France has a failure to assimilate and a dubious future. By Srdja Trifkovic.
After the riots a couple of weeks ago:
Though the Western political establishment pretends to be puzzled by the true cause of the riots, it is the same as it was in 2005, when I noted in Chronicles that Muslims in France and elsewhere in Europe already consider themselves to be de facto autonomous. They see themselves as a community centered on mosques and Islamic centers and justifiably opposed to the broader society of infidels. I wrote then:
“The emergence of a huge diaspora of the faithful away from the heartland is seen by pious Muslims as an event archetypically linked to conquest. The demand for the predominantly Muslim areas to be granted communal self-rule will inevitably lead to the clamoring for the sharia law in a segregated Muslim France. Assimilation is no longer a viable option in France, the country that used to pride itself on its ability to turn foreigners into Frenchmen. That was possible with the Italians, Spaniards, Poles and Russians because they were culturally assimilable and because they came in tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands even (e.g., the non-French Pieds-Noirs), but not in the millions. The Muslims now account for ten percent of France’s population and for more than one-fifth of all newborns. They live in compact communities in which it is no longer possible to buy wine in a local store or to see Amélie in a cinema.”
The French state has failed to integrate its North African and Arab communities into the urban and social fabric because the task is structurally impossible, as illustrated by the current rioters targeting cultural institutions — notably public schools and libraries — more pointedly than in 2005. In the schools of the “difficult neighborhoods” teachers are permanently on the front line in facing the aggressive and often violent demands of teenage. In October 2020, the emblematic episode was the beheading of the history and geography professor, Samuel Paty, just outside his school in the Paris region.
The rejection of French education and culture by Muslim immigrants has become overt and systematic. …
Move over, Gauls
Not a superpower anymore:
France is a former superpower that professes that it still has a destiny of global import. The République is an elective monarchy ruled by regicidal monarchists who still nurture symbols and narratives far greater than their country’s size and economy make likely. Unlike America’s kitschy exceptionalism backed by raw might, the Gallic arrogance is dressed as elegance, a quest for significance rather than dominance.
To that end, ever since De Gaulle entered Paris in August 1944, France has had to simulate a grandeur that is beyond her station by any quantitative reckoning. As De Gaulle once confided to a friend, “I am on a stage and I pretend to believe it, I make believe that France is a great country. It is a perpetual illusion.”
Macron, a pathetic dwarf compared to De Gaulle, declared to the global Politbureau at Davos five years ago that “France is back.” It is not. It is a nation that in trying to avoid risks is shattering into ghettos. The elites try to delegitimize as “populists” millions of French men and women who want to protect their country from further invasion. These same elites fail to integrate — let alone assimilate — further millions of hostile aliens already inside the gates. …
One fact brutally apparent in the banlieues — and painfully puzzling to many Frenchmen — is that the immigrants from North Africa and their French-born offspring reject the civilisation française that has been admired, eagerly emulated and embraced by millions of immigrants and foreigners for centuries. Why are they so immune to Racine, Zola, and Berlioz? Why don’t they ever go to the Louvre or Versailles? They may as well ask, why did Muslims, when they entered the world of Christian civilization, reject humane civilization along with Christianity.
All so predictable to anyone who has looked back at Muslim history. The colonists know that history.
France will adopt Arabic as an official language before the century is finished.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
