Last night probably another hundred cars were set ablaze – as will be the case tonight, tomorrow night, and the following ones. Before large-scale rioting started on 27 October the police had already registered 30,000 car-becues this year – an average of, indeed, 100 a day. What a boost this must be to the French automobile industry. In the same period there were 3,800 attacks on police officers – a “normal” non-riot average of almost 13 a day.
During the past three weeks of rioting an additional 10,000 cars were torched; 130 police officers got wounded; some 100 factories and industrial buildings were vandalized and/or set ablaze; the same thing happened to some 100 schools, kindergartens, sports centers and (other) government buildings, as well as to at least 13 Christian cemetaries, chapels and churches, plus at least 4 Jewish centers and synagogues. There was also one attempt to set fire to a mosque. Two people were murdered: 56-year old Jean-Claude Irvoas was beaten to death in front of his wife and child, and 61-year old Jacques Le Chenadec was kicked to death when he tried to extinguish a burning dustbin in front of the apartment block where he lived.
Today in the Belgian newspaper De Tijd Nicole le Guennec, a French sociologist, says that car torching has been a common phenomenon in France for the past fifteen years. If this is true and if 100 is the average toll of destruction each night, a staggering 547,500 cars have been destroyed in France during that period. Probably more, because when one car is set alight and the fire destroys surrounding cars as well, the statistics count it as only one car fire. The worst night is traditionally New Year’s eve. Last New Year’s eve 330 cars were destroyed, a low figure compared to previous New Years when around 400 cars were set alight.
In contemporary multicultural France such staggering figures of lawlessness are considered to be a sign of “normality” and are hardly reported in the mainstream media. Neither is the following little piece of information. This week Professor Dominique Reynié of Sorbonne University in Paris, told the Brussels weekly Knack that the French state was obliged to borrow money last week to pay the wages of its civil servants. “The money has run out. One must concede: this is no example of a strong state.”
Perhaps what we are witnessing in Europe, but what the politicians and the media dare not say aloud, is the implosion of the (welfare) state. The Soviet Union suddenly collapsed in 1989, when owing to the inability of communism to create wealth, the state went bankrupt, was unable to maintain its army and hold its empire together. In France, the same thing might be happening. The socialist welfare state is no longer able to maintain law and order and is abandoning entire neighbourhoods to anarchy.
Is there a way out? If one is to believe the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut there is not. In an interview in the Parisian conservative newspaper Le Figaro last Tuesday (November 15), he said that it is not the French Republic that is failing. “The school of the Republic died a long time ago. It’s the post-Republic model of super-sympathetic educative community immersed in social activism that’s sinking. But alas, it’s an indestructible model, since it feeds on its own fiascos. It reacts to every failure with intensification. And here we go again: through scorn for truth, tomorrow the French school will thus drown the diversity of the black slave trade in the ocean of anti-Western political correctness. We’ll teach colonization not as a terrible, ambiguous historical phenomenon, but as a crime against humanity. Thus we’ll respond to the challenge of integration by hastening national disintegration.”
It is the same with the social-democratic welfare model. It feeds on its own fiascos and will continue to do so until it collapses – implodes – under its own weight. Consequently it is an indestructible model. The only way out is for the implosion to come soon. If it does, then national disintegration may perhaps still be avoided. If it does not, the social fabric of the nation will be damaged beyond repair.