january 4,
2006
Europe's Troubled Sleep
The death of Europe feels trapped in an abstract realm until the reality of it slaps you across the face. I’ve reported plenty on the subject in its various manifestations from different European capitals, but sometimes I have to ask myself if I’m exaggerating the severity of the crisis. After all, the United States continues to defy the prophets of doom, who seem to pop up in European news reports on a regular basis, by the way. And Europe is rich and modern like the U.S., so I tell myself surely it must be flexible and adaptable enough to survive.
But today influential columnist Mark Steyn writes convincingly about the death of Europe among many, many other related topics in a long piece called “It's the Demography, Stupid” in the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal.
Far more than 10 thousand cars burned in France in November. Afflicted by an advanced stage of political correctness which views the car-burners as virtuous and the state as evil, France was unable to muster the moral authority within itself to forcefully reassert control over all of its territory. This suicidal quasi-religious mindset is why the cars burned for so long and why the authority of the French state burned with them.
I reported recently that European intellectuals now debate the death of the state in France.
The French Socialist Ex-Prime Minister Lionel Jospin used to say that he did not want to read reports about how France was losing control of the suburbs (to immigrant lawlessness) because they depressed him too much. Today not only the French state, but also much of Western Europe, continues in a troubled sleep while the last of the exit doors on this road to oblivion become blocked.
