Posted on 11/09/2005 3:09:36 PM PST by naturalman1975
DO the shocking French riots over the past two weeks have anything to do with the arrests in Sydney and Melbourne this week, and more generally with the war on terror?
The answer is not much, but perhaps a little. To try to burn a society down, or to try to blow it to bits, as is alleged to be the case with some of those involved in the Australian raids and is certainly the case among al-Qa'ida style terrorists, are both expressions of a deep hostility to that society.
This is not to suggest that the French rioters are in the pay of organised Islamist terrorists. But the hostility that liberal Western societies are generating is astonishing. It cannot be attributed to anti-Americanism brought on by the Satanic excesses of the Bush administration. For no one has been more anti-American than French President Jacques Chirac and the French state he heads.
Like most people who have visited Paris, I fell in love with it on first acquaintance. To sip a coffee on the banks of the Seine, with magnificent French architecture in the background and all the chic of Paris strolling by, is the very acme of a traveller's delights.
I see now that the Paris I visited was really a kind of Disneyland Paris, a theme park historical town, like Williamsburg in the US, restored and maintained for the edification of locals and the servicing of tourists. The real Paris, over the hills, is a rancid territory of exceptional racial hostility and alienation.
There are many causes of this alienation, and much to explore. Not least is the collision of some real grievances, arising out of social exclusion, with the predominant liberal ideology which holds that Western societies are essentially corrupt, unjust, immoral, unworthy of support. This attitude, given its purest expression at Western universities, glorifies transgression, rebellion, subversion.
If the culture glorifies victimhood and rebellion, and if you then do actually victimise people, guess what you're going to get.
This requires deep and further analysis. The French case is in many ways unique. Other societies, however, also have their intractable problems. But three conclusions are almost inescapable.
The first is you cannot run a mass-immigration society, or even perhaps a deeply multiracial society, without a free-market economy and a deregulated labour market. Unemployment in France, with its highly regulated labour market, is officially 10 per cent, though in reality much higher. In many of the largely North African and Arab suburbs that have seen the worst rioting, the unemployment rate is three times the national average.
Only a deregulated labour market delivers the fairly low-paid entry-level jobs that are critical to getting started on the road to prosperity and fulfilment.
The extremely generous French welfare state means that, individually, the residents of the Arab and North African ghettoes are not deprived of absolute income. But as we've seen with our own indigenous population, long-term welfare dependance is utterly demoralising. Many of the rioters are third-generation French citizens who, bizarrely, are less integrated into French life than their grandparents were.
Here is a hard truth. Real and effective welfare reform does necessarily involve limiting and reducing welfare payments, while freeing up the labour market. Of themselves, lower welfare payments do not make it easier to get a job, but they provide the motivation, while a free labour market provides the opportunity. If you don't have something like that you cannot run a mass immigration program.
Secondly, those members of the Liberal Party who argue against compulsory voting should take stock of what a lack of involvement in the political system can mean. As the 19th century showed us, when large sections of the urban population believe the political system doesn't pay any attention to them, the best, perhaps the only, way to get attention is to have an occasional riot so that people take their concerns seriously.
It is a central conservative insight that democracy confers both rights and responsibilities. We have in Australia at times taken that responsibility to include even military service. Attending a polling booth on election day is the mildest possible responsibility. Compulsory voting forces you to take responsibility to think about a political choice at election time. As a result, no large section of our population is permanently alienated from the political system and thus the political system has great legitimacy. Compulsory voting is a magnificent Australian innovation - to tamper with it would be the height of radical folly.
And finally, France and most European societies just have not been as successful as the US, Canada or Australia in integrating immigrants. This is partly because as new-world societies the US, Canada and Australia have no link between citizenship and ethnicity. In the US a new citizen makes a credal commitment. He doesn't have to like baseball or Mark Twain but he does have to believe in the rights and duties and purposes of the US constitution.
In Australia we're more informal but operate essentially the same republican and democratic idea. To be an Australian it's not necessary that you look or talk in any particular way, but simply that you make your civic commitment to Australia and agree to abide by its laws.
We are not as diverse at the top as we should be, especially in our political system - names such as Condoleezza Rice and Alberto Gonzales have sadly never figured in a federal cabinet. But we are very diverse in other leadership positions - it was not remarkable that a Victor Chang should be Australian of the Year. French society, and the French idea of themselves, are much more dominated by a French ethnicity. Not having a dominant ethnicity dating back centuries allows the new world to let everyone write their own script as citizens. It looks like much trouble ahead for the French.
So what's with the crocodiles, already?
Compulsory voting? Does anyone know how they enforce that?
Different tactics are being applied for different countries. Note that the majority of the damage and destruction being visited upon the Frenchish people is in the form of property damage, and not people. In Spain it was directed more at people and disruption of commerce, as it was in the US.
The Frenchish people are considered to be of little consequence in the struggle for supremacy of cultural ideals, and the radical Islamics dismiss them almost contemptiously, as not being worthy of great disruptions.
But Frence would make an excellent bastion for the establishment of a new Caliphate. The Frenchish people shall willingly become Muslims, if that is what is necessary to gain the peace.
The underclass that ate Paris
gee, I thought they were talking about Paris Hilton ....
Your name is ticked off the electoral roll.
If you don't attend, without a good excuse, you have to pay a fine of $50 Australian (about the equivalent of $36 US at the moment).
What he doesn't address is that Islamists don't assimilate well at all in any non-majority Muslim country that they immigrate to. Every horrible terrorist attack around the world today is committed by Muslims. This is no accident, and the author cops out by simply blaming the French.
Pretty much like New Orleans, which of course was also originally French.
Personally, I don't think either compulsory voting or gun owning are good public policy. I'm pretty certain though, that I now understand why Australia has moved so far to the left. I never knew about the compulsory voting. Maybe, although I doubt it, compulsory gun owning would move it back the other way. In any event, it might be handy when the the Indonesian Muslim hordes show up on the northern coast.
I'm not in favour of compulsory voting myself. I teach kids - secondary school and university - and most of them are simply not well informed at 18 or even 21 to cast an informed vote.
There are exceptions, and I think they should have the right to vote. But forcing them to the ballot box basically teaches them that it's OK to vote without thinking.
And that just leads, long term, to a less informed electorate forced to vote.
But it looks like its here to stay. The Labor party loves it - in my view, because they tend to get most of the less informed votes - people who think 'Labor is for the working man', and kids who haven't yet learned that just because something sounds good doesn't mean it actually works.
It's only advantage that I can see is that it does tend to diminish claims that a government doesn't have a mandate in some instances.
I've posted this on a couple of threads about this basic subject: . . . the happenings is France come as a cold slap of reality [to mass immigration supporters]. Someday, well within a century, France will be majority Muslim, what will all the folderol about government regulations and ethnic entrepreneurship mean then? And even if the Muslim New France becomes a economic powerhouse should the former natives celebrate because the land mass previously occupied by their now exterminated culture is doing well financially? The Wall Street Journal thinks so, they are bigger believers in Economic Man than any Marxist, and their brand of internationalism based on capitalism is more destructive than any form of communism. The problem is immigration so vast and of people so different that it is genocidal to the existing culture, not the failure to assimilate or the economic model. Multi-racialism/multiculturalism is a religion in the West, spread by the Holy Church Of Television, and people like the author of this piece will defend it and its practical manifestation, immigration, to the literal death of their nations, or even to their own personal death. There is no evidence to the contrary they won't spin away. This is the fundamentalism that threatens the West, not Islam.
Australia is a country that is 92% white, its problems (as this week's headlines show) are just beginning, and this idiot's gloating over the "success" of integration in Australia.
In the US a new citizen makes a credal commitment. He doesn't have to like baseball or Mark Twain but he does have to believe in the rights and duties and purposes of the US constitution.
Even at a superficial level this statement is a lie. There is no test for new citizens, no requirement that they adhere to the tenets of the Constitution, and many of them are quite brazen in getting off the boat and spitting hatred and contempt on the U.S. That doesn't effect their welcome in the least (it's only been recently that even violent alien criminals were deported with any regularity). Indeed it would be odd if they were required to uphold the legal traditions of traditional America since the very reason for them being brought to the country in the first place is to destroy that traditional society. This argument of the left (parroted by the lapdog right) is a moral fraud: they don't care if the newcomers believe in the Constitution, they don't particularly care if they are economically productive, they only care that they're nonwhite. As the late Samuel Francis wrote of this idea of a credal nation:
Moreover, the Kemp-Bennett claim is dangerous because it fundamentally misunderstands the nature of a nation or of any collective political identity other than a debating society. If indeed being an American were "based on a creed, on a set of principles and ideas," then any person in the world who adhered to that creed would be an American. That might be fine with the open borders crowd whom the Kemp-Bennet statement was designed to please, but it also means that any person who does not adhere to the creed is not an American, and in asserting the credal identity of the United States, the Kemp-Bennett statement comes close to formulating the grounds of a new totalitarianism. The Soviet Union was "based on a creed," and Russians who dissented from the creed were punished severely. How else indeed could a state defining itself through a creed cohere? So far from opening the national gates to anyone who wants to come here, defining American national identity in terms of a creed actually guarantees a closed and perhaps brutally repressive regime and implies nothing whatsoever about what kind of welcome we might give to immigrants.In the first place, if you believe in the Creed, you can be a perfectly good American in the slums of Buenos Aires or the jungles of Rwanda, just as you can be a perfectly good Christian or a perfectly good libertarian or a perfectly good communist, and there's no reason at all for you to come here or go anywhere. In the second place, if adhering to the Creed is what makes you an American, then why not give creed tests to all immigrants, or indeed to native Americans, and if they don't subscribe to the Gospel according to Jack and Bill, round 'em up and send 'em back. No one knows what any of the immigrants to this country, legal or illegal, past or present, believe or have believed, and there is no reason for anyone to be examined or tested as to what they believe before being admitted. The credal basis of national identity that Mr. Kemp and Mr. Bennett blather about may sound both high-minded and broad-minded, but upon any but the most superficial examination, it (like so much else of what they have to say) turns out to be transparently false and, if it were taken any more seriously than most of the slogans and bumper-stickers that pass for high political theory among neo-conservatives, could serve as the basis of a far more restrictive regime than any nativist has ever conceived.
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