Paris is Burning
<p>As I predicted two years ago, in <a href='http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=18'>Demographics and the Dustbin of History</a>, Paris is burning.  The banlieu riots are so out of control that the French have declared a national state of emergency.</p>
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<p>Pardon while I quote myself:</p>
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<p>[L]arge, angry, totally unassimilated immigrant populations that are reproducing faster than the natives. This is an especially severe problem in France, where housing developments in the ring zones around all the major cities have become places the police dare not go without heavy weapons&#8230;</p>
<p>The legions of rootless, causeless, unemployed and angry young men among Muslim immigrants may in fact actually be on their way to reifying the worst nightmares of native-European racists.</p>
<p>One way or another, the cozy Euro-socialist welfare state is doomed by the demographic collapse. Best case: it will grind to a shambolic halt as the ratio of worker bees to drones goes below critical. Worst case: it will blow itself apart in a welter of sectarian, ethnic, and class violence.</p>
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<p>That welter of sectarian, ethnic, and class violence has begun. Not just in France, but in <a href='http://www.americanthinker.com/comments.php?comments_id=3574'> Denmark</a>; and it will spread, because the underlying structural problems of the Euro-socialist welfare state are by no means unique to France. Germany, when it blows up (and I mean &#8216;when&#8217;, not &#8216;if&#8217;), is likely to do so in a bigger and uglier way. Watch what happens when the demogogues on both sides start mobilizing ex-East-German proles and Turkish gastarbeiters against each other.  I&#8217;d say a resurgence of neo-Naziism among the former is more likely than not, well matched by a rise in Islamofascism among the latter.</p>
<p>Remember the field day Eurosocialists and their wannabes on the American left had over reports of riots and large-scale lawlessness in New Orleans?  Remember all that lecturing and barely-disguised gloating?  Hey there &mdash; <em>those</em> reports turned out to be frauds ginned up by our media; it turns out there wasn&#8217;t in fact anybody shooting at helicopters or raping people in the Superdome or practicing cannibalism.  Too bad for you than France&#8217;s suburbs are having a <em>real</em> collapse into civil disorder that no amount of media spin can undo.</p>
<p>The riots in France are all the more telling precisely because they are <em>not</em> fundamentally about jihad (or not yet anyway; I expect the Islamofascists to successfully change their complexion soon).  They are an entirely predictable consequence of the fact that the economics of socialism are not sustainable &mdash; a consequence I did in fact predict, in so many words.  The economic and cultural isolation of the banlieus follows as the night the day from the French choice of a dirigiste, slow-growth, redistributionist, and ultimately stagnant system that has no place for the beurs other than as welfare clients.</p>
<p>One of the more&#8230;persistent&#8230;among my commenters wrote that he was expecting &#8220;fulsome schadenfereude&#8221; from me over this.  So let&#8217;s get that out of the way: yes, after years of listening to snotty Europeans drone on about the superiority of their milk-and-water collectivism over the violent cowboy/capitalist American system, part of me is indeed tempted to enjoy watching all those pretensions go down in flames. The doom your folly has earned is upon you now.</p>
<p>But I&#8217;m only part-tempted, because what we&#8217;re seeing is a genuine tragedy.  Europe, before its elites took the Marxist poison, was the cradle of the West. The <em>best</em> possible outcome for it now is to degenerate into an ugly collection of nativist, racist police states run by shrinking minorities of ever-more-fearful whites.  The worst outcomes begin with Islamofascists successfully seizing political power and getting control of nuclear weapons.</p>
<p>Even in the best case there will be consequences for the U.S., of course.  Our birth and immigration rates lock in growth until at least 2050, that is if we don&#8217;t tax and regulate ourselves into Euro-style stagnation (a real possibility, alas). But the European civil wars that are beginning now will surely spill over onto us, if only in the form of waves of refugees.</p>
