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Paris Burning: How Empires End
by Patrick J. Buchanan
The Romans conquered the barbariansâ and the barbarians conquered Rome. So it goes with empires. And comes now the penultimate chapter in the history of the empires of the West.
| Pat's a little too focused on empires and such for my taste. This isn't Rome, and there are other empires to compare to, even if we were an empire, which we're consciously not. I'm tired of the Spenglerian fall of civilization claptrap. Five hundred years from now people with no more imagination than Buchanan will be studying these events and trying to find parallels for their own problems. |
This is the larger meaning of the ritual murder of Theo Van Gogh in Holland, the subway bombings in London, the train bombings in Madrid, the Paris riots spreading across France. The perpetrators of these crimes in the capitals of Europe are the children of immigrants who were once the colonial subjects of the European empires.
| There's always a larger meaning to be found, isn't there? And if you look hard enough you can find a meaning that's larger than anybody else's. Van Gogh's murder and the Madrid bombings were acts of terrorism, carried out by fascists. I'm even ready to drop the "Islamo" prefix and ignore the fact that they're using anarchist tactics for the sake of argument. I'm coming to the conclusion that the riots in La Belle France are as much a matter of PC milquetoast policies reaching their illogical conclusions as a matter of Islamism. Yes, the perps were once colonial subjects; that has something to do with it, but probably not what Pat theorizes. I might also point out that the Roman empire he keeps alluding to actually Latinized much of its empire and integrated its subjects, so that today what used to be Dacia speaks Romanian and what used to be Iberia speaks Spanish instead of (for the most part) Basque and what used to be Gaul speaks French, all of which are descended from Latin. In 476 A.D. they also had fairly similar cultures and social organizations, which were incorporated into the new order of things, with the patron-client system rather naturally adapting to the personality-driven warlord systems that became feudalism. Any parallels to the U.S.A. today are tenuous at best. |
At this writing, the riots are entering their 12th night and have spread to Rouen, Lille, Marseille, Toulouse, Dijon, Bordeaux, Strasbourg, Cannes, Nice. Thousands of cars and buses have been torched and several nursery schools fire-bombed. One fleeing and terrified woman was doused with gasoline and set ablaze. The rioters are of Arab and African descent, and Muslim.
| Mostly Muslim. But there are parallels that are just as strong to the domestic race-based riots we've seen in the U.S. I believe Cincinatti is the most recent. |
While almost all are French citizens, they are not part of the French people. For never have they been assimilated into French culture or society. And some wish to remain who and what they are. They live in France but are not French.
| Most want to remain what they are, which is the failing of the PC system as well as a characteristic of Islamism. |
The rampage began October 27 when two Arab youths, fleeing what they mistakenly thought was a police pursuit, leapt onto power lines and were electrocuted. The two deaths ignited the riots.
| Along with the young bully boyz' carcasses. I'm still trying to figure why the cops shouldn't have been chasing them if they were thieves, and why their departure from the gene pool caused anyone to pause for a second, much less break out in rioting. |
Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy, a candidate to succeed President Chirac, is said to have infuriated and inflamed the rioters. Before the rampage began, he promised "war without mercy" on crime in the teeming suburbs where unemployment runs at 20% and income is 40% below the national average. He has denounced the rioters as "scum" and "rabble."
| I don't fault him for that. He's the single Frenchie who's in power who's not being PC. I stated the other night that whether you're infuriated and inflamed or happy like a clam or maybe just having a normal day, you're still responsible for your behavior, and that society expects you to behave in a civilized manner. How the citizenry feels is no concern of the government. How the citizenry behaves is. He should wage "war without mercy" on crime, since crime is by definition antisocial behavior. And we've seen that his political rivals have been methodically cutting the floor out from under him even as he's tried to take action. |
Like the urban riots in America in the 1960s, which the Kerner Commission blamed on "white racism," Paris's riots are being blamed on France's failure to bring Islamic immigrants into the social and economic mainstream of the nation. Solutions being offered range from voting rights for non-citizens to affirmative action in hiring for the children of Third World immigrants.
If voting rights are extended to non-citizens, I'd expect them to be extended to all non-citizens, to include me. I was in Gay Paree as recently as 1983, and before that I actually spent several days in the northern part of the country. So obviously I deserve a vote.
Being a Republican, I don't think much of affirmative action, which breaks down to taking a job from one guy and giving it to another for whatever reason the state thinks is a good one. Those ideas are subject to change without notice. The idea of addressing historical injustices seems like a good one, until you notice that affirmative action programs are somehow always open-ended. There's no point at which you stop trying to make up for past injustices, yea, unto the 7th and even the 70th generation, until you're left with another cause for affirmative action years down the road. |
To understand why this is unlikely to solve France's crisis, consider how America succeeded, and often failed, in solving her own racial crisis. While, as late as the 1950s, black Americans were not integrated fully into our economy or society, they had been assimilated into American culture. They worshipped the same God, spoke the same language, had endured the same Depression and war, listened to the same music and radio, watched the same TV shows, laughed at the same comedians, went to the same movies, ate the same foods, read the same books, magazines and newspapers, and went to schools where, even when they were segregated, they learned the same history. We were divided, but we were also one nation and one people. Black folks were as American as apple pie, having lived in our common land longer than almost every other ethnic group save Native Americans. And America had a history of having assimilated immigrants in the tens of millions from Europe. But no European nation has ever assimilated a large body of immigrant peoples, let alone people of color.
| Nailed that one, didn't you, Pat? |
Moreover, the African and Islamic peoples pouring into Europe â there are 20 million there now â are, unlike black Americans, strangers in a new land, and millions wish to remain proud Algerians, Muslims, Moroccans. These newcomers worship a different God and practice a faith historically hostile to Christianity, a traditionalist faith that is rising again and recoils violently from a secular culture saturated in sex.
| Which explains the failure of PC. The immigration policies are goofy. Everyone but Jacques and Dominique admit that. |
Severed from the civilization and cultures of their parents, these Arab and Muslim youth may hold French citizenship and carry French passports, but they are no more French than Americans who live in Paris are French. Searching for a community to which they can truly belong, they gravitate to mosques where the imams, many themselves immigrants, teach and preach that the West is not their true home, but a civilization alien to their values and historically hostile to their nations and Islam. The soaring Muslim population is a Fifth Column inside Europe.
| Excellent statement of the obvious, but it has nothing to do with the breakup of the "American empire." Pat's merely wandered off subject, I think. |
Nevertheless, their numbers must grow. For not only do they have a higher birth rate than the native-born Europeans, no European nation, save Moslem Albania, has a birth rate (2.1 births per woman) that will enable it to endure for many more generations. The West is aging, shrinking, and dying. Yet, to keep Europe's economy growing and taxes coming in to fund the health and pension programs of Europe's rising numbers of retired and elderly, Europe needs scores of millions of new workers. And Europe can only find them in the Third World.
| To work where? You just pointed out that the turbans have a hideous unemployment rate. The benefits they receive actually drain the economy, because the Frenchies, like the noble Romans before them, have created a low-paid liesure class that has nothing to do but sell drugs to each other and riot. |
Nor should Americans take comfort in France's distress. By 2050, there will be 100 million Hispanics in the United States, half of them of Mexican ancestry, heavily concentrated in a Southwest most Mexicans still believe by right belongs to them.
| Maybe most Mexicans do, but most Mexican-Americans don't. Mexican-Americans have been around since the Republic of Texas, and they were there before then, just calling themselves something else. We share at least the European part of our culture with them, and given time they assimilate into the larger culture. The problem we're having is that they're coming faster than they can be assimilated, but it's not the same problem Europe is having. The North Africans in Europe refuse to be assimilated. |
Colonization of the mother countries by subject peoples is the last chapter in the history of empires â and the next chapter in the history of the West â that is now coming to a close.
| That is your concluding sentence? It has little to do with what you were taking about, and even where it does there are strong counterarguments. It's apples and oranges, conclusions drawn from weak evidence, and the arguments have zip to do with American hegemony, existent or non-. Go organize a vanity campaign or something. |
Posted by: Saint Michel 2005-11-10 |
