Hello from France and thanks for that great piece. One could actually believe you live here... We are indeed reaching a turning point and I seriously think that should France fall, the rest of the West would be doomed. There seems to be a "pincer" threat between the new woke faith coming from the far left feeding from US campuses and the rise of Islamism feeding from uncontrolled immigration. We are closing a loop now with the post-modernism coming from the US but originally created by French leftist philosophers and the immediate threat of terrorism made possible by irresponsible politicians raised in liberal post-modernist ideas.
1) France is fragile because, while it is the oldest Western nation, it has a unique DNA - which actually has nothing to do with DNA. France is a nation that was not built upon an ethnicity or tribal group. And it's not a federation like Germany or a group of kingdoms like the UK, it is a centralized country. We have the Franks, a German barbaric tribe, the Gallic Celts, the Scandinavian Normands, and indeed the Latin Romans to cite the key components. It means the country cannot rely on ethnicity to regroup. It's a unique identity that makes France hold together based on a long history made of tears and glory, shared values and of course Catholicism. The danger today is that the woke left pushes to deconstruct French history which is our key bond while the Catholic faith has weakened like elsewhere in the West. The ties holding the nation together are weaker today. It is also fragile because massive immigration from North Africa brought Islam which is not just a faith but a political ideology which fundamentally conflicts with French secular values and Catholic roots. There has also been a cold type of Civil war since the French revolution that has deeply divided our people and almost like a national trauma. Let's not forget about half a million people were killed in the 1790 and that crack has resurfaced since then. That weakens the ability to resist as a nation.
2) This special identity brings strengths as well. There is a new alliance of intellectuals and regular people who want to resist and they come both from Right and Left typically because it is about saving a nation a bit like Catholic monarchists and Anti Clerical socialists fought together in the trenches in WW1. This is quite unique as well and can inspire other countries. You can find atheist philosophers like Michel Onfray, who defines himself as a Socialist partnering with Eric Zemmour, a writer of Jewish North African descent who admires Napoleon. Today we have ppl like those really willing to work together against the threat. The other strength is the French Army which is today the last 'real' army in Europe. It cannot compare with the US in terms of fire power and IT but it has remained solid with real fighting experience and also a deep understanding of foreign terrains and civilizations. Most officers joining the armed forces come with strongly rooted ideals. It is for a reason that the elite Foreign Legion is made of people coming from around the globe and ready to fight for France to their deaths. This example has a deep meaning that France still lives and inspires and it explains why the military is so popular for a big majority of French people, why their letters resonated so deeply. Remember Joan of Arc. She is today still seen as a savior whether you are Catholic or not... The secular values are rooted as well with a spirit of neutrality in public spaces when it comes to religion. This is a major fence to resist against Islamism and it is shared between Left and Right - hence the alliance mentioned above. "Laicite" is typically misunderstood in the Anglo Saxon world but it basically refers to strict neutrality. It has nothing to do with racism. Since Islamism always creeps in by taking small steps, winning small victories until it can rule, our secular values are an important weapon. This is probably why the Woke left influenced by the US campuses targets these values as a priority, by promoting a multi cultural society which simply doesn't belong here and would mean war.
The current upheaval is global, and not (as you eloquently say) limited to national borders. But you are right to monitor the situation in France. It is the thin and cracked backbone supporting the western civilization. The other major card in our house of cards is America... Both countries have in common to look at the world with universal eyes for good and bad reasons.
The problem is that government is no longer by the consent of the governed.
In Western Democracies, unelected regulators, judges and bureaucrats make almost all of the most important decisions. This causes unrest because elections appear not to have the consequences voters expect.
Governments faced with popular protest movements, like the Tea Party or Yellow Vests, suppress them like peasant uprisings. Unpopular policies, like transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, are justified by unexplained "expert opinion." Even dissenting experts are suppressed.
For example, open discussion of global warming, whether it exists and, if it does, the most economical ways to deal with it, is suppressed. The common man may not have an MS in Statistics, like me, but they notice gasoline prices are going up in service of a theory which allows no dissent. This causes unrest.
The prevailing governing philosophy is that government knows better than the people themselves what's best for them. Vox populi, vox dei, is a totally obsolete concept for modern bureaucrats. However, the people think they should be able to choose for themselves. This conflict will only be resolved by a return to less intrusive government, or an advance to a more openly oppressive state. So far, the state is getting more repressive, but allowing mob violence to intimidate political enemies into submission.
"The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?"
Thanks for this thorough, thoughtful, and alarming piece on the problems of Islamism and American-imported identity politics that are assailing France. I’m a professor of French in the US, and this is one of the only articles I’ve read on what’s happening over there that isn’t either lazily undetailed or just plain legacy media bull&*%t.
I’m a fan of your theory of a general Upheaval with a nexus of related dilemmas plaguing the liberal democracies of the West. I do, however, want to insist a little on just how much the Islam question ups the ante in France compared to the American case. France is considered a special target by Islamists for two reasons: on the one hand, it’s the land of the Franks and the point of departure for the Crusades; on the other hand, it’s considered the nation of the Revolution and thus of atheism, humanism, and secularism. Paris in particular is the “capital of an undefinable mixture of Catholicism and impiety,” to quote the historian Pierre Vermeren in his 2016 book La France en terre d’Islam (France in the Land of Islam). This unique combination of historical inheritances makes it doubly hated by Islamists and a symbolic target for their agenda (or fantasy, if you prefer) of global domination.
France, as your article helps show, appears to be slowly coming around to the idea that these kinds of archaic motivations do in fact motivate certain people. The question is whether it’s not already too late, and whether the French are not always a fatal step behind their enemies.
On another note, if you’re interested in imagining what a French civil war might actually look like, the 2016 novel Guerilla by Laurent Obertone (a nom de plume) is the place to go. Obertone, who is trained as a journalist, based the novel on the working hypotheses of the French intelligence services. He has also written a number of non-fiction bestsellers on the theme of "insecurity" in France. This has made him persona non grata in respectable society, but that’s how you know he’s worth reading. The only catch is that he hasn’t been translated into English.
Mr. Lyons, There is much to fear in your analysis, but also bits to cheer. Specifically regarding the latter, influential people, at least in France, are beginning finally to pinpoint the principal source of the cancer chewing away at the vital organs of Western Civilization: U.S. Universities.
I am part of a Franco-American family. Usually we reside in the USA but spend part of every year in France and sometimes stay longer. We are in France currently.
My wife is French and my French language skills are poor, but I don't sense the same kind of political divisions in France that we have in the USA. In America, the media has the Left and Right separated into two completely and mutually hostile realities. France has a lapdog media that is inseparable from the power structure. American media has US citizens hating each other. There is nothing comparable in France. I don't see civil war here. But there is a common distain for the feckless French state. It's response to Covid was particularly appalling. It combined draconian infringements on personal freedoms not seen since the Nazi Occupation with a thoroughly inept medical response. Meanwhile France has an entrenched and corrupt ruling class - they all go to the same university to learn to be politicians - that makes the USA's stale political class look dynamic. I'd say that if anything, France is ripe for a revolution and the USA for the civil war.
That, said, your article is interesting and makes a lot of good points.
The central tenet of Critical Race Theory as taught in seminars for corporations and as understood by BLM and their "allies" is: "All white people are racists". It does not take an efficient mind anything more than that irrevocably to conclude that CRT is unadulterated racism veiled by verbiage. One does not need to study Islam long or deeply to confront the absolute hatred hatred of non-believers, of democracy, indeed of the underpinnings of western civilization, demanded of Muslims. I have said for at least a score of years that war- real war, war with the gloves off as in WW1- with Islam was inevitable and would start in either France or Belgium. The ideas I see as implicit in your essay, sir- that a French civil war would not be presented in the international press as a war against Islam, and that it would not ignite WW3- are shortsighted and wrong. When the balloon goes up it will soar. Paris is not Petrograd in 1917 but Vienna in 1683. We should ever be mindful of the adage, usually attributed to Sun Tzu, that "in time of peace the wise man prepares for war". Get ready. It shan't be long.
I think many of us, even an average nobody like myself, have kind of sensed this coming for a long while. Even if we were unclear on how it would all unfold and exactly come undone. I still don't know if will take 50 years or 50 months to play out. I know a few baby boomers who think similarly but take some weird solace in the fact they'll likely be dead before anything serious happens. I am not as confident being a Gen X'er. So what now? Just sit and wait?
I am writing from Italy where I have lived, on and off, for over 40 years. Italy is an interesting arena in which to view the introduction of woke identity politics. Modern Italy (post WWII) was never really united, its fractious politics a remnant of the bipolar cold war (Marxist leftists vs. Christian Democrats), but the fault lines were always social and cultural, not racial or ethnoreligious (Italy did not have slavery in the last century, nor does it have a large post-colonial Muslim population). What is left of the Italian Post-Communist left is largely in tatters, and the center left Democratic party is dipping its toe into woke politics (along with green climate politics), in an attempt to salvage some semblance of a political platform (it has to contend not only with an array of right of center parties, but also the amorphous populism of the 5 Star Movement which upended the Italian political scene a decade ago). But how do you mobilize the younger generation if most of them are white and middle class, and you can’t coopt BLM by blaming the police or systemic racism? You fall back on the gender wars. The Democratic Party recently shot itself in the foot by insisting on rigid “pink quotas” for female representation in its reconstituted leadership only to have several female party members lamenting backroom deals and corruption in the selection process (of other female party members). But the big new move is the “DDL Zan” a law billed as an anti-homophobia law that threatens to punish speech that is deemed offensive (one shudders to imagine the already lethargic Italian legal system absorbing all the new cases). So the bottom line for Italy, in my estimation, is that the political left, in desperate need of new energy, is going to adopt some watered down version of American woke politics, mostly focused on gender and sexuality, but framed as a larger move towards “inclusivita’” and time will tell whether it will effectively penetrate the body politic or remain like the McDonald’s restaurant, a ubiquitous American presence with limited influence on Italy’s “cultural cuisine.”
I thproughly enjoy your articles but the claim above about "climate-induced migration" from Africa and Central America borders on laughable. These populations are fleeing leftist-induced hellholes. I have yet to hear anyone in the migrant caravans scream "Climate is getting us! HEEEELLLLLP!"
Commenting from the UK I'm in complete agreement with your analysis. Although we are some way behind the cycle of 'upheaval' than France, many are convinced that it will come. What is quite astonishing though is the extent to which the middle-class establishment and political elites are 'pushing the narrative' that has been exported from the US. They appear to have no understanding of where the divisions they are creating will lead us. This I find strange because the middle-classes, as I've understood them, are particularly protective of their own advantage and financial well-being. I don't think it's a case of them believing they 'protect' themselves from the inevitable upheaval, but of them being completely blind to it due to a myopic self-righteousness. I personally trace this back to the post-modernist influence in our educational institutions and the widespread acceptance of critical theory by those who've gone through a contemporary university education. Many of them are now entering the establishment, as is their middle-class wont, and as a result we see an increasing disparagement of traditional culture. Indeed we are being treated, over the next few weeks, to a TV series in which Anne Boleyn, wife of Henry, is played by an actress of African heritage. The cultural elites will praise it to the skies and nobody will watch it.
I'm a bit unclear as to your basis for thinking that any of this migration is the least bit climate induced. My impression is that it's entirely economic, and you don't have to appeal to 'climate change' to explain why the first world is more attractive to economic migrants than the third world.
Are you sure the New Faith hasn't, all unnoticed, started to infect your own thinking?
Hmm, I read While Europe Slept 15 years ago. France and well as other Western European nations have put on blinders with respect to the rise of radical Islam and the unwillingness of certain populations to assimilate. Our ancestors should have also anticipated that their colonial exploits would one day come back to haunt future generations. What did they expect? However, as an American, I take exception to the notion that all of this is being exported from the US. Europe has been asleep, perhaps not wanting to face hard truths in the post-WWII era and here we are.
like most woke leftist this author only gets part of the story correct. As the author himself repeats many of the same themes of this "new faith"
While he does an excellent job on the theology and those who push it he should refrain from making any scientific proclamations as its not within his wheel house of actual knowledgeable.
Futher to blame Republicans I
i.e. those who stand on the law through his accusations against Trump only further exposses the authors inability to focus on the problem which he himself prescribes proclaims much of this "new faith" The authors inability not to blame the messenger in an attempt to cover for his full throated truths about the left and its academic and media support. Leaves the author still part of the problem not part of the solution.
I have asked two friends who live in France their sentiment about the army officer letters. They both think they are exaggerated but nonetheless not without substance. From my observation, affectio societatis is strong in France so the country may be farther away from civil war than one might think, but still...
I think France is facing the same problems that US: an inability to properly analyze its past foreign interventionism mistakes and hold those who made them to account. These mistakes have a real potential of domestic destabilization, especially in France whose population include a large number of people with origin in Africa and the Middle East. It is mind boggling that foreign policies are not discussed more closely in relation to domestic policies in both countries. Those who actually dare to try (for example Tulsi Gabbard) have been vilified in an abject manner.
Interesting. While I claim no special knowledge, I do spend more time thinking about France than most Americans. France has been the leading edge of modernity since the demise of the Roman Empire, for better and for worse, and is therefore worth paying attention to. The translation of identity politics into French as communitarianism I found especially interesting as that seems at odds with the meaning in English, as often identified with Etzioni . I have always though Etzioni's philosophy to be a stalking horse for collectivism, but in fairness he has a much broader notion of the community than the fracturing implicit in identity politics. I am sure he is aware of the French usage but haven't seen any comment by him.
Hello from France and thanks for that great piece. One could actually believe you live here... We are indeed reaching a turning point and I seriously think that should France fall, the rest of the West would be doomed. There seems to be a "pincer" threat between the new woke faith coming from the far left feeding from US campuses and the rise of Islamism feeding from uncontrolled immigration. We are closing a loop now with the post-modernism coming from the US but originally created by French leftist philosophers and the immediate threat of terrorism made possible by irresponsible politicians raised in liberal post-modernist ideas.
1) France is fragile because, while it is the oldest Western nation, it has a unique DNA - which actually has nothing to do with DNA. France is a nation that was not built upon an ethnicity or tribal group. And it's not a federation like Germany or a group of kingdoms like the UK, it is a centralized country. We have the Franks, a German barbaric tribe, the Gallic Celts, the Scandinavian Normands, and indeed the Latin Romans to cite the key components. It means the country cannot rely on ethnicity to regroup. It's a unique identity that makes France hold together based on a long history made of tears and glory, shared values and of course Catholicism. The danger today is that the woke left pushes to deconstruct French history which is our key bond while the Catholic faith has weakened like elsewhere in the West. The ties holding the nation together are weaker today. It is also fragile because massive immigration from North Africa brought Islam which is not just a faith but a political ideology which fundamentally conflicts with French secular values and Catholic roots. There has also been a cold type of Civil war since the French revolution that has deeply divided our people and almost like a national trauma. Let's not forget about half a million people were killed in the 1790 and that crack has resurfaced since then. That weakens the ability to resist as a nation.
2) This special identity brings strengths as well. There is a new alliance of intellectuals and regular people who want to resist and they come both from Right and Left typically because it is about saving a nation a bit like Catholic monarchists and Anti Clerical socialists fought together in the trenches in WW1. This is quite unique as well and can inspire other countries. You can find atheist philosophers like Michel Onfray, who defines himself as a Socialist partnering with Eric Zemmour, a writer of Jewish North African descent who admires Napoleon. Today we have ppl like those really willing to work together against the threat. The other strength is the French Army which is today the last 'real' army in Europe. It cannot compare with the US in terms of fire power and IT but it has remained solid with real fighting experience and also a deep understanding of foreign terrains and civilizations. Most officers joining the armed forces come with strongly rooted ideals. It is for a reason that the elite Foreign Legion is made of people coming from around the globe and ready to fight for France to their deaths. This example has a deep meaning that France still lives and inspires and it explains why the military is so popular for a big majority of French people, why their letters resonated so deeply. Remember Joan of Arc. She is today still seen as a savior whether you are Catholic or not... The secular values are rooted as well with a spirit of neutrality in public spaces when it comes to religion. This is a major fence to resist against Islamism and it is shared between Left and Right - hence the alliance mentioned above. "Laicite" is typically misunderstood in the Anglo Saxon world but it basically refers to strict neutrality. It has nothing to do with racism. Since Islamism always creeps in by taking small steps, winning small victories until it can rule, our secular values are an important weapon. This is probably why the Woke left influenced by the US campuses targets these values as a priority, by promoting a multi cultural society which simply doesn't belong here and would mean war.
The current upheaval is global, and not (as you eloquently say) limited to national borders. But you are right to monitor the situation in France. It is the thin and cracked backbone supporting the western civilization. The other major card in our house of cards is America... Both countries have in common to look at the world with universal eyes for good and bad reasons.
The problem is that government is no longer by the consent of the governed.
In Western Democracies, unelected regulators, judges and bureaucrats make almost all of the most important decisions. This causes unrest because elections appear not to have the consequences voters expect.
Governments faced with popular protest movements, like the Tea Party or Yellow Vests, suppress them like peasant uprisings. Unpopular policies, like transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, are justified by unexplained "expert opinion." Even dissenting experts are suppressed.
For example, open discussion of global warming, whether it exists and, if it does, the most economical ways to deal with it, is suppressed. The common man may not have an MS in Statistics, like me, but they notice gasoline prices are going up in service of a theory which allows no dissent. This causes unrest.
The prevailing governing philosophy is that government knows better than the people themselves what's best for them. Vox populi, vox dei, is a totally obsolete concept for modern bureaucrats. However, the people think they should be able to choose for themselves. This conflict will only be resolved by a return to less intrusive government, or an advance to a more openly oppressive state. So far, the state is getting more repressive, but allowing mob violence to intimidate political enemies into submission.
"The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?"
DJT, Warsaw, July 6, 2017
like him or not, he was certainly prescient
Thanks for this thorough, thoughtful, and alarming piece on the problems of Islamism and American-imported identity politics that are assailing France. I’m a professor of French in the US, and this is one of the only articles I’ve read on what’s happening over there that isn’t either lazily undetailed or just plain legacy media bull&*%t.
I’m a fan of your theory of a general Upheaval with a nexus of related dilemmas plaguing the liberal democracies of the West. I do, however, want to insist a little on just how much the Islam question ups the ante in France compared to the American case. France is considered a special target by Islamists for two reasons: on the one hand, it’s the land of the Franks and the point of departure for the Crusades; on the other hand, it’s considered the nation of the Revolution and thus of atheism, humanism, and secularism. Paris in particular is the “capital of an undefinable mixture of Catholicism and impiety,” to quote the historian Pierre Vermeren in his 2016 book La France en terre d’Islam (France in the Land of Islam). This unique combination of historical inheritances makes it doubly hated by Islamists and a symbolic target for their agenda (or fantasy, if you prefer) of global domination.
France, as your article helps show, appears to be slowly coming around to the idea that these kinds of archaic motivations do in fact motivate certain people. The question is whether it’s not already too late, and whether the French are not always a fatal step behind their enemies.
On another note, if you’re interested in imagining what a French civil war might actually look like, the 2016 novel Guerilla by Laurent Obertone (a nom de plume) is the place to go. Obertone, who is trained as a journalist, based the novel on the working hypotheses of the French intelligence services. He has also written a number of non-fiction bestsellers on the theme of "insecurity" in France. This has made him persona non grata in respectable society, but that’s how you know he’s worth reading. The only catch is that he hasn’t been translated into English.
Thanks again for this great piece.
Mr. Lyons, There is much to fear in your analysis, but also bits to cheer. Specifically regarding the latter, influential people, at least in France, are beginning finally to pinpoint the principal source of the cancer chewing away at the vital organs of Western Civilization: U.S. Universities.
I am part of a Franco-American family. Usually we reside in the USA but spend part of every year in France and sometimes stay longer. We are in France currently.
My wife is French and my French language skills are poor, but I don't sense the same kind of political divisions in France that we have in the USA. In America, the media has the Left and Right separated into two completely and mutually hostile realities. France has a lapdog media that is inseparable from the power structure. American media has US citizens hating each other. There is nothing comparable in France. I don't see civil war here. But there is a common distain for the feckless French state. It's response to Covid was particularly appalling. It combined draconian infringements on personal freedoms not seen since the Nazi Occupation with a thoroughly inept medical response. Meanwhile France has an entrenched and corrupt ruling class - they all go to the same university to learn to be politicians - that makes the USA's stale political class look dynamic. I'd say that if anything, France is ripe for a revolution and the USA for the civil war.
That, said, your article is interesting and makes a lot of good points.
The central tenet of Critical Race Theory as taught in seminars for corporations and as understood by BLM and their "allies" is: "All white people are racists". It does not take an efficient mind anything more than that irrevocably to conclude that CRT is unadulterated racism veiled by verbiage. One does not need to study Islam long or deeply to confront the absolute hatred hatred of non-believers, of democracy, indeed of the underpinnings of western civilization, demanded of Muslims. I have said for at least a score of years that war- real war, war with the gloves off as in WW1- with Islam was inevitable and would start in either France or Belgium. The ideas I see as implicit in your essay, sir- that a French civil war would not be presented in the international press as a war against Islam, and that it would not ignite WW3- are shortsighted and wrong. When the balloon goes up it will soar. Paris is not Petrograd in 1917 but Vienna in 1683. We should ever be mindful of the adage, usually attributed to Sun Tzu, that "in time of peace the wise man prepares for war". Get ready. It shan't be long.
I think many of us, even an average nobody like myself, have kind of sensed this coming for a long while. Even if we were unclear on how it would all unfold and exactly come undone. I still don't know if will take 50 years or 50 months to play out. I know a few baby boomers who think similarly but take some weird solace in the fact they'll likely be dead before anything serious happens. I am not as confident being a Gen X'er. So what now? Just sit and wait?
I am writing from Italy where I have lived, on and off, for over 40 years. Italy is an interesting arena in which to view the introduction of woke identity politics. Modern Italy (post WWII) was never really united, its fractious politics a remnant of the bipolar cold war (Marxist leftists vs. Christian Democrats), but the fault lines were always social and cultural, not racial or ethnoreligious (Italy did not have slavery in the last century, nor does it have a large post-colonial Muslim population). What is left of the Italian Post-Communist left is largely in tatters, and the center left Democratic party is dipping its toe into woke politics (along with green climate politics), in an attempt to salvage some semblance of a political platform (it has to contend not only with an array of right of center parties, but also the amorphous populism of the 5 Star Movement which upended the Italian political scene a decade ago). But how do you mobilize the younger generation if most of them are white and middle class, and you can’t coopt BLM by blaming the police or systemic racism? You fall back on the gender wars. The Democratic Party recently shot itself in the foot by insisting on rigid “pink quotas” for female representation in its reconstituted leadership only to have several female party members lamenting backroom deals and corruption in the selection process (of other female party members). But the big new move is the “DDL Zan” a law billed as an anti-homophobia law that threatens to punish speech that is deemed offensive (one shudders to imagine the already lethargic Italian legal system absorbing all the new cases). So the bottom line for Italy, in my estimation, is that the political left, in desperate need of new energy, is going to adopt some watered down version of American woke politics, mostly focused on gender and sexuality, but framed as a larger move towards “inclusivita’” and time will tell whether it will effectively penetrate the body politic or remain like the McDonald’s restaurant, a ubiquitous American presence with limited influence on Italy’s “cultural cuisine.”
I thproughly enjoy your articles but the claim above about "climate-induced migration" from Africa and Central America borders on laughable. These populations are fleeing leftist-induced hellholes. I have yet to hear anyone in the migrant caravans scream "Climate is getting us! HEEEELLLLLP!"
Commenting from the UK I'm in complete agreement with your analysis. Although we are some way behind the cycle of 'upheaval' than France, many are convinced that it will come. What is quite astonishing though is the extent to which the middle-class establishment and political elites are 'pushing the narrative' that has been exported from the US. They appear to have no understanding of where the divisions they are creating will lead us. This I find strange because the middle-classes, as I've understood them, are particularly protective of their own advantage and financial well-being. I don't think it's a case of them believing they 'protect' themselves from the inevitable upheaval, but of them being completely blind to it due to a myopic self-righteousness. I personally trace this back to the post-modernist influence in our educational institutions and the widespread acceptance of critical theory by those who've gone through a contemporary university education. Many of them are now entering the establishment, as is their middle-class wont, and as a result we see an increasing disparagement of traditional culture. Indeed we are being treated, over the next few weeks, to a TV series in which Anne Boleyn, wife of Henry, is played by an actress of African heritage. The cultural elites will praise it to the skies and nobody will watch it.
I'm a bit unclear as to your basis for thinking that any of this migration is the least bit climate induced. My impression is that it's entirely economic, and you don't have to appeal to 'climate change' to explain why the first world is more attractive to economic migrants than the third world.
Are you sure the New Faith hasn't, all unnoticed, started to infect your own thinking?
Hmm, I read While Europe Slept 15 years ago. France and well as other Western European nations have put on blinders with respect to the rise of radical Islam and the unwillingness of certain populations to assimilate. Our ancestors should have also anticipated that their colonial exploits would one day come back to haunt future generations. What did they expect? However, as an American, I take exception to the notion that all of this is being exported from the US. Europe has been asleep, perhaps not wanting to face hard truths in the post-WWII era and here we are.
like most woke leftist this author only gets part of the story correct. As the author himself repeats many of the same themes of this "new faith"
While he does an excellent job on the theology and those who push it he should refrain from making any scientific proclamations as its not within his wheel house of actual knowledgeable.
Futher to blame Republicans I
i.e. those who stand on the law through his accusations against Trump only further exposses the authors inability to focus on the problem which he himself prescribes proclaims much of this "new faith" The authors inability not to blame the messenger in an attempt to cover for his full throated truths about the left and its academic and media support. Leaves the author still part of the problem not part of the solution.
I have asked two friends who live in France their sentiment about the army officer letters. They both think they are exaggerated but nonetheless not without substance. From my observation, affectio societatis is strong in France so the country may be farther away from civil war than one might think, but still...
I think France is facing the same problems that US: an inability to properly analyze its past foreign interventionism mistakes and hold those who made them to account. These mistakes have a real potential of domestic destabilization, especially in France whose population include a large number of people with origin in Africa and the Middle East. It is mind boggling that foreign policies are not discussed more closely in relation to domestic policies in both countries. Those who actually dare to try (for example Tulsi Gabbard) have been vilified in an abject manner.
Interesting. While I claim no special knowledge, I do spend more time thinking about France than most Americans. France has been the leading edge of modernity since the demise of the Roman Empire, for better and for worse, and is therefore worth paying attention to. The translation of identity politics into French as communitarianism I found especially interesting as that seems at odds with the meaning in English, as often identified with Etzioni . I have always though Etzioni's philosophy to be a stalking horse for collectivism, but in fairness he has a much broader notion of the community than the fracturing implicit in identity politics. I am sure he is aware of the French usage but haven't seen any comment by him.