Europeans have no concept of freedom

Look at what the “conservative” candidate for president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, says about a citizen’s right of self-defense: There is none. Just sit back and let the authorities do it. For the French, l’état, c’est tout.

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Howard Sutherland has an interesting angle on this:

Without excusing French domestic spinelessness, I think this attitude is yet another baleful consequence of the French Revolution. The French state glorifies the revolution and celebrates it as the birth of modern France. But most Frenchmen with any sense of their own history have some awareness of the horrors and brutality – among the French, not brought in by foreigners – that the revolution unleashed. France has a history, beginning before the revolution but peaking and gaining new strength with the revolution, of political violence and unrest. Normal Frenchmen fear what armed and angry Frenchmen might do to each other (Englishmen laugh at the incessant strikes and riots from safely across the Channel, but for the West it is no laughing matter that one of our leading nations is so politically immature). France’s rulers remember the Catholic and royalist resistance to their precious revolution, especially in the Vendée. Accordingly, there is a weird convergence of rulers and ruled in favor of a disarmed citizenry.

What has changed in France is tolerance of political unrest on the part of foreigners in France. The banlieue intifadas would have been inconceivable even 20 years ago. Even more inconceivable would have been the passive acceptance of them by the French state – and by ordinary Frenchmen. It is no accident that chauvinism is a French word. I can’t believe how much the French seem to have changed, and in so short a time. Wherever he is now, General de Gaulle must rue the day he set France on its Arabophilic course.

Van Wijk writes:

Disgusting. Was their ever a view more musical to a criminal’s ear?

Unfortunately, “Let the professionals handle it” is fast becoming a mantra over here as well. I seem to remember that this land was won for the most part by amateurs.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 24, 2006 01:07 AM | Send