Dear Colleague:

France's riots may portend France's end, due to the unfashionable topic of
demographics.

Steven W. Mosher
President

PRI Weekly Briefing
11 November 2005
Vol. 7 / No. 44


France's End
By Joseph A. D'Agostino

Demographics is not a fashionable issue.  Pundits and politicians prefer
to discuss other aspects of social difference and reasons for social
change such as economics and race.  Most American news stories about and
commentators on the recent riots in France have blamed a combination of
high unemployment (economics) and discrimination (race) for the riots.
They have suggested that more jobs, quotas, and government spending would
solve France's problem with her young Muslim rebels.  Unfortunately,
another aspect (demographics) tells us that there is no practical solution
to France's problem, and the radical Muslims are likely to win.

The importers of the Algerian insurrection certainly seem to have won this
round, with French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin promising more
money for areas dominated by immigrants and their offspring and Interior
Minister Nicolas Sarkozy forced to back off from the hard line he took
when he called the rioters "scum."  French authorities asked Muslim
religious leaders to help end the violence, granting tacit legitimacy to
the anti-Western imams.  Regardless of the intrinsic wisdom of these
decisions, the fact that they came in response to violence means they will
encourage more violence.  As Heywood Brown said, "Appeasers believe that
if you keep on throwing steaks to a tiger, the tiger will become a
vegetarian."  These riots were organized, at least to a large extent,
according to de Villepin and Sarkozy.  The tigerish organizers of the
riots have achieved a victory.  Terrorism works.

So what is France to do?  She has failed to create employment for many of
her young people, whether French or foreign, due to her socialistic
policies, while the French electorate continues to demand continued
statism and unaffordable social welfare policies.  Despite trying hard,
she has failed to assimilate her immigrants and their children, and
contrary to what one might think, the children and grandchildren of the
initial immigrants tend to be more radical and anti-Western than the
immigrants themselves.  The trends are all in the wrong direction.  And
the self-destructing, cringing, appeasing, and degenerate Western European
nation in which they live will never win the respect of these radical
young men, who will demand more and more and more.  I read that the French
media are full of stunned incomprehension: Why are they rioting here, when
France has been so steadfast in opposing the war in Iraq and in leading
international opposition to the United States generally?  Their craven
lack of understanding of basic human psychology, the psychology of men not
so effete as themselves, condemns them.

The sort of young men that France has nurtured in her bosom are very scary
indeed, and sound worse than many inhabitants of our own urban ghettos.
In the Autumn 2002 City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple described the vicious
street loiterers he saw when he visited Paris' government-planned
immigrant suburbs.  "A kind of anti-society has grown up in them-a
population that derives the meaning of its life from the hatred it bears
for the other, 'official,' society in France," he wrote.  "This
alienation, this gulf of mistrust-greater than any I have encountered
anywhere else in the world, including in the black townships of South
Africa during the apartheid years-is written on the faces of the young
men, most of them permanently unemployed, who hang out in the pocked and
potholed open spaces between their logements.  When you approach to speak
to them, their immobile faces betray not a flicker of recognition of your
shared humanity; they make no gesture to smooth social intercourse.  If
you are not one of them, you are against them."

The huge amounts of money that the French government has poured into these
area has done nothing to improve mainstream France's image among these
ghetto-dwellers, and never will.  "Benevolence inflames the anger of the
young men of the cités as much as repression, because their rage is
inseparable from their being," said Dalrymple.  "Ambulance men who take
away a young man injured in an incident routinely find themselves
surrounded by the man's 'friends,' and jostled, jeered at, and threatened.
. . . Of course, they also expect him to be treated as well as anyone
else, and in this expectation they reveal the bad faith, or at least
ambivalence, of their stance toward the society around them.  They are
certainly not poor, at least by the standards of all previously existing
societies: they are not hungry; they have cell phones, cars, and many
other appurtenances of modernity; they are dressed fashionably-according
to their own fashion-with a uniform disdain of bourgeois propriety and
with gold chains round their necks."

Like all men reduced to useless dependence, they hate those who support
them while being unable to throw off their sloth.  Raising their standard
of living without putting them to work will do nothing.  "They enjoy a far
higher standard of living (or consumption) than they would in the
countries of their parents' or grandparents' origin, even if they labored
there 14 hours a day to the maximum of their capacity," Dalrymple noted.
"But this is not a cause of gratitude-on the contrary: they feel it as an
insult or a wound, even as they take it for granted as their due.  But
like all human beings, they want the respect and approval of others,
even-or rather especially-of the people who carelessly toss them the
crumbs of Western prosperity.  Emasculating dependence is never a happy
state, and no dependence is more absolute, more total, than that of most
of the inhabitants of the cités."

Yet the sloth of the native French is more debilitating, because though a
people can survive the advanced degeneracy of its men, as many have, it
cannot survive that of its women.  If a people's women cease to bear and
raise enough children, that people dies.  If most of its women decide
career, freedom, and pleasure are more important than hearth and family,
that people dies.  In no other area of life does the accumulation of
individual decisions more profoundly affect society as a whole.  Feminism
kills.

Muslim women, in Europe and most other places, are relatively family- and
child-oriented.  Most Frenchwomen couldn't care less.  Examining the
birthrates for the two groups, the "French" French will be overwhelmed by
their guests soon enough.  France's overall birthrate of children per
woman is about 1.9, a little less than the replacement rate.  The French
government forbids the collection of statistics by race or religion (it's
one nation, they say), but demographic experts think that the mostly
Muslim immigrant population's birthrate is an astonishing twice that of
the native population, possibly higher-and more immigrants flood into
France every day, where up to 10% of the population is already Muslim.
Some folks think France will be 40% Muslim by 2050, perhaps sooner.

Though French unemployment may be high now, someone will have to work to
support native France's aging population, which refuses to bear the next
generations itself.  The plan was to have the immigrants do it.  Maybe the
plan needs revision.

Even with immigration, the proportion of French people over 65, which was
16% in 2000, is projected to hit 27% in 2050, with all the attendant
increases in the costs of already-bankrupt social security and health care
systems.  The proportion over 80 will go from 4% to 11%.  At the same
time, the proportion of people entering the workforce will shrink.  It's
unsustainable.

I could discuss  all the other things I've learned about France recently
from reliable sources: the six-fold increase in crime in the last few
decades, the cultural acceptance of gang rape in immigrant neighborhoods,
the foreign (often Saudi) funding of nearly all mosques in France, the
rapidly growing influence of radical Islam among France's Muslims, and the
fact that over half of France's prison population is of immigrant stock.
There is also a lot of evidence to support the thesis that the native
French have denigrated their guests: Walled them off in vast grim, modern
housing projects; bombarded them with degenerate popular culture just as
they were cut off from their original cultures; provided welfare rather
than employment; and left their spiritual needs to be tended almost
exclusively by Muslim firebrands with no competition from Christian
missionaries.

Algeria was once a department of France.  One day, France may be a
province of Algeria.  Demographics will likely make the difference.


Joseph A. D'Agostino is Vice President for Communications at the
Population Research Institute.


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