France Is Falling, Again

I am probably the last to have found out, but I just discovered an excellent television series on Amazon. It is a French criminal procedure drama, one that has now run for seven seasons. In French it is called Engrenages. In English it is entitled, Spiral. As it happens, the French word does not mean spiral. It refers to the meshing of gears in a gear box.

Anyway, the acting is superb. The actors are true professionals, though not internationally known. They are not celebrities. The writing is excellent. So, if you have a few dozen hours to spare, the show is well worth your time. One warning: it is occasionally very gruesome. So, if you have a weak stomach, consider yourself forewarned.

That much to say something nice about what is coming out of France these days. Because the rest of this post will be anything but encouraging. My source is Guy Milliere, writing for the Gatestone Institute.

The subject, often addressed in the television show, is the price of immigration in France. It suggests that France is overwhelmed by the number of Muslim and African migrants, and is now treading water. Milliere suggests that France is falling under the weight of immigration. How long it will take for the same problem to overwhelm countries like Germany of Sweden is a guess. As of today, we understand why Great Britain exited the European Union.

Milliere opens with an event that occurred less than a month ago:

Saturday, April 18, 11 pm. Villeneuve-la-Garenne, a small town in the northern suburbs of Paris. A young man rides a motorcycle at high speed and hits the door of a police car. He breaks his leg. He is sent to the hospital. He does not have a driver's license but does have a long criminal history. He was sentenced several times by the courts for drug trafficking, robbery with violence and sexual assault.

As soon as news of the accident is released, hostile messages about the police circulate on social media; and in a dozen cities in France, riots break out. The riots are continue for five days in a row. A police station in Strasbourg is attacked and set on fire. A school is nearly destroyed a few miles from Villeneuve-la-Garenne.

Apparently, such riots are so common that no one bothers to report on them. What did the French government do? Of course, it tried to show deep understanding of the grievances that supposedly caused the riots:

Rather than responding with firm language, the French government is saying that an investigation into the behavior of the police has been opened and that the officers will most likely be punished.

The country is in lockdown, but the police have been told not to enforce it in Muslim migrant communities, in the No-Go zones that constitute many Parisian suburbs:

France's general population remains under extremely strict lockdown; the police have been ordered to enforce the rules ruthlessly. Permits to leave one's home were limited to 60 minutes, once a day, and no farther than half a mile….

People living in no-go zones [zones-urbaines-sensibles "sensitive urban zones"] are treated differently. Police officers have been told by the government not to stop them at all and to avoid as much as possible going near where they live.

How do the police explain this? They are simply outmanned:

Yves Lefebvre, president of a police union, remarked:

"The government knows that a large-scale uprising could happen, and that a minor incident might be enough to set the powder keg ablaze. Therefore, police officers have unwritten instructions: they must avoid incidents at all costs. If an incident occurs, they know that the government will blame the police, and no one else".

"The choice of the government is easy to explain," he said. "The police would not have the materiel or the manpower to calm a large uprising".

Since 2005 these No-Go zones have proliferated:

Today, there are more than 750 no-go zones in France, and police enter them only by carefully preparing commando-like operations beforehand. Gangs and radical imams seem totally in control.

For instance:

In 2005, the police tried to quell the riots, unsuccessfully. For three weeks, the country seemed on the verge of a civil war. Today, because members of the government seem to believe that if riots occur, a civil war really could happen, the police are asked not to intervene and to stand aside until the destruction stops. In July 2018, riots lasting almost a week broke out in Nantes. While the public library and other buildings burned down, the police remained invisible. Eight months later, in March 2019, when riots lasting three days broke out in Grenoble and hundreds of shops and cars were totally destroyed, the police again remained invisible.

Migrants are running criminal gangs involved in drug trafficking. They have no interest or intention of assimilating:

A few months ago, a police officer, Noam Anouar, who infiltrated Islamist circles, published a book, France Must Know. No-go zones in France, he wrote, are now foreign enclaves on French territory. "The gangs operating there," he noted, "have formed a parallel economy based on drug trafficking."

"They consider themselves at war with France and with Western civilization. They act in cooperation with Islamist organizations, and define acts of predation and rampage as raids against infidels".

Anouar concluded that reclaiming these areas today would be complicated, costly, and involve calling in the army.

For years, successive French governments have chosen a policy of "willful blindness": they simply behave as if they do not see what is going on. They do not even try to find solutions.

When, in 2015, the country saw a series of terrorist attacks: on the satirical magazine Charley Hebdo, in the Bataclan Theatre and in Nice, the government took a soft approach. It called the attacks a mental health issue:

Since then, there seems to have been a choice by the government to define terrorist attacks as "inexplicable" and committed by people who were "depressed". The no-go zones were treated as time bombs that would eventually explode, but with the explosion delayed a few years.

Currently, exempting the no-go zones from a lockdown appears to be one way the government implicitly admits that they are no longer a part of French territory, but tries to maintain a precarious coexistence with them.

In other words, Muslim migrant have established their own communities, with their own culture, often at variance and in conflict with Western culture. The French seem to have run out of ideas about how to deal with it.

And there is the question of pandemic management. According to Milliere, the government has mismanaged the crisis:

The French government could be expecting criticism for its appalling management of the pandemic. As of late April, most doctors still did not have protective face-masks, and screening tests were still virtually absent. Doctors have lost the right to decide what medicine to prescribe and are forbidden to see patients in person. They can only recommend using acetaminophen or aspirin to whoever calls on the phone.

People who have the symptoms for Covid-19 are asked to remain at home without medication; if their condition worsens, they may call an ambulance. If they are over 70 years old, however, an ambulance will not come. A decree from March 19 asked hospitals strictly to limit access to people defined as "too old". The number of deaths in retirement homes is horrendously high.

France’s much praised national healthcare system will not allow anyone over seventy to be admitted into a hospital. Hmmm. Who was it who said that nationalized healthcare meant rationed healthcare?

Commentators are starting to say that France is a fallen country:

"The feeling of decay that permeates the minds of many French today comes from a truth that few wanted to admit," wrote a historian, Pierre Vermeren, in Le Figaro. "France is a fallen country..."

Laurent "Riss" Sourisseau, a survivor of the 2015 jihadist attack on Charlie Hebdo, and now its editor-in-chief, noted:

"France is living hours of disillusionment as deep as those it had known in May 1940... Before our eyes, everything collapsed at an unimaginable speed... We will have to ask a question: why such a disaster... how was this possible. And the present catastrophe inevitably brings us to the same conclusions: incompetence, disorganization, lack of long-term vision, improvisation. In summary: the nullity of our leaders."

"Two months of lockdown," the author Éric Zemmour said on CNews TV, "will lead to an unprecedented economic crisis and probably to a very serious explosion of violence: it is high time to face reality: France is on the brink of chaos".

And you thought America had it bad.