Michel Houellebecq, Platform, Kindle Edition, 2004

Posted on July 1, 2021 by Martin van Creveld

Famed French author Michel Houellebecq does not need an introduction. That is why, instead of reviewing the book in the normal way, I decided to simply present some passages I found particularly striking. Not necessarily nice or pleasant—Houellebecq is not the kind of writer who makes you feel good about yourself, let alone the society in which you spend your life. But striking. Especially when I read them for the second time. Readers are welcome to agree, disagree, or add any others of their own; after all, though I expect to be censored every day, so far my blog remains free.

The words in italics after some paragraphs are mine.

p. 104.

“Further along there was a table of Hong Kong Chinese – recognizable by their filthy manners, which are difficult for Westerners to stomach, and which threw the Thai waiters into a state of panic, barely eased by the fact that they were used to it. Unlike the Thais, who behave in all circumstances with a finicky, even pernickety propriety, the Chinese eat rapaciously, laughing loudly, their mouths open, spraying bits of food everywhere, spitting on the ground and blowing their noses between their fingers – they behave quite literally like pigs. To make matters worse, that’s an awful lot of pigs.

Based on personal observation, I agree.

p. 112-13.

“At the time when the white man thought himself superior, racism wasn’t dangerous. For colonials, missionaries and lay teachers in the nineteenth century, the Negro was a big animal, none too clever, a sort of slightly more evolved monkey. At worst, they considered him a useful beast of burden, capable of performing complex tasks; at best a frustrated soul, coarse, but, through education, capable of elevating himself to God – or at least western reason. In both cases, they saw in him a ‘lesser brother’, and one does not feel ‘At the time when the white man thought himself superior, racism wasn’t dangerous. For colonials, missionaries and lay teachers in the nineteenth century, the Negro was a big animal, none too clever, a sort of slightly more evolved monkey. At worst, they considered him a useful beast of burden, capable of performing complex tasks; at best a frustrated soul, coarse, but, through education, capable of elevating himself to God – or at least western reason. In both cases, they saw in him a ‘lesser brother’, and one does not feel hatred for an inferior – at most a sort of cordial contempt. This benevolent, almost humanist racism has completely vanished. The moment the white man began to consider blacks as equals, it was obvious that sooner or later they would come to consider them to be superior. The notion of equality has no basis in human society… Once white men believed themselves to be inferior,.. the stage was set for a different type of racism, based on masochism: historically, it is in circumstances like these that violence, inter-racial wars and massacres break out. For example, all anti-Semites agree that the Jews have a certain superiority: if you read anti-Semitic literature, you’re stuck by the fact that the Jew is considered to be more intelligent, more cunning, that he is credited with having singular financial talents – and, moreover, greater communal solidarity. Result: six million dead.”

Western society seems to be determined to making men qua men feel inferior. That, my dear feminists, is when things become really dangerous for you.

p. 113-14.

“Racism… ‘seems to be characterized firstly by an accumulation of hostility, a more aggressive sense of competition between males of different races; but the corollary is an increased desire for the females of the other race. What is really at stake in racial struggles…is neither economic nor cultural, it is brutal and biological: it is competition for the cunts of young women.”

p. 115.

“[In Europe] it’s not the whites that make the law any more … I predict an increase in racial violence in Europe in years to come; it will all end in civil war… It will all be settled with Kalashnikovs.”

p. 188-89.
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“As we get closer to suffering and cruelty, to domination and servility, we hit on the essential, the intimate nature of sexuality… “Cruelty is a primordial part of the human, it is found in the most primitive peoples: in the earliest tribal wars, the victors were careful to spare the lives of some of their prisoners to let them die later, suffering hideous tortures. This tendency persisted, it is constant throughout history, it remains true today: as soon as a foreign or civil war begins to erase ordinary moral constraints, you find human beings – regardless so. Cruelty is a primordial part of the human, it is found in the most primitive peoples: in the earliest tribal wars, the victors were careful to spare the lives of some of their prisoners to let them die later, suffering hideous tortures. This tendency persisted, it is constant throughout history, it remains true today: as soon as a foreign or civil war begins to erase ordinary moral constraints, you find human beings – regardless of race, people, culture – eager to launch themselves into the joys of barbarism and massacre. This is attested, unchanging, indisputable, but it has nothing whatever to do with the quest for sexual pleasure – equally primordial, equally strong.

p. 211.

A source of permanent, accessible pleasure, our genitals exist. The god who created our misfortune, who made us short-lived, vain and cruel, has also provided this form of meagre compensation. If we couldn’t have sex from time to time, what would life be? A futile struggle against joints that stiffen, caries that form. All of which, moreover, is as uninteresting as humanly possible – the collagen which makes muscles stiffen, the appearance of microbic cavities in the gums.

p. 240-42.

“Something must be happening to make Westerners stop sleeping with each other; maybe it’s something to do with narcissism, or individualism, the cult of success, it doesn’t matter. The fact is that from about the age of twenty-five or thirty, people find it very difficult to meet new sexual partners; although they still feel the need to do so, it’s a need which fades very slowly. So they end up spending thirty years of their lives, almost the entirety of their adult lives, suffering permanent withdrawal.

Halfway along the path to inebriation, just before mindlessness ensues, one sometimes experiences moments of heightened lucidity. The decline of western sexuality was undoubtedly a major sociological phenomenon which it would be futile to attempt to explain by such and such a specific psychological factor… You have several hundred million Westerners who have everything they could want but no longer manage to obtain sexual satisfaction: they spend their lives looking, but they don’t find it and they are completely miserable. On the other hand, you have several billion people who have nothing, who are starving, who die young, who live in conditions unfit for human habitation and who have nothing left to sell except their bodies and their unspoiled sexuality. It’s simple, really simple to understand: it’s an ideal trading opportunity.

p. 244-54.

“Giving pleasure unselfishly: that’s what Westerners don’t know how to do any more. They’ve completely lost the sense of giving. Try as they might, they no longer feel sex as something natural. Not only are they ashamed of their own bodies, which aren’t up to porn standards, but for the same reasons they no longer feel truly attracted to the body of the other. It’s impossible to make love without a certain abandon, without accepting, at least temporarily, the state of being in a state of dependency, of weakness. Sentimental adulation and sexual obsession have the same roots, both proceed from some degree of selflessness; it’s not a domain in which you can find fulfilment without losing yourself. We have become cold, rational, acutely conscious of our individual existence and our rights; more than anything, we want to avoid alienation and dependence; on top of that we’re obsessed with health and hygiene: these are hardly ideal conditions in which to make love. The way things stand, the commercialization of sexuality in the East has become inevitable.”

p. 361.

“More than any other people, [the Germans] are acquainted with worry and shame, they feel the need for tender flesh, for soft, endlessly refreshing skin. More than any other people, they are acquainted with the desire for their own annihilation. It is rare to come across the vulgar, smug pragmatism of Anglo-Saxon sex tourists among them, that manner of endlessly comparing goods and prices. It is equally rare for them to exercise, to look after their bodies. In general, they eat too much, drink too much beer, get fat; most of them will die pretty soon. They are often friendly, they like to joke, to buy a round, to tell stories; but their company is soothing and sad.

I have lived in Germany and am fluent in the language. I’d say that hardly any German over 13 is free from the burden: the more they deny it, the guiltier they feel.

I understand death now… I don’t think it will do me much harm.”

But life can.

Les dames sans merci

Posted on August 3, 2017 by Martin van Creveld

Let’s hand it to women: Rarely in history were they in a position to make law and apply it. For every female legislator who ever lived there were ten, probably more, male ones. For every female judge ten, probably more, male ones. Rarely if ever were executioners—those who did the dirty work of decapitating people, burning them at the stake, crucifying them, stoning them to death, and so on—female.

Still there is little doubt that women are as capable of engaging in cruelty as men are. To start, as so often, with Greek mythology. Not, needless to say, because the stories describe real events that actually took place. But because, as their longevity and continuing popularity suggests, they often penetrate deep into the human soul. Perhaps more than any others, they seem to bring out many of the strange and terrible things it is capable of doing.

To punish Acteon for having seen her naked, the hunting goddess Artemis changed him into a stag and had him torn to pieces by his own hunting dogs. To punish Alcmena for having slept with Zeus, the latter’s wife Hera sent snakes to kill the infant Heracles (she failed). For having done the same, she had Io stung by so many gadflies until she went stark raving mad and tried to kill herself. Medea killed her brother, two of her children, and one of her uncles. On another occasion she tricked two young women into boiling their father and eating them. All without being punished, incidentally.

As the saying goes, “no fury like a jilted women.” Not for nothing did the Greeks imagine the Erinyes, the goddesses of vengeance and retribution, as women. So terrifying was Medusa’s visage that anyone who looked at her was instantly turned into stone. But modesty and jealousy were not the only motives that drove some women to commit dastardly acts. As well-known as any of the above is the story of Orpheus. Orpheus was a singer and lute-player. So sweet was his music that the beasts of the field flocked to listen to him. At one point in he lost his beloved wife Euridice, was allowed to retrieve her from the underworld, and lost her for the second time. Wandering about forlornly, he came across a group of Maenads, followers of the wine-god Dionysius. Half-crazed with wine and music, they tore him to pieces.

In the whole of English history, no ruler had more witches executed than “Good Queen Bess” (Elizabeth I). Among some North American Indian tribes, including the Cherokee, Iroquois, Omaha and Dakota, torturing prisoners of war to death was a female specialty. One objective was to inflict the greatest possible pain; another, to humiliate the victims as much as possible. In nineteenth-century Arabia, by one account, bridegrooms had to undergo a bizarre ceremony. Standing naked, they would have the skin of their penises stripped off in front of their prospective bride. The latter assumed a sitting position and watched the proceedings while beating a drum. If he flinched she had the right to reject him.

Referring to Britain’s wars in northwestern India, Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) wrote:

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,

and the women come out to cut up what remains,

jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
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and go to your gawd like a soldier.

Throughout history, women have flocked to watch executions just as much as men did. The Vestal Virgins had privileged seats at the amphitheater where they could enjoy, among other nice shows, people of both sexes being savaged by wild beasts and women being made to copulate with animals. Voltaire tell us that, during the torture and execution of the would-be regicide Robert François Damiens at the Place de Grève in 1757, female spectators not only outnumbered male ones but displayed greater insensitivity to the victim’s horrible sufferings. The knitting women (tricoteuses) of the guillotine, as they were known, have remained justly famous. American women, as well as American men, routinely watch as criminals are being put to death. And what is it that the beautiful young woman, with slightly parted lips, in one of Kees van Dongen’s paintings is looking at? A bullfight, perhaps? Or an auto-da-fe?

The list of women who enjoyed other people’s pain and suffering and were sometimes actively involved in inflicting it could be extended at will. Here I shall limit myself to just two more examples. The World-War II German Einsatzgruppen, which between them may have killed as many as a million Jews in Russia and Poland, hardly need to be introduced. Less well known is the fact that the wives of some of the commanders involved visited their husbands and watched the proceedings. At least one spent part of her honeymoon shooting prisoners from a balcony.

Women formed a small minority among concentration-camp guards. But this did not prevent some of them, notably Irma Grese of Bergen-Belsen, Maria Mandel of Auschwitz, Ilse Koch of Buchenwald, and Herta Ehlert of Ravensbrück from gaining a fearsome reputation. Not to mention Herta Oberheuser, also of Ravensbrück. Dr. Oberheuser was a physician who conducted horrifying medical experiments on inmates. Her specialty was to deliberately inflict wounds on her subjects. Next she would rub in foreign objects, such as wood, nails, glass slivers, and dirt so as to simulate injuries received in combat. The experiments, which were very painful, over, she used to finish off her victims by means of lethal injections.

Several of the women in question were married or engaged to their male colleagues, as Frau Koch was. Others were single and, like the men, were exhorted by SS boss Heinrich Himmler to maintain “comradely relations” with the remaining staff. The war over, a few were made to stand trial either at the hands of the occupation authorities or, much later, the German ones. However, only two were executed.

The other example I want to discuss is that of Abu Ghraib, the infamous Iraqi prison not far from Baghdad. Under Saddam Hussein it housed political prisoners many of whom were tortured and executed. Following Saddam’s downfall it was renamed “Camp Redemption”—a nice example of American hypocrisy, that—and used to hold as many as 7,500 prisoners. In charge was a female brigadier general, Janis Karpinski. She commanded a mixed unit of men and women who acted as jailers. The prison seems to have been the scene of much torture, some of it official and inflicted during interrogations and the rest more or less at random by undertrained guards who feared the inmates and hated them. The resulting images, smuggled out and disseminated by the press, shocked the world. The more so because at least one famous artist, the Colombian Fernando Botero, used them to produce a series of paintings. In the end, out seven US soldiers who were convicted, four were female. Karpinski herself was reprimanded and demoted to colonel which meant that her pension went down. But she never stood trial.

Similarly, women have been prominent among suicide bombers. Judging by these examples, women are as capable of committing and enjoying all kinds of terrible acts as men are. If, historically speaking, they did the former much less often, then this was mainly because they did not have the opportunity. As the case of Abu Ghraib shows, now that women are entering every field and profession, including the military, this may very well change.

The question is, is that really what society, and women themselves, want to happen?