EFL Even though he does write for the NYT, Paris edition, Vinocur is very perceptive and connected. RTWT
On one hand, there is French hubris, and its gratuitiously insulting embrace of France's immigrants as partners in the country's threadbare formulas of grandeur, equality and universality.
On the other, there is the eternal French dependency on the state, the allegiance to the French model that has failed to provide the jobs, education, housing, or respect adequate to integrate Arab and African Muslims into a rich and resourceful country with real claims to special grace.
These two elements run together, and it is at the point where they cross that French reality has imploded: the intersection of the fakery producing a one-size-fits-all Frenchness, and the ceaseless defense of a rigidly statist social model refusing to reform the economy, open up the labor market, or consider affirmative action.
So the violence here arises not only from specially French circumstances including massive housing projects in enclaves for the poor, and a dismal colonial history in North and Black Africa. It also comes, pre-rationalized, from the homegrown French who provided the conceits fashioning the rationale, however jumbled, of the rioters.
An Arab kid in Clichy-sous-Bois may not articulate it, but what rage it must create to hear he lives in the greatest, smartest, most fair country in the world, revered as Islam's best-friend-in-the west from Algeria to Oman, and then have to deal with a French reality of racist scorn and rejection.
In the country of the 35-hour week, where the state is hardly the symbol of the work ethic, or civic sense in the land of the continuous public service strike, administrative and school buildings have become the choice targets of the rioters' Molotov cocktails. The republic's social welfare payments are there, but accompanied by private sector job creation so enfeebled and hiring discrimination so real that they turn any young person taking up the state's offer to wield a broom or toilet brush into his neighborhood's collaborateur.
Alain Touraine, the sociologist and perhaps the country's best known academic, has pointed to the falseness and the lies in French society's portrayal of itself for itself as the place where the most profound causes of the violence and disintegration are found.
The fact was that France paid no attention to an average of 60 cars (the figure is from the Interior Ministry) burned every night around the country in the months leading up to the riots.
Or that in 2004, an internal security agency reported that there were 300 communities nationwide "in retreat," basically ones with a marked presence of Islamic fundamentalism, hatred of France and the West, anti-Semitism, and violence.
Lionel Jospin, talking on the radio Wednesday morning, when asked about affirmative action as a solution, just dismissed it out of hand. The former Socialist prime minister, whose failure to provide the French a strong enough notion of personal security led to his defeat in the first round of the 2002 presidential elections, said this kind of affirmative step "contradicts our republican tradition." If France is to go forward, he insisted, "it's got to be within our model."
Indeed, a day or two before the riots began, Dominique de Villepin, the prime minister, described affirmative action as "semantic debate" in a country known by one and all to be committed to equal opportunity.
Now, Francois Bayrou, leader of the centrist group that with the neo-Gaullists, makes up Jacques Chirac's presidential majority, describes France as a "sick state, a state swollen into impotence" with "a democracy that doesn't work well." This means, he said, that "reality never enters political discussions."
But asked why the riots were happening here, since France's neighbors seemed to be escaping its misery, Bayrou offered a general response that, like the answers of the other politicians he condemned, hid from the specifics of both responsibilities and solution:
"As long as French democracy doesn't change," Bayrou said, "these accidents are going to continue." He left it there.
I liked his book... Hat tip No Pasaran!
When, seven months ago, I finished writing my book, "The West's Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations?" (Regnery Publishing, Washington D.C. September 11, 2005), London had not been attacked by Islamist terrorists, the Tate Museum in London had not removed an art exhibit because it offended radical Muslim sensitivities and France had not yet experienced the explosion of violence from elements of its Muslim population in its "no-go zone" communities.
The fact that I predicted all those events in my book was not the result of clairvoyance. It was merely the result of a normally intelligent person looking at the facts, and their rather obvious implications, without the blinding effect of a politically correct mentality.
After studying what the radical Islamists were saying and doing in Europe, I opened my book with a scenario of a London Islamist terrorist attack and an Islamist demand for removing offensive European art work from museums. Then, I wrote: "Muslim parts of Paris, Rotterdam and other European cities are already labeled no go zones for ethnic Europeans, including armed policemen."
As the Muslim populations and their level of cultural and religious assertiveness expand, European geography will be "reclaimed" for Islam.
Europe will become pockmarked with increasing numbers of little Fallujahs that will be effectively impenetrable by anything much short of a U.S. Marine division. "Thus, as the fundamentalism expands into European (and perhaps to a lesser extent American) Muslim communities, not only will Islamic cultural aggression against a seemingly passive and apologetic indigenous population increase, but the zone of safety and support for the actual terrorists will expand as well." (The West's Last Chance, pp. 55-56).
Now, two weeks into the appalling explosion of violence in Europe (and the equally appalling French governmental passivity in the face of such violence) most of the world's media treats this huge event as the third or fourth story on the evening news. From the BBC and CNN to the major newspapers of the world, the story is underreported and misreported. On Monday The Washington Post was still not reporting the story on the front page.
The big networks have consistently given only headline coverage to the story. I was in Russia last week (lecturing and doing media on my book) and actually timed the BBC coverage of the French Muslim violence story at about a minute and a half, while in the same broadcast the post-Pakistani earthquake-relief story was given over fifteen minutes. CNN International proportioned its coverage similarly.
Soon, the violence of the last two weeks will be seen as the opening of an event of world-historic significance.
Even when the current violence subsides â even when the French government attempts to placate its radical Muslim population by offering more welfare benefits and programs â it will not be the end of the story. A new benchmark of the possible will have been established. The flaccid and timorous response of the French government will only increase the radicalizing Muslim elements' contempt for Western cultural weakness.
As Paul Belien, writing from Brussels this weekend, observed: "It is not anger that is driving the insurgents to take it out on the secularized welfare states of Old Europe. It is hatred. Hatred caused not by injustice suffered, but stemming from a sense of superiority. The 'youths' do not blame the French, they despise them." As Mr. Belien reports, look what a typical radical Muslim leader, Dyab Abou Jahjah, the leader of the Brussels-based Arab European League, says: "We reject integration when it leads to assimilation. I don't believe in a host country. We are at home here and whatever we consider our culture to be also belongs to our chosen country. I'm in my country, not the country of the Westerners." Or consider the statement of a German radical Islamist that I recounted in my book (based on a National Public Radio news-story broadcast): "Germany is an Islamic country. Islam is in the home, in schools. Germans will be outnumbered. We [Muslims] will say what we want. We'll live how we want. It's outrageous that Germans demand we speak their language. Our children will have our language, our laws, our culture" (The West's Last Chance, page 75).
This is not about Muslim poverty (the Islamist terrorists who hit London all had good jobs. Mohammed Atta, who struck us in New York, was well-born and came from a prosperous family.) It is about radical Islamist self-confidence and contempt for the West. And, it is about Western weakness.
We should not sneer at French weakness, but rather should encourage them to re-find their strength. It is a strength we will need to find in ourselves, as well. Vive la France!
#2
Yes, but it's hard to do a genocide against a restless, aggressive, armed population when your own demographics consist mostly of aged people and single-child families at best...
#3
Not only do the Islamics have the demographics but they have the money. The U, S, is balkanizing and we probably have less border control than Europe. And our leaders are RoP correct behind their gated communities. But I do believe one the European will go crazy and kill everything that moves.
#4
"...aged people and single-child families at best." And even these have neither firearms nor experience in their use. I wonder what would happen if the riots spread to Switzerland?
Again, no link, only opinion, kill it if inappropriate.
Yesterday I followed the "Radio-Courtoise" (main french conservative/right wing radio) intervention of two Action Police CFTC unionists, who came to discuss the recent riots... this was very enlightening... :
- The police officers ROE prevented them from responding to any provocation (in fact, the police was to avoid at all cost to be "provocative" itself); in one incident, a youth fired an handgun at a riot cop and ran away, and wasn't pursued.
- There was about 2000 arrests; of thoses, only 173 (about 9%) led to prison sentences, the highest being IIRC 4 months (while the theorical sentence for arson is... 10 years).
- Minors are untouchables; all the police can do is to bring them back home.
- All this is not new, there is a deliberate policy since 2002 of "outsourcing" the policing of theses area to the islamic powers, leaving the police to cordon them. This is what was tried by the gvt this time again, with the "mediators".
This is not working, even the UOIF (french muslim brotherhood) controls only "official" islam, while the true mover & shaker islam is under the spell of the GSPC (algerian salafists, linked to AQ).
- The gvt has chosen to lay down when confronted by the use of force, because it knows it lacks the ressources to fight a large scale "situation", and will continue its policy of buying the social peace.
- There are lots of weaponry in theses area, which have not been used so far.
- There is at least some coordination, with supposedly courriers going from one 'hood to the other to give objectives and a targets list.
- One of the declenching factors of this has been the drug shortage.
(precision from an another source, a forum, so take with salt : there is traditionally a cannabis/haschich shortage in summer, when the professional dealers, 95% of them being africans/arabs goes back to their country of origin. This time, the shortage extended beyond that period, because of an agreement between the EU and Morocco - producer of about 80% of european drug - to eradicate this culture, and a few big custom busts). This "dry spell" has disrupted the "black economy", estimated to literally billions of euros, and increased the tensions.
- The gvt has no real commitment to eradicate the "black economy", to keep theses areas placated; this summer, a departemental police administration linked the social aid files with the car registration ones; this led to the discovery of hundred of people supposedly living only with the socila aid from the State, but possessing one or several luxury cars, thus indicating other means of subsistance (drug,...).
This was expressely terminated by the higher hierarchy (the catholic rightwing talk show host mentioned the links between widespread Enlightened Elites substances abuses and the lack of will to enforce the law).
#3
"One of the declenching factors of this has been the drug shortage"
The UN must begin immediate operations to airlift in the critical supplies. The masses must be opiated. Keep them stoned. A stoner will not succumb to the influence of the Imams.
8 police officers were suspended and will be investigated : 2 of them for excessive use of force during an arrest (which resulted on "bruises and abrasions on the forehead and right foot without work incapacity" of the suspect, must have been a Rodney King-like arrest...), 6 for being passive witnesses.
From what I've read, their major mistake has been to make the arrest in front of France 2 public television's cameras...
#6
Note the drug shortage excuse may be bogus, apparently the places most heavily involved with drug trafficking have been relatively calm; perhaps it was the "little fishes" who rioted, not the big ones?
#10
I only post because this is a subject I follow too, the way the Republic has caved in front of this is quite a spectacle to behold.
As for the self-esteem issue, have no fear, my overweight problem, a complete lack of social life and a very small penis (thanks to my chinese ancestry) are keeping it at a very moderate level, rightly so.
When the state of emergency was passed (note Dhimminique Galouzeau "de Villepin" never even used the expression), it was clearly said there wouldn't be any censorship involved, like the law allows.
That wouldn't have been necessary anyway, the french msm are gladly self-censoring (see this link in french, about the way torched churches were not mentioned in online french press, or when it briefly was, it was later supressed)...
Still, the internet remained relatively free, and acted as the conservative blogosphere in the USA. But...
Starting in late 11/09 afternoon, right after the 1955 law was reactivated, french web users found they couldn't access the most popular "islamophobic" websites, http://www.france-echos.com/, http://www.occidentalis.com/index.php, and http://www.coranix.com/ (plus possibly others).
This was discussed on conservative french forums, and tech-savvy forumers found this was a systematic filtering by the french ISP (ALL of them, it seems)
In fact, it could even be the "Emeraude" plan, in which during crisis time, internet traffic is redirected to military servers using filters and interception (tinfoil hat alert!, though this is certainly possible).
Anyway, french user cannot access theses sites anymore, except by using a proxy. This is censorship, plain and simple. Note that french "moderate" muslim sites (complete with hidden jihad call, anti-french, anti-western/anti-US and antisemite prejudice,...), islamoleftist (such as the infamouis Radio-islam), and lefists websites still are freely acessible.
The blocked sites are NOT neonazi, they are conservative and "islamophobic", but the french gvt has been very afraid of the internet, especially after the "Radikal Web" affair, a rightwing webring of anti-islam and anti-Shiraq websites, which was hounded by the "thought police" ("antiracist" & plain leftist hackers and orgs with contacts in french police), and later busted when there was a totally unrelated "attempted attempted" assassination agaisnt Our Dear Leader.
Since then, the gvt has been pressuring islamophobic webmasters by suing them one after the other.
This is only minor, but this needs to be known in the USA : *theses* are the people who wish to control the internet...
#1
I read a article that showed how French TV is censoring the riot news, even to the point of not showing burning cars and buildings (Canal Plus?). Then the French press themselves were getting pissy because they thought the foreign news services were emphasizing the riot coverage too much.
Posted by: ed ||
11/10/2005 9:38 Comments ||
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Funny, and french media-related too : there was two break-ins at the respective offices of the newspaper & magazine «Figaro» and « Le Point». Computers were stolen, including one belonging to an investigative journalist writng about public health issues and notably asbestos, and one belonging to... the new girlfriend of Nicolas Sarkozy! Lol! Police seems to think theses are not "random" break-ins, but targeted ones.
#5
5089 : I can get into the islam-danger.com site.
Alta Vista Translation : "The goal of this site is to propose all the resources necessary so that each one can seize the true nature of Islam."
There is also a link to an article that Omar Sharif has been threatened with death by the Cicadas.
Alta Vista translation : "The actor Omar Sharif (Laurence of Arabia...), of true name Michael Shalhoub, has been just threatened of died by an Internet site held by close relations of network Al-Qaeda."
Sites owners say it wasn't a server failure nor an hacking, have no explanation, and are not willing to blame censorship... weird?
Did all the forum people (including fat, useless myself) cried wolf?
The techies at the Subversiv forum did all the DNS stuff and all (sounds very painful), and they were pretty sure it was tampered with, filtering from the ISP. Acess was normal from others countries, including Belgium for example, but not from a french PC, except with a proxy or an anonymizer.
To be classed either in "False alarms" or in "Things that make you go paranoid"...
I should have been more cautious and added a "?" in the title.
Glad the sites are back, though. No, it wasn't a publicity stunt :-).
Just a link to a Canal+ video of the riots; a subtitle strategically placed sez "Sarkozy, fasciste!" ("Sarkozy, fascist!"), but according to many french forums listeners (including me), the "youths" actually shout "Sarkozy, sale juif" ("Sarkozy, dirty jew!"), this is clearly audible, Sarko effectively being part-jewish.
Did the bobo channel Canal+, and especially the tv show involved which is obsessively left-leaning, voluntarily misled the viewers?
Add this to the "allah u akbar", or the references to Jerusalem or the "mosque" (IE the teargas cannister supposedly shot into it), and you can see theses riots are purely motivated by poverty and discrimination...
Speaking of the Clichy mosque incident, this was apparently a provocation, the so-called "teargas canister" was a spent shell kicked into the mosque from the outside... and the worrying fact is all the mosque pious muslims(tm), including the one who conveniently filmed the scene with his cellphone, the ones who were later interviewed by tv, or even the Mejliss/Oumma (main french muslim forum) mods who suppressed direct testimonies of the incident, were *complicit* in this fraud...
#4
Great post anonymous5089. Sure not going see this on Time-Warner. This lowlife rabble is clearly waiting for that charismatic leader. Salad-bar, or whatever. Almost (gasp) wish I could parle francais, so thanks posters. I like Sarkozy; he comes off as a sour frog Bogie. What happened to tough. That is, the righteous use of force to fight evil.
by Patrick J. Buchanan
The Romans conquered the barbariansâ and the barbarians conquered Rome. So it goes with empires. And comes now the penultimate chapter in the history of the empires of the West.
Pat's a little too focused on empires and such for my taste. This isn't Rome, and there are other empires to compare to, even if we were an empire, which we're consciously not. I'm tired of the Spenglerian fall of civilization claptrap. Five hundred years from now people with no more imagination than Buchanan will be studying these events and trying to find parallels for their own problems.
This is the larger meaning of the ritual murder of Theo Van Gogh in Holland, the subway bombings in London, the train bombings in Madrid, the Paris riots spreading across France. The perpetrators of these crimes in the capitals of Europe are the children of immigrants who were once the colonial subjects of the European empires.
There's always a larger meaning to be found, isn't there? And if you look hard enough you can find a meaning that's larger than anybody else's. Van Gogh's murder and the Madrid bombings were acts of terrorism, carried out by fascists. I'm even ready to drop the "Islamo" prefix and ignore the fact that they're using anarchist tactics for the sake of argument. I'm coming to the conclusion that the riots in La Belle France are as much a matter of PC milquetoast policies reaching their illogical conclusions as a matter of Islamism. Yes, the perps were once colonial subjects; that has something to do with it, but probably not what Pat theorizes. I might also point out that the Roman empire he keeps alluding to actually Latinized much of its empire and integrated its subjects, so that today what used to be Dacia speaks Romanian and what used to be Iberia speaks Spanish instead of (for the most part) Basque and what used to be Gaul speaks French, all of which are descended from Latin. In 476 A.D. they also had fairly similar cultures and social organizations, which were incorporated into the new order of things, with the patron-client system rather naturally adapting to the personality-driven warlord systems that became feudalism. Any parallels to the U.S.A. today are tenuous at best.
At this writing, the riots are entering their 12th night and have spread to Rouen, Lille, Marseille, Toulouse, Dijon, Bordeaux, Strasbourg, Cannes, Nice. Thousands of cars and buses have been torched and several nursery schools fire-bombed. One fleeing and terrified woman was doused with gasoline and set ablaze. The rioters are of Arab and African descent, and Muslim.
Mostly Muslim. But there are parallels that are just as strong to the domestic race-based riots we've seen in the U.S. I believe Cincinatti is the most recent.
While almost all are French citizens, they are not part of the French people. For never have they been assimilated into French culture or society. And some wish to remain who and what they are. They live in France but are not French.
Most want to remain what they are, which is the failing of the PC system as well as a characteristic of Islamism.
The rampage began October 27 when two Arab youths, fleeing what they mistakenly thought was a police pursuit, leapt onto power lines and were electrocuted. The two deaths ignited the riots.
Along with the young bully boyz' carcasses. I'm still trying to figure why the cops shouldn't have been chasing them if they were thieves, and why their departure from the gene pool caused anyone to pause for a second, much less break out in rioting.
Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy, a candidate to succeed President Chirac, is said to have infuriated and inflamed the rioters. Before the rampage began, he promised "war without mercy" on crime in the teeming suburbs where unemployment runs at 20% and income is 40% below the national average. He has denounced the rioters as "scum" and "rabble."
I don't fault him for that. He's the single Frenchie who's in power who's not being PC. I stated the other night that whether you're infuriated and inflamed or happy like a clam or maybe just having a normal day, you're still responsible for your behavior, and that society expects you to behave in a civilized manner. How the citizenry feels is no concern of the government. How the citizenry behaves is. He should wage "war without mercy" on crime, since crime is by definition antisocial behavior. And we've seen that his political rivals have been methodically cutting the floor out from under him even as he's tried to take action.
Like the urban riots in America in the 1960s, which the Kerner Commission blamed on "white racism," Paris's riots are being blamed on France's failure to bring Islamic immigrants into the social and economic mainstream of the nation. Solutions being offered range from voting rights for non-citizens to affirmative action in hiring for the children of Third World immigrants.
If voting rights are extended to non-citizens, I'd expect them to be extended to all non-citizens, to include me. I was in Gay Paree as recently as 1983, and before that I actually spent several days in the northern part of the country. So obviously I deserve a vote.
Being a Republican, I don't think much of affirmative action, which breaks down to taking a job from one guy and giving it to another for whatever reason the state thinks is a good one. Those ideas are subject to change without notice. The idea of addressing historical injustices seems like a good one, until you notice that affirmative action programs are somehow always open-ended. There's no point at which you stop trying to make up for past injustices, yea, unto the 7th and even the 70th generation, until you're left with another cause for affirmative action years down the road.
To understand why this is unlikely to solve France's crisis, consider how America succeeded, and often failed, in solving her own racial crisis. While, as late as the 1950s, black Americans were not integrated fully into our economy or society, they had been assimilated into American culture. They worshipped the same God, spoke the same language, had endured the same Depression and war, listened to the same music and radio, watched the same TV shows, laughed at the same comedians, went to the same movies, ate the same foods, read the same books, magazines and newspapers, and went to schools where, even when they were segregated, they learned the same history. We were divided, but we were also one nation and one people. Black folks were as American as apple pie, having lived in our common land longer than almost every other ethnic group save Native Americans. And America had a history of having assimilated immigrants in the tens of millions from Europe. But no European nation has ever assimilated a large body of immigrant peoples, let alone people of color.
Nailed that one, didn't you, Pat?
Moreover, the African and Islamic peoples pouring into Europe â there are 20 million there now â are, unlike black Americans, strangers in a new land, and millions wish to remain proud Algerians, Muslims, Moroccans. These newcomers worship a different God and practice a faith historically hostile to Christianity, a traditionalist faith that is rising again and recoils violently from a secular culture saturated in sex.
Which explains the failure of PC. The immigration policies are goofy. Everyone but Jacques and Dominique admit that.
Severed from the civilization and cultures of their parents, these Arab and Muslim youth may hold French citizenship and carry French passports, but they are no more French than Americans who live in Paris are French. Searching for a community to which they can truly belong, they gravitate to mosques where the imams, many themselves immigrants, teach and preach that the West is not their true home, but a civilization alien to their values and historically hostile to their nations and Islam. The soaring Muslim population is a Fifth Column inside Europe.
Excellent statement of the obvious, but it has nothing to do with the breakup of the "American empire." Pat's merely wandered off subject, I think.
Nevertheless, their numbers must grow. For not only do they have a higher birth rate than the native-born Europeans, no European nation, save Moslem Albania, has a birth rate (2.1 births per woman) that will enable it to endure for many more generations. The West is aging, shrinking, and dying. Yet, to keep Europe's economy growing and taxes coming in to fund the health and pension programs of Europe's rising numbers of retired and elderly, Europe needs scores of millions of new workers. And Europe can only find them in the Third World.
To work where? You just pointed out that the turbans have a hideous unemployment rate. The benefits they receive actually drain the economy, because the Frenchies, like the noble Romans before them, have created a low-paid liesure class that has nothing to do but sell drugs to each other and riot.
Nor should Americans take comfort in France's distress. By 2050, there will be 100 million Hispanics in the United States, half of them of Mexican ancestry, heavily concentrated in a Southwest most Mexicans still believe by right belongs to them.
Maybe most Mexicans do, but most Mexican-Americans don't. Mexican-Americans have been around since the Republic of Texas, and they were there before then, just calling themselves something else. We share at least the European part of our culture with them, and given time they assimilate into the larger culture. The problem we're having is that they're coming faster than they can be assimilated, but it's not the same problem Europe is having. The North Africans in Europe refuse to be assimilated.
Colonization of the mother countries by subject peoples is the last chapter in the history of empires â and the next chapter in the history of the West â that is now coming to a close.
That is your concluding sentence? It has little to do with what you were taking about, and even where it does there are strong counterarguments. It's apples and oranges, conclusions drawn from weak evidence, and the arguments have zip to do with American hegemony, existent or non-. Go organize a vanity campaign or something.
Posted by: Saint Michel ||
11/10/2005 00:00 ||
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#1
Has Pat ever got any prediction right?
I never take him seriously as I can not remember any thing he has claimed that came out the way he claimed. In other words his functional score is a bit low.
#3
I'm coming to the conclusion that the riots in La Belle France are as much a matter of PC milquetoast policies reaching their illogical conclusions as a matter of Islamism.
Author! Author! Orwellian Siamese twins these two diseased concepts might be.
#4
great comments Fred. I'm coming to the conclusion that the riots in La Belle France are as much a matter of PC milquetoast policies reaching their illogical conclusions as a matter of Islamism.
I've actually been thinking about this today. It must cause a little bit of unease in the group that we refer to as "elites", when they look around and realize that their beloved uprising by the masses actually has a chance of coming to pass. Yet... how strange it must be for them to look in the mirror and realize that they, themselves, are the very ones that the masses are revolting against. For so long, "the elites", full of self-righteous piety, have encouraged and empowered "the masses" to act. And now they wake up to discover the masses are rattling at the gates of their gated communities. And whoa and behold, "the elites" are not their champions, but their intended target.
So now these "elites" are forced into a catch 22 if they want to practice all they preached. They are forced to be tolerant of the intolerant, who wish to destroy all that the "elites" claimed they stood for - women's rights, sexual freedom, religious tolerance, dialogue instead of war, etc. etc. And to fight those who threaten to burn down everything they claim to stand for - the "elites" have to do the very things that they have so long claimed to be against. What to do?
I'm going to try and get my thought across without too much time and effort, I need to get some sleep - But it is the logical conclusion.
It occurs to me that what we are seeing is the end of an era where the prevailing wisdom was that peace, love and group hugs are all the world needs to be a happy place. To summarize - we discovered that if you have a war, and nobody comes - then good people get raped, massacred and starved, on a consistent basis.
The leftist elites for so long have claimed the moral high ground in polite society and have shut down dissent of their viewpoint with screams of heretic witch "racist" to anyone who dares to dissent. Recent articles did a great job of discussing the demands of impossible purity and perfection.
To get to the end of my long rambling point - I think there are times when the "prevailing wisdom" just shifts. At one time, to discuss mental illness, you had to invoke Freud to have credibility. Now we look back and just see him as a perv with an excessive obscession over sex and bowel movements.
And so it is with just about all of the the new and improved "wisdom" of the sixties. The true believers will continue to cling to their doctrine, proclaiming you just need more faith to make it come to pass. But the beliefs are now officially defunt. Those that espouse them are no longer wise sages, but old fools.
I'm sorry for wasting so much bandwith...but I'm in that tired, rambling mode. So if you are still with me... I have one last thought.
Today when I was driving, I stopped for some geese to cross the road - so did all of the other cars. And it occured to me, how the Islamists and the rioters are like these geese. I could easily run them over and squash them - but I had no desire to do so. The big one stopped in the middle of the road, acting all tough - and I dutifully obliged him, because I could. But if the situation were such that my life depended on not stopping - well - I'd try my best to avoid him... but hey.. stuff happens.
And that is basically how this conflict will end. We are the car - the rioters/fanatics are the geese. At some point - they will have to get out of the road, or we will be forced to run them over.
#5
One wishes careers as moron political pundits were ended half as easily.
Buchanan is the left's favorite "conservative". He'll either say things so stupid they make conservatives in general look bad, or he'll say things the left is in complete agreement with.
For this, they continue to support him.
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
11/10/2005 7:56 Comments ||
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#6
While France has not assimilated huge coloured populations it has absorbed LOTS of Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, Poles and the Chinese/Vietnamese are not doing bad.
The difference is:
1) Unlike Italians or Portuguese who considered France as richer, more advanced and more learned than their countries, these are immigrants who have an ideology telling they are superior to the locals. You don't want to assimilate with inferiors: think in a Nazi moving to Black Africa
2) All things being equal you have more crime between the marginalized people but it much worse when those people follow a doctrine who encourages atacking and plundering the infidels. This will reinforce the racist feeling from the locals (BTW, the European immigrants also met with racism but their chiklds or grand-childs were just French with funny names)
3) At the time when Italians or Portuguese were moving to France they were nearly completely cut off from their original cultures. Modern immigrants travel far more to their country of origin, have satellite dishes their governments have created programs to keep them in touch with their original country both culturally and ideologically. In the old times the child of immigrants felt nothing special about the country of their fathers and would have had no qualms in serving in the army against it.
4) In those glorious days there was no multicultism. Every French teacher even when his class was 90% immigrant or even when sent to Black Africa opened his history book and told "Our ancestors the Gauls, had blond hair and blue eyes". Meaning that whatever your ethinc roots, spiritually you were a French and had Gaul ancestors. Period. And he felt he made them a favour by molding them into a superior nation and culture (and please no anti-french sneers: just compare the numbrer of Nobel Prizes and Field Medals of France vs Spain, Italy or Portugal). But after 1968 and, still more after 1981 we had teachers who denigrated France, felt their duty to bend backwards for accomodating the immigrants, organized arabic lessons while the MSM were telling that all cultures were equal, that we could not be judgemental (and that is why, poligamy and female genital mutilation were not actively pursued) and that any problem was due to French racism and none to pooor immigrants.
#7
Thank you for your insight, JFM, it's always a good learning expierience for me to read your comments. I sincerely hope things work out for France.
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
11/10/2005 11:07 Comments ||
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#8
I forgot a factor: France had not been at war with Italy and for Napolonic invasion of Spain it was over a century ago. This was not the case with Algerians who in addition had a governemnt who fanned on anti-French hate in order to hide its illegitimacy. (It would be intesresting to know the composition of Muslim rioters: evenly spread between Morrocans, Tunisians and Algerians or disproportionately Algerian).
Posted by: d ||
11/10/2005 11:15 Comments ||
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#9
"But after 1968 and, still more after 1981 we had teachers who denigrated France . . . "
This is also a problem here and an aspect of social deconstructionism which is aimed at undermining existing strengths in a society and replacing them with a new "ethic"--leading to political change favoring the left. First they must dismantle the guiding values of the society, then they can change it, and ultimately claim control.
We know he's right, and I realize it's preaching to the choir, but I think this commentary is worth a bookmark as he quotes the revisionists, all of them, and these may prove useful when you need to refute some Kool Aid swilling Moonbat liar.
#2
In his press conference on the indictment against Libby, Patrick Fitzgerald insisted that lying to federal investigators is a serious crime both because it is itself against the law and because, by sending them on endless wild-goose chases, it constitutes the even more serious crime of obstruction of justice. By those standards, Wilsonâwho has repeatedly made false statements about every aspect of his mission to Niger, including whose idea it was to send him and what he told the CIA upon his return; who was then shown up by the Senate Intelligence Committee as having lied about the forged documents; and whose mendacity has sent the whole country into a wild-goose chase after allegations that, the more they are refuted, the more they keep being repeatedâis himself an excellent candidate for criminal prosecution.
I'll drink to that!
Posted by: Bobby ||
11/10/2005 8:53 Comments ||
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#3
Less talk, more Wilson indictments plz.
Also, on some wacko page, there was talk that Wilson was actually a spy working for the French and that the whole affair was a setup to discredit and expel them.
Supposedly, they'll move to France in 2006 after striking a no-prosecution deal.
It's all very nostradamus-crystalballish, but I thought it was clever.
#1
My vote for MOST priceless: (I think I pulled something trying not to laugh out loud 8^)
I am a noob to blogging and missed all the CBS deal, but if we really don't need a reason, let's do it again! C'mon, can we? Huh? Huh? I want to do it, too!
An orderly exit from Iraq depends on the development of a viable Iraqi security force, but the Iraqis aren't even close. The Bush administration doesn't take the problem seriouslyâand it never has
by James Fallows
Long, long, pessimistic piece in The Atlantic. If Mr. Fallows is right, America is hopelessly screwed and it's all Bush's fault, of course.
0820 CST update: link fixed. Sorry.
Followup on comments: to be clear, I don't endorse anything Mr. Fallows says, and I'm well aware of his employment history. The Atlantic is a decent magazine, so when they allow someone like this to put up a big piece, it deserves attention.
What Mr. Fallows misses is a simple concept: success breeds success. He misses this because he was associated with Carter, I think. But as the Iraqi army and police start to have success (and they are already), it becomes easier for them to be successful in the future. Morale is better. Training becomes more focused. They learn from their mistakes. And very importantly, the bad guys have less to work with beause your successes tend to put them out of business (see Steve Den Beste's take on a similar situation, the intifada in Frankistan). So the Iraqi army and police have a long-term trend line that is upward.
Likewise, the political situation has a long-term trend line that is hopeful. They've managed to settle their political differences enough to get a constitution (imperfect but impressive) and are going to have a permanent government by January. That's huge. The terrs know this which is why they're going to go all out to try and stop the elections. The wheels can come off the political end easily, of course, but so far it's encouraging -- the Sunnis are getting a clue, the Shi'a are mostly behaving, and the Kurds understand that they can't go it alone.
What we have to do is get past the short term, and the sniping that's out there in Washington that's being done for political purposes. GWB seems to be the kind who will hold fast, but the rest of his party, I don't know.
Posted by: Steve White ||
11/10/2005 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
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#1
Link don't work. Here it is, if you got's a subscription.
#2
Back during the Cold War, James Fallows was against just about every major military system we have in place today. John Kerry must have voted against just about every bill funding the acquisition of these weapons systems on the basis of negative articles by Fallows. Fallows is a guy who has no credibility.
#3
He was a Carter speechwriter. That says a lot right there. Wrote one of those "we're all going to be eating udon and learning Kanji soon" books in '94 (really bad timing). Very ambitious. Grew up in Redlands when it was still a farm town and went to Harvard.
I always take his articles in the Atlantic with a big grain of salt. Always a lot of good information, but after it all gets processed through his brain, the conclusions always come out skewed or trivialized (as in a trivial solution to a math problem). In fact, I haven't even read the conclusion of his last few articles. More of a tool of the left elites than a leader or ideologist.
#4
Wasn't he one of those annoited scholars that claimed Reagan was going to destroy the world by confronting communism. Just nod and hopefully he wqill go away.
#6
The man obviously doesn't read the blogs out of Iraq, or he'd shut up already. The Americans are on the Syrian border, along the Euphrates, and in Baghdad because Iraq security forces have taken their place elsewhere. Even in those three remaining locations, all the ops I've read above company level were usually joint US-Iraq. The Iraq security forces are also the ones taking the higher casualties [just like the S.Korean army in the Korean War]. The man is a day late and a dollar short.
Run the Thank you video [med for those with 512M memory otherwise small]. Then run The Other Iraq. Makes Mr. Fallows an idiot as he deserves to be labelled.
#10
GP - I almost missed it last night, but Kurdistan had an ad in prime time in the DC area! I woke up from a commercial-enduced slumber to see "Kurdistan - The Other Iraq" and the end of a 30 second spot.
Posted by: Bobby ||
11/10/2005 21:59 Comments ||
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As Iran's new President Mahmoud Ahamdinejad prepares to mark his first 100 days in office his friends and foes are debating his performance so far and, as might be expected, reaching different conclusions.
His political foes within the Khomeinist system, especially the mullahs he defeated in last June's elections, have conducted a massive campaign of character assassination against him. This has come in the form of leaks, sound bites, and outright attacks in the media and pubic gatherings.
Two mullahs, both former presidents, are leading the campaign against Ahamdinejad. One, Hashemi Rafsanjani, has not yet recovered from the shock of losing to Ahmadinejad whom he had once dismissed as "lightweight" and "an upstart". The other Muhammad Khatami is sore because Ahmadinejad cut the budget of the so-called "dialogue of civilisations" that the former president had created to hoodwink the Western powers and the Arabs into believing that the regime was burying its Khomeinist ideology for good.
Both mullahs are also worried about the audit that Ahmadinejad has ordered to find out how public finances were administered in the past 16 years, that is to say during the successive presidencies of Rafsanjani and Khatami. An initial report claims that some $120 billion out of a total of $600 billion in Iran's oil income since 1979 is not "properly accounted for".
The Khatami-Rafsanjani faction is also sore at the fact that many of its members have lost the plum jobs they had secured over the past 16 years. Many provincial officials have been dismissed and some 30 ambassadors are to be replaced. The purge started by Ahmadinejad has also spread to major public corporations that have been used as milking cows in a complex system of distributing favours.
If the current trend continues it could pull the carpet from under the feet of the new elite of rich mullahs and their hangers on formed over the past quarter of a century. Some of the new rich produced by the Islamic revolution have already fled the country and are beginning to settle in various Western countries. Others are selling their assets, hence the collapse of the Tehran Stock Exchange, in a "take the money and run" scenario.
But class warfare is not the only reason why rich mullahs hate Ahmadinejad. They also hate him because he is reviving the original revolutionary discourse of Khomeinism without any "taqiyah" (dissimulation).
The concepts and ideas that Rafsanjani and Khatami treated as mere metaphors are being redefined as literal truths under Ahmadinejad.
One key concept is that of the Hidden Imam, the awaited Mahdi of the Twelver Shi'ites. To Rafsanjani and Khatami this is no more than an escathalogical idea with little immediate relevance to the actual life of society. Ahmadinejad, however, has restored the concept of the Hidden Imam as the central truth of Iran�s political, cultural, economic and social life. He has written and signed a pact with the Hidden Imam and has asked all officials to do so, a move that, taken to its logical conclusion, dispenses with the need for any mullahs including the "Supreme Guide". Thus the government of the Islamic Republic becomes answerable to the Hidden Imam and not to the "Supreme Guide" or the Iranian electorate.
This reinterpretation of Twelver Shi'ism excludes not only any form of rule by the mullahs but also any form of electoral democracy. In this way Ahmadinejad hopes to outflank the two principal political forces that have been fighting for power in Iran since the middle of the 19 th century. His message is: neither mullahrchy, nor democracy.
Ahmadinejad has also changed the Islamic Republic's international profile. Unlike Rafsanjani and Khatami who spoke one way inside Iran and another way outside, Ahmadinejad uses the same discourse everywhere. He addressed the United Nations' General Assembly in the same way he addresses a gathering of Jihadists in a suicide-bomber training camp in Tehran. Unlike Rafsanjani who talked of business and trade, Ahmadinejad speaks of struggle and sacrifice. Unlike Khatami who spoke of Descartes and Hegel to impress the West, Ahmadinejad speaks of the revolutionaries of classical Islam such as Abazar al-Ghaffari and, of course, Imam Hussein.
Unlike Rafsanjani and Khatami who tried to redefine Islam in a way as to please the modern world, a world that is shaped and dominated by Western ideas, Ahmadinejad is trying to revive the purest definition of the faith and asserts that Islam is an alternative to the current global system and not a candidate for becoming a small part of it.
Ahmadinejad's radical discourse has also confused the fake Islamists who send their children to study at Western universities but who insist that the children of the poor should attend Koranic schools only. Those who have tried to build a life on the basis of a little bit of Islam and a little bit of Western modernism are made uncomfortable by Ahmadinejad who is forcing everyone to take sides. What Ahmadinejad is saying is simple: one cannot be half pregnant, either you are or you are not.
Seen in that context Ahmadinejad's pledge to wipe Israel off the map like "a stain of shame", is an attempt at forcing everyone to take sides on what has been the longest running conflict in modern Middle East. Ahmadinejad is asking everyone to decide the nature of the Israel- Palestine conflict. Is it a conflict only about statehood, borders, security, sharing of water, settlements and diplomatic relations? If the answer is yes, the conflict cannot, indeed should not be treated, as a religious one pitting Muslim against Jew. It would be a political conflict, one of countless such conflicts throughout history. And, if it is a political conflict, then all the religious energy injected into it over the past half a century must be regarded as misplaced.
If, on the other hand, we are facing something other than a political conflict, there could be no question of ever accepting the existence of Israel as a state within any frontiers. The peace treaties that Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority have signed with Israel become documents not of political expediency but of apostasy.
In less than 100 days Ahmadinejad has shaken many mullahs on their pulpits and more monkeys up their trees. The reason is that he is asking everyone to be honest with themselves. He believes that the world is heading for a clash of civilisations in which Islam is the only credible alternative to Western domination. And he is convinced that Islam can and will win.
It is now up to everyone to decide whether or not that analysis could be taken seriously or dismissed as the juvenile illusions of a novice who will, in time, learn that the real world is different. But the dilemma that Ahamdinejad has created for most Islamists inside and outside Iran cannot be ignored. He says Islam is not just a flavour to add to policies that are not, indeed cannot be, Islamic. Either we go the whole way and abolish politics as a space distinct from religion or we stop using religion as a device to give our policies the legitimacy they do not deserve.
Posing such questions is no mean feat; and in less than 100 days.
According to recent surveys of newspaper readership, you are not reading this. You didn't even buy the paper. You get your news from somewhere else -- the Internet, talk radio, an alien satellite that pipes everything through your fillings, the guy at the coffee shop who can't shut up about Dick Cheney.
No one is reading newspapers. Not even the people who make the newspaper. Even its traditional markets -- cat-box liner, packing for glassware when you move -- have been taken over by new alternatives. (You can pack your glassware in cat-box litter, for example.) Newspapers are dead.
Really? People have been predicting the death of papers since TV started slaughtering the afternoon dailies. The rise of the home computer, for example, convinced investors to sink bazillions in proprietary systems that delivered the news on eye-killing, tumor-inducing low-res monitors. Newspapers survived. AOL did not kill the paper, because the daily paper never had AOL's technological problems. (I can't open the paper! It's busy!) Cable talk shows did not kill the paper, unless you believe people have decided that Bill O'Reilly somehow replaces the comics and horoscopes.
Bias didn't kill the papers; even if you believe that the modern paper is staffed entirely with Bolsheviks intent on forcing everyone into hemp jumpsuits and hybrid autos, the market for lefty-slanted news is still substantial. If you can't make a pretty penny peddling Bush-Is-Evil in this market, you're not trying.
What threatens newspapers is the medium itself. Its virtues are undeniable -- it has dispatches from foreign lands, lost-pet ads, AND it mops up spills. It has ease of use, serendipity, tradition, a reputation assembled over the decades, a mix of high and low. That's the problem: It's all things to all people.
This is the era of narrowcasting, of picking and choosing from a hundred different sources, most of which cover the topic better than most newspapers. No one interested in computers bothers with what newspapers have to say about the subject; no one eager to discuss the last episode of "Lost" flips to the TV page on Thursday morn. It's all on the Web -- the greatest public square in human history, complete with pickpockets and sphincterless pigeons.
Technology is rewriting the paradigms with such speed that newspapers can barely report on them in a timely fashion, let alone adapt.
A layout artist using a fancy program to arrange wire copy on a page is still doing a Gutenberg, so to speak. Meanwhile, the technologically savvy are plucking their own information out of the ether and sorting it to fit their twitchy modern lives. NBC provides podcasts of its popular news programs, and you can automate the download. Grab the iPod on the way out the door, connect the FM transmitter in the car, and voila: customized radio en route to work. How can newspapers compete without giving every subscriber a personal servant who reads the paper aloud from the back seat?
But it's not a fatal spiral. Not if newspapers go local. Unfortunately, most papers still see themselves as the Trusted Guardians of the Global Yesterday, serving up a cold meal of worldwide news to people who've already read the updates on the Web. This is a mistake. Leave the big picture to The New York Times and the Washington Post and the networks. Get small. Only newspapers have the resources to cover their hometowns. Yes, newspaper readers want to know about the world. But they also want crime and restaurant reviews and cute spelling bee winners and dog photos and anti-pothole crusades.
Also, stop chasing the younger market. They do not care what your reviewer thinks of "Doom the Movie." They played the game AND blew through the expansion pack AND downloaded a bootleg of the film on BitTorrent. Trying to court this demographic makes newspapers look like Grandpa doing the Funky Chicken, and it hurts.
In any case, newspapers are dead, the experts assure us. Pity, but these things happen. Media rise and fall. People move on. Why, once upon a time, millions of Americans got their news and opinions by listening to the AM band of the radio. AM radio! Really.
Who could imagine such a thing today?
Posted by: Steve ||
11/10/2005 09:33 ||
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#1
Yes James. And there are still people who ride horses and if you go to Amish country they still employ the old horse and buggy. I'm sure the old media will still be around in the future, just like the big band sound can be found today someplace, somewhere. Its just that as the generations pass, those more comfortable with change at the speed of light will be found before their digital based technology rather than the bird cage liner.
Maybe if the media simply stated the facts wirh regard to the news and let us come to our own conclusions, instead of slanting their "reporting" to suit their political views...
#4
10 years ago I took 3 dailies. On Sunday 5. Now the local TLH Democrat only.... for sprots and obits only. I'd say comics... but the damn things are butchered and shrunk to an unreadable mess. I'm not watching anymore TeeVee tho... wonder what it is... age?
#7
He doesn't mention the real killer for newspapers - the lose of classified ads. Earlier this year online classifieds past (in volume) print ads in Oz. Not only are the ads a major revenue source, they are the reason many people buy the newspaper.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
An orderly exit from Iraq depends on the development of a viable Iraqi security force, but the Iraqis aren't even close. The Bush administration doesn't take the problem seriouslyâand it never has
