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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Guy Milliere</title>
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		<title>No Future for France</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/guy-milliere/no-future-for-france/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=no-future-for-france</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/guy-milliere/no-future-for-france/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 15 May 2013 04:43:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Guy Milliere]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[decline]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[France]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[gay marriage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[growth]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Protest]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Riot]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=189401</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why even the French are giving up on their own country. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/pb-130307-france-protest-ps6.photoblog900.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-189567" alt="pb-130307-france-protest-ps6.photoblog900" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/pb-130307-france-protest-ps6.photoblog900-450x322.jpg" width="270" height="193" /></a>An atmosphere of insurgency hangs over France. Month after month, demonstrations against the legalization of gay marriage bring together hundreds of thousands of people, and mobilization is not weakening. Members of the government are harassed by disgruntled crowds during each trip they make. Bankrupt factories are stormed by angry workers who sometimes occupy the streets to erect barricades made of burning tires. Leftist groups hold rallies and accuse the government of not being radical enough. Rightist groups hold other rallies and suggest that French civilization is threatened and must fight back. Rabid feminists attack Catholics by stripping naked in public and shouting obscene slogans in churches and cathedrals.</p>
<p>Financial scandals are accumulating and slowly discrediting the entire political class. One month ago, Jerome Cahuzac, a Secretary of Finance, center left, who was in charge of the fight against tax evasion, was indicted for tax evasion. Now, Claude Gueant, a former Secretary of the Interior, center right, is accused of bleaching &#8220;black money&#8221; coming from the former Libyan dictatorship. François Hollande was elected President just one year ago, but he is already discredited and on the ropes: none of his predecessors had fallen from grace so fast. Seventy-six percent of the French express a negative or very negative opinion of him, and the number continues to rise. Mainstream magazines describe him with an unforgiving ferocity: &#8220;The Mediocre President,&#8221; says one, &#8220;He shames us,&#8221; adds another.</p>
<p>Articles appeared recently comparing the situation to the 1789 Revolution and Hollande to Louis XVI, a weak King who ended up on the guillotine. Others drew comparisons to February 1934, a time when extremist groups attempted to seize the National Assembly in a context of widespread corruption and political decay. Some analysts, trying to find a ray of light amid the darkness, have spoken of a &#8220;French Spring.&#8221; But apart from the fact that the calendar says it&#8217;s spring in France, it is difficult to see anything that resembles &#8220;spring&#8221; in what is occurring.</p>
<p>France is a democratically unstable country. In two hundred and twenty years, she underwent eleven regime changes, and has seen innumerable riots. But in the past, rioters were carriers of hopes and dreams, even if their hopes and dreams were often tinged with illusion. Today, hopes and dreams are essentially absent. Pessimism among the French is frighteningly massive:  Seventy-one percent of the French think that the future will be much worse than the present.</p>
<p>France is a country where belief in a providential man capable of rehabilitating the country and able to deal with chaotic situations has persistently permeated citizens&#8217; minds. Napoleon the First remains a virtually undisputed hero, although he sowed war throughout Europe; Marshal Petain keeps many admirers; General de Gaulle is often presented as a man who liberated France largely alone and &#8220;restored pride.&#8221; Today, there is no one to play this role. Hollande was a default candidate, chosen by his party only because Dominique Strauss Kahn (the front runner) had been involved in a sordid case of rape in New York, one year before the election. Nicolas Sarkozy was beaten by Hollande because he had disappointed those who supported him initially. No other leader of national stature has emerged, and those who rise and protest, no matter who they are and what they think, have no leader.</p>
<p>France is a country in decline, and for the first time, a large part of the population discerns that the decline is for real.</p>
<p>It is also a country where intellectual debates are suffocated and where the long march of the left through the institutions has produced results, marginalizing or eliminating any non-socialist idea from education, culture, politics and the media. And the consequences are plain to see.</p>
<p>Many French discern the immensity of the problems. How could they do otherwise? The economy has been stagnant or in recession for several years, the unemployment rate has been rising steadily and is now well above ten percent according to official figures, or much higher if those who have given up looking for a job are reintroduced in the statistics. Poverty affects more than twenty percent of the population. Slums have reappeared on the outskirts of Paris. Violent attacks are multiplying. Each week, dozens of women are raped, students are stabbed in the courtyard of high schools and passersby are slain. The lawless areas dominated by gangs and radical imams proliferate.</p>
<p>Most French feel frustrated and want solutions.</p>
<p>Most of them are in favor of tougher penalties for crime, but see that politicians, left or right, talk, but do not act and seem overwhelmed by an out-of-control situation.</p>
<p>All of them would want a rapid return to growth and job creation, but almost all of them blindly believe that growth and job creation will come from government decisions.</p>
<p>A majority of the French want protectionist measures, the survival of the welfare state as it is, higher taxes for the rich and a strong and omnipotent State.</p>
<p>They refuse to see that the coffers are empty, that deficits are abysmal, that the government can no longer afford to waste money, that socialism is a dead end, and that the decline they fear and the chaos they see coming are a direct result of decades of socialism.</p>
<p>Their anger is presently directed against socialists because socialists govern. It is directed against François Hollande because he looks incompetent. It is directed against a pro-gay marriage law perceived as a futile provocation and an attempt to destroy the family in a time when the country seems on the verge of collapse. It is directed against politicians unable to save the country from the fate that emerges, and who instead seem to aid the fulfillment of that fate.</p>
<p>Their anger is an expression of anxiety, powerlessness, and despair.</p>
<p>One century ago, Emile Durkheim, a French sociologist, used a word that could adequately define French society as it is today: &#8220;anomie.&#8221; He wrote, &#8220;A society is in a state of anomie when the rules that allow it to function dissolve.&#8221;</p>
<p>The rules that allow French society to function are dissolving. People see that the present in France is bleak and that what is coming is even bleaker. They look for solutions, but they see that the solutions in which they could place their hopes don&#8217;t work or seem out of reach. They mistrust politicians, any and all politicians.</p>
<p>What will happen? The latent insurgency will probably last. Demonstrations and riots will take place here and there. Governments will replace governments. The future will be bleaker than the present. Anger, anxiety, powerlessness and despair will increase. Anomie will reign. There will be no coup, no regime change, no uprising.</p>
<p>It is indeed difficult to see anything that resembles a &#8220;spring&#8221; in what is occurring in France. It is difficult to see anything that resembles a spring in what has been occurring for months in Greece and Spain, Italy and Portugal.</p>
<p>In his last book, &#8220;After the Fall: The End of the European Dream and the Decline of a Continent,&#8221; Walter Laqueur asked the right question: &#8220;Does Europe still have a future, will it still exist a decade or two from now? Or will it revert to what it had been before &#8211; a mere geographical concept?&#8221;</p>
<p>What is occurring in France is a French tragedy. But it is part of a wider tragedy that must be faced and analyzed, without looking away.</p>
<p>Viewing the French tragedy as anything less than part of a wider tragedy would be an even more tragic mistake.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>A Beautiful Mind &#8211; by Guy Millière</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/guy-milliere/a-beautiful-mind-by-guy-milliere/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-beautiful-mind-by-guy-milliere</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/guy-milliere/a-beautiful-mind-by-guy-milliere/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 15 Oct 2009 04:08:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Guy Milliere]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=29683</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Laurent Murawiec was a fearless foe of Islamic radicalism.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-29684" title="Laurent" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Laurent1.jpg" alt="Laurent" width="450" height="542" /></p>
<p>On the morning of October 8, I learned of the <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/13/AR2009101303329.html">death</a> of my friend<strong> </strong><a href="http://www.hudson.org/learn/index.cfm?fuseaction=staff_bio&amp;eid=Murawiec">Laurent Murawiec</a>, the French-born author of <em>The Mind of Jihad</em>, a seminal and ambitious work that casts radical Islam as a successor to the totalitarian ideologies of the Western world. And yet, because his work was so contrary to the prevailing politics of the mainstream media, you are unlikely to learn about his contributions to the understanding of Islamic terrorism.</p>
<p>Indeed, because we are living in an era when all the values that enable a culture to remain alive and strong are systematically inverted and perverted, almost no one will speak of him anywhere. For my part, I know I have lost a friend and an irreplaceable brother-in-arms. The road that lies before me will be more difficult, and I will feel even more alone. At this moment, I think of his two daughters, who are still so young and who will have to face the future without their father. I think of his wife, who has not been in the U.S. for very long; the ordeal can only be terribly trying for her. I think of his family in Europe.</p>
<p>When one is absorbed by a multitude of tasks, one can sometimes let time slip by, without giving all the attention one should to those who really deserve it. Sometimes in recent years, because my stay was short and I was about to go elsewhere, I passed by Washington, where Laurent was a senior fellow with the Hudson Institute, without taking the time to contact him. I always thought that there would be another opportunity: but there will be no other opportunity, and I feel through and through the pangs of guilt.</p>
<p>What remains is for me to pay tribute to his memory and his work. Laurent was a fearless man. He never ceased to prove it in his too short life. He never hesitated to say or write what he thought should be said or written, whatever the personal cost may be. In 2002, for instance, he told a Pentagon advisory panel that the United States should <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/13/AR2009101303329.html">seize Saudi oil fields and target its financial assets</a> if the country failed to act against Islamic terrorism. Fallout over the undiplomatic assessment forced Laurent to resign from his then-employer, the Rand Corporation, but he made no apologies for saying what he believed.</p>
<p>He never pitied his own plight. He was an uncompromising man who never diluted his words, since he was one of the few who know that the truth, when it is watered down, is no longer the truth. He was an intellectual in the highest sense of a term: someone who worked with tenacity to create and spread ideas and knowledge, in order to dispel darkness and bring more light to others and the world.</p>
<p>He wrote articles that, behind a seemingly polemical tone, showed an incisive erudition. He wrote remarkable books, some of them as yet unpublished: one of them is about Europe and bears a very appropriate title: <em>The Empire of the Setting Sun (L’Empire du soleil couchant)</em>. Laurent was also the author of <em>War in the Twenty-first Century (La Guerre au XXI<sup>e</sup> siècle</em>), a masterly analysis of the “revolution in military affairs” that has changed the face of war in recent years. He also wrote <em>The Spirit of Nations (L’Esprit des nations)</em>, an innovative essay about the connections between geopolitics and the history of cultures, which opened new horizons of research to those who understand that the world has become a more complex place. <em>The Next War (La Guerre d’après)</em> is a charge leveled against Saudi Arabia, and the best documented and most innovative approach to have been published about a country and a regime that is almost everywhere behind the spread of radical Islam today (the book was published in the US under another title: <em>Princes of Darkness: the Saudi Assault on the West</em>).</p>
<p>Laurent’s masterpiece, however, is <em>The Mind of Jihad</em>. Originally published in two volumes, it has now become available in a complete edition thanks to Cambridge University Press. It is not just one more book about radical Islam; it is one of the most important books on the subject ever published.</p>
<p>The book shows very precisely what makes Islamic radicalism inseparable from Islam itself, and traces the connections between radical Islam and the most nihilistic and more violently destructive political trends that have emerged during the last two millennia. It masterfully reveals the danger facing the West, and it explains the deleterious attraction that jihad exerts over the adherents of other totalitarianisms. I am convinced that <em>The Mind of Jihad</em> will be read and reread for years to come, and that it will become a classic. Michael Ledeen described it as “at last, a book on radical Islam that does it all.” Fouad Ajami calls it “a work that will make for itself a sure place in the writings on Islamic radicalism.”</p>
<p>Laurent still had much to say, write and offer. He spoke little of his plans, but all those who were fortunate enough to know him are sure he was at the dawn of further accomplishments. He spoke little of his own and his family’s past. However, he gave me texts about the memory of the Holocaust and the mutilations that it had inflicted on his family. He was Jewish, even if it is an aspect of himself that he almost never evoked. He was a steadfast friend of Israel – not because he was Jewish, but because he was firmly on the side of liberty and the dignity of human beings, and because he was obstinately hostile to all that oppresses, degrades and perverts the human spirit.</p>
<p>Like many of those who have had to choose between compromise and exile, he chose exile and left his native France. But he became an American, attached to everything that has belonged to the true soul of America since the time of the Founding Fathers.</p>
<p>Laurent’s death won’t generate much media attention. But everything that he was will survive him, an ever-shining light in the hearts and minds of all those who have met him and loved him. Although I feel more alone in his absence, I will always cherish the memory of conversations with Laurent. And though he is gone, I know when I read his words that he will never disappear.</p>
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