Now go back to that bland statistic you hear a lot these days—“about ten percent of France's population is Muslim”. Give or take a million here, a million there, that's broadly correct—as far as it goes. But the population spread isn't even. And when it comes to those living in France aged 20 and under, about 30% are said to be Muslim and in the major urban centres about 45%. If it came down to street-by-street fighting, as Michel Gurfinkiel pointed out in The New York Sun, “the combatant ratio in any ethnic war may thus be one to one”—already, right now, in 2005. By 2010, more elderly white Catholic ethnic frogs will have croaked and more fit healthy Muslim youths will be hitting the streets. One day they'll even be on the beach at St Tropez, and if you and your infidel whore happen to be lying there wearing nothing but two coats of Ambre Solaire when they show up, you better hope that the BBC and CNN are right about there being no religio-ethno-cultural component to their “grievances”.
Au contraire, I am the story. That's to say, I'd have been happy to recycle for another decade or so the same Clinton sex jokes that provided me with a very easy living during the Nineties were it not for the fact that I've got three kids under the age of ten, and it seems to me that by the time they're in young adulthood a lot of the places I know and love—including, believe it or not, France—will be a lot less congenial, if not lost forever. I'm in this thing for me and mine. I am the story. And so are you. And, if you're a European and you reckon you're not, you'd better be a childless centenarian in the late stages of avian flu. Unless you act, you're going to lose your world.
Finished laughing yet? Okay, on we go. Most likely, those continental demographic trends will accelerate—as they did during the decline of the Roman Empire, when the imperial capital's population fell at one point as low as 500. Some French natives will figure they don't have the stomach for the fight and opt for retirement elsewhere. The ones who don't will increasingly be drawn down the old road to the neo-nationalist strongmen promising quick fixes. That's why I call it the “Eurabian civil war”: The de Villepin-Chiraquiste tendency will be to accommodate and capitulate, but an unreconstructed minority will not be so obliging and will eventually act.
So what can be done? When your electorate's split between a young implacable ethnic group and elderly French natives unwilling to vote themselves off their unaffordable social programs, there aren't a lot of options your average poll-watching pol will be willing to take. M de Villepin put it very well: “What does it matter where this path leads, nowhere or elsewhere?” The Euroconsensus leads nowhere. Time to try elsewhere.
This is cache, read story here
