The Outstater
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Viva la France — Or What’s Left of It
“Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.” — Enoch Powell’s “River of Blood” speech (1968)
WE HAVE SPENT three generation now trying to help those seen as more vulnerable, less advantaged, less privileged, or however you want to say it. But watching from afar the ethnic civil war in France this summer, it is clearly time to help others as well — those with the resolve to protect our civilization, our liberty, our identity, whether or not they be advantaged, privileged, or however you want to say it.
France is coming to that realization too late. It now knows that mass migration is a thing, not just good intentions gone awry. It changes countries inherently. It reverts to the world’s default setting — envy, violence, misery, chaos, injustice and systemic poverty. Hollywood may romanticize the indigenous world, but try living in it for a while. You will be on the next boat to France — or America, or what you imagined once was America.
An interview during the debacle that was the Afghanistan withdrawal sticks in the mind. A Taliban officer was asked why if the end of the U.S. presence was so welcomed by his countrymen were so many stowing away on U.S. rescue flights. His answer: “Who wouldn’t?” And back in Indiana, lest you think our officials will protect us from such insanity, Gov. Eric Holcomb blithely welcomed these random Afghans as if they were Italian shoemakers, Swedish farmers or Japanese gardeners.
Let’s return to the events in France, namely a week of violent rioting ostensibly over a fatal traffic stop. There are hundreds of thousands of immigrants arriving every year. Forty-one percent of them are from Africa, the population of which is expected to double in the next generation. They are no longer coming to work in the tomato fields to begin a generations-spanning climb into the middle class. They are coming to join a burgeoning, welfare-fueled diaspora stuck in the cities, “stuck,” meaning their young men and women see no place for themselves in the high-tech yuppie world there. Violence and gangs rule, a clash of civilizations.
That last is the important part: Unlike the story of immigrants of the past two centuries, they are not melding into the host civilization, becoming what it means to be French or American or British. And a report released by the French Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies this spring found that a third of the people in France now are either immigrants or immigrants’ children or immigrants’ grandchildren.
So, are we going to learn from this?
Thomas Sowell famously observed that each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization “by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.” Today, half of them are learning they deserve special reparations of one sort or another and the other half is learning that if you are raised in a home deemed “privileged,” if you compete on merit in school and in the workplace, if you make a Christian marriage, you are expected to stand gladly in line behind political designated groups for jobs, education and housing. It is no wonder they laugh at what we call our founding principles.
The Left both in France and America would treat the rioters as a victim caste, one championed in Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent in Students vs. Harvard College. Justice Clarence Thomas responded that such a view was unfathomable to him: “It is an insult to individual achievement and cancerous to young minds seeking to push through barriers, rather than consign themselves to permanent victimhood.”
To raise such concern is to invite denigration as a racist or, in the case of Thomas, the stooge of racists. That must change. We have a right — literally — to describe the vision we have for our nation, our identity, a right to be alarmed at what we have seen this last week on the streets of Marseille, Nanterre, Lille, Toulouse, Pau and Lyons.
There are those in the ruling class who have used their power to encourage mass immigration solely as a means of advancing ideology or merely to feed resentment. Now they are using riots. They should prepare to explain themselves to a nation falling apart.
If they cannot, there is a word for that, too. It is “treason,” or however you want to say it. — tcl
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