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Europe

Paris Burning: How Empires End

2005-11-10

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

#9 "But after 1968 and, still more after 1981 we had teachers who denigrated France . . . "

This is also a problem here and an aspect of social deconstructionism which is aimed at undermining existing strengths in a society and replacing them with a new "ethic"--leading to political change favoring the left. First they must dismantle the guiding values of the society, then they can change it, and ultimately claim control.

Thanks for your posts JFM.

Posted by: ex-lib 2005-11-10 12:00

#8 I forgot a factor: France had not been at war with Italy and for Napolonic invasion of Spain it was over a century ago. This was not the case with Algerians who in addition had a governemnt who fanned on anti-French hate in order to hide its illegitimacy. (It would be intesresting to know the composition of Muslim rioters: evenly spread between Morrocans, Tunisians and Algerians or disproportionately Algerian).

Posted by: d 2005-11-10 11:15

#7 Thank you for your insight, JFM, it's always a good learning expierience for me to read your comments. I sincerely hope things work out for France.

Posted by: Deacon Blues 2005-11-10 11:07

#6 While France has not assimilated huge coloured populations it has absorbed LOTS of Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, Poles and the Chinese/Vietnamese are not doing bad.

The difference is:

1) Unlike Italians or Portuguese who considered France as richer, more advanced and more learned than their countries, these are immigrants who have an ideology telling they are superior to the locals. You don't want to assimilate with inferiors: think in a Nazi moving to Black Africa

2) All things being equal you have more crime between the marginalized people but it much worse when those people follow a doctrine who encourages atacking and plundering the infidels. This will reinforce the racist feeling from the locals (BTW, the European immigrants also met with racism but their chiklds or grand-childs were just French with funny names)

3) At the time when Italians or Portuguese were moving to France they were nearly completely cut off from their original cultures. Modern immigrants travel far more to their country of origin, have satellite dishes their governments have created programs to keep them in touch with their original country both culturally and ideologically. In the old times the child of immigrants felt nothing special about the country of their fathers and would have had no qualms in serving in the army against it.

4) In those glorious days there was no multicultism. Every French teacher even when his class was 90% immigrant or even when sent to Black Africa opened his history book and told "Our ancestors the Gauls, had blond hair and blue eyes". Meaning that whatever your ethinc roots, spiritually you were a French and had Gaul ancestors. Period. And he felt he made them a favour by molding them into a superior nation and culture (and please no anti-french sneers: just compare the numbrer of Nobel Prizes and Field Medals of France vs Spain, Italy or Portugal). But after 1968 and, still more after 1981 we had teachers who denigrated France, felt their duty to bend backwards for accomodating the immigrants, organized arabic lessons while the MSM were telling that all cultures were equal, that we could not be judgemental (and that is why, poligamy and female genital mutilation were not actively pursued) and that any problem was due to French racism and none to pooor immigrants.

Posted by: JFM 2005-11-10 10:43

#5 One wishes careers as moron political pundits were ended half as easily.

Buchanan is the left's favorite "conservative". He'll either say things so stupid they make conservatives in general look bad, or he'll say things the left is in complete agreement with.

For this, they continue to support him.

Posted by: Robert Crawford 2005-11-10 07:56

#4 great comments Fred.
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.

I've actually been thinking about this today. It must cause a little bit of unease in the group that we refer to as "elites", when they look around and realize that their beloved uprising by the masses actually has a chance of coming to pass. Yet... how strange it must be for them to look in the mirror and realize that they, themselves, are the very ones that the masses are revolting against. For so long, "the elites", full of self-righteous piety, have encouraged and empowered "the masses" to act. And now they wake up to discover the masses are rattling at the gates of their gated communities. And whoa and behold, "the elites" are not their champions, but their intended target.

So now these "elites" are forced into a catch 22 if they want to practice all they preached. They are forced to be tolerant of the intolerant, who wish to destroy all that the "elites" claimed they stood for - women's rights, sexual freedom, religious tolerance, dialogue instead of war, etc. etc. And to fight those who threaten to burn down everything they claim to stand for - the "elites" have to do the very things that they have so long claimed to be against. What to do?

I'm going to try and get my thought across without too much time and effort, I need to get some sleep - But it is the logical conclusion.

It occurs to me that what we are seeing is the end of an era where the prevailing wisdom was that peace, love and group hugs are all the world needs to be a happy place. To summarize - we discovered that if you have a war, and nobody comes - then good people get raped, massacred and starved, on a consistent basis.

The leftist elites for so long have claimed the moral high ground in polite society and have shut down dissent of their viewpoint with screams of ~~heretic witch~~ "racist" to anyone who dares to dissent. Recent articles did a great job of discussing the demands of impossible purity and perfection.

To get to the end of my long rambling point - I think there are times when the "prevailing wisdom" just shifts. At one time, to discuss mental illness, you had to invoke Freud to have credibility. Now we look back and just see him as a perv with an excessive obscession over sex and bowel movements.

And so it is with just about all of the the new and improved "wisdom" of the sixties. The true believers will continue to cling to their doctrine, proclaiming you just need more faith to make it come to pass. But the beliefs are now officially defunt. Those that espouse them are no longer wise sages, but old fools.

I'm sorry for wasting so much bandwith...but I'm in that tired, rambling mode. So if you are still with me... I have one last thought.

Today when I was driving, I stopped for some geese to cross the road - so did all of the other cars. And it occured to me, how the Islamists and the rioters are like these geese. I could easily run them over and squash them - but I had no desire to do so. The big one stopped in the middle of the road, acting all tough - and I dutifully obliged him, because I could. But if the situation were such that my life depended on not stopping - well - I'd try my best to avoid him... but hey.. stuff happens.

And that is basically how this conflict will end. We are the car - the rioters/fanatics are the geese. At some point - they will have to get out of the road, or we will be forced to run them over.

Posted by: 2b 2005-11-10 07:18

#3 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.

Author! Author! Orwellian Siamese twins these two diseased concepts might be.

Posted by: Zenster 2005-11-10 04:34

#2 One wishes careers as moron political pundits were ended half as easily.

Posted by: .com 2005-11-10 03:46

#1 Has Pat ever got any prediction right?
I never take him seriously as I can not remember any thing he has claimed that came out the way he claimed. In other words his functional score is a bit low.

Posted by: 3dc 2005-11-10 01:41

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