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Friday, April 18, 2003
16:34 - Europe's Predicament
http://www.thebuggyprofessor.org/archives/00000074.php

(top) link
The Buggy Professor has pulled together a few of the more incisive articles from the past months which help to explain the political situation in France and other EU countries (particularly Germany and Russia)-- what makes them tick, what ticks them off, and how they resemble ticks. It's rather creepy stuff. One of the featured articles is Dalrymple's "Barbarians at the Gates" from a few months ago-- full of florid hyperbole, I'm sure, but dozens of other articles lend it grim credence.

The post is long, but it's worth a read.

The impression one is left with is quite frankly that France and the EU flatly refuse to do anything "the American way"-- including adopting the typical American solutions to the very problems created by their refusal to resemble America, such as multiculturalism rather than our "melting pot". Their social mores forbid them to cast any but a blind eye upon the religiously-defined anti-Semitism in their street protests or the Wild West lawlessness of the North African immigrants in the cités, lest they appear to be as culturally insensitive as the Nazis or-- worse-- the Americans.

Some EU countries are starting to push back, though. I heard on the radio a little while ago that the Netherlands is making efforts (in the wake of Pim Fortuyn's assassination, whose motivation is only now being fully digested, though it was fairly clear before now to anybody who's been paying attention) to reassert the Dutch national identity. They're teaching Dutch language and Dutch culture classes to immigrants, supported with economic incentives, intended to encourage the non-native-born populace to miscegenate, to become-- if not Dutch, then at least hyphenated, just like the Americans. Such an initiative is dreadfully gauche and retrograde in the face of transnational progressivism, and I'm sure it horrifies Europeans for whom the preservation of all cultural purity except their own is paramount, but those are exactly the attitudes that ensured we had an unprotected left flank when 9/11 came along-- and even Europe's left recognizes that the cités aren't just a quaint tourist attraction whose problems a few more social assistance programs will solve. Europe's grown soft-- wilfully-- and soft is a perilous thing to be these days.

Old Europe seems to have learned the lesson of Nazi Germany all too well-- and in shying away from such a phenomenon ever arising again from among its own elite, has only succeeded in fostering it among those downtrodden populations it steadfastly refuses to interfere with. I'm not insensible to the moral teachings of West Side Story, but sometimes the world just stubbornly refuses to play like a stage production, and sometimes there is no moral.

Overcorrection always has unintended consequences.

UPDATE: Den Beste has the goods on France. Or, I guess, the bads.


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