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11-8-05 , 11-10-05 and 11-11-05

liberté, égalité, flambé

by

Jay B. Gaskill

 

THE FIRST PHASE

11-8-05

 

History will later record that the naïve ideals of the French Revolution finally guttered out in 2005.

 

The flames of a new intifada began on October 27th 2005 in France when incendiary mobs of unassimilated Moslem Arab and African “youths” rampaged in several Paris suburbs, overcoming police forces and burning cars block by block, a vehicle conflagration without precedent. 

 

At this writing, the mobs threaten the great city itself. As of November 8th, Clichy-sous-Bois, St-Maurice, Stains, Colombes, Aubervillers and Grigny were in ongoing turmoil, and the rioting had crossed the French-Belgium border. Virtually every one of France’s 25 urban areas is experiencing mob violence. 

 

The fiction that this was merely “youth unrest” driven by economic factors has worn too thin, even for the politically correct press: Islamic extremist voices surface in press accounts as the primal scream of the intifada: “Riot for Islam!” and “[W]e are a single nation and if a single nation is touched, then all the others will erupt like a burning volcano!”.

 

The French Revolution was based on a social construct of absolute equality – an arrangement to be achieved by decree in spite of all natural and cultural differences. Its ruthless implementation consigned a whole generation in Russia and Eastern Europe to economic and political failure.  Marxism, the bastard child of the French Revolution, is still among us, useful as a vestigial foot on a fish, occasionally the source of a terminal social disease.

 

In a more benign form, this same utopian construct spawned suicidal immigration and welfare policies in France, opening the gates to a massive subsidized Islamic migration.  A hard core of culturally and religiously alienated underemployed males, a tinderbox of resentment, became embedded in communities that were alien to France, yet fully within its borders. These young men are, for the most part, not the heads of families; their only stake in the larger world, it seems, is in the success of Islam itself as an uber-religion. 

 

There are now cities and communities in France in which unassimilated Moslem populations are in effective political control of the local power structure. Though France’s immigrant population has been estimated at about 15%, the Islamist plurality within that group has remained stubbornly non-assimilated. They may well have achieved critical mass.  Only the next few years will tell.

 

The concentration of this subpopulation in key areas has created a crisis of control. Roughly five million Muslims live in France, with large aggregations in urban centers.  They far outnumber the French Jewish population; incidents of violent anti-Semitism are all too common.

 

The revolutionary ideals of the French Revolution have turned back on themselves, allowing an atavistic social order to take root within a post-modern one.  France has only timidly begun to reclaim itself as a traditional culture. It doesn’t help that its former Roman Catholicism has been supplanted by a hedonistic, pacifistic, politically correct secularism. 

 

This summer, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, a new member of the old school, successfully sponsored legislation outlawing polygamy and forced marriage among other Islamist customs. 

 

But the overall dynamic does not favour recovery.  Like their fellow Europeans, the French are not reproducing rapidly enough to replace themselves.  Having lost confidence in their own brand of civilization, it becomes less and less plausible that they will assimilate the hordes of newcomers.  They are at risk of being overwhelmed.

 

Over the next few short years, the future of France, and by extension that of Western Europe, will be determined by how vigorously (or at all) that the remnants of traditional civilization reassert themselves.  

 

 

11-10-05

 

THE NEXT PHASE

From an AP account:

Violence in France fell sharply overnight, the police chief said Thursday, one day after the government toughened its stance by imposing emergency measures and ordering deportations of foreigners involved in riots that have raged for two weeks.

In the past two nights, there was a notable decline in the number of car burnings _ a barometer of the intensity of the country's worst civil unrest in nearly four decades.

National Police Chief Michel Gaudin said there was a "very sharp drop" in violence overnight. While youths have been battling riot police with rocks and firebombs, "there were practically no clashes with police," he said.

Assimilation requires time and the existence of an ethos sufficiently attractive that accommodation to it will not forever be resisted.  But the very first element of assimilation is adoption of the local language and the second is the absolute insistence that the rules of the civilization be followed.  Both elements are required but the rules must be followed ab initio.

 

It appears that the French may yet learn that “When in Rome, do as the Romans do” was advice given of necessity to visitors to a robust, self confident civilization. And the baseline power of any civilization worthy of the name is the power of exclusion.  Once that power is lost, the boundaries that define a civilization lose all meaning. An alien, counter-civilization, encapsulated like a tumor, cannot be tolerated when its members refuse to follow the rules.

 

This is not rocket science.

 

 

11-11-05

 

THE “CONVERSATION” PHASE

 

Predictably, members of the French government are now talking about a failure to implement the “sacred” ideal of equality; the communities from which the rioters emerged are talking about discrimination; and other pundits, including our own neo-Marxist leftists, are talking about economic deprivation.

 

Let’s give each conversational thread its due, but add the missing context:

 

  1. The sacred ideal of equality has proved impossible to implement everywhere.  That very goal, in its utopian form was peculiar to the ethos of the French revolution.  The goal of equality in fact (as opposed to equality before the law) was not adopted by the Anglo-American version of the Enlightenment.  Note: My use of the term “sacred” here was intentional.  One only has to reread the speeches of Robespierre to grasp that the French Revolution inaugurated the notion of the state as an inherently sacred replacement for religion. This has made assimilation very, very difficult for “fundamentalist” religious cultures.
  2. Discrimination is another way of describing the famously French version of old-world snobbery, to be sure, but it also is an incidental side effect of the core Islamist culture, transplanted intact from its 12th century milieu, and placed in the middle of a modern, ultra-secular social order.  Every pre-assimilated group in this country has felt “discrimination”, an effect that was largely overcome once the newly arrived culture became assimilated.  Like certain other cultures (think of the classically Chinese communities) these Islamist ex-pats for the most part don’t want to be assimilated. But unlike the innate feelings of cultural superiority felt by many of the old Chinese families, the residuum of cultural self confidence conferred by institutional memory of a great civilization, the Islamist minds of these males are filled with a deep insecurity, the sense of a religious world view “held down” by secular oppression. This is an insecurity all too often masked by a propensity to fanaticism.
  3. The causal role of economic deprivation is unconsciously exaggerated by the neo-Marxists, who having rejected the communist totalitarian versions of socialism in favor of mixed economies, still cling to Marxist economic determinism as a theory of human behavior.  But these riots are about the psychology of dispossessed and marginalized males whose actual economic circumstances (through state subsidies) are far better than the original social and economic conditions prevalent where their parents of grandparents lived before they emigrated from Morocco, North Africa, and other predominately Muslim regions.  These young men share a motivation common to the subsidized Saudi males whose “welfare” is oil revenue based and whose lifestyle, in narrowly material terms, is very wealthy indeed.  These males are driven by the need for meaning and purpose, a need for earned respect that was stripped away by their “kept” circumstances and that is now sought in a “holy” struggle.  This is jihad as therapy in a totally secular environment that seems to officially discount all other forms of meaning and purpose. 

 

In sum, there is trouble ahead for the French and the rest of Western Europe. 

 

However difficult the solutions, nothing can be accomplished until the players understand reality.  Immigration has been slowed down recently.  Assimilation is taking place, if at all, at a glacial pace. 

 

The massive conversion of Europe to an Islamic state is not a pretty picture.  Nor is the prospect of a low level, 20 year civil war. 

 

Europe’s current economic malaise is curable, but only when it sheds the baggage of paleo-socialism and embraces a more dynamic economic model. 

 

Assimilation of alienated cultures will be painfully slow, as long as the rich cultural tradition of old France remains buried in trivial political correctness, and remains closely held by a cultural aristocracy.  As “backward” and “shallow” as the American model might appear to some European minds, this country is still a beacon for constructive social change.  Will the Europeans finally recover from the French Revolution?

 

Stay tuned.