Posted on 11/09/2005 7:05:39 PM PST by SLB
"Civilization is hideously fragile," argued C. P. Snow. "There's not much between us and the horrors underneath, just about a coat of varnish."
Snow's statement takes on ominous overtones in light of the raging riots in and around Paris. Over the past nearly two weeks, demonstrations, rioting, car burnings, and various other acts of violence have spread throughout the suburban enclaves where the city's ethnic minorities--mostly immigrants from North Africa--are congregated. The violence is not limited to France. Similar violence has erupted in Brussels and other European cities. Clearly, something has gone horribly wrong.
Even as many in the Western media attempt to downplay the extent and nature of this violence, the smoke is spreading, and the debris is mounting. The world has watched as France has been thrown into a state of emergency, with riots, street fighting, and arson enveloping entire neighborhoods. The weak, slow, and confused response of the French government has only exacerbated the problem. Even as the government declared a state of emergency, French authorities still deny the extent of the disorder.
For years now, observers have warned that Europe has put itself in a position of tremendous vulnerability. Even as European birth rates have fallen below population replacement levels, immigrants, largely from Muslim lands, have been eagerly received and put to work. In one sense, many Western European nations built the economic expansions they experienced during the 1960s and 1970s on a base of immigrant labor.
Now, France and its neighboring countries are reaping what they have sown. The economic growth of the 1960s and 1970s has been replaced with economic stagnation and rampant unemployment. The young men now rioting in the streets of Paris represent the second generation of immigrants, and they face a bleak future with little hope of gaining jobs or a chance to obtain the European vision of happiness and prosperity.
Furthermore, they don't want to embrace that European worldview in the first place. To a far greater extent than their parents, these second-generation inhabitants of minority enclaves want to reassert their Islamic identity and force their agenda upon the nation.
France is now home to an estimated six million Muslims, most of African descent. This Muslim population, the largest in Europe, represents almost one tenth of the total population of France. "The government hasn't really realized we're facing a major political crisis," said Patrick Lozes, president of the Circle for the Promotion of Diversity in France told The Washington Post. "The French social model is exploding."
Indeed, as The Wall Street Journal noted, "France is the main testing ground of the continent's ability to bring this rapidly growing minority into the fold." It's not going well.
The Europeans have prided themselves on rejecting America's concept of the "melting pot." Instead of assimilating immigrants into the larger national culture, France (along with most other Western European nations) has encouraged immigrants to maintain their own identity, language, and culture and has created a "salad bowl" model that now contributes to this civil strife.
Without doubt, the protests are linked to economic realities. Young men who have little opportunity for jobs and economic power can easily opt-out of the entire cultural project--especially when they were never invited to join in the first place. Unemployment among French citizens in their twenties now stands at twenty percent, and the unemployment rate for members of the country's minority population of the same age is forty percent. This alone is a recipe for disaster.
Nevertheless, the economic explanation is woefully insufficient. The rioters, often identified in the press as "youths," are agents of violent rage and social anarchy. As observer Mark Steyn comments, the riot is now taking on the shape of "a rather shrewd and disciplined campaign."
The urban terrorists who are rioting in France have taken their cues from terrorists in the Middle East, where car burnings and similar demonstrations of violence have become a means of routine political protest.
Paul Belien, writing from Belgium, suggests that France is no longer able to defend itself against the forces of barbarism. "Unlike their fathers, who came to France from Muslim countries, accepting that, whilst remaining Muslims themselves, they had come to live in a non-Muslim country, the rioters see France as their country," he explains. "They were born here. This land is their land. And since they are Muslims, this land, or at least a part of it, is Muslim as well."
Furthermore, Belien argues that the rioters are not driven by anger, but by hatred. These young agents of disorder do not merely hate their limited economic prospects, but the very civilization that has harbored them. "It is hatred," Belien insists. "Hatred caused not by injustice suffered, but stemming from a sense of superiority. The 'youths' do not blame the French, they despise them."
Steyn suggests that the widespread outbreak of violence in Paris and beyond represents "the start of a long Eurabian civil war." Steyn, along with other concerned observers, understands that Europe is heading for a Muslim future. After all, the Muslims are having babies at a rate that far exceeds native Europeans. Furthermore, they are driven by a clear political agenda, deep Islamic conviction, and a clear and coherent concept of what they want the culture to be--an Islamic state.
The French, on the other hand, while possessed of an enormous sense of cultural superiority, no longer possess a clear or coherent concept of what it means to be French. They stress tolerance, but have embraced forces of radical intolerance.
As Thomas Sowell explains, "In the name of tolerance, these countries have imported intolerance, of which growing antisemitism in Europe is just one example. In the name of respecting all cultures, Western nations have welcomed people who respect neither the cultures nor the rights of the population among whom they have settled."
Steyn's concept of "Eurabia" also points to the links between the violence in France and the simmering hatreds of the Middle East. For the last several decades, France has attempted to appease its Muslim citizens by supporting Arab governments, criticizing Israel, and offering financial assistance to radical groups such as Hamas. Presumably, the frustrated Muslim youth of France were to be thankful for the French government's support of Muslim extremism in the Middle East. What possessed the French to think that the extremism would remain outside its own borders?
The unrest in France should serve to underline the deep cultural commitments that are fundamental to civilization. No society can withstand the threat of rampant anarchy from within. Civilization is always an achievement--a work and project embraced and supported by the vast majority of citizens, who enter into a social compact for the common good.
France has struggled with these ideals ever since the French Revolution. Unlike the American Revolution, which was established upon an inherited Christian worldview and the conservative streams of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution was radical, violent, anarchic, and highly secular.
Indeed, secularism has been an official French project for most of the last two centuries. Even as the French revolutionaries replaced the cross on the altar of the Cathedral of Notre Dame with a likeness of the goddess Reason, the French have prided themselves on the highly secular nature of their cultural experiment.
From one angle, this experiment appears to be a radical success. After all, only a small minority of French citizens consider themselves active Christians. Christianity plays almost no public role in the nation and its public culture. On the other hand, it is now apparent that this secularism, so eagerly embraced as a national project, has left a huge vacuum in the soul of French civilization. Even as nature abhors a vacuum, a secular vacuum will not long survive. The Muslim youths now rampaging through the streets of Paris want to fill that vacuum with Muslim rage.
Writer Theodore Dalrymple speaks of "barbarians at the gates of Paris." Those who honor civilization and understand, like C. P. Snow, that civilization is "hideously fragile," must look to France with concern and soberness. Will European civilization soon be a thing of the past?
Mark Steyn's observation about the riots being organized is correct. This is part of the pattern of jihad. Muslims will test the defenses of prospective targets with "razzia" - raid-like actions carried out to the rapidity and force of response from their ultimate targets.
They used the identical tactics in Kosovo, which they now control (thanks to help from the EU, UN, the Clinton and Bush administrations). Here's a run-down of Muslim action there: http://www.balkanpeace.org/hed/archive/july01/hed3809.shtml
France and old Europe have failed the test miserably. The "yoots" may take the French regime's bribe of money and racial preferences and calm down in the short term, which will enable them to increase their stocks of AKs, RPGs, and C4 for the real conquest to be carried out later, when their numbers will be even greater.
The Euros are already behaving like servile, feet-shuffling dhimmis. Not too long ago, London's Tate Museum (the same museum that displayed the "sculptures" of the Virgin Mary made of dung a few years back) removed artwork that Muslims might find offensive. When people swallow decades of lies from the cultural Marxists in control of government, education, media, and even churches (such as they are in Europe), they become slaves in spirit. Unless there is a real sea-change, dhimmitude will surely be their destiny.
Ping for a later read, when I'm not too tired to digest all this.
<< Well, at least there are the Aussies. >>
I am in Australia at present and am daily appalled by the huge numbers of people here who blindly and/or willingly/hatefully join the un-and-anti-Australian and America [And, it follows, Judeo-Christian/Western Civilization] hating ranks of and follow such of the Socialist Internationalist lickspittles as the execrable "Green"senators, Bob Brown and Kerry Nettle and other politicians of the as-execrable and as haplessly power-hungry and stand-for-nothing, fall-for-anything 'Australian "Democrats"' and of the underlying foundational core of the Australian Labour Party.
But, while never losing sight of the awful reality of the obscenely-opportunistic gun grab he pulled a few years ago - and that he is on record as saying often and emphatically that the protection and defense of one's and one's family lives is not an acceptable to his government reason to be issued a permit to own a weapon - am somewhat relieved by the steadying tiller hand of Aussie battler and prime minister, John Howard.
And I particularly like the unshakable resolve to live in and to deal with reality that is demonstrated every minute of every day by Australia's former Minister for Immigration and present Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock. Mr Ruddock has a Vice-President Dick Cheney-like quality.
And, should John Howard decide to retire, oh that the indefatigable Mr Ruddock succeed him as prime minister.
I've been looking for the most recent news about France today on FR and there hasn't been any. You know of any French blogs and can you read French?
I find an uncanny resemblance to these haters as portrayed in Orwell's "1984". To give the unwashed masses in that novel, a chance to unleash pure hate, they chant GOLDSTEIN GOLDSTEIN. This is because it is an outlet. Their inner hate is then dissipated. To say they hate Big Brother is death by torture.
In Canada it is HATE BUSH, HATE BUSH. The fools cannot even give an articulate reason. They mouth off what the television often implies. They see and hear some vile twisted American politicians on the left, when they switch channels. Uncanny re "1984".
Well, a bit of a screed, hope you do not mind. Tis' a dark November night around the Great Lakes. Tommorrow, thirty years ago, the gallant ship Edmund Fitzgerald went down. Time for me to get some shut eye. Cheers.
"There's no such place as Kansas City, Kansas. That's just a myth." --Rush Limbaugh
Islam, The Alleged Religion of Peace® ( TARP™ )? Click this picture:
No, I am not exaggerating. Click the pic, go to "last," and read backwards.
If you are not informed about this stuff, you will be made sick. If you are informed, you will be made mad, all over again.
Then, there is this little problem...
For "Thunder on the Border," click the picture:
Kindly note tagline:
A very entertaining read.
I thought France will slide into Chaos in somewhere around 2020, I was wrong. The violence came much earlier than I thought.
Let France go to hell, this is what they get for support Hamas and Hazbolla, LOL!
Although the ecological/climatic disaster that precipitated the Dark Ages didn't make North Africa unliveable, it pretty much kicked civilization there in the teeth for many centuries.
Spain ended up being the high spot in the West and attracted everybody worth knowing.
Car fires up since last night down since Sunday, but in my opinion it has gotten worse because they are now targeting power stations (two was burned last night.)
Non-Muslim areas has had little damage so far.
My brother-in-law now lives near Paris he is none political and told us the riots are a long way from him and doesn’t effect him at all. That comment in itself is interesting to me. In other words the Muslims are only hurting themselves.
http://no-pasaran.blogspot.com/ and http://www.france-echos.com/ are good ones...
I can read French, but you can probably use online translation software to figure out some stuff...
Thanks. That's what I was wondering. How pathetic that they blame all their problems on others and only make it worse for themselves. I could understand why someone would want to lash out at others in anger but to destroy yourselves is beyond comprehension.
<< -They have left our borders unattended and unguarded and an unchecked criminal invasion and increasingly hostile colonization robs us of our language and our culture - and Rule of Law.
And, because the vote has been extended to every criminal alien colonist - and to his dog and his every turd-wurld relative, who can register online to vote and vote in any election without ever having set foot in America, of our beloved Fraternal Republic. Ten or twenty years?
Better be prepared and have your weapons close to hand. If not already loaded and cocked. >>
Locked and loaded, I say.Yes. I knew when I wrote that part about being taken over in ten or twenty years that it was more like today and tommorrow instead. Just hate to deal with the cold hard facts, I guess.
<< Just hate to deal with the cold hard facts, I guess. >>
Welcome to the Western World.
[And its suicide watch]
Ten or twenty years? I think it could be one or two years.
<< Ten or twenty years? I think it could be one or two years. >>
Me too!
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