Thinking the Unthought

The above image is the cover of a new book by Olivier Arnaubec.  Its title is French for "The Wall".

The image makes pretty clear what the author means by this, and his projected date for it.  The book is supposed to envision a near future (2023) when the French will have finally put their foot down and said "Assez de l'Islam!" ("Enough Islam, already!")  And as a consequence, they will have decided to split France in half (as the image indicates), erecting a wall, and relocating all its Muslims south of that wall. 

Granted, his book is a work of fiction, an exercise in what might be called political science fiction.  An essayist at Riposte Laïque ("Secular Response"), a French counter-jihad website, has reviewed the book (actually, the idea of the book, since he admits he hasn't yet read it), and grapples well with some of the concrete issues it raises -- similar issues to the ones by which over the years I have been beleaguered & buffeted by PC MCs and Counter-Jihadists alike because I have dared to propose a thought experiment about the Total Deportation Meme, most thoroughly explained in my essay An Iron Veil.  There are a few notable differences between my meme and Arnaubec's idea -- mine discusses a remedy for the entire West, while Arnaubec focuses on France; mine wants to relocate Muslims outside the West, not partition parts of the West and grant Muslims some kind of enclaves within it; and finally, mine envisions a "veil" while his seems to posit a literal wall.  Who knows, he may have been thinking in terms approximately as figurative & flexible as mine, where the actual material nuts & bolts of the meme are not the point (since pragmatic problems & solutions are not a matter of ideas, but of technology & common sense).

The reviewer -- who calls himself "Messin'Issa" (apparently an apostate from Islam and now a counter-jihadist himself) -- submits the book's idea to a critical appraisal, and has a couple of problems with it, but also seems to appreciate the speculative level on which it also operates as a work of fiction and therefore imagination.  Or, as I call it, "pushing the meme".

The main problem Messin'Issa has with Arnaubec's imagined future is that it is too soon, and too rosy.  And its long term future (looking toward the end of our century) too optimistically free of the problems of Islam.  In fact, Messin'Issa worries that the opposite seems to be devolving -- both with the ongoing metastasis of Muslims in France's midst, and the politically correct policies & mentality of the mainstream doing nothing much to stem that metastasis -- and sees little reason to hope.  He marshals quite a compelling defense of pessimism.  Not only that, but Arnaubec wrote his book well before the latest Paris attacks; and now its theme is more searingly poignant than ever.

In terms of its central idea of a Wall, Messin'Issa dismantles the whole thing brutally into its component parts, each of which he exposes for its implausibility or ill logic. Of all the points he brings up, perhaps the most cogent in my estimation was his protest that the millions of Muslims (by 2023 -- probably by then a million or two more than the current millions (probably 7 million, though no one seems to be sure) -- would not be adequately identifiable, since in France "[l]es statistiques ethniques sont interdite" (domestic ethnic statistics are not permitted, probably because it would be "racist" to catalogue them).  This objection doesn't necessarily address the related dynamic -- namely that Muslim behavior will spiral so out of control that the French mainstream will be compelled logically to take appropriate measures to deal with it -- it merely points out that at that relatively soon date (only 8 years away), given current French procedure, there will be no practical way to move all those Muslims because they won't be able to be located.  That's a common sense objection, and it's also common sense to conjecture that if the problem gets bad enough, the French can find ways to work around it, though it will be remarkably messier, costlier, and probably bloodier than it would have been had the French mainstream been thinking ahead all this time (by, among other things, keeping tabs on all its Muslims). 

Conclusion:

Anyway, in my view, these various nuts & bolts of the issue are less important than the mere & sheer effect of the idea.  Once the meme is put out there, with a boldly drawn, literal wall dividing France on a book cover, and once it's tossed around and talked about, even critically, then the thought which the mainstream dares not think begins to be thought.  And thinking the unthought (much less the unthinkable) is where most sociopolitical change among free people is born.

The unthought in question is not about some specific literal plan with its specific literal nuts & bolts; it doesn't have to be this specific book with its specific "wall".  It can be thought in many different ways and styles, and brought into the light of the public conversation, as a symbol of the paradigm shift we need to undergo.  It's thus about the general principle -- namely, the realization that, to paraphrase Kipling:

West is West, and Islam is Islam, and never the twain should meet.

How precisely this gets worked out eventually is less important, since the nature of the problem will dictate the contours of the logic of its management.  Given that it's a reasonable supposition that Muslim malevolence and mendacity will continue to metastasize, it's not a matter of If, it's a matter of When.

Let's just hope that the West will be able to do it relatively soon enough to minimize the mess, cost and blood involved.  The rate of how relatively soon the West finally gets around to doing this depends on how many people start thinking the unthought.

Update:

I've just noticed a more recent and more extensive review of  Arnaubec's book (which now I see apparently already came out this past summer), published also on the French counter-jihad site Riposte Laïque ("Secular Response").  If I find anything noteworthy there, I'll add to this essay here.