As if in reaction to my earlier post, David A. Andelman explicates the problems underlying the riot in France in a post at American Purpose:
The host of deep-seated fault lines that have sent many into the streets here on so many occasions runs very deep. Vast disparities persist in rank, wealth, privilege, and opportunity between classes; and now—with the increasingly diverse nature of French society—in the distrust, fear, and hatred of individuals who do not look, sound like, nor believe in the same fundamentals as the bulk of the French people.
Perhaps none of this was brought home to me more immediately or viscerally than by a prescient remark from one of France’s great strategic thinkers—Count Alexandre de Marenches, the longest serving head of French intelligence and counselor to presidents from Charles de Gaulle to François Mitterrand.
“The greatest, perhaps mortal, danger for France is the vast community that is living within our nation whose language we do not speak, whose religion we do not embrace, whose customs we do not understand or accept,†he told me in the early 1990s, when we were working on our book The Fourth World War. This is still France’s greatest danger today.
In the thirty years since Marenches’ observation, this nation-within-a-nation has grown and metastasized, adding new elements and accents, into multiple pockets of frustration, poverty, and lack of opportunity that have implanted themselves all over France. Earlier waves of migrants came from French colonies in North Africa (the Maghreb) or southern Africa. The latest waves come from different Islamic regions torn by violence or terrorism.
And therein lies the rub. Historically, France’s colonies like Algeria and Niger were part of France. Legally, the French have allowed more or less open immigration from those places as long those moving to France adopted “Frenchness” which includes the French language and French mores and manners.
Within those constraints the French government doesn’t even keep track of the population by race, country of origin, or religion so long as they’re French.
As M. Andelman observes an increasing number of French people don’t speak French and don’t accept French manners or mores. The Frenchness which is the very foundation of the modern French state is collapsing and I’m not sure what can be done about it.
What can and will be done is collapse of French society until practicality overcomes pretense. I can only hope that occurs before white Frenchmen begin boarding makeshift boats to cross the Atlantic.
Don’t look down on the French. Whites are a minority in the under 15 yo cohort in the US right now, and they will be an absolute minority not later than 2050. The foundation of this country was WASP. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are products of WASP culture. The coming black/brown majority had no part in formulating those documents, and they put no value in them. They actually reject them.
So 20 years from now the Europe and US we know will have disappeared, replaced by something like Latin America, Africa, the Middle East.
If any remnant of Western Civilization persists, it will reside in Russia. Of course, they might be absorbed into China, the final Mongol victory.
bob sykes: The foundation of this country was WASP.
While the literal foundations were laid by Black slaves.
bob sykes: They actually reject them.
“They” is a lot of individuals.
No doubt, some slaves danced a jig when the masters in the big house had declared their freedom. “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, they’s free at last!”
I’ve occasionally observed that my family has probably been here longer than nearly anybody else without having any Native American, English, or sub-Saharan African ancestry. Several branches of my family go back to the 18th century and some may go as far back as the 17th century.