"A Cold Hand Just Touched Me"
Morrissey's "Notre Dame" Lyrics in the Wake of the Plot to Destroy the Cologne Cathedral
So apparently, Islamist terrorists wanted to blow this up, and were some steps down the road of delivery:
And maybe also this:
Of course, it’s early in the reports and investigations, and no, we can’t trust our intelligence agencies as much as we tended to in the 80s-10s era, but here’s the info they’re releasing:
Early indications point to the Taliban’s Islamist State of Afghanistan, the regime so strengthened by Biden’s idiocy, being a major player in the plot. (I regard debate about whether we should have to some degree stayed in Afghanistan, or gotten out entirely, as legitimate, so don’t over-interpret my meaning when I mention the fact that Biden’s pull-out was disastrous.)
What emotions would you be undergoing now, had the bastards brought it down this New Year’s Eve as intended? Sadly, given current patterns, it is rational to predict an Islamist cathedral-downing is going to happen in Europe at some point.
One of Morrissey’s newer songs, another unwillingly unreleased one, “Notre Dame,” is the most apropos commentary:
Notre-Dame, we know who, tried to, kill you (2x)
Notre-Dame, we will not, be silent (2x)
Before investigations
They said, 'This is not terrorism!'
…Notre-Dame, a cold hand, just, touched me (2x)
Notre-Dame, we will not be silent (2x)
The cold hand is that of Islamist killers, who want to chill your heart, to freeze it in resignation, in hopelessness. It may be “un-televised,” and you may dearly want to not see it, but it is there all right, fingering, probing our weaknesses and divisions.
Do you remember how you felt when you first saw the images of Notre Dame cathedral in flames that day in 2019, before we knew that it would be saved in the main?
Morrissey apparently doesn’t believe the official explanations about how that fire started. I have not, for the purposes of writing this, looked into how stories about the investigation have played out in the four years since. I know the official explanation released a month or so afterwards felt fishy, and like Morrissey, I was disgusted that a summary dismissal of the terrorism possibility was issued so quickly in the days and hours afterwards. Still, the official explanation could nonetheless be correct.
But the Cologne plot, assuming the evidence for its existence and seriousness stands up, shows you why it hardly matters whether we will ever be certain that the official Notre Dame explanation is the most likely one, since Morrissey’s hunch has at least proven true with this other “cathedral-event-of-concern.”
The song was unveiled in live performance this year, and recorded in a studio version, but remains unreleased due to the machinations of music-biz insiders who wish to punish Morrissey for a number of off-the-reservation-remarks, but most of all, for his willingness to support the dissident British figures who call for limitations upon future Muslim immigration, most particularly those of the now-defunct minor party For Britain, such as Anne Marie Waters.
For my writing on the suppression of his newer music, a prime example of what Bret Weinstein calls “surgical totalitarianism,” see:
from summer of ‘22: Carl’s Rock Songbook, No. 132, Morrissey “Bonfire of Teenagers”
and from February of this year: “An Update on the suppression of Morrissey’s Music”
and in a recent best-albums of ‘23 piece, I shared this excellent compilation of live versions of the songs from his two suppressed albums:
Update: I should mention that the best political-philosophy resource for thinking about the Islamist and plain-Islamic threat to Europe remains Pierre Manent’s Beyond Radical Secularism: How France and the Christian West Should Respond to the Islamic Challenge.