France’s Multiculturalism Experiment Goes Up in Flames

“French culture doesn’t exist in and of itself; there is no such thing as a single French culture. There is culture in France and it is diverse.”

That was French President Emmanuel Macron in 2017, putting his own spin on the insipid “diversity is our strength” mantra that’s been the thoughtless creed of Western elites for more than two decades.

Now France, like so many other Western countries, is reaping the whirlwind of that shallow, misguided ideal. Riots are breaking out all over the country.

But it isn’t a case of France being French.

In fact, just the opposite.

This instead feels like the beginning of the end of a foolish and civilizationally suicidal globalist, “multicultural” project facilitated by EU elites that can no longer accommodate its contradictions.

I’m going to back up a bit here for those who haven’t been paying close attention to what’s been happening across the pond. Over the weekend, protests in France—absurdly billed by much of the media as student frustration with large class sizes and fiscal “austerity”—exploded into a torrent of violence that authorities have been unable or perhaps unwilling to contain.

Left-leaning media continue to spin a narrative about what’s happening, downplaying the violence in way that will be quite familiar to those who remember the Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police “mostly peaceful” riots in 2020.

One now-deleted X post by CBS described what was happening in France as “scuffles” between “small groups of protesters” and police.

Does this look like a scuffle to you?

The situation got bad enough that Macron addressed the nation, but he hardly rose to the occasion. Instead, the French president seemed to minimize the violence, highlighted the importance of “listening and dialogue,” and blamed America.

Typical.

A Charles de Gaulle he is not. That great French statesman who led his country out of the ashes of World War II may have found a way to blame America, but he would not have let “student” protests or any other sort of protests collapse what he and his people had rebuilt.

When faced with a crisis, de Gaulle appealed to the nation as a nation and won.

What does Macron have to appeal to? Good sense? National solidarity? Laughable.

President Donald Trump has a different assessment of the situation. He said on Truth Social that France needs to close the borders, “FAST.”

He later doubled down.

That’s all true. But even if France suddenly shut the border down right now it wouldn’t solve the problem as I’ll explain in a bit.

Macron and most of the media want us to believe this whole thing is just a little bit of earnest discontent over the problem of “affordability” or some nonsense like that. It isn’t.

These aren’t your run-of-the mill union-led protests that have been endemic to France from seemingly time immemorial. Instead, what we’ve seen is large scale looting, clashes with police, and most disturbing of all in the case of France—attacks on statues and other historic places.

The beautiful, 143-year-old Limoges Town Hall was lit on fire and mostly burned to the ground.

Statues and other historic places have been inundated, desecrated, and besieged.

Even the Louvre had to be shut down. The museum put out a weak and piddly statement about a “student social movement” that deserves to be hung in, well, the Louvre. Maybe they can put it in the ashes once it burns down.

In some cases, it seemed to be leftist anarchists leading the charge.

In others, it was Muslims waving Palestinian flags and otherwise expressing various forms of Islamic solidarity.

And dichotomy is an important point here. It certainly seems like leftist groups fanned the flames of this whole thing, likely with a bit of organizational coordination and a lot of money. But they clearly weren’t the reason these riots got so big so quickly.

This instead appears to be a hodge-podge of the disaffected—anarchist leftists, unassimilated Muslims, street thugs, and maybe even a few foreign agitators.

More than ever before there are huge swaths of people living in France and other Western nations with no investment in their future.

Whether looking for a socialist revolution, a globalized intifada, or just a bit of fun on a Saturday night, there’s now a critical mass of people willing to pillage their own country, in part because they don’t see it as their country at all. Or at least not a country worth any more than any other.

And that’s why the response to this mess has been so weak and unsatisfactory.

Even if Macron and others like him were willing to use force to put the riots down, that wouldn’t make the crisis go away. And that’s because the problem goes so much deeper than the public funding of schools or whatever nonsense they want to cook up to explain their predicament.

The issue is that generations of Western elites have treated their nations as interchangeable, as merely pieces of a larger global order.

They strangled the dynamism from their society and tried to bandage it by importing millions of people from culturally distinct lands with no plan to integrate them. GDP went up a little, government burdens went up a lot. Discontentment grew.

They allowed their children, or really, other people’s children because they rarely seem to have ones of their own—learn that their country’s past is one to be ashamed of. Why defend a cultural heritage when you’ve been told that was built on nothing but the pillaging of others?

I don’t want to engage in hyperbole. The riots won’t literally lead to the end of France this week. The country isn’t imminently going to fall to communism or be under Sharia law, at least for now.

However—and I do think this is extremely important—what we are witnessing in the streets of Paris and in smaller cities with large immigrant, or second and third generation, unassimilated Muslims absolutely represents a breakdown of the French nation.

The country is now awash in hordes of people uninvested in the future of France as France. They aren’t interested in preserving the heritage of the country. They don’t care about appeals to national pride. They won’t be happy with a slightly higher paycheck.

Even closing the border right now won’t fix this mess. Cracking down on the rioters will only buy time. What France needs is for its leaders to believe in and celebrate French culture, not just some watered down, meaningless “culture of France.” Refuse to bring people in who won’t assimilate. Deport those who engage in violence and threaten their neighbors.

Let the people know that their country won’t end with a few bangs in the streets and then a whimper. If there is still some part of a country worth saving, go save it. If they don’t, the void will eventually be filled by socialists and Islamists.

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Domains for Sale · GOTPeople.org · TheDSAPlatform · The Truth About Socialism

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