‘The European Conservative’: A Civilizational suicide note on the Seine

The International Olympics Committee is in full-on damage control over its blasphemous Paris opening ceremony show. The IOC has apologized for the event, and deleted it from its YouTube channel. These elites would like everyone to forget what a global television audience saw last Friday: a filthy mockery of the Last Supper of Jesus Christ, featuring drag queens as the disciples, and Barbara Butch, an obese lesbian DJ, as Our Lord, writes Rod Dreher, an American journalist who writes about politics, culture, religion, and foreign affairs, a director of the Network Project of the Danube Institute in Budapest, at ‘The European Conservative’.

“Oh yes! Oh yes! The New Gay Testament!” Butch later messaged on Instagram. Underscoring the point, that tableau vivant was titled, in punning French, La Cène Sur Un Scène Sur La Seine – that is, The Last Supper Staged On The Seine.

The satanic parody feast featured as its blasphemous Eucharist a priapic Smurf meant to represent Dionysius — perhaps a sneering, obscene reference to St. Denis (a Gallicized version of “Dionysius”), the third-century martyr who is a patron saint of Paris. According to a tumescent Associated Press account of the event, the Greek god of wine pointed to his penis and sang, in French, “Where to hide a revolver when you’re completely naked?”

What the world saw was a transgressive homosexual romp and stomp across what Christians hold sacred. France’s elites signaled to the planet that it sacralizes homosexuality, transgenderism, sexual excess, and blasphemy. The Paris Olympics overture was a floor show for the Antichrist.

As many commenters noted, these oh-so-courageous would never do this to Muslims. Nor should they, I hasten to say! It’s just that France is deep into a culture war between Islam and secularism that will determine the country’s future. For years now, many authorities have warned that the struggle could easily tip over into a civil war. And yet, these decadent French elites are determined to hasten the destruction of Western civilization.

Nobody will resist contemporary “barbarians” to defend a civilizational order that places the sexually disordered at its symbolic pinnacle. Ordinary Frenchmen might fight for the Blessed Virgin Mary, or for Marianne, the symbol of the Republic, or at least for Brigitte Bardot. But for Barbara Butch? Please.

Symbolism matters. National symbols concentrate and proclaim what a nation thinks of itself, and how it wants other nations to think of it. Speaking on Saturday of the Olympics opening ceremony debacle the night before, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán noted archly, “At the end of the day, every nation has the right to show its true colors; that’s what we saw.”

It’s interesting to consider a tale of two cities — Budapest and Paris — and of two rivers, the Danube and the Seine. Every August 20th, the national feast day of St. Stephen the King, the Orban government ends its light show over the Danube by having drones form a giant cross of light.

Contrast that with the corpulent lesbian Christ figure surrounded by writhing drag queens, re-enacting a blasphemous Last Supper on a bridge over the Seine. The point is, what does the leadership of these nations consider to be their nations’ highest values? The goals to which they aspire?

In France, as in so much of the West, the general answer is: inversion, which is what critical-theory academics mean when they speak of “queering” something. It means to turn the meaning of something inside-out, as our governing and cultural elites have done to our civilization’s values. We are told that we must be diverse, which means punishing those who hold non-progressive views. We are told we must be equitable, which means majorities must accept as just their permanent second-class status, and all the humiliations that go with it. We are told that we must be inclusive, which means excluding Christians, whites, and males.

Watching the degrading Paris ceremony on Friday, with its exaltation of sexual transgression and regicide, brought to mind Hannah Arendt’s line about how uncontrolled transgression laid the groundwork for 20th century totalitarianism: “The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it.”

What happened on Friday night in Paris was a globally televised dismantling and mockery of one of the core symbols of Western civilization, as a manifestation of France’s national character. The etymological opposite of “symbolic” is “diabolic.” Draw your own conclusions. But do not miss the symbolism here, when, hours after the opening ceremony, the 18th arrondissement of Paris lost electrical power. The only thing left illuminated was the Basilica of the Sacre-Coeur, built in the 19th century in reparation for the crimes of the Revolution. The light shines in the darkness, and even in Paris, the darkness did not overcome it.

read more in our Telegram-channel https://t.me/The_International_Affairs