The police union Action Police CFTC called for curfews to be imposed in all riot-hit areas to combat the "civil war that spreads a little more every day". The mayor of one town, Raincy, north of Paris, announced a late-night street ban on children to "avoid a tragedy". The union also urged the government to send in troops to defeat the trouble-makers, mainly mobs of young people from poor estates dominated by Muslim families whose origins are in France's former colonies in north and sub-Saharan Africa...
More than 1,400 vehicles were destroyed, two policemen were injured by birdshot and petrol bomb attacks were launched on schools, churches and public buildings.
A country that continuously chides America while letting its elders die in a heat wave, that created a bureaucratic superstate in the European Union, that kisses the ass of Saddam Hussein, that todies for Iran's terror-masters, that looks whistfully on the days of its Revolution and the La guillotine, might finally have a serious wake up call.
But I highly doubt it. France is a nation of sycophants. They are incapable of decisive action and cutting through the grey to see the stark choices they face. They are so wedded to leftist political ideology that its logical nihilism will soon be upon them. Better to burn than to fight back against an oppressed Muslim. Needless to say, I don't even think they have the guts to fight back - hence, there will be no "civil war." France will capitulate. It's what they do.
I'm reminded of the words of Denethor:
"But soon all shall be burned. The West has failed. It shall all go up in a great fire, and all shall be ended. Ash! Ash and smoke blown away on the wind!"
But that may be France's destiny. It is not America's.
Americans for the first time in my memory seem not to care a whit what Europeans think — to the great consternation of our elites on the East Coast. Heartland Americans think the French are ridiculous, and seem almost to welcome Gallic disdain. Most of us out here, far from being deprived yokels, have a clearer appreciation of the quite profound amorality in Europe than anyone in the Ivy League: we detect a cynical, self-loathing paralysis of cheap talk and aristocratic banter on the continent that never leads to any real good physical deed: prancing and preening in Brussels and Paris, but paralyzing fear when the real innocents are being butchered in Serbia a few miles away. Tough talk to a democratic and humane America, not so tough talk to nightmarish killers in Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.
I had a conversation not long ago with a European, who typically so, began with the pained look of someone who was methodically entering a long grandfatherly lecture about the American pathologies of "unilateralism" and "exceptionalism." When I laughed and told him he should worry more about keeping us in NATO than threatening to leave, more about America turning its attention to Russia, India, Japan, and South America than to Paris and Rome, and expect pride rather than guilt that we stopped the Russians, fought the Gulf War, kicked out Noriega, and bombed in Serbia. In short, when I made it clear that Europe is irrelevant, he was shocked — and, mon dieu!, of all things, hurt! Europeans, I think, are going to learn that their real fears are not that we wish to control them, work with them, influence them, or corrupt them, but rather that we simply prefer to forget about them. They are rapidly becoming little more than an old windy Nestor — wordy, impotent, and full of empty advice about a glorious past in someone else's busy present...
Let the Europeans be toadies and fear these abjectly bankrupt regimes; let Americans worry more about the poor half billion people who have had to suffer and endure under them. Europeans, not us, are on the wrong side of history — and it is more embarrassingly apparent each day of this present crisis. Like the weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall, what is ahead is fraught with uncertainty and fear, but it is also, in some strange and macabre way, full of rare hope as well.
Night lies over Paris. If it does not burn, it will only be because they've abandoned their pretentions and have decided that Western Civilization is worth saving. It remains to be seen.
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