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 no