This may only be one man’s perspective but the picture it paints of France can only be described as melancholy:
France is almost finished. The nightmare is almost here. France has to know the horrors of the nightmare if you want her to have a chance to wake up. Sure, you may find some exceptions to the rule. France has some decent intellectuals: but they have about the same access to the mainstream media that dissenters had in the Soviet Union twenty years ago. France has bold politicians: one, maybe two if I want to be extremely generous. France still has genuine journalists: you could count them on the fingers of one hand. For the next years, come to France if you want, visit old monuments, but do not expect to be understood or appreciated by the locals. Behave as you would in a third world country; soon France will be a third world country. Perhaps it will wake up with a start, but who knows? Right now, if you read the polls, only 53% of the French hope the U.S. army will defeat Saddam: the rest hope the United States will be defeated and Saddam will win…
The author of the article is a Frenchman.
[My thanks to Boris Kuperschmidt for the link]
Yes, and if this scenario comes to pass, in twenty-odd years time a fundementalist Muslim country will be in the middle of Europe, armed with nuclear weapons and itchin’ for a little Jihad.
WWII will look like a joke if goes badly.
France’s statist politicians believed they could accept the Islamists into their society and pander to them to get their votes. But they will find they’ve opened a Pandora’s box over which they have no control. Where they believed they were using the Islamists to strengthen their power, they’ll realize in the end that it was the Islamists who were using them to gain power. Intellectuals, indeed.
Spot on there Byron. You too David Janes on the fundamentalist muslim country in EUrope. A worse scenario is that French succeeds in gaining a leading (and controling) role in EU – and after that we’ll have a fundamental muslim France. With nukes and jihad on their agenda.
Wasn’t there a French guy who thought the plane crashing into Pentagon on 9/11 was fake and a conspiracy, and wrote a book about it?
Well, at least they make good cheese…they can’t be all bad, right?
It was indeed a Frenchman with the conspiracy theory about 9/11 and the Pentagon. I’m pretty sure it was also a Frenchie who thought that the Twin Towers were collapsed with explosives and not the planes running into them. France seems to be a hotbed of conspiracy theorists lately.
France, although smaller than Texas, has more than twice the population of California (if I remember correctly).
Despite having less than 2% of the population of the world, France still exercises a large cultural and political impact. If the French abandon their culture and become an ‘Islamic’ nation, I suspect that they’ll become irrelevant.
The French 9/11 conspiracy book was a #1 bestseller in France! (Not a fringe phenomenom). See http://www.PerfidiousFrance.com
are you people connected with reality at all? or are you just having a laugh…
If you’re serious, i really think you need to go to France, meet a few real French people, observe how things go. The likelihood of France becoming anything like a fundamentalist muslim state (or indeed anything but a militantly secular state) are so incredibly slim as to be invisible.
I hope not. I have the largest collection of french jokes stand second to no one in contempt for France’s sterile self-absorbtion, refusal to allow US flyover rights to bomb Libya, rudeness to tourists, and gallic jealousy, there are still amazing people there. What a shame.
A_t,
Duly noted, but I wonder how you would address your complaint to then ‘real French person’ who wrote the article?
I just sold an article to the American Spectator about France’s self-absorbed and silly foreign policy, so I sympathise with Monsieur Milliere, but one number of his did catch my eye.
“Within twenty years Muslims will be a majority in France” he says at one point. In his other article for FrontPage he says six million Muslims live in France (“at least ten per cent of whom are radical Muslims” – so that makes six hundred thousand of those).
Even if a quarter of the 53 million non-Muslims presently living in France (59 million subtract 6 million) die of old age in the next two decades, that leaves France’s Muslims with the remarkable chore of multiplying themselves sixfold in one generation to outnumber other French people. That would be an average (not peak, but average) of twelve children per French Muslim mother. Sound a little unlikely?
M. Milliere has some desperately important things to warn us about, so it’s a shame to see him undercut his own case with exaggeration like this.
–
A_t….
Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.
This article is somewhat exaggerated, but there is something creepy about modern France. Not just the 18% who vote for Le Pen, but also something like 30% that voted for hard left commies and Trotskyites. And the chattering classes display a case of group-think and reality denial that resembles the state-owned Arab media.
I find it all rather creepy. It appears much of the society is voluntarily turning its back on classic liberal ideas. It is a strange thing to observe in what is still a free society.
David,
It’s always possible to find one person from a particular country, who’ll condemn it, hate it’s present state, & predict terrible things about it’s future. Having grown up in France, still having family there, & having been back there fairly recently, i’d say his views don’t seem representative of what most French people see as France’s future.
For a start:
“Within twenty years, Muslims will be a majority in France”
Sounds a lot more like National Front propaganda, based on spurious correllations, than any kind of fact. *Could* be true; i’m not going to eliminate anything out of hand, but I have to see precisely what the prediction’s based on before I’ll give it any serious consideration.
So long as muslims are not a majority, even if every single last one is a dyed-in-the-wool fanatic who’s all up for the downfall of the western world etc. (unlikely, simply knowing the number of moped-riding, dope smoking, drinking, swearing arab kids i grew up around), and given that France is a democracy, it’s so, so very unlikely to go Islamist. About as likely to as the UK… ie. not at all.
Mark,
Three posts above, you did some math and concluded that each Muslim woman needs to have 12 children (average) in the next 20 years. No need! You are not considering the continuing immigration from the Muslim countried to France. I don’t want to go into the calculations – but traditionally, Muslims marry at relatively young age and have kids unlike the typcial western white people. Within the next 25 – 30 years, there may be two generations of French Muslims AND more immigrants plus their children!
Muslim majority in France? May not be in 20 years, but in about 25 – 30 years. Also, a people don’t have to be 51% (majority) to gain power in a democracy. They just need to be the single biggest block of votes. I don’t think we need even wait 20 years for that. Scary thought.
Dang! Sagar beat me to it! However, just to add a little gloss to his points, in a parliamentary system small but highly motivated parties can exercise an undue influence. Further, the French are apparently making little to no effort to assimilate their immigrant Muslims (a whole ‘nother topic there), which means that this group will continue to be a cohesive bloc, with hefty grievances.
I don’t know if France will go the full Monty on sharia, but they are building up a whopping internal racial conflict for themselves that will stain and distort France forevermore. That will be a real shame, regardless of exactly how it all plays out in the end.
Take a look at some of the Anti-Semitism seen in France recently and combine that with their history of it and I think you’ll see why Muslims are immigrating there. Maybe the French are integrating their Muslim immigrants?
A question: just for comparison – how many muslims are there in Britain ? In Germany ? In Italy ?
Is the phenomenom of muslin inmigration peculiar to France ?
No Jacob, the phenomenon of Muslim immigration is not peculiar to France – are you not American? The States has a large Muslim population itself, as does the UK, and the latter is certainly increasing. This alarms many like myself, and baffles us too: we can guess at the reasons, ranging from inertia to paranoid conspiracy theory, but this doesn’t make it much easier to understand why a rational, civilised, technologically advanced, culturally sophisticated society should willingly nurture a growing minority group of economic migrant aliens who tend to despise us even when they’re not actively hostile…
And where France is concerned the situation is even worse. I like France and the French, and go there whenever I can; I’d quite like to live there. I am dismayed by the boneheaded anti-Gallic crudities this sort of debate (and the Iraq business) arouses from people who have usually never been within a thousand miles of France. But while dismissing these lunatic prophecies of imminent Muslim majority (a W.European Islamic nuke-armed jihad? Too many SF comics, too much Wild Turkey…) it’s alarming to contemplate the massive Islamic population of the Paris suburbs, Marseilles, and so on. Where will it end? Will the French see sense? Which UK political party will stop the “asylum seeker” nonsense?
Point taken about immigration, Sagar! And of course even a small block can exert influence in a democracy.
But Milliere does make himself sound a bit loopy. If ten per cent (his figure) are radical, and today’s French Muslim population even multiply threefold (quite a feat) we still only have three per cent of France, or about two million radicals.
If the French had shown a little more interest in cultures other than their own, and a little less inclination to use paramilitary policeforces like the CRS on troublesome immigrant communities, they might have friendlier, more pro-French Muslims there. Since I like both Poussin and MC Solaar, French haut cuisine alongside Indian or Persian cooking, I don’t know quite what to say to the French.
Re: immigration worries of previous commentors
Assimilation into the larger national identity is the key here. By the second or third generation, many immigrants identify themselves as Americans first and foremost (at least in my personal experience as one of the ‘huddled masses’ lucky enough to arrive at our fine shores; which may or may not mean a thing 🙂 ). What does worry me is the trend toward an insane type of multi-culturalism, which snears at the idea of a common American ‘culture.’ It is one thing to respect other cultures, it is another to intellectually Balkanize people to the point that an ethnic identity completely displaces a sense of national identity.
I remember a conversation with an Italian friend of mine who grew up in Belgium – he said that what really surprised him about America was how little time it took to be accepted completely as an American. Growing up, he was made to feel like an Italian camping out in another European country. I don’t know if this is an isolated experience or indicative of anything more. Anyway, the way in which immigrants become part of the larger culture or national ideal is as important as the patterns of immigration, probably more so.
we can guess at the reasons, ranging from inertia to paranoid conspiracy theory
Multiculturalism (without assimilation), encouraged by powerful people who have interests in undermining the successful Anglo-Saxon culture. A new front in the Cold War, basically.
I used to think that the female muslim immigrants in France would assimilate, marry frenchmen and that everything would be okay.
The same way the Irish assimilated in the US, via inter-marriage. i.e. Irishwomen who were ready to marry anyone except an Irishman. (my grandmother)
Now, I do not think it is going to happen. Arab women (beurettes) who try and marry or date outside their faith are exposed to vicious attacks and gang rape.
What is missing here is a little historical perspective.
In 1938 the motto of many Frenchmen was,
“Better Hitler than Blum”. The spirit of Vichy still
lives in modern France. More Jews were deported
from UNOCCUPIED France to the death camps
than from any other unoccupied part of Europe.
Massive French resistance to the Nazis was a myth
nurtured by the UK, the US and Le Grand Charles.
Read “Collapse of the Third Republic” by William
Shirer. French colonialism was brutal and their
nasty work in Africa makes them hated there.
I am a great admirer of many things French but
not their politics.
“Massive French resistance to the Nazis was a myth
nurtured by the UK, the US and Le Grand Charles.”
Do you mean prior to the invasion of France, or after?
If after, I don’t think anyone suggests there was ‘massive’ resistance to the Germans, but at the same time, many courageous individuals gave their lives, and you can hardly hold the whole population responsable for not resisting; guerilla warfare, sabotage and risking your life on a daily basis aren’t everybody’s cup of tea, no matter where you are.
As for the antisemitism, this is a charge that has come up so often of late, particularly in the American press, but is there much evidence for it, beyond a few national front crazies vandalising graveyards etc? Have any opinion polls been taken, are there any reputable studies of the phenomenon?
“Arab women (beurettes) who try and marry or date outside their faith are exposed to vicious attacks and gang rape.”
Gross generalisation, surely… I’m not denying this has happened, but you’re hardly going to see news items going “French man marries arab woman… everything calm; nothing wrong at all”, are you? Within every ethnicity I can think of, there’ll be a significant minority who will look down on those who choose to marry ‘outsiders’. The response is inexcusible, but very much analogous to white women who’ve married black men and got fire bombs through the door, which has happened in the UK in the past and will probably happen in the future, but doesn’t mean that brutal thugs dominate white culture, or that the whole country’s heading for a fascist future.
Also, what all of you miss in this discussion of immigration, is integration takes time; you can’t expect someone to arrive in a country and immediately feel at home. Even in the ‘easy-to-integrate’ states, think of the ghettoisation that has traditionally prevailed in New York… but then several generations down, the divisions between people are usually far less important, and it’s hard not to assimilate some of the culture you grow up around. This is incredibly visible in the asian (indian subcontinent) population in the UK today.
A_t:
One point to make — the “ghettoization” of New York did not only occur spontaneously because people were unwilling to assimilate and needed to be given more time. It was a systematic process that took place during the 1920s and 30s (I believe), at which point the major banks in the city took a detailed block by block and neighborhood by neighborhood census of the city’s population and began policies, such as refusing to issue housing loans to *any* particular ethnic group unless they were purchasing property in a particular neighborhood/area. Subsequently, this affected how (and how much) government funding was allotted. In relatively little time, New York City went from being one of the most integrated cities in the nation to being one of the most segmented. (And gerrymandering has not helped.)
Just saying — you make valid points but I wouldn’t use New York City — it’s not “traditional” but an artificial example.
CRL, re. NYC… i didn’t know that; fascinating & strange!
ah well.. take the cosmopolitan melting pot city of your choice then… London’ll probably do nicely, though it’s a lot less ghetto-ised than most racially diverse US cities i’ve visited.
–The States has a large Muslim population itself–
No we don’t, anywhere from 2-6 mill, depending on whose figures one uses. It’s closer to 2 m.
I haven’t travelled extensively in France, but I have been to Paris. Loved it. Contrary to everything I’d been led to expect, the people were genuinely helpful, and uniformly pleasant and well-mannered. I liked them quite a lot.
Chirac, however, strikes me as an idiot. His stated refusal to support the enforcement of 1441 emboldened Saddam and undercut what slim chance at effectiveness the inspections ever had. This has, ultimately, resulted in the diplomatic isolation of his country. France has much to worry about, not only for its seeming eagerness to facilitate it’s own descent into irrelevance, but for many of the reasons that the author of the above article stated.
True, there was some exaggeration there, but the general points he made are valid. Large groups of young, disaffected, bored and angry youth are a Bad Thing in any culture, regardless of the ethnicities involved. As was pointed out, these young Muslims are by design or by choice or both, not actively participating in the French mainstream. The Old Guard is dying out, and what is rapidly replacing it looks very different. Demographic change is not bad in and of itself, but when the values of the burgeoning group of up and comers include contempt and hatred for the status quo, look out.
There’s certainly racism and exclusionary aspects to American society for immigrants, but in a generation or so, one finds that more often than not, a change occurs. The sons and daughters of the immigrants assimilate to a degree, and also change the mainstream. Not an unhealthy way to go. I live in an area with a substantial Arabic and Palestinian population. They own businesses and restaurants and get elected to public office. This kind of civic participation doesn’t seem to be happening in France.
For this reason, I think that the French have good reason to worry.
<<--The States has a large Muslim population itself-- No we don't, anywhere from 2-6 mill, depending on whose figures one uses. It's closer to 2 m.>>
Sandy, that’s the sort of figure I’d have guessed, and by my standards it’s “large” – though perhaps I would have done better to describe it as “significant”.
I’m glad to see people distinguishing here between the political actions of the French State, and the attitudes of ordinary French citizens.
Salut à tous.
Juste un petit mot pour vous dire que je trouve vos remarques hilarantes. Elles ne font que confirmer ce que tout le monde pense de vous en France: vous avez un complexe d’infériorité -justifié- par rapport à notre pays.
Trois exemples suffiront:
1/ les 13 colonies des Etats-Unis n’existent que grâce à la France (Lafayette etc)
2/ les Etats-Unis ont eu besoin d’acheter un tiers de leur territoire à Napoléon (Lousianne = du Canada au Mexique)
3/ le vocabulaire de la langue que vous parlez est à 50 % français.
A part ça, bonne journée et surtout, continuez: “les chiens aboient, la caravanne passe” (proverbe arabe).
One solution….throw out the dirty bastards. They’ve shown that they don’t want to assimilate. All they want is “jihad”. In fact they even celebrate 9/11 as a holiday in the US and in the islamic world. They hate anyone and anything thats not islamic. Throw them out deport them whatever. I’m sick of all this political correctness bullshit. If we don’t, we are going to have bigger problems like the Serbs were having years ago.
p.s. boycotting their businesses wouldn’t hurt either.