded the Frontiers of Knowledge Prize in March 2023 by the BBVA Foundation, funded by the international banking group BBVA, which describes itself as a “responsible banking model aimed at creating a more inclusive and sustainable society.” Singer is praised on the BBVA Foundation website as “one of today’s most influential moral philosophers” whose work “marked a turning point in expanding the field of ethics to the animal realm.”

If we compare these theses to the slogans, “My womb is mine,” to the abortion hysteria, to the promotion of surrogate motherhood, or to the claimed “rights” to inflict death on those who don’t have to live, or on those who don’t want to live anymore, according to opinions or utilitarian calculations, one thing is clear: These street or press slogans, like all the subjectivizations of the meaning of life, are only the simplified and coarse translations of what thinkers conceive coldly and teach with method and authority. All of these thinkers concoct in order to exasperate the desires of a society freed from all transcendence, where man is called to become the object of his own animal appetites; they are drive to demand this, quenching more or less unconsciously their thirsts of new liberties from the fountains of their own death.

III. A False Social Debate

In view of the points that we have made about this question thus far, it appears that the umpteenth “debate of society” proposed to the French on euthanasia is in truth neither a debate, nor a social requirement.

The word “debate,” in fact, is only used to give the moral violence inflicted on society the appearance of respectful consideration of contrary opinions. In reality, the ideology at work holds a priori these opinions as obstacles to be knocked down, because they are rooted in “retrograde” conceptions.

It is enough to observe the modes of government which succeed one another, in particular since Nicolas Sarkozy, and especially since the election of Emmanuel Macron, towards a tyrannical practice of power, to be convinced without difficulty of the purely rhetorical character of the call to debate.

It is as much the case of the free opinions which are evoked, just like animals which run loose, during a hunt, until a bullet puts an end to the futile hope of survival that this reprieve had given rise in them.

Moreover, this pseudo-debate is attributed to be “social” for only two reasons.

The first reason is to give the illusion that this debate responds to new concerns of every citizen, which would not be met by the current legal rules.

However, it should be recalled that the Claeys-Leonetti law of February 2, 2016, which reinforced the right of access to palliative care, also provided for the possibility of drafting “advance directives” for each person with respect to the conditions of his or her end of life, and of designating a “trusted person” who will be able, in the absence of such a person, to bear witness to the expressed wishes of the patient.

[The “advance directive” is a document that any person of legal age may draw up in the event that he or she is no longer able to express his or her wishes regarding the end of his or her life, in order to indicate what he or she wishes regarding the continuation, limitation, cessation or refusal of a treatment or medical procedure (cf. art. L. 1111-11 and art. L. 1111-12 of the French Public Health Code)].

The law thus allows any person to oppose “unreasonable obstinacy,” i.e., therapeutic prolongation, by recognizing in particular the right to request “deep and continuous sedation” until death, if the patient’s vital prognosis is imminent. [“Deep and continuous sedation” consists of inducing and maintaining an alteration of consciousness until death, associated with analgesia and the cessation of all life-sustaining treatments (cf. art. L. 1110-5-2 of the same code)].

The sufficient conditions of these provisions make it clear that the proponents of euthanasia are not so much seeking relief from suffering at the end of life, which the applicable law already favors, as they are seeking a right to kill.

In this respect, it is important to emphasize that the demand for this right is opposed by the majority of the medical profession, which stresses that it is above all the culture of palliative care that is largely lacking and that the legalization of euthanasia would lead to “upsetting the definition of care” and provoke “a major ethical shift.”

[On the importance of palliative care, see the recent book by J.-F. Poisson, Soins palliatifs, la vraie alternative à l’euthanasie, 2023, and compare this recent article].

The second reason why it is claimed that this pseudo-debate on euthanasia is a “social” debate is to give the impression that the final success sought will be the result of a general consent that no longer allows it to be legally challenged.

The process followed for the legalization and then the constitutionalization of abortion is the perfect illustration of this strategy. The “debate in society,” which is repeated year after year, consists only in serving the same poison again and again into the hands of the people and in harassing them in a thousand ways, until they resolve to swallow it freely and enter a state from which they will not be able to escape.

It is therefore of the utmost importance to understand that these so-called “society projects,” presented as conditions for a better, more just and more compassionate society, are necessarily linked to the deleterious philosophies which inspire them more or less directly and which ultimately lead only to the death of man.

To consent to these, is necessarily to enter the principles of these in one’s mind. It is to take an irreversible anthropological and moral step against the natural order, regardless of the excuses, often sentimental and compassionate, with which one seeks to cover it. There is therefore no other alternative, for those who intend to remain human, than to reject and resolutely fight against these projects which proceed, as always, only from a swindling of freedom and happiness.

Patrick de Pontonx is a lawyer based in Paris. The French version of this article appeared in Ce Soir.

Featured: The Murder, by Paul Cézanne; painted ca. 1867—1870.

Which Law Do You Live Under?

I.

One cannot but be grateful to Messrs. Xavier Azalbert and Stanislas Berton for their recent, rewarding discussion of “how the West has been intoxicated.”

Thought-provoking, that word intoxication, from the Greek toxicon, which means a poison sped by arrow. As it happens, toxon means a bow, so that the original meaning of intoxication is thus a willful act of harm, an act that is calculated and not some accident of nature. An act designed to kill.

The poison that Azalbert and Berton describe; is the act of lying. In biblical tradition, lying is more of the deed than a word. It stands for the betrayal of trust to, first and foremost God’s trust, because God will keep the faith. Lying is thus peculiar to the diabolic deed, aimed to wreck divine creation and bring down mankind as a whole.

Mr. Berton has also drawn a distinction between the lying by political figures as they attempt to protect the citizenry and the poison lie. Indeed, Plato himself acknowledges the utilitarian lie uttered by a government, which he calls “lying by the word”, as a thing excusable owing to its purpose—to protect the people—as distinguished from the “actual lie”, uttered to lead another soul into error, and a despicable act 5.

All these factors are now found combined. Lying is the weapon wielded by the powerful against the citizens of every Western country whose trust they betray as they twist the straitjacket strings and poison the citizenry’s mind. Their arrows are propaganda-vectors, whether in politics, culture or the mass media, who by their maneuvers, their Newspeak, and in fine by outright persecution, poison minds and mores.

Since what is at stake in the battle between truth and lying has always to do with how one judges things in their essence, whether that clearly be identified or cunningly disguised, it is hardly surprising that the poison of lying intoxicates Man’s very identity. Identity, by definition, pertains to the reality of what one Is and Is Not.

Not by chance, then, does one find subverting “identity” at the core of the mass-lying served up to strike a death blow at whatever resists that still deserves the name “Mankind”.

Whether conscious of the fact or not, this “intoxicated West” has taken to lying about itself above all. Although in history, the West may once have deserved the admiration Mr. Berton recalls, its prestige is now usurped as it claims a worldwide moral authority it no longer deserves. Whether the individual, society, the family, all have come under unrelenting onslaught from a West which denies and savages its founding principles. Elsewhere, I have referred to this, in French, as l’Oxydant rather than l’Occident, which in English would be something like the Wastrel West (the Oxidizing West).

II.

Once the all-pervading lie has been identified, it must be fought—and not simply by ascertaining whether one is well or poorly informed, manipulated or not, or whether or not rights are under attack. The issue is whether Man as a free and rational being, will survive.

Despite the very high stakes—and Orwell’s Nineteen Eight-Four is the textbook—this is little understood. Those who would revolt still tend to think and react based on forms of intoxication instilled by education and the mass media. Lies about their dignity as Men, their rights, and the meaning of life or their political existence. Those who attack globalization, for example, do so on behalf of the very individualism, subjectivism and egoism on which globalization relies.

If he who would rise up is infected by the principles which led to his enslavement, he will only tighten his chains, like an insect struggling in the spider’s web.

A revolt will succeed only when the citizen cuts himself free from whatever enslaves him. How to defeat Wokism, if one clings to the “truth” of one’s personal opinions? If one insists on lying to oneself by living by the principles one purportedly rejects, repelling the Army of Lies becomes a pious wish.

The crises into which we are now plunged do nevertheless present the great advantage of compelling us to face a dilemma that can be solved only by choosing truth: either we continue to feed the monster, living and thinking as the monster would have us do docilely, consuming material and ideological objects and fashions—or we starve out the monster by opting for the truth as it is, accordance with objective reality—rather than caprice and fallacies of construction.

When a Roman came before a Judge, the latter would first ask him this: “By which law art thou ruled?” And by that law would he be judged. If my own, personal law, the law which rules my life and thoughts, is liberalism, i.e. individualism whereby the supreme authority is one’s own opinion, by what right do I groan at the yoke I have myself chosen? If however, I wish to be free of it, for myself and the society of men around me, I must reflect upon myself and upon the principles that liberalism seeks to undermine.

In that respect, a common error is to see Christianity as the enemy, whereas it is that belief that historically, forged the principles underpinning the West. In aiming at the wrong target, Christianity’s opponents become putty in the hands of those who would destroy them. On the other hand, there are observers whom one would scarcely call “Catholic”—Michel Onfray, Douglas Murray, Niall Fergusson or Tom Holland—who have studied history and contend that the survival of Christianity, too often betrayed by its own clerics, is critical to the survival of a true West if freedom and law still have any meaning.

There is a valuable lesson to be learnt from what is now taking place worldwide. As Russia moves away from the West’s decadence and totalitarianism she embraces her unique identity and rejects self-hatred. The nations of Africa should do the same. Each country will do best to act and live according to its own, distinct identity. China, India, and Iran would be well advised to follow suit. If the West is to overcome its intoxicated obsession with liberalism, it too will have to return to its traditional roots.

Patrick de Pontonx is a lawyer based in Paris. [Translated from the French by Mendelssohn Moses].

Featured: The Judgment of Solomon, by Nicolas Poussin; painted in 1649.