OPINION:
Sometimes God takes us to the edge of an abyss and bids us look in to see what awaits us if we make the wrong choices.
That was what happened in the 1930s with Nazism and in most of the 20th century with communism. It is happening with the “red-green alliance” that is smashing France and spreading across Europe like a virulent contagion.
The left was born in the fires of revolutionary France. Now, the Jacobins are back with fire and devastation.
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With open borders and socialism, it is probably too late for France, even if Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party wins the 2027 presidential election. Ms. Le Pen has already capitulated by declaring, “Islam is compatible with the republic.” She is supposed to be a realist.
The drama playing out in the streets of Paris and other European cities should serve as a warning.
To understand the chaos rocking France, we must go back 237 years to the French Revolution, which started with a protest over the price of bread. It ended in the world’s first totalitarian state, a sea of blood, decades of warfare and Bonapartism. Everything ghastly in the 20th century started in 18th-century France.
The French Revolution was ushered in by high taxes, massive public debt and a ruling class that refused to confront reality. Sound familiar?
Louis XVI borrowed to support the American Revolution. Then, to pay off the debt, he raised taxes — especially those that fell hardest on the poor. He called the Estates General to approve the new taxes, which became the National Assembly, which led to storming the Bastille, the end of the monarchy and the Reign of Terror.
Yet the biggest mistake the French aristocracy made was in thinking that the orchestra would never stop playing. Louis thought the people loved him until he got a shave with the national razor.
Today, countries such as France are ruled by leaders who are equally oblivious to what is happening around them. French President Emmanuel Macron, the country’s worst mistake since Waterloo, is deliberately blind to the truth. “People have claimed that we were invaded by hordes of migrants and Islamists which is totally false,” he insists.
Mr. Macron says the riots are a cry for better schools and a higher standard of living.
Of course. The Palestinian flag, which rioters wave, has always stood for excellence in education, and the hammer and sickle is a symbol of upward mobility. What is the French word for delusional?
Here are a few inconvenient facts for Monsieur Macron. The Muslim population of France has gone from roughly 1% in the 1960s to 10% today. Of young Muslims, 57% believe Shariah should take precedence over the laws of the French Republic. Why should little things such as polygamy and wife-beating stand in the way of a multicultural paradise?
There are 751 no-go zones in France, areas in or around large cities that the gendarmes dare not enter because so-called migrants have done such an exceptional job of assimilating.
Like the Ancien Regime, modern France is an economic basket case.
In 1974, the French public debt was around 15% of gross domestic product. Today it is 115%. Government spending is 57% of GDP, compared with 23% in the United States. French social spending is three times as high as in America and the highest in Europe. If French schools are crappy, it is because that is all they can afford.
Americans have had a taste of mob rule with the George Floyd riots in 2020. Antifa and its allies have been in the streets since President Trump began deporting criminal aliens.
The French have the hard-left, crypto Communist Party of Jean-Luc Melenchon: La France Insoumise. We have the Democratic Party dominated by the demented Democratic Socialists of America and neo-Jacobins such as Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, Sen. Bernard Sanders, Vermont independent — the fossil in a fright wig — and Bolshevik babe Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York and Stalingrad Democrat.
What was once the party of Thomas Jefferson, Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy has become a radical socialist, antisemitic gang addicted to violence. It is not only France or America that is at stake, but Western civilization itself.
You could say that 1789 was the opening gun. The current insanity is a milepost on the road to hell.
The upheaval in France is a warning for America. Republicans should be grateful for the campaign ads the French are doing for them.
• Don Feder is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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