The retired officers argue that Islamists in the immigrant-heavy suburbs are “detaching large parts of the nation and turning them into territory subject to dogmas contrary to our constitution.” French civil authorities no longer actively police these areas.
But Islamism may not be the worst of it. The letter decries “a certain anti-racism” that in reality has “only one goal: to create on our soil a malaise, even a hatred between communities.” The retired officers accuse the “hateful and fanatical supporters” of this ideology” of “despis[ing] our country, its traditions, its culture, and want[ing] to see it dissolve by tearing away its past and its history.” Their goal, according to the authors, is “racial war.”
Given these development, the letter warns of a coming civil war. Old people tend to equate change with deterioration. That’s particularly true of those who spent their professional careers upholding the status quo.
However, the second letter, which endorses the views of the first, comes from more than 2,000 soldiers who are currently serving. They describe themselves as part of the generation deployed abroad in France’s fight against Islamist forces in Mali, and Afghanistan, where they lost comrades who “offered their lives to destroy the Islamism to which you [the government] have made concessions on our soil.”
These service members have also protected that “soil” directly — French subways, schools, and synagogues. In doing so, they “have seen. . .the abandoned banlieues… where France means nothing but an object of sarcasm, contempt or even hatred.”
Their letter argues that France is becoming a failed state. It too warns of civil war, prompted by “not from military rebellion but from a civil insurrection.”
it’s worth noting, as Lyons emphasizes, that although the two letters were widely condemned by the French establishment, few challenged their basic premise that France is in a state of growing fracture and even dissolution. Instead, says Lyons, the focus of controversy was on the military taking a political position.
To what extent might America “disintegrate” along the lines alleged in the two French letters? As one of our major political parties — the one currently in power — is flirting (at a minimum) with “anti-racists” and despisers, of the two toxins described in the letters — an implacably hostile immigrant population and hostile lefty dogmatists — the latter is the more dangerous.
On policing, our civil authorities haven’t abandoned American neighborhoods, but that may be where we’re headed. As incentives increasingly are against patrolling high-crime neighborhoods, the course of least resistance is to pull back. And because nature abhors a vacuum, civil authority likely will be replaced by some sort of uncivil authority.
Lyons writes:
- [N]o revolution has ever remained contained by national borders. The New Faith (alternately referred to as Anti-Racism, the Social Justice movement, Critical Theory, identity politics, neo-Marxism, or Wokeness) is a trans-national ideological movement, which can no more remain confined to the United States than it remained confined within the American academy where it matured (it was arguably born in, well… France). And it is more than capable of rapidly adapting itself to and flourishing within whatever national context it penetrates.
But, wherever it goes, it’s just as disruptive to the foundations of social and political order.