France is committing national suicide. Therefore, what?

There is a FrontPage Magazine symposium today on France’s Muslim crisis. Though the symposiasts’ analyses of the situation seem somewhat confused and contradictory, they do make one point loud and clear, that France has gotten itself into very deep trouble by importing an Islamic population that it cannot integrate. FrontPage and the participants even use the word suicide. First, on FP’s main page, it says:

Symposium: The Death of France
By Jamie Glazov
Did les Francais commit national suicide?

Then in the symposium itself, Jamie Glazov for FP says:

FP: It sounds like France is finished to me. It committed suicide. Nidra Poller?

Poller: Yes, of course, Jamie, France has committed suicide. But the problem is, France will still be with us, France will still be a problem crying for help. When an individual commits suicide, he’s gone. Countries live on geographically even when their hearts stop beating.

Nidra Poller, an American writer who has lived for 30 years in France, goes on to say in effect that there is a lot of ruin in a great nation, and that France, no matter how bad things are right now, can still recover. Fine. Unfortunately, she gives not the slightest notion of how this might happen. While she decries the French elites who thoughtlessly created this insoluble problem and even today refuse to allow anyone to talk frankly about it, Poller engages in her own evasions. She continues her response to Glazov:

How can France possibly integrate such a population? Could France integrate a comparable influx of Americans, most of them drawn from the poor, under-educated, unsophisticated, backward classes? José Bové became a hero for attacking a McDonald’s restaurant. But if you say that France cannot absorb 5 or 8 or 10 or 15 million Muslims, you are a filthy racist.

Today, there are still enough French people in France to reclaim their sovereignty. Not by shrinking back to a narrow-minded peasant mentality but by truly accepting the risks of modernity.

Well, it sounds like the same remedy as we’re proposing for the Middle East: free markets, free press, authentic democracy. The 2007 elections will be decisive. The “leadership” that got us into this predicament will most probably be disavowed. But we can’t be sure that it will be replaced by a truly effective, forward-looking government.

First she speaks of “reclaiming sovereignty,” a radical-sounding statement that suggests the idea of the French reclaiming France for the French, with all that that implies; but then she segues into Bush-style democracy-promotion. What does the latter have to do with the former? How would greater openness and democracy fix France’s Muslim problem? She’s just said in no uncertain terms that the Muslims cannot be integrated, then she calls democracy the solution. The rest of her long response to Glazov seems even more incoherent. Neither she nor the other participants mention the only possible solution, which is the removal of the Muslims from France.

However, maybe I’ve misunderstood Poller. Maybe she is indirectly suggesting that, since it was the lack of free speech and democratic accountability in France that allowed its anti-national elites to bring the country into this disaster, therefore real democracy, by allowing the French people to speak freely and to assert their national will politically, would result in the rejection of the Eurabian policies and the reduction of the Muslim presence in France.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 09, 2005 12:33 PM | Send