France in Twilight

Watching France descend into darkness

An interesting update on Islam in France and how French leaders are dealing with the situation.  Or rather, not dealing with it.  The writer, Bruce Bawer, is an American who has long lived in Norway.  His article includes this extraordinary passage which includes a rather basic question from a retired French general, Roland Dubois:

The minds and hearts of these people are consecrated to a set of beliefs and practices that represent an existential menace to Western Civilization.  To pretend that these believers can be reined in by any lame law or charter or pact is sheer folly.  As one General Roland Dubois asked rhetorically in a recent commentary:  When faced with a choice between a sacred text, dictated by Allah himself, and therefore untouchable to the end of time and some newly concocted document, more or less imposed by the unbelievers, which text can you expect to win out?  Muslims have felt a sense of indomitability in France for some time now; can anyone honestly expect them to turn meek?  The bottom line, then, is this:  If Islam were harmless in the first place, there would be no need for any laws or charters to control its adherents; but since Islam is not harmless, such documents are useless – except perhaps as part of an effort by Macron to make it look to voters, in the run-up to the next election, as if he’s actually doing something about the issue.  [Emphasis added]

In an Open Letter to the President of France and Members of Parliament, General Dubois and nineteen of his fellow retired generals write:

As Cardinal Mercier, Primate of Belgium, once said:  When prudence is everywhere, courage is nowhere.  Ladies and Gentlemen, stop equivocating — the hour is late, the work ahead is immense.  Do not lose time, and know that we are ready to support political leaders who would undertake the rescue of the Nation.

However, if nothing is done, heedlessness will continue to spread its poison throughout society, inexorably.  In the end, there will be an explosion, and our comrades in active military service will be forced to step in and undertake the perilous mission of protecting our civilizational values and the lives of our fellow citizens.

It is easy to see that the time for hesitation is over.  Otherwise, tomorrow, civil war will put an end to this growing chaos, and there will be thousands of deaths, of which you will bear responsibility.

Editor's note:  Translation from The American Mind.  Read the full translated letter here:  Twilight in Paris (love the title).

Needless to say, the letter has not been received well by the French bien-pensants.  Left-wing politicians labeled it a thinly veiled call for insurrection, and called for legal action and prosecutions.  Here is an accounting of the episode from the Daily Mail.  The Mail updates the story here.  Here is the story in The Telegraph, also updated.

The Left offers no substantive alternatives.  They certainly dare not address Dubois' question above.  In this new millennium, the Left has only one playbook:  Label anyone who disagrees with their narrative a bigot, have them canceled or fired, and completely ignore the mayhem all around.

As Samuel Huntington wrote in The Clash of Civilizations, Islam has bloody borders.  And the European border is no longer the Mediterranean Sea.  Today, the border stretches through every major European city.  And the blood spilling has just begun.
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I Can No Longer Be a Patriot

I was once a patriot who loved my country as much as anyone.

I love the story of our founding and the men who made it happen.  Throughout history, can anyone point to a founding story more exemplary that ours?

And our founders gave us the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, and the Constitution.  We have the Bill of Rights; we have the First Amendment.

Yes, our history includes slavery, but it also includes great sacrifice to end slavery.  We have Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address.  We have Frederick Douglass.

Our history is first the story of survival, followed by western expansion, followed by our nation's rise to international preeminence.

Yes the United States has made some mistakes overseas.  But on balance, we have done more good than harm.  It is worth noting that, today, two of the world's strongest democracies are Germany and Japan.

We have rich Native American history, with names like Manhattan, Dakota, Cherokee, Seminole, Navajo, and Cheyenne.  We have not always treated our native brothers well, but my God, we are richer for their experience and contributions.  I know what all European descendants know:  We owe them so much.

Likewise, our history of civil rights is far from perfect, but we have led the world in advancing the civil rights of our people.  All of our people.  We have Susan B. Anthony and Booker T. Washington.  We have Martin Luther King, Jr.

We have a fair and impartial judicial system, based on common law and precedent, inherited from the British.

And how can one not love the natural beauty of our nation?  I grew up on the beaches of the Carolinas.  But we have the Smokey Mountains, the Everglades, the Grand Canyon, Denali, the list is endless.  Niagara Falls, right?  Hawaii!

Along with our nation's natural beauty, we have abundant natural resources.

And the world's most advanced and most productive agriculture.

And our history is not only geopolitical.  We have Thomas Edison and Henry Ford and Thomas Watson and Steve Jobs.  We have the Wright brothers.

We are the land of opportunity and free commerce.  It is a culture of opportunity.  We lead the world in business startups.  We have Benjamin Graham and Warren Buffett.

We have Silicon Valley and the internet.  The British may have led the world into the Industrial Revolution, but we perfected it.  And then we led the world into the digital revolution.

We have Milton Friedman.

We have Hemingway and Steinbeck and Mark Twain and Edith Wharton.

We have Cole Porter and Frank Sinatra and Buddy Holly and Duke Ellington.  We have jazz, Louis Armstrong, and Gershwin.  We have Nashville.  We have Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein.  We have Nina Simone.  We have the New York Philharmonic.

We have George Michael Cohan and Tennessee Williams.

We have Hollywood and the greatest movies and television ever made.  We have William Powell and Myrna Loy.

We have Frank Lloyd Wright and I.M. Pei.

We have Edward Hopper and Georgia O'Keeffe and John Singer Sargent and Andrew Wyeth.

We have our rabble-rousers.  Cesar Chavez, Madalyn Murray O'Hair, Upton Sinclair, Christopher Hitchens (who joined us late in life after many years of living in this country).  We are a better country for them.  Oh yes...we are.

We have the world's greatest cities.  New York, Chicago, San Francisco, New Orleans, Miami.

We have the world's greatest universities.  Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Caltech, and MIT.

We have the world's greatest medicine.  The Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins, the Cleveland Clinic, Sloan Kettering.  We have the CDC and the NIH.

We have the world's most advanced military.  We have civilian control.  We have Grant and MacArthur and Patton.  We have West Point and Annapolis.  And eager young men and women who volunteer to serve.  That is no small thing.  We have drones.  And regardless of what you think of drones in the military, our pilots, our boys and girls, sit safely in the American desert.  Also no small thing.

We put men on the moon; we brought them back home.  Today even as I write this, we are exploring Mars with yet another drone.

We live in a wonderful neighborhood, with the ever friendly Canadians to our north and vibrant Mexico to our south, bounded by the world's great oceans to our east and west.  We love our Caribbean neighbors.  We love, mourn, and hope for our Cuban friends and family.

And oh yes, let us not forget, we have our immigrants.  Other than Native Americans, we are all immigrants.  Our people represent all of the world's religions, large and small.  And we come from every corner of the planet.  We used to call this the melting pot.  It is perhaps our greatest attribute.

And finally, we have the world's greatest people.  Individualistic and independent and confident and generous.  Americans believe in truth and justice and hard work and in a sense of fair play.  And I think it is worth noting that we have always believed in healthy debate.  Right from the First Amendment, Americans have always believed that free, unfettered speech will lead to the best outcomes.

Note this is largely a list of people and their accomplishments and all they represent.  Of course patriotism is partially about place, but it is more about people and ideas.  It is about history.  It is about culture.

What comes first?  History or culture.  They are clearly intertwined.  But it seems to me that history, like politics, is downstream from culture.  It is culture that determines how history is made.  Or even if history is made.  American culture meant we must bravely free far away Europe.  Swedish culture meant, they must stay cowardly neutral to the horrors right next door.  Just imagine that:  Neutral to Hitler.  Imagine a culture that allows for that.  Afterwards history does and must shape culture going forward.  Today Sweden is committing national suicide, largely I think, because they are ashamed of their past.  This is obviously true of Germany as well.

So we look at the Grand Canyon and we feel pride of place.  But when we think of our culture and all that it has given us, this is the wellspring of patriotism.

Culture.

And what of our culture today?

Many people no longer revere our history.  Let's face it, many Americans are ashamed of our history.  Some are angry.

They find fault with our founders and our Constitution as originally written.  To them, it is a charter of negative liberties.  And it allowed for the original sin of slavery.  No matter that we as a people later fought a bloody civil war and used the constitutionally provided mechanism, envisioned by those founders with great prescience, to add an amendment banning the abhorrent practice.  They focus on our slaveholding origins; they call for reparations.

These same people focus on all the mistakes that the United States has made overseas.  They don't point to Germany and Japan.  They point to Vietnam and Cuba and Central America, and throw around terms like colonial ambitions.

They focus on our failure to treat Native Americans properly.  They despise Columbus and his European pathogens, philosophical as well as epidemiological.  They point to the failure of our civil rights struggles.  They actually want to reverse course and re-segregate the races.  To justify this travesty they use terms like critical race theory and white privilege.  And woke, whatever the hell that means.

Martin Luther King Jr's dream about content of character has been drowned out by the likes of Ibram Kendi, and his call for equality of outcomes.  They redefine the word equity to suit their purposes.

These people believe that all cultures are relatively equal.  And because they truly believe this fiction, they cannot possibly understand why outcomes are not equal as well.  So they blame systemic racism.  Inequality of outcomes is prima facie evidence of systemic racism.  Of course it is.

They do not value the history and culture of Western Civilization and all that it has given us.  They believe that Africa is poor and despotic, not for cultural reasons, but because of guns, germs, and steel.  They do not recognize Islam as aggressively hostile, misogynistic, and homophobic; rather they label the rest of us Islamophobic.

Because they cynically believe that new immigrants will boost their voter rolls, they do not value the integrity of our borders.  Never mind that this hurts our poorest, working class citizens the most.

We have seen the breakdown of our court system.  We have activist judges who do not respect the Constitution as written, much less property rights (Kelo).

At one time big business was a fairly conservative affair.  Today big business is in bed with its partner and protector, big government.  Benjamin Graham is dead and Warren Buffett is 90.  Today our titans of industry pander to the political Left.  Our leading corporations, from the Fortune 500 to the Silicon Valley behemoths lean left and censor right.

They outsource to China.  To be fair, we are all responsible for this.  But even now that China has proven itself unworthy of our business and our partnership and our trust, the Left continues to shamefully pander to the CCP.  And if you point out that Wuhan is in China, you're a racist.

Small family farms have given way to more productive large agricultural enterprises (agribusiness).  Good in a way, but like all big business, they favor big government.

Sadly Milton Friedman is no longer with us.  Today we have Paul Krugman and his ilk.

As surprising as it may be for America, home of the First Amendment, today we have a culture of censorship.  And cancel culture is a form of censorship.  Many of us simply no longer believe that free speech leads to the best outcomes.  Some take it a step further, equating speech with violence.  These same people often overlook the actual violence taking place in our streets.

In fact these people throw around the term racist so much that it has lost all its meaning.  If you take issue with any bit of their narrative, you simply must be a racist.  Most people can't stomach the label, so today self-censorship is rife.

Cole Porter has been replaced with Cardi B.  Here I want to say:  But we have Andrea Bocelli.  Right?  But Bocelli is Italian.  And while the US may be a large market for his work, how many Americans know his name?  This is a relevant contemporary cultural divide:  Cardi B. versus Andrea Bocelli.  WAP versus Con Te Partirò.  It truly is time to say goodbye.

Of course it is unfair to use an Italian who barely speaks English as the standard.  So can John Legend and Diana Krall save us?  Oops, Krall is Canadian.  But look at today's Billboard:  Polo G, Lil Nas X, oh and Cardi B.  Cardi B. barely speaks English either.  How did we come to celebrate the inferior?

While I am no expert on architecture, I think the distinction between Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry speaks volumes about our cultural deterioration.  Have a look at examples of their respective work, and decide for yourself.  The difference stretches beyond form and function, and even beyond tastes and aesthetics.  As with contemporary music, surely our acceptance and appreciation and even celebration of the chaotic and the inferior is a moral failure.

Same with high art.  Today's most notable artists include Christopher Wool and Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jeff Koons.  Goodness.

Regarding literature, let me quote from a recent Bari Weiss piece:  "The curriculum no longer features classics such as The Scarlet Letter, Little Women, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Lord of the Flies.  New books include:  Stamped, Dear Martin, Dear Justice, and Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass."

Could Hollywood make a movie like To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) today?  Too racist.  Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)?  Too jingoistic.  Forget about it.

After generations of one party rule and corrupt government, our great cities are falling apart.  And falling into civil chaos.  As I noted recently, the people, the citizens, continually vote for the clowns running these cities.  They have the government that they voted for.  Not once, not twice...many times.

Our great universities have diversified themselves in every way conceivable, except for the only way that matters:  Diversity of thought.  Our academy has become a joke.

And do we really believe that our great institutions of medicine will stay preeminent with more and more government involvement in the field of medicine?  Yet most Americans want government involved in our healthcare.  As for the CDC and the NIH, their response to Covid has been a shameful exercise in Kabuki theater.

Today, frighteningly, even our military is going woke.  And they seem less concerned with our actual enemies and more concerned with media critics who point this out.  We might wonder how far they will take the whole equity bonanza?  Can they contain it to enlistment goals and promotions?  Or will we actually see it in failed missions and God forbid higher casualty counts?

So again, what of our culture today?

A full half of our population support this nonsense.  They condone or tolerate or outright support these new cultural aberrations.  Which sadly have become the new cultural norms.  And it is not an equal half.  We are talking about the half in charge of our bureaucracies, the academy and K12 education, the media, publishing houses, journalism, Hollywood, and big business.  And all of their supporters.

And have you noticed, the bien-pensants are so very self-righteous about all of it.  After all, how difficult is it to follow the narrative?  There is very little thought involved, but vast confidence in their beliefs.  Just ask any of them.  The true believers remind me of Bolsheviks; those who merely go along with it remind me of Soviets.  The rest of us are loathsome dissidents.

These are not my people.  They are not of my tribe.  I am not one of them.

This is not my culture.

It is not that I don't want to be a patriot.  It is rather...

I can no longer be a patriot.

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New York City is Begging Businesses to Leave

Louis Rossmann asks Why am I still here?

Make no mistake about it, government does not work for you.  You work for government.  NYC just does not care to hide it any longer.  Not that Bill de Blasio's city government cares, but this video has over 1.1 million views, making it one of Rossmann's most popular videos in a mere two weeks.

Good job New York City!

Anyone thinking of moving to New York City, or God forbid starting a business there, should watch some of his videos.

Michael Goodwin has more:  The possibility of permanent decline and the ultimate destruction of the New York we know is unmatched in modern memory.

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The Good People of the Left

Rob Hoogland is in jail for the crime of being a responsible parent

A couple of days ago, Bruce Bawer summarized this story in A Certain Madness Amok:

[Judge] Bowden placed remarkable restrictions on Hoogland [the father].  He was forbidden to try to persuade A.B. [the 14-year-old daughter] to stop treatment [sex-change therapy].  He was forbidden to address her by her birth name.  He was forbidden, in any conversation with anyone, to refer to her as a girl or to use female pronouns to describe her.  If he were to do any of these things, ordered Bowden, it would be “considered to be family violence” — yes, violence — under the Family Law Act.  That’s par for the course today, when certain words are viewed as acts of violence, while objective acts of violence — such as the use of chemicals to permanently alter developing bodies, and the use of scalpels to remove healthy organs — are regarded as purely benign.

This is an important article.  Leftist thinking on the whole trans issue is truly bizarre.  But hey, if they want to live in a fantasy world of their own making, so be it.

But it is not enough for them to believe it themselves.  They need all of us to believe it.  In fact, they require us to believe it.  It's bad enough that they indoctrinate credulous children.  Now they are outright abusing children; sacrificing children on the altar of their factitious ideology.  Emotionally damaging and even physically mutilating children, without parental knowledge or consent.  Hoogland refers to it as grooming.  But what we have here is state-sponsored child abuse, causing irreversible damage.

And even that is not enough.  If a parent tries to prevent such abuse?  Even if he merely speaks out against it?  Jail him.  He's not a parent, he is a dissident.

If the Left feels free and justified to act in this manner, on this issue, can there be any limit to their exploits?  And their power.  It should be noted that this is not some far-left fringe element.  This is the Canadian establishment.  The more moderate, center-left types either condone this totalitarian behavior or they tolerate it or they outright support it.

We simply must stop thinking of left-of-center types as good people.  They are anything but.

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