Fjordman finds the picture is more complicated than may first appear.

See also my previous posts on the demographics decline of the West and Europe in particular, and where it is leading.

George Will explains the conundrum of welfare states:

Two decades ago, the sociologist Daniel Bell wrote about “the cultural contradictions of capitalism” to express this worry: Capitalism flourishes because of virtues that its flourishing undermines. Its success requires thrift, industriousness and deferral of gratifications, but that success produces abundance, expanding leisure and the emancipation of appetites, all of which weaken capitalism’s moral prerequisites.

The cultural contradictions of welfare states are comparable. Such states presuppose economic dynamism sufficient to generate investments, job creation, corporate profits and individuals’ incomes from which comes tax revenue needed to fund entitlements.

But welfare states produce in citizens an entitlement mentality and a low pain threshold. That mentality inflames appetites for more entitlements, broadly construed to include all government benefits and protections that contribute to welfare understood as material well-being, enhanced security and enlarged leisure.

The low pain threshold causes a ruinous flinch from the rigors, insecurities, uncertainties and dislocations inherent in the creative destruction of dynamic capitalism. The flinch takes the form of protectionism, regulations and other government-imposed inefficiencies that impede the economic growth that the welfare state requires.

So welfare states are, paradoxically, both enervating and energizing — and infantilizing. They are enervating because they foster dependency; they are energizing because they aggravate an aggressive (think of burning Peugeots) sense of entitlement; they are infantilizing because it is infantile to will an end without willing the means to that end, and people who desire welfare states increasingly desire relief from the rigors necessary to finance them.

Read the whole thing for ample illustration of the process in the current French Republic.

Will also nicely sums up Sarkozy’s task in the French Culture Wars (a phrase used by Greg Sheridan in The Australian a couple of weeks ago, that appeared here a two days prior) he will have to win to reverse the above:

During the 25 years that the French left and some right-wing nationalists have spent reviling “cold, heartless impoverishing Anglo-American capitalism,” France’s per capita gross domestic product has slumped from seventh in the world to 17th. Sarkozy’s task is to convince the French that their government’s solicitousness on behalf of their security and leisure explains the work they must now do to reduce their insecurity.

Paul Greenburg expands and concurs:

It won’t be easy rousing France out of its own version of Carterism. The symptoms are all there—the 9 percent unemployment rate (22 percent for able-bodied persons under the age of 24), the welfare programs the state can less and less afford even as they sap individual initiative, the cultural miasma styled multiculturalism, the growing ring of slums reserved for Muslim immigrants around every big city, the rising crime rate and sporadic rioting … to all of which the powers that be responded with little more than a Gallic shrug.

At the center of the French slide has been the disintegration of the family: From 1970 to 2005, the divorce rate in France went from 12 percent to almost 40 percent; 20 percent of all French couples are unwed; a third of all French mothers live alone; 40 percent of all French children are born to unmarried couples … and so sadly on. (Sound familiar?)
….
By their votes, the French have said they’re ready to reverse course, but being ready for change and actually changing are two different things. It’s one thing to prescribe strong medicine, another to take it.

Continuing with the theme of the day, The Chronicle Review has an excellent essay by Walter Laqueur today, adopted from his forthcoming book “The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent”, which will be published next week (h/t The Brussels Journal):

This, then, is the picture of Europe in the first decade of the new century. It is a picture of gradual decline. Future historians may well be at a loss to understand why the sorry state of affairs was realized only late in the day, despite the fact that all the major trends — demography, the stalling of the movement toward European unity, and the crisis of the welfare state — had appeared well before the turn of the century.

The decline of the Roman Empire has been discussed for centuries, and it could be that the discussion about the decline of Europe will last as long. Decline often does not proceed as quickly as feared; there are usually retarding circumstances. But it is also true that, for better or worse, the pulse of history is beating quicker in our time than before.

There is also a danger that we will throw up our hands in despair and accept with resignation Europe’s future role as a museum of world history and civilization, preaching the importance of morality in world affairs to a nonexistent audience. Surely decline offers challenges that ought to be taken up, even if there is no certainty of success. No one can say with any confidence what problems the powers that now appear to be in the ascendancy will face in the years to come. And even if Europe’s decline is now irreversible, there is no reason that it should become a collapse.

There is, however, a precondition — something that has been postponed. The debate should be about which of Europe’s traditions and values can still be saved. The age of delusions is over.

Extracts from a new essay by Fjordman:

[..] I have heard individuals state point blank that even if Muslims become the majority in our countries in the future, this doesn’t matter because all people are equal and all cultures are just a mix of everything else, anyway. And since religions are just fairy-tales, replacing one fairy-tale, Christianity, with another fairy-tale, Islam, won’t make a big difference. All religions basically say that the same things in different ways. However, not one of them would ever dream of saying that all political ideologies “basically mean the same thing.” They simply don’t view religious or cultural ideas as significant, and thus won’t spend time on studying the largely unimportant details of each specific creed. This is Marxist materialism.

The unstated premise behind this is that the age of distinct cultures is over. All peoples around the world will gradually blend into one another. Ethnic, religious and racial tensions will disappear, because mankind will be one and equal. It’s cultural and genetic Communism. Nation states who create their own laws and uphold their own borders constitute “discrimination” and an obstacle to this new Utopia, and will gradually have to be dismantled, starting with Western nations of course, replaced by a world where everybody has the right to move wherever they want to and where international legislation and human rights resolutions define the law, upheld by an elite of — supposedly well-meaning — transnational bureaucrats managing our lives.

What the proponents of this ideology don’t say is that even if it were possible to melt all human beings into one people, which is in my view neither possible nor desirable, this project would take generations or centuries, and in the intervening time there would be numerous wars and enormous suffering caused by the fact that not everybody would quietly allow themselves to be eradicated.

[..]

The extreme Left didn’t succeed in staging a violent revolution in the West, so they decided to go for a permanent, structural revolution instead. They now hope that immigrants can provide raw material for a violent rebellion, especially since many of them are Muslims who have displayed such a wonderful talent for violence and destruction. The Western Left are importing a new proletariat, since the previous one disappointed them.

A poll carried out on behalf of the Organization for Information on Communism found that 90 percent of Swedes between the ages of 15 and 20 had never heard of the Gulag, although 95 percent knew of Auschwitz. “Unfortunately we were not at all surprised by the findings,” Ander Hjemdahl, the founder of UOK, told website The Local. In the nationwide poll, 43 percent believed that Communist regimes had claimed less than one million lives. The actual figure is estimated at 100 million. 40 percent believed that Communism had contributed to increased prosperity in the world. Mr. Hjemdahl states several reasons for this massive ignorance, among them that “a large majority of Swedish journalists are left-wingers, many of them quite far left.”

I have personally read statements by leading media figures not just in Sweden, but all over Western Europe, who openly brag about censoring coverage of issues related to mass immigration and the Multicultural society.

[..]

Ideas about Multiculturalism and de-facto open borders have achieved a virtual hegemony in public discourse. By hiding behind labels such as “anti-racism” and “tolerance,” Leftists have achieved a degree of censorship they could never have achieved had they openly stated that their intention was to radically transform Western civilization and destroy its foundations.

According to the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, “the lofty idea of ‘the war on racism’ is gradually turning into a hideously false ideology. And this anti-racism will be for the 21st century what Communism was for the 20th century: A source of violence.”

[..]

Many Marxist ideas have been allowed to endure and mutate, such as the notion that culture is unimportant or that it is OK to stage massive social experiments on hundreds of millions of people. The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm has stated that had the Soviet Union managed to create a functioning Socialist society, tens of millions of deaths would have been a worthwhile price to pay. But Marxist ideals of forced equality can only be enforced by a government with totalitarian powers, and will thus inevitably lead to a totalitarian society. There is no “enlightened Marxism,” and the idea that there is has ruined more lives than probably and other ideology in modern history.

Marxism is an organized crime against humanity.

[..]

Ideas matter. Individuals matter. Cultures matter. Truth matters, and truth exists. We used to know that. It’s time we get to know it again, and reject false ideas about the irrelevance of culture. We are not racists for desiring to pass on our heritage to future generations, nor are we evil for resisting to be treated as lab rats in social experiments on a horrific scale. We must nip the ideology of transnational Multiculturalism and unlimited mass migration in the bud by exposing it for what it is: A Communism for the 21st century.

Tony Blair has posted a video message on his youtube channel to congratulate Nicholas Sarkozy on the election win.

Blair is the first world leader to have his own channel on youtube.

Nice one, on both accounts.

See the video here.

French democracy in action:

A car burns in Clichy- sous- Bois

“Throw like a girl” or “How can you fuck the system when you just can’t get it up?”

The vegetarian option.

French confetti.

No Parasan reports:

Mohamed Mechmache, President of AC Le Feu — an association created following the November 2005 riots, has ominously warned that “France did not understand the message sent during the riots in October and November of 2005.”
In Lille, just before 22h00, around 200 anarchists French youths with black flags grouped around the Grand Place and chanted “Fascist Sarko, the people will have your hide”. After pelting riot police, the demonstrators were dispersed. One demonstrator was injured.

Firemen in the south of Lille have answered 20 alarms for torched vehicles.
[..]

Many more photos, videos, links and commentary over at the excellent No Parasan.

Meanwhile LGF is running a poll: How many cars will be torched?

UPDATE: (h/t Carry On America) A letter to the National Review’s The Corner from an American in Paris (addressed to Jonah Goldberg):

Hello Jonah—-

As an American living in Paris and married to a Frenchman, let me point out a few things: 85.5 % voter turnout is not only amazing, it is also without precedent. Even in France, 75% voter turnout only last happened 40 years ago. This was a HUGE election. Every last granny in the nursing home went to the polls. 53-47 under those circumstances is one helluva mandate and Sarkozy knows it.

Sarkozy just gave his acceptance speech, in which he uttered the somewhat astounding—-and from a political point of view, needless—-line: “…and let me say to our American friends, they can count on our friendship.”

Don’t believe the crap about the car burnings: there were only slightly more car burnings last night than the night before the first round elections. As for Segolene and her remarks concerning violence in the “banlieues”: there are certainly many here who saw her utterances as a threat. It was seen, certainly at least on the right, as something akin to blackmail.

Welcome back to the adult table, France. Jokes aside, the most significant outcomes of this election are a) the end of unrepentant Gaullism, the root of so much plainly stupid posturing in French foreign policy and b) the beginning of the end of what in most Western nations would be termed the far Left as a meaningful force in French politics. The five Communist candidates did poorer in this election than the last, and more importantly the Socialists have been decimated. As a commentator whose name I cannot recall right now noted recently France is in desperate need of a real social democratic party to the take the stage on the centre-left. Looking at the first round results, the Socialists only got 25% and together with other far left rabble the left got a total of 35%. The relatively strong vote for the centrist nobody Bayrou at 19% is further proof how frustrated French voters are with the paucity of choice on the French political landscape, with a vast ideological void between the conservative Union for a Popular Movement and the Socialists, which led to many voting for Bayrou in the first round.

The Western world has been leaving France further and further behind. The dead weights of Gaullism and an illogical leftward bias of the centre of gravity of French politics largely responsible for this can now be shed. The former was going to be dropped no matter who won. Getting rid of the latter is going to be far more painful. Not only must the Socialists fade, splinter and give birth together with other more realist left-wing forces to a new party on the left, but the whole culture of French politics must mature and evolve. After all even Sarkozy has a protectionist streak and his proposed economic reforms are although in the right direction are too mild to make the required shift that would arrest the inertia of economic decline and the whole political system still rides on a culture maintained by the same tired old institutions, the very which Bayrou attempted to rebel against. Hopefully Sarkozy was mild on reform talk because he was taking a cautious approach, but has far more in mind in the long term. And now, best of luck in the coming French Culture Wars, Nicholas Sarkozy. You’re going to need it.

UPDATE: 2: Mark Steyn is taking a more of a realist approach and explains what will happen without the ‘luck’ and why.

UPDATE 3: Stratfor takes the longer view with their predictions - Sarkozy is facing a Culture War against the Left (as well as the North-African immigrant and farmers) and its going to get violent for years go come (subscription only):

What will the future — and specifically, the immediate future — bring?

The short answer is violence. Royal’s April 4 warning of impending political violence in case of a Sarkozy win was not solely a last-ditch effort to scare up some votes, but a very real prediction of what could happen. There are three power groups in France that consider such violence justifiable.

The first group comprises France’s 2.3 million farmers. Based on whose numbers you use, 40 percent to 75 percent of a French farmer’s income is provided by government subsidies. The majority of these come from the European Union. The source of that money, the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), has been enshrined in the EU budget since the multinational body’s predecessor, the European Economic Community, was formed more than 50 years ago. When the CAP disappears, the entire French way of life in the countryside will change. Faced with the prospect of destitution, the countryside will thus go up in flames.

But not today. Any decision on the CAP must be made along with the other 26 EU member states. Existing agreements mean the CAP is theoretically safe until 2013. That bit of violence will therefore be for another day.

The second group is France’s roughly 6 million Arab Muslim immigrants, most of whom hail from North Africa. These are people who have faced cultural and institutional discrimination and have been ghettoized into France’s rundown suburbs. This group got its first taste of rioting in 2005. Sarkozy has, to put it lightly, advocated a very firm hand against them. No group stands to be affected more if Sarkozy is able to implement his policies, so the real surprise in the next few days would be if France’s Muslims did not rise up in some way involving fire.

The final group is the French left, and specifically the French youth. Whereas in the United States society largely has frowned on public uprising since the American Revolution, violence against the state has become part of the French cultural mythos. The French Revolution and the subsequent Reign of Terror stand out in the French mind because they were the most extreme cases of popular violence, not the only cases. In every generation France has experienced a boiling over of rage against the state, with the most recent iteration being the student riots of 1968.

The cultural grip of those riots persists even today — something Sarkozy made much of during his campaign — intimidating the state into allowing a rich set of social benefits for the French. Ultimately, Sarkozy’s manifesto boils down to “it is time for France to get with the program” and run a tighter ship. That means less money for state spending, and dare we say, Anglo-style labor reforms.

While farmers will cause problems in the future, and Arabs will cause problems now, it is the left that will determine whether Sarkozy goes down in history as a revolutionary leader or a failed one.

France is bracing itself for Nicolas Sarkozy’s win in the Presidential elections on Sunday:

Mr Sarkozy’s supporters had no illusions about life in France under his presidency. “It will be difficult,” said Gerard Pochy, a former accountant from Avignon. “Protesters will take to the streets, there will be strikes against reform, but Mr Sarkozy has the conviction to change things and stick to his guns. Yes, the housing estates will riot if he gets in, but they would riot anyway, they’re so marginalised.”

Deal with the riots now and push through economic reform or avoid riots for now (for a very short now) by voting for Royal and get a civil war later. Fairly simple choice, really. If its not too late already that is.

Be afraid, says Azouz Begag, a former government minister:

MARGARET WARNER: Azouz Begag, the son of Algerian immigrants, recently quit as the French government’s minister for equal opportunity after what he says were racial insults from his fellow minister, Sarkozy. [Erm.. what?]
He says Sarkozy is playing with fire.

AZOUZ BEGAG: I’m afraid, if he is elected in the 6th of May, in the evening of the 6th of May, there will be a lot of problems in the neighborhoods where the people have been insulted by this guy two years ago.

“Dont vote for Sarkozy, it may upset the rioters… into rioting!” What about the people whose cars and property were burned two years ago? Do you think maybe they were insulted?

MARGARET WARNER: So you think riots will break out?

AZOUZ BEGAG: I’m afraid. I’m afraid. [..]

You’ll be voting for fear then.

Oh, lets hear from the kids:

And if Sarkozy wins? “Burn, the place will burn,” shouted a group of school kids.

I expect George Galloway and possibly the Russian media will be impressed.

The latest issue of the New Statement is some kind of cheese-eating wankfest, which I don’t recommend wasting your time on, but here’s a little bit of comedy that frothed out of the jibberish:

Agnès Poirier, a young French woman who now resides in London, expounds on why so many French people are moving to London:

The culture shock feels intense and elating. For some, it proves too hard. In 2004, the French consulate had to help repatriate 300 young French people who, according to one official, “couldn’t adapt to the harshness of the Anglo-Saxon lifestyle”.

Reverse Paris Syndrome, perhaps?

Frédéric Niel informs us, with not a hint of irony:

Far from the stereotype that a 35-hour week has bred laziness among French workers, young people place a great deal of importance on jobs: half of all young French people say they want to become civil servants, mainly for the job security.

Thats job security now, or else.

Chain-smoking movie director Bruno Dumont, “one of the most intriguing and talented film-makers in France”, shares his thoughts about his country:

“I think the French are diseased, [..] Everything happening in France at the moment shows it’s a diseased country. It’s a country that is searching for meaning and can’t find it. That’s why I feel a lot happier when I’m abroad.”

[..] In France, where secularism is highly prized, Dumont’s films have been criticised for being too “Catholic” in their portrayal of the battle between good and evil. He responds to this with derision. “I’m not Catholic. I don’t believe in God. But at the same time, I’m obsessed by the sacred, by spirituality. The question of redemption has been present well before Christianity, but as French people are a bit stupid, they see all that in religious terms.”

[..] Although his films do not directly engage with politics, Dumont believes that “to retain his dignity, an artist must live in opposition. He must be critical of his country. If not, then he is worthless.” He intends to vote for the “extreme left” in next month’s presidential elections.

Like I said, its a total wankfest. But it certainly gives you a bit of insight into the desease that has indeed gripped France.

Anthony Grant has more on the French malaise in “France’s New Surrender”, for the NY Sun.

And I hope you didn’t miss this latest symptom of the illness.

Nidra Poller in the first of the linked articles:

Against the Giuliani principle, represented in a mild French version by Nicolas Sarkozy, stands the jihad-intifada strategy: I disrespect your laws, defy your authority, attack you frontally and if you dare lift a hand against me I scream “victim” and call in my troops.

Well put.

This poster was dropped in mailboxes in the department (which is like an English county) of Seine-Saint-Denis, northeast of Paris, where 1/4 to 1/3 of the population is now Muslim:

The heading reads:

“They Only Stop Troublemakers!”

Under the hat it reads:

“Deliberately led into traps, forced to bow before youths still holding a Molotov cocktail in their hands (knowing that this low life will be set free the next day), forced to watch youths break windows in the name of Allah, and then being accused of ‘brutality’ because of a simple ID verification…”

Followed by:

Support Your National Police

before the inevitable civil war and before… that!

Note what “that” (ca) is at the bottom of the picture.

Via Cassandra in the comments.

I wonder how many “no-go zones” France has now?

Another excellent instalment from Pascal Bruckner in the Multiculturalism debate on signandsight.com (my initial post on the debate here):

[..]

At the heart of the issue is the fact that in certain countries Islam is becoming Europe\’s second religion. As such, its adherents are entitled to freedom of religion, to decent locations and to all of our respect. On the condition, that is, that they themselves respect the rules of our republican, secular culture, and that they do not demand a status of extraterritoriality that is denied other religions, or claim special rights and prerogatives such as unisex swimming pools and separate gym or other classes. A tense international context surrounds this problem. Today a fundamentalist wave is bearing down on Europe, seeking to re-Islamise the Muslim communities accused of tepidness, and ultimately to place our entire continent of infidels under the law of the Prophet. This proselytism is carried out by all kinds of revanchist groups, the Saudi Wahhabists, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists, all of whom rival each other in zeal. The birth of an enlightened European Islam takes on importance in this context, one which can serve as a model for Muslims all over the world.

I repeat: two directions lie open to us here. The first, inspired by the Anglo-Saxon tradition, stresses strict differences, basing itself on the respect for religious adherence. Here multicultural Canada is the key reference. The other, more French in inspiration, is based on an equally strict separation of church and state, and the subordination of beliefs to civil law. Even if both models are currently undergoing a crisis, as Timothy Garton Ash rightly notes, it seems to me that in all respects the principle of secularism remains the best compass.

Modern France was formed in the struggle against the Catholic Church, and remains extremely sensitive to religious fanaticism. And I maintain that Jacques Chirac, supported by the commission headed by Bernhard Stasi, was right to put a law to parliament on the banning of religious symbols in school and public administrations. This initiative passed easily, with few opposing voices. Supporters included a majority of French Muslim women keen to safeguard their emancipation, among them Fadela Amara (news story), founder with Mohammed Abdi of the association \”Ni putes, ni soumises\” in the suburbs (more here).

\”In conflicts between the weak and the strong, liberty helps suppress the weak, while the law protects them\” said Abbé Grégoire at the time of the revolution. It\’s so true that many English, Dutch and German politicians, shocked by the excesses that the wearing of the Islamic veil has given way to, now envisage similar legislation curbing religious symbols in public space. The separation of the spiritual and corporeal domains must be strictly maintained, and belief must confine itself to the private realm.

It\’s not enough to condemn terrorism. The religion that engenders it and on which it is based, right or wrong, must also be reformed. Can one understand the Inquisition, the witches burned at the stake, the Crusades and the condemnation of heretics without referring to the dogmas of Roman Catholicism? The time has come to do for Islam what was done for Christianity as of the 15th century: by bending it to modernity and adapting it to contemporary mentalities. It is too often forgotten that the fight against the Church in Europe was one of outrageous sectarianism, with unheard of violence on both sides. Cathedrals were burned; priests, bishops and nuns were hung or guillotined; the clergy\’s goods were confiscated. But in the end this fight liberated us from the tutelage of the cassock, radically limiting ambitions on the part of Rome and the various Protestantisms to direct the social order and govern not only people\’s consciences, but also their bodies. There is no reason why Islam, as soon as it enters the Occidental democratic sphere, should escape secularism and enjoy a favour that is denied to other confessions.

[..]

Read the whole thing.