Democracy among the unbelievers
Mark Steyn poses a critical issue to the cynical French administration:
French cynics like the prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, have spent the last two years scoffing at the Bush Doctrine: Why, everyone knows Islam and democracy are incompatible. If so, that’s less a problem for Iraq or Afghanistan than for France and Belgium.
Steyn thinks that France, and Europe, are now in the first battles of their Civil War, and that prospects do not look good, given the craven ways of the infidels:
Battles are very straightforward: Side A wins, Side B loses. But the French government is way beyond anything so clarifying. Today, a fearless Muslim advance has penetrated far deeper into Europe than Abd al-Rahman. They’re in Brussels, where Belgian police officers are advised not to be seen drinking coffee in public during Ramadan, and in Malmo, where Swedish ambulance drivers will not go without police escort. It’s way too late to rerun the Battle of Poitiers. In the no-go suburbs, even before these current riots, 9,000 police cars had been stoned by ”French youths” since the beginning of the year; some three dozen cars are set alight even on a quiet night. ”There’s a civil war under way in Clichy-sous-Bois at the moment,” said Michel Thooris of the gendarmes’ trade union Action Police CFTC. ”We can no longer withstand this situation on our own. My colleagues neither have the equipment nor the practical or theoretical training for street fighting.”
At one point, however, French forces did have the training and will to fight, but that was a long time ago:
The French have been here before, of course. Seven-thirty-two. Not 7:32 Paris time, which is when the nightly Citroen-torching begins, but 732 A.D. — as in one and a third millennia ago. By then, the Muslims had advanced a thousand miles north of Gibraltar to control Spain and southern France up to the banks of the Loire. In October 732, the Moorish general Abd al-Rahman and his Muslim army were not exactly at the gates of Paris, but they were within 200 miles, just south of the great Frankish shrine of St. Martin of Tours. Somewhere on the road between Poitiers and Tours, they met a Frankish force and, unlike other Christian armies in Europe, this one held its ground ”like a wall . . . a firm glacial mass,” as the Chronicle of Isidore puts it. A week later, Abd al-Rahman was dead, the Muslims were heading south, and the French general, Charles, had earned himself the surname ”Martel” — or ”the Hammer.”
Poitiers was the high-water point of the Muslim tide in western Europe. It was an opportunistic raid by the Moors, but if they’d won, they’d have found it hard to resist pushing on to Paris, to the Rhine and beyond. ”Perhaps,” wrote Edward Gibbon in The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire, ”the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.”
Steyn does not sound optimistic on the outcome of today’s war in Europe. Neither does the thoughtful David Warren:
The solution of the old Catholic France was, over the centuries, that of Charles Martel: victor at Tours in 732 A.D., where the advance of Islam on Western Europe was stopped. It consisted in a frank realization that two civilizations were clashing, where only one could prevail. The choice was relatively simple: victory over the invaders, or death and servitude.
The modern, enlightened alternative is “negotiation”. Good luck with it.
Finally, these thoughts on the gloomy future post-Christian France seems to be creating spark our memory of something that Steven den Beste wrote in 2003. His piece is about the fantasy world that was to be the EU project. However, we quote it to show that France is not only post-Christian, but has two other failed religions, rationalism and Marxism:
A new fiction arose; a new explanation which Europeans told one another as a way of explaining away their weakness and dependency. Europe’s peace and prosperity had not come about because of American military occupation; it had happened because Europe had transcended old fashioned ideas about security through strength. Europeans started to get along because they had moved to a new political and intellectual plateau, where all problems could be solved through negotiations and war was no longer needed. The Americans had nothing to do with it, and indeed because they remained wedded to the old-fashioned ideas of “peace through strength” it was actually Europe which was superior in all the ways that really mattered.
Added to this was a secular religion called Marxism, which had strongly influenced European political thought for the previous hundred years and which remained powerful and persuasive for some, who clung to it with a fervor usually seen in the most die-hard fundamentalists of Christianity or Islam. As with any successful religion, it had a prophet and books of revelation. He told his followers that they were more virtuous than unbelievers. He promised his followers that they were destined to be victorious. Other religions promise that victory when their deity finally returns to Earth and works with His followers to defeat the infidel; Marxism as a secular religion instead invoked a kind of historical predestination.
It is our view that in the long run, and maybe quite a bit before that, believers beat unbelievers. Those who believe nothing have nothing to die for, and more importantly, nothing to kill for. France appears to be decidedly post-Christian. As important, the weak religion of rationalism — in which wise men can can negotiate instead of fight — is failing. The tepid Marxism of France has also failed in a sea of bloated government spending (57% of France’s GDP) and wretched prospects for the young (22-30% unemployment). It is no wonder that government spokesmen blather on about dialogue and respect (”Il faut que la loi s’applique fermement et dans un esprit de dialogue et de respect,” via Le Monde). They have so little else to fall back on.