Francois Hollande has "deployed the military" and declared a "state of emergency." Neither of these measures will mean anything. I had the chilling experience of standing atop the south tower of the World Trade Center in New York City four months before nineteen men with box-cutters brought it down. Terrorists operate in cells and in small numbers.
The leaders will go into a mad rush to "save Europe" from Greek debt and impending political incorrectness. No one will say Islam is the problem, it will be "religious extremism," something that, supposedly, everyone else is capable of doing. These sorts of conflicts are usually brought to a head and resolved by open war, but that will not happen now, not yet. The dispute is not between combatant nations, it is between cultures—post-Christian, decadent Europe and the zealous, augmenting Islamic minority. Multiculturalism is the secular European church's sacrament; their inerrant leaders should be expected to uphold the orthodoxy they have created and blame everything on the Islamic State, which a calm analysis would likely show to be a symptom, not a cause, of what happened in Paris.
Until the cultural and political landscape changes so that open dispute may allow reconsideration of Europe's direction since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Eurocentrists will continue to bomb the enemy remotely, except the enemy is not Islam, but Marine le Pen.
I am not politicizing this tragedy. I have no stake in French politics. What happened is quite serious. Pray for the repose of the dead, and maybe that common sense may benefit the living.
"We are reminded in this time of tragedy that the bonds of liberte, egalite, fraternite, are not just the values French people share, but we share."
ReplyDelete-Barack Obama
The philosophy that was responsible for the death of so many Catholics is apparently something "we share".
The really enemy is Marine Le Pen? Is she committed to "laicete"? If so, the not insignificant following the National Front has among the French branch of Tradistan is quite an irony, and a sad one at that.
ReplyDeleteFN does embrace laïcité, but mostly as a vehicle to be enforced against Muslim practices. There are monarchist, sectarian, anti-laïcité political parties in the right (Action Francaise, Alliance Royalist, Nouvelle Action Royaliste) but these are bereft of any presence in the legislatures and amount to little more than exotic clubs. The old French Right was discredited in the wake of Vichy, but in truth it's never been characterized by stability of ideology or institutions.
DeleteSo FN is what's left as the only game in town - in reality, a highly reactionary party of the left which has managed to become a home for many traditionalists, who mostly seem to prioritize preserving or even restoring the integrity of the French nationality, the battle against laïcité being a lost cause, even if some will never admit it. (Lefebvre's support seemed to key on FN being the only notable party to oppose abortion, though his increasing anxiety about Muslim immigration in his last years seems to have been part of the equation, too.) Perhaps some of our regulars have more extensive contact with this mileiu to nuance or modify what I've said.