Emmanuelle Ménard: “It is the Right Not to Think Like You That You Are Besmirching and Trampling”

Emmanuelle Ménard is the wife of Robert Ménard, the Islam-critical mayor of Béziers in the south of France whose videos have appeared in this space a number of times. Mme. Ménard recently gained a name for herself after being elected to the national legislature with the backing of the Front National and other right-wing parties.

Below is a speech given recently by Mme. Ménard on the crackdown on free expression in France.

Many thanks to Oz-Rita for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:

Video transcript:

00:20   Thank you,
00:24   Mr. President,
00:28   Mme Attorney General (Minister for Justice).
00:32   If several articles of this law of confidence
00:36   merit questioning, I wonder about their relevance,
00:40   even their legitimacy. It’s of course
00:44   the first article of the ordinary law that would it come back to,
00:48   since the non-registered have not had the floor this morning.
00:53   This first article, and I’m weighing my words, [is] a veritable
00:57   attack, a real crime, a veritable
01:01   infringement on the freedom of expression.
01:05   This law consists, no more, no less,
01:09   of criminalising opinions that don’t seem to please you, but which are
01:13   opinions nonetheless. Threatening with
01:17   ineligibility anyone who is found guilty of defamation, insult,
01:21   or discrimination — it is the right not to think like
01:25   you that you are besmirching and trampling.
01:29   You yield to the era of time, take the easy way,
01:33   and indulge in a certain amount of groveling, too.
01:37   You yield control to the media, to the “what-will-they-say”. You submit
01:41   to these pseudo-‘human rights’ associations, you turn into
01:45   a real guard dog for the police
01:49   of thought. In the middle of summer, while France is
01:54   on holiday, you extend yet a little more the reign of this
01:58   political correctness which already causes devastation. Who will now dare
02:02   to make a value judgment about such customs,
02:06   such behaviours, beliefs,
02:10   or cultures? Who will dare to confront the
02:14   agreed group-think on what is acceptable to challenge,
02:18   what is tolerable to contest? Of course
02:22   freedom of expression must have limits.
02:26   Of course, we agree, we ALL agree
02:30   to condemn racism, anti-Semitism
02:34   or homophobia. But could wishing to contain
02:38   mass immigration be reducible to racism?
02:43   Could concern about national identity
02:47   be a proof of xenophobia? Would questioning
02:51   gender theory be sexism or
02:55   homophobia? You invoke republican values,
02:59   but today it’s used all over the place to justify anything.
03:03   What do you want? To force everyone to love the Islamic headscarf?
03:07   The burkini? Marriage for all?
03:11   With, as a bonus, the obligation to smile at the migrants?
03:15   What do you want? Imprisonment in the Bastille for ‘evil thoughts’?
03:19   Excommunication, banishment from
03:24   the democratic space? I admit
03:28   I have had enough of all these backroom observatories,
03:32   — commissions — high authorities, that are supposed to return us to
03:36   the right path. I have had enough of these lesson-donors,
03:40   always more donors of lessons, always more moralising.
03:44   I have had enough of those who want to take me
03:48   by the hand and whisper in my ear not only
03:52   what I have to say, but what I have to think.
03:56   I warn you… I allow myself to
04:00   warn you: you are voting for a law that is demagogic,
04:04   Liberticidal. You will exclude from the debate
04:08   and the field of simple lawfulness, ideas and
04:12   discourses which simply contradict the
04:17   dominant ideology, the ideology of the moment.
04:21   You will allow the reign of a climate of intimidation, a new
04:25   McCarthyism, a kind of mental hygiene; you
04:29   will encourage a hunt for ‘bad ideas’, for ‘bad thoughts’.
04:33   I dare not imagine that this is what you want.
04:37   We will have to beware of words, simple words,
04:41   everyday words, everybody’s words. One will have to be cunning,
04:45   make oneself understood with half-words, using allusion.
04:49   We must be permanently on our guard, lie, and lie to ourselves.
04:53   You know it, reality is hard, unpleasant,
04:57   depressing at times, but it is here, taking us by the collar,
05:01   forcing us to see it and describe it for what it is.
05:05   You cannot want that. I have the naivety
05:10   to think that this ‘modernity’ which you never cease to claim as your own,
05:14   is precisely the right to question all these beliefs,
05:18   the right to express opinions, even disturbing, even shocking ones,
05:22   the right to criticise, even at the risk of blaspheming. SO:
05:26   must I call you “Ladies and Gentlemen the Censors”?
05:30   I do not want to do this, but do not force me to do it. —Thank you, Mme Menard.
 

12 thoughts on “Emmanuelle Ménard: “It is the Right Not to Think Like You That You Are Besmirching and Trampling”

  1. You MUST NOT contradict the dominant ideology. True in France. True in The States.

    Which leaves us where, WHERE?

    How do you reason, how do you compromise with totalitarians?

    Beats me.

    • Such a brave speech – however the sparce audience in the
      Chamber didn’t even attempt to hide their contempt for
      Her expression of the truth behind the proposed legislation!

      Macron, as the other “main squeeze” pensioner in his life,
      Mutti Merkel, is intent on destroying all the traditional moral
      Pillars of his country, knowing full well that the vacuum
      Left will be immediately filled with the pillars of Islam.

      The ruling, ethnomasachistic, gynocentric, self deluded, elites
      Of the west have sown the seeds of destruction in their nations
      And yet they are still voted back into power every election.

      When will the psychologically castrated/neutered populace
      Rise up against this collective “suicide note” being written
      In their behalf?

  2. ” You know it, reality is hard, unpleasant” …

    Why should reality be so hard in the west “recently”?

    When Europeans were Christian “liberals” liberated themselves from the “illusions” and hypocrisy of the Believers. Christians and Christianity was bombarded with all types of accusations and crimes and at the same time exonerating themselves and describing themselves as “enlightened” by whatever science discovered. Scientific Truth, they said, was their guide and would not accept any fairy tales of Genesis or Revelation.

    That enlightenment did not last long. As soon as all traces of Faith disappeared from the acephalocardius , and killing spiritual emptiness appeared, people started creating some to distract them from reality: Tattoos, body piercing, dyeing hair in seven outrageous colours, convulsive songs and dances, Elvis is not dead, mistake any political crisis in Asia, Africa and Venezuela as our own.

    Secularism, Multiculturalism: WE include everything. Result we lost everything. We lost ourselves, our Faith, our values, our conscience. No sense of right or wrong.

    Our Traitors admire muslims because they are so staunch believers in their own values, values sprung from their faith.

    needless to say they might be hypocrites: they might drink alcohol, take kuffar women and be adulterers, steal from kuffar, . . . but he will never forget his ultimate goal: steal and colonise all the countries peopled by cowards.

    When we cannot solves the simplest of our problems, we cover our [backsides] by going and the problems in The Soviet Union, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and installing MUslim Brotherhood in Egypt and The WH.

    The most recent outrageous illusions we want to distract us and entertain us are terrorists have nothing to do with islam, and Islam is a religion of peace. Therefore we must force it on the west because we are spiritually bankrupt, and without values. So we need some aggressive values.

  3. A new “Reign of Terror” perhaps ? Bring back Madame La Guilliotine ?

    Sweden has gone. Within two generations, Austria, Greece, Italy, Spain and the once mighty Germany will follow. Sharia May seems determined that Britain will follow.

    Will the last Englishmen please turn out the lights .

  4. Great speech!

    Spot on, again its these beauracrats in backrooms, who are compiling and constructing the invisible “iron cage” to ensnare us all inside the intelletctual prison of political correctness insanity.

    These well paid, socialist pen pushers, are the modern equivalent of the guards and administrators that run the death camps and gas chambers of auswitz and belsen, (we were just doing our jobs), they said, after the game was up, and the piles of dead corpses, gold teeth, human hair and lamp shades made of human flesh were piled up in sheds,

    But now the new belsen is not some sheds with ovens and a chimey stack, but it is our whole countrys and society as a whole.

    The barbed wire has been replaced by political correctness, and the thugs who will ensure you dont escape are your now your local bobby, who has unwittingly been turned into the new nazi stormtroopers, who for a weekly wage will without question deliver the cosh to your head. Shackles to your limbs, and brand you in the courts of the witchfinder generals, then incarcerate you to rot in there concrete tombs.

    Any person who is working in any capacity for pay within our gov and social institutions are the enemy of all freedom and decent people.

    They are the arbitratitors of the destruction of our lives, the time is here that when we rise up, we must hunt down every singlecone of these implimentors of the eussr new belsen hell.

  5. A very brave woman. Wish there were more like her in Western Europe.
    Did you see the reactions from the listeners? They did not even want to hear what she had to say, because deep down they KNOW it’s so true what she says, but admitting to knowing this may cost them their job, friends and even home, family and livelihood.
    The scary thing is, that since a few decades, the overall majority people in in the West became, at least “officially”, PC.
    This is no longer only the perverted trait of an obscure minority of fake “intellectuals” who deliberately wanted to bring the West down (as it still was before 1960, read “Frankfurter School”), nor the obsession of a group of hysteric misfits who hate the West due to emotional problems (as was still the in the 1970’s and 1980’s), but now it reached the vestiges of power, and even infected the thoughts of most normal people, who usally would disagree with this humbug, but now no longer dare to speak up against it. The scary thing is that this goes up to the point that the no longer dare to even THINK differently, as this woman correctly pointed out.
    The situation we face today in the West concerning topics like mass-migration, gender-identities, climate change and the religion of peace could very much remind us of the faity tale of the “Naked Emperor” by H.C. Andersen.
    And this is France, not even the most PC country in Europe. If you go further North, your mind will get blasted even more.

    • I was going to paste an extract of your comment, but it would have been basically all of it. I couldn’t agree with you more. I especially loathed the reactions/facial expressions of the chamber members that the camera zoomed in on: a young red-haired guy making a look of bored contempt; next to him a young black woman responding with a half-hearted sneer; then a late middle-aged man giving a ritualistic scoff ( plainly pandering to any constituents of his who may see this footage); and, finally, a long haired very young man smirking broadly and reflexively because the speaker is from the FN.

      I see all four as members of the crowd responding like blinkered automatons to the boy in HC Andersen’s tale who says the Emperor has no clothes.

      What a brave woman Madame Renard is.

  6. I am surprised by it all – good speech, I would say something very similar to what she has said. What is surprising to me are the reactions in the audience: Seems like I underestimated the French governing bodies, they really do believe that what she said was “evil”, maybe?

    Anyhow, I learned a new word today. Liberticide. It rhymes with Genocide, I guess.

Comments are closed.