Whats more disconcerting is the criticism Hirsi Ali has received, particularly in Europe, from various intellectuals and philosophers, cultural relativists in-denial and morally obtuse apostles of the coming great Multiculturalist Utopia, some of whom had the gall to call her an “Enlightenment fundamentalist”. This attack on Hirsi Ali, and the accompanying championing of “moderate Islamist” Tariq Ramadan was the subject of a momentous debate I posted about earlier, which serves as the background for this post.

The cover story of the current issue of The New Statesman is called “Who’s afraid of Tariq Ramadan?” (and doesn’t Ramadan ever look the part of a modern philosopher?), by Paul Berman, and contains the most erudite, complete and clear defense of Ayaan Hirsi Ali against the lot above, yet. The whole essay is very long, broken up over 12 pages, so I recommend heading straight for the “print” version, which allows you to view it in one page. Feel free to search the page for “Ayaan” to get the relevant part (not that the whole thing is not worth reading, it is).

Here’s Berman’s explanation of why these people attack Hirsi Ali:

If you open either of her books and read a few lines at random, you will discover one reality that you would hardly guess from reading those attacks. Buruma–and he is not the only one to do this–presents Hirsi Ali as a diehard enemy of Islam, dedicated to hurling insults, which, to be sure, she does do, and with gusto. But this is not her major theme. In her books, and in the little film that she made with van Gogh, she dedicates herself mostly to something else, and that is to describe and to decry the miseries of women in the portion of the Muslim world that she knows best–in East Africa and Saudi Arabia, together with the immigrant zones of Europe. Her account of her own genital mutilation as a little girl, and of the botched genital mutilation of her sister, and the sister’s tragic life and suicide; her portrait of girlhood and marriage in Somalia, Kenya, and Ethiopia, not to mention her own forced marriage, which she fled; the portrait of her grandmother, the Somali nomad, and the patriarchal customs of the past, which do seem to have lingered on; her sense of horror, as a girl, at seeing the women of Saudi Arabia for the first time, these women who have no faces because of their veils and whose black garments hang so shapelessly upon their bodies that, in order to know which way the women are facing, you have to look to see which way their shoes are pointing; her account of the shelters for abused Muslim women in Holland; her account of the terrors of refugee existence, and the double terrors of refugee existence for women–all these passages express something that can never be detected in a certain kind of high-minded cerebral journalism today. It is a visceral anger at oppression. A moral indignation, and not just a wistful pragmatism.

But mostly these passages in Hirsi Ali’s books raise the issue of women’s rights, and not from an outsider’s point of view, regardless of how many times she has been denounced for making herself an outsider to Muslim life. Hers is a story marked by knives–the knife at her own genital mutilation, and at her sister’s; the knife at the murder of her friend and colleague, pinning to his chest the sheet of paper threatening her own life. This is not a Swiss professor! Here is the actual insider; the real thing. I suppose that all this unironic indignation can only be annoying in the extreme to a certain kind of refined sensibility. Something about those knives takes away the quality of abstraction that allows a social issue to be shrugged off. It is always good to be subtle and nuanced, but Hirsi Ali’s writings have the effect of making a large number of nuanced subtleties look ridiculous.

About Hirsi Ali we do not have to wonder: where does she stand on the question of stoning women to death? Or on the obligation for husbands to beat their wives? Read one page by her and you will know the answer; and if you read two pages, you might begin to suspect that, on the television screens of France, the man who defended the oppressed of the oppressed in the poorest neighborhoods of Europe was Nicolas Sarkozy. But that has got to be the problem from a perspective like Buruma’s. This talk of women’s rights–doesn’t it point ultimately in directions that ought to be regarded as (here is the mystery of our present moment) conservative? Better the seventh century than Nicolas Sarkozy.

If there is an intellectual establishment, and I suppose there is, the attacks on Hirsi Ali radiate from its center. And this, the campaign against Hirsi Ali–this, like the anti-Semitic mob assault during the Paris peace march of 2003, or like the spectacle of millions of Britons marching under the leadership of an Islamist organization, or like the calm discussions in The New York Times of why it would be wrong to condemn with any vigor the stoning of women to death–this does represent something new. Here is the new development among journalists and intellectuals, the development that Ramadan’s career has served to illuminate. Something like a campaign against Hirsi Ali could never have taken place a few years ago. A sustained attack on an authentic liberal dissident crying out against injustices in remote parts of the world and even in the back streets of Western Europe, a sustained attack that appears nearly to have erased the very mention of women’s oppression and the struggle for women’s rights from discussion–no, this could not have happened yesterday, except on the extreme right. This is a new event. This is a reactionary turn in the intellectual world.

And delving deeper, past “the reactionary turn”, we happen upon a nose-dive:

[the French writer Pascal Bruckner] wrote a criticism of the leftist doctrine that in [the seventies] was still known as “Third Worldism”–meaning the hope and the expectation that, around the world, the impoverished countries, the former colonies and semi-colonies, would generate, as an aspect of their struggle against Western imperialism, a worldwide revolutionary alternative, a soulful new kind of socialism, a new and revolutionary culture. This was the doctrine that venerated revolutionary leaders such as Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and Fidel Castro not because they were communists but because they were the leaders of the Third World revolution.

But Bruckner, in writing about the “Third Worldist” idea, noticed that among the good-hearted leftists of the Western countries, sympathy for oppressed people in the former colonies had turned into a kind of dehumanizing contempt for the oppressed people in the former colonies, without anyone having noticed. He called his book The Tears of the White Man, and in its pages he served up a spectacular exposé of left-wing European clichés about the poor and the oppressed in faraway places–an enormous catalogue of Noble Savage imagery and other fantastical pictures of the superior qualities of downtrodden people in poor countries, compared with their former oppressors in Europe. The book was a demonstration of how, through a combination of guilty consciences and patronizing ignorance, the European intellectuals had ended up re-creating the worst sorts of racist and colonialist imaginings of what people in other places and with other skin tones must be like: their wisdom, virtue, selflessness, brilliance, and, above all, their profound quality of being different.

Bruckner has returned to this topic from time to time over the years, and just last year he came out with a sequel called La Tyrannie de la Pénitence, or The Tyranny of Penitence, updated to our own age, in which the “Third World” of yore has been renamed the “south,” and the imperialists have been renamed the forces of globalization. And the sequel has led Bruckner to take a new glance at how, in our own time, the progressive intellectuals of the Western countries, out of a continuing self-contempt and feeling of guilt for the Western crimes of the past, have likewise updated their fantasies about the wronged and inscrutable people of other regions without really changing them. Ian Buruma, because of his sundry books, was the ideal person for The New York Times Magazine to assign a profile on Tariq Ramadan; and Pascal Bruckner, because of his own books, has turned out to be the ideal person to write about Ian Buruma. Bruckner noted the peculiarities of Buruma’s campaign against Hirsi Ali. He took note of Timothy Garton Ash’s contribution to this campaign in The New York Review of Books. And Bruckner offered a philosophical analysis.

Buruma and Garton Ash, Bruckner concluded, had fallen for the intellectual miasmas of the postmodern sensibility, and the miasmas had led, via the errors of relativism and an indiscriminate multiculturalism, to the simplest of philosophical mistakes. This was the inability to draw even the most elementary of distinctions. In the postmodern idea, the Enlightenment has come to be looked upon as merely one more set of cultural prejudices, no better and very likely rather worse than other sets of cultural prejudices–a zealotry that is unable to control its own excesses. From this point of view, someone like Hirsi Ali, who grew up in an atmosphere of Islamist radicalism and the Muslim Brotherhood in Africa and has taken up a new outlook committed to rationalism and individual freedom, has merely gone from one fundamentalism to another–not much different, seen in this light, from van Gogh’s murderer.

That people on the political left have a certain set of opinions, just as people do in other parts of the ideological spectrum, is not surprising. What is surprising, however, is how often the opinions of those on the left are accompanied by hostility and even hatred.

Particular issues can arouse passions here and there for anyone with any political views. But, for many on the left, indignation is not a sometime thing. It is a way of life.

How often have you seen conservatives or libertarians take to the streets, shouting angry slogans? How often have conservative students on campus shouted down a visiting speaker or rioted to prevent the visitor from speaking at all?

Or beat their teacher to death with sticks, for that matter. Here’s an example from China’s Cultural Revolution of what results when that anger is taken to its pathological conclusion and made into state policy:

“What is your name?” the Great Helmsman asked a young student as she pinned a Red Guard armband on him in front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace. “Song Binbin,” she responded enthusiastically. The name her parents chose meant “properly raised” and “polite,” qualities that Mao Zedong found unappealing. “Be violent!” he ordered the girl. A short time later she changed her first name to Yaowu, or “Be Violent.”

It was Aug. 18, 1966 and the 72-year-old Chinese leader had called male and female students to assemble on Beijing’s Square of Heavenly Peace to launch his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Hundreds of thousands waved Mao’s little red book and cheered the old man.

Mao’s call to violence fell on willing ears among many young people. Thirteen days earlier Song, 19 at the time, was presumably present when the female students at her school, which was part of the Beijing Teachers University, killed their teacher, Bian Zhongyun. The girls brutally beat the 50-year-old woman to death using wooden sticks spiked with nails. On the day before the killing, members of the Red Guard had already maltreated the teacher, who was the party leader at the school — they suddenly viewed her as a “counter-revolutionary revisionist” who they believed had gambled away her life.

Bian went down in history as the first victim of the Cultural Revolution — the bloody mass movement Mao used to eliminate his enemies within the party. The teacher’s murder was followed by the killings of millions of Chinese people. The ten-year campaign destroyed entire families, irreplaceable cultural treasures and centuries-old traditions. In August 1966 alone, about 100 teachers were murdered by their own students in the western section of Beijing.

Thomas Sowell sums up his point:

If it is hard to find a principle behind what angers the left, it is not equally hard to find an attitude.

Their greatest anger seems to be directed at people and things that thwart or undermine the social vision of the left, the political melodrama starring the left as saviors of the poor, the environment, and other busybody tasks that they have taken on.

It seems to be the threat to their egos that they hate. And nothing is more of a threat to their desire to run other people’s lives than the free market and its defenders.

And here’s an example of what free market capitalism has been teaching the children of China’s great Asian competitor, India:

During the mid-1990s, the first Internet cafes began opening up in Bangalore, with one going into operation nextdoor to Gopinath’s house. “My brother Shreyas took me there. I was fascinated. The Internet changed my life,” he says. He spent every spare minute online.

He taught himself how to build Web sites. “He spent every rupee he had in the Internet Café,” says his mother, disapproval still evident in her voice. Gopinath admits, “I had been a good student up until then. After I discovered the Internet, I was an average student.” Before finding cyberspace, he had dreams of becoming a veterinarian.

So what did he become instead? How about this:

Suhas Gopinath started a software company at age 14 and has since become one of the most remarkable success stories of the Indian IT boom. Now he’s 21 and runs a world-class business with 400 employees.

Nice one, Suhas!

Tarek Fatah summed it up nicely (again):

“For atheists, considered worthy of the death penalty by Islamists, to team up with their ultimate opponents in attacking Canadian civic society, demonstrates the fundamental bankruptcy of these two political ideologies.”

Jonah Goldberg points out the absurdities and hilarities of a similar event in Cairo:

At the annual Cairo antiwar conference in Egypt, the hot panel discussion this year was “Bridge-Building Between the Left and Islam.” John Rees, a British Trotskyite, observed: “Where else can you sit down in a single evening and listen to senior people from Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, people from the revolutionary left and the antiwar movement from around the globe?”

Gosh, it sounds great. I’m just sorry I missed the rollicking game of Pictionary between the Castroites and the jihadis afterwards.

[..]

In the 1960s, every would-be revolutionary called himself a Marxist, usually without any serious regard to what Marx wrote, said or believed. The specifics of the ideology didn’t matter, because Marxism was the oogah-boogah word radicals used to scare the fat, lazy bourgeoisie. In 1969, Stuart Schram, a specialist on Chinese Communism, wrote that “never in the course of the past century has the name Marx been so widely invoked; never has this name served to justify so many ideas and actions totally foreign to the genius of Marx.”

Today, Marxism has lost its oomph. Yuppies drinking five-dollar lattes put Che Guevara t-shirts on their private-school toddlers.

And because nobody thinks Marxists are scary anymore, radicals consumed with hatred for the status quo — for America, for Western civilization or for the plain old dreariness of their boring lives — don’t bother calling themselves Marxists anymore. It’s not that they’re any more or less Marxist then they were before. It’s just that Marxism won’t get a rise out of your in-laws the way it used to.

But Islamic radicalism? Hooboy, that’s where the action is. Of course, not everybody follows the John Walker Lindh route and actually converts to Islam, just as not every Black Panther supporter became a bank robber. But who can deny that this post-colonial, anti-imperialism, indigenous-peoples-and-the-suburban-revolutionaries-who-love-them-unite! stuff is in many respects just a magnet for the same riffraff and rabble rouses of yesteryear?

Sure, there’s much to fear in Jihadism. But there’s also something deeply pathetic about it, too. And that’s worth pointing out.

More on the great useful idiot tradition of the Left here.

[..] Sweden is a great example of why we need limited government, a state that only upholds law and order and does not concern itself with pushing a particular ideology on its people.

Why does the government dispense with the social contract and attack its own people? Well, for starters, because it can. The state has become so large and powerful that is has become an autonomous organism with a will of its own. The people are there to serve the state, not vice versa. And because state power penetrates every single corner of society, there are no places left to mount a defense if the state decides to attack you. Its representatives are no longer leaders of a specific people, but caretakers preoccupied only with advancing their own careers through oiling and upholding, and if possible expanding, the bureaucratic machinery.

[..] A characteristic of the situation in Western Europe is that we have more and more laws, yet at the same time more and more lawlessness. The German journalist Jens Jessen claims that his country has been gripped by a “prohibition orgy” regarding tobacco, cars, cheap holidays and computer games, television and fast food. The process is “disconcerting and almost grotesque in its systematization.” He believes there is some level of compensation going on for the powerlessness of politicians.

Parallel with an explosion in street crime, the state turns on its law-abiding citizens with a proliferation of regulations and an inflation of laws. The less control the state has over the the most important tasks of society, the stronger its desire to assert its power over the tiniest details becomes. Or is it a subtle show of force, a constant reminder to the average citizen of who’s boss, a sign that resistance to state policies is feared?

As Jessen points out, the dangerous thing about this spirit of prohibition is that “once it’s out of the bottle, it spreads like an infection” whose first casualty is tolerance: “The fettered citizens are going to loll in security; the more unbearable the state regulations, the more relaxed they will feel. But such a society, one that makes the individual citizen and he alone responsible for all possible environmental sins, can easily become the blind accomplice to the worst catastrophes on the international stage.”

[..]When does the rule of law break down? It breaks down when laws are no longer passed with the consent of free people, when citizens no longer feel that the law is just, when regulations become so numerous that it is virtually impossible even for decent individuals not to break the law on a regular basis and when the authorities are incapable of protecting their country’s borders while criminals rule the streets. It breaks down when the law appears increasingly arbitrary, when it invades the most intimate details of the life of law-abiding citizens while it allows great freedom to criminals. In short, it breaks down when it no longer corresponds to reality and to the sense of justice experienced by ordinary people.

Unless current trends are changed, I fear parts of Western Europe could reach critical mass soon.

Do read the whole thing.

Tarek Fatah, a long-time left-leaning Muslim, jokes that maybe he’s just too good looking to be taken seriously as a representative of Islam. Certainly, the things he has to say about small-l liberals and the radical left in Western democracies – and their attitudes toward his faith – are anything but pretty.

“The liberal-left has a preconceived vision of what a Muslim is, and most of us don’t fit that mould,” says Fatah, a moderate leader in the Canadian Islamic community.

Clean-shaven himself, Fatah says many on the left expect Muslims to have dark, unruly beards and to be wearing unflattering flowing robes.

Fatah and many of his friends eschew both, but he’s known Muslims to rent robes when they meet with politicians or activist groups, in order to provide good visuals for the media.

But more disconcerting, he says, is a tendency he’s noticed among many on the left to embrace radical Muslims because they like the anti-U.S., anti-George W. Bush rhetoric of such people.

“They think they’re like the Sandinistas,” he says, referring to the Nicaraguan rebels of the 1980s.

Fatah’s frustration boiled to the surface this week as he prepared to fly to New York for a private screening of Islam vs. Islamist, a film cut from the line-up of the America at a Crossroads series of documentaries last month after PBS producers decided it was too alarmist.

For Fatah, the abrupt cancelling of a film looking into intimidation of moderate Muslims such as himself by conservatives is a symptom of something much more troubling he’s noticed in Western society – liberal guilt feeding liberal racism.

“It’s the racism of low expectations,” he says, adding the left is too willing to overlook the sexist and homophobic attitudes of conservative Muslims in hopes of gaining an ally against the U.S. administration.

Add to that liberal guilt for being part of the rich West, he says, and a situation soon develops in which the most outspoken Muslim critics of the West get the most attention.

“Moderate Muslims don’t have a place where they can speak, and the censoring of this film shows it,” says Fatah, who is featured in the film, produced by Martyn Burke.

Fatah lashed out at anti-war groups who march shoulder to shoulder with conservative Muslim groups to protest the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, without paying enough attention to the politics of the groups they are allying with.

[..]
A subject of numerous death threats for his criticism of conservative Muslims, Fatah says members of the left, by trying to be culturally sensitive, have at times become little more than apologists for those making the threats.

“The people who we hope in Western society would say, `How dare you make death threats,’ are saying, `Oh, we can understand, there’s a cultural disposition that permits people to be idiots’,” he says.

“They’re homophobes, but we understand.”
[..]
But for Fatah, the issues are much larger, a marriage of convenience between the left and conservative Muslims.

“Nothing makes them feel better than to say, `Those people who are being pissed on by George Bush, we’ll take care of them,’” Fatah says.

In so doing, he says the left may be falling into the same trap that the right once did – allying with Muslim fundamentalists to satisfy short-term goals, without enough attention paid to what those people believe.

“Toronto’s downtown war-withdrawers, Trotskyites march with the very people who would hang them,”
he says, pointing out that many on the left are atheists.
“The biggest crime in the eyes of Islamists is someone who denies the existence of God.”

]]> http://www.taoofdefiance.com/2007/05/11/tarek-fatah-on-the-marriage-of-convenience-between-the-left-and-conservative-muslims/feed/ 0 http://www.taoofdefiance.com/2007/05/11/multiculturalism-a-communism-for-the-21st-century/ http://www.taoofdefiance.com/2007/05/11/multiculturalism-a-communism-for-the-21st-century/#comments Fri, 11 May 2007 10:09:22 +0000 Popovich http://www.taoofdefiance.com/2007/05/11/multiculturalism-a-communism-for-the-21st-century/ 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.

]]> http://www.taoofdefiance.com/2007/05/11/multiculturalism-a-communism-for-the-21st-century/feed/ 0 http://www.taoofdefiance.com/2007/05/11/biting-the-hand/ http://www.taoofdefiance.com/2007/05/11/biting-the-hand/#comments Fri, 11 May 2007 01:21:06 +0000 Popovich http://www.taoofdefiance.com/2007/05/11/biting-the-hand/ that massages you.

The caption for this photo on Spiegel online reads: “A police officer in Hamburg gives a demonstrator a massage after he strained his back while throwing a bottle.”

I’d be careful, you may get sued later for pressing too hard.

UPDATE: Its back rubs for young and old in Germany at the moment.

Green with envy or just green? The banner reads “Ram and Sink the G-8!”

Where’s my fucking massage?

Oh no, its the anarchists!

]]> http://www.taoofdefiance.com/2007/05/11/biting-the-hand/feed/ 0 http://www.taoofdefiance.com/2007/05/07/the-french-democratic-model-the-first-photos-are-in/ http://www.taoofdefiance.com/2007/05/07/the-french-democratic-model-the-first-photos-are-in/#comments Mon, 07 May 2007 01:09:39 +0000 Popovich http://www.taoofdefiance.com/2007/05/07/the-french-democratic-model-the-first-photos-are-in/ 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.

]]> http://www.taoofdefiance.com/2007/05/07/the-french-democratic-model-the-first-photos-are-in/feed/ 0 http://www.taoofdefiance.com/2007/05/04/andrew-klavan-the-big-white-lie/ http://www.taoofdefiance.com/2007/05/04/andrew-klavan-the-big-white-lie/#comments Fri, 04 May 2007 07:33:22 +0000 Popovich http://www.taoofdefiance.com/2007/05/04/andrew-klavan-the-big-white-lie/ This has already been posted all over the joint, but just in case you missed it:

The thing I like best about being a conservative is that I don’t have to lie. I don’t have to pretend that men and women are the same. I don’t have to declare that failed or oppressive cultures are as good as mine. I don’t have to say that everyone’s special or that the rich cause poverty or that all religions are a path to God. I don’t have to claim that a bad writer like Alice Walker is a good one or that a good writer like Toni Morrison is a great one. I don’t have to pretend that Islam means peace.

Of course, like everything, this candor has its price. A politics that depends on honesty will be, by nature, often impolite. Good manners and hypocrisy are intimately intertwined, and so conservatives, with their gimlet-eyed view of the world, are always susceptible to charges of incivility. It’s not really nice, you know, to describe things as they are.

This is leftism’s great strength: it’s all white lies. That’s its only advantage, as far as I can tell. None of its programs actually works, after all. From statism and income redistribution to liberalized criminal laws and multiculturalism, from its assault on religion to its redefinition of family, leftist policies have made the common life worse wherever they’re installed. But because it depends on—indeed is defined by—describing the human condition inaccurately, leftism is nothing if not polite. With its tortuous attempts to rename unpleasant facts out of existence—he’s not crippled, dear, he’s handicapped; it’s not a slum, it’s an inner city; it’s not surrender, it’s redeployment—leftism has outlived its own failure by hiding itself within the most labyrinthine construct of social delicacy since Victoria was queen.

[..]

And because we’ve allowed leftists to define the language of political good manners—don’t say women are less scientific; don’t remark that black people bear the same responsibility for their actions as whites; don’t point out that the gunman was a Muslim, it’s not nice—the sort of person willing to speak the truth isn’t always the sort of person you want to be seen with. It sometimes takes, I mean, a Rush Limbaugh or a Sean Hannity to withstand the obloquy attached to stating the facts of the matter. If these people in their public personae seem harsh to more genteel conservatives, it may be because it requires that extra dollop of aggression to shatter the silence created by the Left’s increasingly elaborate sensitivities.

]]> http://www.taoofdefiance.com/2007/05/04/andrew-klavan-the-big-white-lie/feed/ 0 http://www.taoofdefiance.com/2007/05/02/french-car-bq-season-coming-early-this-year/ http://www.taoofdefiance.com/2007/05/02/french-car-bq-season-coming-early-this-year/#comments Wed, 02 May 2007 08:19:30 +0000 Popovich http://www.taoofdefiance.com/2007/05/02/french-car-bq-season-coming-early-this-year/ 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.

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