The Submission - Revisited
Thinking back to Michel Houellebecq's ahead of its time satire.
I regret this one a bit, because I am letting politics creep into The Middlebrow, and because I understand the feelings on all sides, but I can’t let this go because I am afraid that legitimate opposition to right wing politics in both Israel and the United States is veering towards appeasement of a type of fascism that goes, as Friedrich Nietzsche warned us, “Beyond Good and Evil.”
We have been warned many times, but I can’t help recall one from more than nine years ago.
Michel Houllebecq’s novel The Submission was published the same day that Islamofascists attacked the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. The butchers murdered a dozen people, including a close friend Houllebecq’s. The attack was not met with the broad condemnation you’d expect from a pluralist society. The insane murders were the most disturbing thing, but the excuses for it, and the sympathy for the attackers that came from the Western left were alarming.
While the Hebdo maniacs were barely literate, the implications of what they did and the failure of liberal society to universally condemn them, was captured in Houllebecq’s novel, The Submission. a comic dystopia about life in France after the formerly civilized country submits to Shariah law.
Think about where we were in the West in 2015. After two terms of President George W. Bush and two terms of Barack Obama, the United States and its European allies remained mired in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Osama bin Laden, who had orchestrated the September 11th attacks, had been killed four years prior. Attention had turned from history-altering terrorist attacks to the excesses of the U.S. response and to the treatment of migrants from the Middle East throughout Europe and the U.S.
The attacks on the Charlie Hebdo offices were a reminder that to a small but influential group of Islam’s adherents, Western notions of freedom and pluralism would never be tolerable. These extremists (and some have great influence and wealth) had chosen to follow a prophet who could not take a joke or endure an insult.
The Submission provoked because its premise seemed so unlikely. A Muslim takeover of France’s democracy was an almost offensive fantasy, given that France’s history of imperialism throughout the Middle East had led to the establishment of an immigrant under-class that had been alienated from economic or political power. An unresolved problem French society faced nine years ago is the disenfranchisement of its minority populations, not its sudden political and cultural empowerment.
Then Donald Trump became president in the U.S., reminding us all, despite Clinton becoming president without a popular majority and W. Bush becoming president while losing the popular vote and needing the Supreme Court to rig the electoral college, that “one person and one vote” does not rule most democracies
The Submission suggests that lefty voters in the West might ally themselves with illiberal Islamists out of a combination of cultural acceptance, a tendency to side with “the weak” and antipathy for a secular right wing that they view as fascist.
What seemed far-fetched in The Submission is now a huge part of the 2024 election, as Muslim-aligned voters in Michigan, along with their supporters from the left, have turned Michigan into a shockingly contested state.
Even after 9/11, the left in the U.S. had been concerned about waging “war on Islam” and wanted to view movements like Al-Qaeda has something more akin to an international criminal organization than representatives of some sort of culture or nationality that we would clash with in a more traditional war. Left wing thinkers like Christopher Hitchens saw a lot of danger in this because, he argued, countries throughout the Middle East had organized themselves on explicitly illiberal principles.
Hitchens’ argument should feel familiar to anybody who has made the argument that tolerance cannot be extended to intolerant people, like Nazis, because if people in liberal societies tolerate the intolerant, they will eventually wind up oppressed without a fight. The difference, here, is that the western left has no sympathy for Nazis, and a lot of sympathies for people from primarily Islamic countries who they view as the victims of the legacy and perpetuation of Western colonialism in the region. That Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIS or Al-Qaeda have all used civilian populations as “human shields” drives self-defeating political sympathy.
Which brings us back to Houellebecq who warned us back in 2015 that making common cause with religious extremists to counter rightward political extremists is a dangerous proposition (and always has been).
Maybe it’s time to pass around free copies of The Submission on college campuses?