November 8, 2005
Paris Burning: How Empires End
By Pat
Buchanan
The Romans
conquered the barbarians -- and the barbarians conquered Rome.
So it goes with empires. And comes now the final chapter in the
history of the empires of the West.
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 and
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.
At this
writing, the riots are entering their 12th night and have spread
to Rouen, Lille, Marseille, Toulouse, Dijon, Bordeaux, Strasbourg,
Cannes and Nice. Thousands of cars and buses have been torched,
and several nursery schools firebombed. One fleeing and terrified
woman was doused with gasoline and set ablaze. French police are
now being shot at and wounded.
The rioters
are of Arab and African descent, and Muslim. 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.
The rampage
began on Oct. 27, when two Arab youths, fleeing what they mistakenly
thought was police pursuit, leapt onto power lines and were electrocuted.
The two deaths ignited the riots.
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 percent
and income is 40 percent below the national average. He has denounced
the rioters as "scum" and "rabble" -- and
if the riots persist, his stock will rise.
Like the
urban riots in America in the 1960s, which the Kerner Commission
blamed on "white racism," Paris' riots are being blamed
on France's failure to bring Islamic immigrants into the social
and economic mainstream. Solutions being offered range from voting
rights for non-citizens to affirmative action in hiring the children
of Third World immigrants.
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. Moreover, the African and Islamic peoples
pouring into Europe -- there are 20 million there now -- 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.
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. 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.
In any "war
of civilizations," the soaring Muslim population is a potential
Fifth Column inside Europe.
Nevertheless,
their numbers must grow. For not only do they have a higher birthrate
than the native-born Europeans, no European nation, save Moslem
Albania, has a birthrate (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.
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.
Colonization
of the mother countries by subject peoples is the last chapter
in the history of empires -- and the next chapter in the history
of the West, which is now coming to a close.
Copyright
2005 Creators Syndicate
