Archive | France
In late 1917, Roy Sumpter and his brother Frank, both from the small farming town of Chatham, Illinois, shipped out with the AEF for the Western Front. Their older brother William, my great-grandfather, had already fought in the Philippines and Mexico; with a new family in Chatham, he would leave this war to his brothers.
Camp Logan
Sept 20 - 17
Dear mother: -
I will write a few lines today. Well two sections of our regiment have just arrived and the third will get here about six o’clock. There is not much news here to write about that instrest (sic) you. Well our General left for France Tuesday to prepare a camp for us. The rumor is now that he will return in time for us to — this page of Roy Sumpter’s letter is lost — made you can use the prints. I will close for this time, (illegible) soon.
Roy
To get to France across a U-boat-infested Atlantic was no sure thing, but Roy and Frank made it.
Sometime during the Hundred Days’ Offensive, Roy Sumpter was wounded. Stretcher-bearers took him away from the front, but before he reached an aid station, a German shell exploded above, killing Roy outright. Half a world away at that moment, my great-great grandmother in Chatham, Illinois, announced, “Roy’s dead.” Her other son, Frank, survived to see the Armistice we commemorate today, and spent Christmas in a ruined Europe.
Veterans Day is meant to honor all American veterans of all America’s wars, and they deserve it. But it does us well to remember the war from which the remembrance emerged. We remember the dead and the heroic, and especially those whom we know: Roy Sumpter, Kim Hampton, Eric Paliwoda, and Ken Dwyer. Those of us whose service was of no consequence honor those whose service took their all.
1LT Trevino, Nicaragua, December 1998
Popularity: 42% [?]
This piece originally ran in National Review Online.
It is something about this time of year, perhaps, that brings the impulse to jihad to a boil in the British Isles. Almost exactly two years ago, I sat with hundreds of travelers in the airport at Edinburgh, Scotland, watching the televised scenes of horror unfold hundreds of miles to the south, in London. It was slaughter on the morning commute: dozens of Britons blown to bits in buses and on subways. Though we had no confirmation, then, of who perpetrated the bloody acts, it was easy enough to guess. And so it is easy enough to guess who is behind the multiple would-be car bombings in the United Kingdom now.
Technorati Tags: Islam, Europe, United Kingdom, War
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Popularity: 34% [?]
As predicted, or more accurately, threatened by Ségolène Royal, there is violence in the wake of Nicolas Sarkozy’s victory in the French presidential election. The riot and mayhem in the streets of Paris recalls past acts of destruction and outrage at the hands of losing partisans: from the 1996 brawls in Washington, DC, by Dole supporters; to the destructive spree of angry Tories in the City of London in 1997; to the recent smashing of shop-windows by Republicans on 8 November 2006; and yes, to the violence visited upon the hapless City of Light by RPR youth in the aftermath of Mitterand’s 1988 victory in France. The present wreckage on French streets — see an excellent series of photos here — is therefore of a piece with long-established Western tradition.
Technorati Tags: America, Democrats, France, History, Politics
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Popularity: 18% [?]
The online left’s response to my piece on “The Avid Losers” has been rather predictable: reminders of the horrible things that often must be done to win wars — which, to clarify, I largely endorse — and an inchoate protest from an otherwise obscure philosophy professor in Singapore. (As an aside on a secondary point in the latter, the American involvement in the First World War was, in fact, quite justified, and even “noble,” if nobility were grasped by the avid-loser class.) So much for them.
The one exception is “Dr NGO’s” (a pseudonym for an academic who prefers one) rather interesting exposition on the Philippine Insurrection. (This is of some personal interest to me, as my great-grandfather lied about his age so he could go fight in that war.) “Dr NGO” takes issue with my reference to that conflict as a useful example when considering Iraq: to be more specific, he doesn’t think “any answers we might arrive at” on “the question of exactly how the USA effectively ‘pacified’ the Philippines” will “be applicable to the radically different political-military landscape of a century later.” This is absurd: history has its lessons, and the debate is over what they are, and their specific relevance — not their very existence. Furthermore, in a world where human nature and political behavior as laid forth in Homeric texts still yield relevant lessons, it seems probable that events (technically) within living memory would be similarly valuable. Acceptance of “Dr NGO’s” statement renders irrelevant the historian’s profession beyond the utilitarian virtue of keeping academics off the streets.
Beyond this, “Dr NGO’s” argument betrays meaningful gaps in historical knowledge. He argues against the idea that the public and political wills in wartime were somewhat more steadfast in previous eras than today — a departure from the contention that things then were so different as to be irrelevant, except, it seems, when they’re not. He writes: “[W]henever things went seriously wrong [in colonial wars], the public conscience or the bureaucratic bean-counters always said, at some point, ‘The cost is too great, it’s simply not worth it,’ and pulled back.” Except they didn’t. It is true that there are several examples of imperial powers cutting their losses: the Italians after Adowa and the British after Majuba come to mind. But we also have contrary examples. Consider the French conquest of Algeria, which proved tediously difficult after an initial success (in the seizure of Algiers), but was explicitly pursued to its end on the grounds that whatever the failures of French war policy, the duty of the state in wartime was to win. (Imagine the Democratic critics of the Iraq war displaying that measure of patriotic feeling.) From British history, we have the Indian Mutiny and the Boer War, both of which were thoroughly disastrous in their opening phases — and both of which were won by a doggedly determined United Kingdom and its Empire. “Dr NGO” avers that he cannot think of a single case in which an “imperial [power committed itself] to ‘pay any price’ to conquer a distant society.” The average Briton of 1902 could, and I suspect the average Westerner of that era also could. One expects as much of an academic historian now.
“Dr NGO” further assigns too much significance to the interplay of two phenomena: first, the already-discussed erroneous idea of the historical persistence of a weak public and political wartime will in the West; and second, the less erroneous idea that non-Western peoples are now armed with the concept of nationalism. The latter is only less erroneous because it is mostly true — but it does not follow that it is significant. Nationalism is not a magic balm that reduces the per-soldier kill ratios between Western and non-Western armies, which have, so far as we can tell, only gone up through the modern era. Nor is it a meaningful factor in the Iraqi insurgency, which, pace Ba’athist ideology, appears to be motivated far more by pre-nationalist ideas of communal vengeance, honor, and religious obligation than anything else. Here we tread on the ground that “Dr NGO” wishes to prepare — that of functional irrelevance to the case at hand.
Still, “Dr NGO” does manage to arrive at something close to the heart of the matter, if despite himself:
The United States made a public commitment to stay and rule the Philippines indefinitely, if not permanently, and was backed in this by other imperial powers….This had some effect on the resistance. Perhaps such a commitment is what [Trevino] wants us to make in Iraq, but my sense is that a century later most Americans, and the rest of the world — to say nothing of most Iraqis — would be reluctant to see us to shoulder such a semi-permanent “burden” again.
There is, of course, no need to stay and rule Iraq indefinitely (however much Iraq might benefit from that tutelage); but a commitment to stay and fight indefinitely — at least until, say, the traditional preferred end state of victory — would be de facto the same from our enemies’ perspective. (This understanding, however opaque, is one of the few conceptual things the Bush Administration has gotten right in the war.) As for “Dr NGO’s” reference to the reluctance of “most Americans,” it’s a nice illustration of the point of my essay that began this exchange: that the American political classes, in which we may include politically-conscious academics like “Dr NGO,” believe the American people to be as timid and defeat-oriented as they are. It needs restating that the available data indicates precisely the opposite: Americans at large are generally willing to pay the price for victory. They lose heart after the political classes do, making the choices of the latter a matter of plain volition, and hence moral content — not the circumstance-driven necessities of the emerging narrative of the advocates of defeat in Iraq. “Dr NGO” deserves credit for constructing the only coherent, if still wrong, response to my piece. A true pity, then, that he joins his fellows in failing to directly address its very crux.
Popularity: 30% [?]
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Bring it.
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We care about Europe for the same reason we care for the suicidal: because a chosen fate is not inherently a just one, and we are called to act when an unjust end threatens. We care about Europe because filial piety is still a virtue: we are, in the end, a European nation as surely as our peers in the Anglosphere and much of Latin America, and parts of Africa and south Asia. This is not a racial classification, and it is a testament to the encompassing wisdom of the European heritage that it is not. We care about Europe out of self-interest: it is a culture and a way of life that we are heir to — and when we see its internal flaws lead it inexorably (though not inevitably) to this slow death of self-negation, we ignore its lessons at our peril.
We care about Europe out of common interest: its enemy is ours.
We have seen that enemy at work of late. The insane furor over the now-famous Muhammed caricatures in the Danish Jyllands-Posten has metastasized into a true clash of civilizations. It seems that depiction of the Prophet is prohibited — albeit a prohibition observed mostly in the breach — and now that the kufr has violated the law, he must pay. In Damascus, the Danish and Norwegian embassies have been put to the torch. In Beirut, the Danish consulate has been ransacked and fired. In Palestine, the descent into Iraq-style barbaric anarchy continues as European Union offices have been raided, and Europeans have been kidnapped. Danish companies suffer a boycott across the Muslim world; and Denmark itself has seen relations broken with Muslim nations which, though quite happy to peddle Nazi-quality anti-Semitism, cannot endure the thought of mild fun poked at their Prophet.
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An image from no4denmark.com, a Muslim website set up to promote the eschewing — and apparently the lynching — of all things Danish.
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The doughty Danes refuse to apologize. The Danish Queen, living up to the example of her royal predecessors, has called upon her countrymen “to show our opposition to Islam” in this hour. There is, the Danes patiently explain, this heritage and belief in freedom of conscience, and therefore freedom of expression. It is baffling, no doubt, to those who prefer to express inchoate frustration through mayhem and murder; but little Denmark sees no reason to capitulate to their sensitivities. On Denmark’s side are a few publishers of a few newspapers: Liberation, El Pais, Le Monde, France Soir, Die Welt, La Stampa. And there are a few bloggers. This, pathetically, is the totality of the defense of the West.
Arrayed against Denmark alongside the howling mobs of the fanatically faithful are the great powers upon whom the defense of the West supposedly rests. UK Secretary Jack Straw, egged on by the odious Iqbal Sacranie, struck a blow against small publications daring to insult the majesty of Islam when he declared that the “republication of these cartoons has been unnecessary, it has been insensitive, it has been disrespectful and it has been wrong.” (So much, then, for a European Union providing for a common defense!) The Vatican, which once organized vigorous defenses against these depredations, instead hearkened back to a less noble element of its past and announced that “The right to freedom of thought and expression … cannot entail the right to offend the religious sentiment of believers.” Well. Doubtless the Papacy is mindful of the precarious position of the Chaldeans and Maronites at the mercy of the offended population, to say nothing of the Franciscan custodians of the holy places: between a slow demise by oppression, and a swift one with honor, it has made its choice.
Worst of all is the wholesale capitulation of the United States. The American press has been spineless, with no significant print or television outlet to date having the courage to show the cartoons even in the course of reporting. Going the media one better in the vigorous embrace of gutlessness, the Administration of George W. Bush has come out firmly on the side of the fanatics: “We all fully recognize and respect freedom of the press and expression but it must be coupled with press responsibility. Inciting religious or ethnic hatreds in this manner is not acceptable.” This sickening pandering to the sensibilities of a cohort it has already profoundly alienated is made worse by the abandonment of a wartime ally. Denmark stands with us in Iraq and Afghanistan, and its soldiers there are even now under mortal threat because of this fracas. Add, then, one less reason to go to war with the United States: not only does it botch its planning, but when the enemy gets angry, it will throw you to the wolves.
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One of the offending cartoons of Muhammed from Jyllands-Posten.
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What to call that enemy is a conundrum all its own. Some would have it that the foe is political Islam; others a radical Islam; others a national or cultural stridency in which Islam is merely an incidental tool; still others a false Islam. Certainly we can say what it is not: it is neither the infantile, sanitized faith touted by the shallow minds of the present Administration; nor is it the innocently beleaguered victim of its dhimmi-minded predecessor. And certainly we can say who, if not what, threatens us: people who identify as Muslim, and are prepared to do violence to that end.
Eschewing the tedious and irrelevant debate over what to call the enemy, and what his precise relationship is with the faith he curiously often professes, this much is indisputably true. It is assuredly this same foe who, having accorded a hero’s burial to a murderer of the Bloody Seventh, having celebrated the slaughter of September 11th, and having called to power the masters of suicide bombers, now feels immensely outraged over the desecration of his Prophet. Know this: neither massacre of innocents, nor mauling of children, nor infamy dredged from the horrors of the Dark Ages repel their consciences — and still less do they spur a reexamination of their fundamental beliefs. But draw the beloved Prophet?
Kill.
The barbarians have won. Let us be forthright about this. In what should be a clear case of right and wrong — free expression good, death and violence against it bad — the great powers of the West have failed in their most elementary duties of conscience and self-preservation. There is no moral difference between appeasing the sensitivities of violent Islam, and appeasing the sensibilities of Germans circa 1933 who yearned for the return of the Volksdeutsche. The aping of the rhetoric of a just demand (for sensitivity!) does not signify the existence of that just demand (for submission!). There is no point of satiation at which the killers of 9/11, Theo van Gogh, Atocha, Fallujah, or the rest will be satisfied. There is no supine posture to forever preclude the “cartoon rage” of today. There is no appeasing gesture to deflect the blow. There is no demonstration of goodwill that will engender the same. There is only weakness — and strength.
We are not among the strong. We have chosen not to be.
“They have won. That is the sad fact.
”I guess that during the next generation no one in Denmark will draw the Prophet Mohammed.“
Certainly not. The ultimate fault is not the murderous masses’, but our own. That is the truth. And that is our shame.
Popularity: 29% [?]
There’s not much more to say about the uprising in France. It drags on into its third week despite the invocation of a 1955 Algerian War-era law expanding state powers to enforce public order — an irony not lost on the nihilist youth bent on smashing the land that gave their parents some refuge from the poverty, tyranny and bloodshed back home. And it drags on despite claims to the contrary. (The French elite, so used to be on the dispensing end of unwelcome criticism, are desperate to escape being its recipients.) Things in France are so bad that a mere reduction in torched vehicles (from the low thousands to the high hundreds) qualifies as a “lull.” But what a lull: the French economy is beginning to suffer — and as it goes, so will go Europe. Meanwhile, unrest continues across the country, and hundreds of neighborhoods are essentially beyond the control of the state.
It’s worth repeating that the Muslim revolt in France is entering its third week. Contrast with the duration of other major riots:
Cincinnati, 2001 — 2 days
Seattle, 1999 — 1 day
Los Angeles, 1992 — 6 days
Crown Heights, 1991 — 3 days
Washington, DC, 1968 — 5 days
Newark, 1967 — 6 days
Watts, 1965 — 6 days
Detroit, 1943 — 2 days
Tulsa, 1921 — 2 days
New York City, 1863 — 4 days
Is this a unique event? Is it uniquely troubling? Is it uniquely durable and dangerous? Yes, yes, and yes.
The state is reacting as best it can — which is not terribly well, but when one starts from zero, any improvement is by orders of magnitude. There are already troubling signs that the much-maligned Sarkozy will crack down in ways that will proving troubling once the crisis is past: his personnel are deporting non-French rioters, apparently promoting summary justice for detainees, and targeting online freedom of speech in an effort to quell incitement. The first and last of these things are not indefensible in themselves — but the summary justice brings to mind murderous Versaillais shooting down suspected Communard prisoners by the hundreds.
Of course that’s neither an exact nor terribly fair parallel. The Versaillais, after all, solved their problems.
Popularity: 16% [?]
It is the twelfth night of the insurrection in France, and death is on the march. Three hundred communities, unto the most rural hamlets, are staggering under the blows of Muslim youth on a rampage. Police are coming under small-arms fire. Further evidence of the organized, insurrectionary nature of the troubles has come in the discovery of a bomb factory in the Paris suburbs. The violence has spread to Belgium. The violence has spread to Germany. And the rest of Europe waits its turn.
Has the French integration model failed? Something has failed — but there must be a realization that the ideal and the reality of that model are two different things. The danger for France is that it may jettison the ideal in the aftermath of this uprising. That ideal — equality of citizens as citizens, and the primacy of French culture and Western values — is the only just and equitable model for assimilation of immigrants in a democracy. What is true for France is true for America. But France shows signs of losing confidence in this as the troubles drag on: already there are signs that France may abandon its ideal for a model of ethnic preferences. And a fatwa against the rioting (which has been rejected by other prominent French Muslims) appears to have the implicit endorsement of the French authorities. If so, the capitulation to the idea that French Muslims may look to a source of law and justice other than the state is almost certainly a fatal one.
Don’t think the insurrectionists cannot sense the weakness. Islamists are going into battle with shouts of “Allahu akbar!” Online incitement and coordination defies the efforts of the authorities to cope; and the messages grow increasingly chilling:
“The cops are petrified of us, everything must burn, starting Monday, the operation ‘Midnight Sun’ starts, tell everyone else, rendezvous for Momo and Abdul in Zone 4 … jihad Islamia Allah Akhbar.”
User “Samir’s” message is just as threatening. “You don’t really think that we’re going to stop now? Are you stupid? It will continue, non-stop. We aren’t going to let up. The French won’t do anything and soon, we will be in the majority here.”
The response from Muslim leaders is predictably troubling. In addition to the rejection of the anti-riot fatwa, non-French Muslims are getting in on the act. Turkish Premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan has blamed the unrest on France’s failure to “listen to us.” Spanish Muslim leader Abdelkarim Carrasco has declared that France must accomodate Islam: “Either Europe develops and supports the idea of a mixed culture, or Europe has no future.” (Consider, as a thought experiment, the reaction to a similar declaration issued with regard to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or Iran.) Beyond this, the Muslim leaders of the world are mostly focused upon Denmark’s failure to behave as a good dhimmi — a cause for which the doughty Danes, having just faced down their own Muslim uprising, have little sympathy.
Would that France had the same courage. Would that France did not need it.
Popularity: 13% [?]
The following was written to a correspondent who wrote in response to this post.
I agree that communal segregation is probably the primary cause of the riots in France. That being said, I don’t think the segregation is wholly the fault of non-Muslim France — there’s enough evidence to indicate that it’s self-imposed to a significant extent. And the Islamist “ringleaders” that many of the French authorities refer to, being politically aware by definition, are quite likely to be themselves influenced by their perceptions of France’s Iraq stance.
Interestingly, the difference between a place like France and a place like Germany is that the former has historically granted citizenship to its minorities, viewing its nationhood (at least in theory) as an ideological rather than an ethnic concept. Germany, by contrast, has more or less refused to grant citizenship to its minorities and immigrants — and their descendants. One would think, therefore, that German minority communities would be more apt to riot than French. I don’t have an answer as to why this isn’t so, but it’s interesting to ponder.
Returning to the idea of a self-imposed segregation, this apparently becomes the more pronounced in direct proportion to self-identification as Muslim. We see it in America, too. Witness, for example, the alienation of many American Muslims immediately after 9/11; or the Muslim-American grieving for Sheikh Yassin. The antidote is, as you note, openness on the part of the host culture to integration — but that only goes so far. Both parties must move — and one assumes that it is the guest that must move the further, toward the host.
I suspect that the long-term solution for France is the aggressive promotion of the French ideological identity, which must come at the expense of the communal identities of the minorities. The short-term solution is the suppression of the riots by any means necessary. But with the leadership playing its political games, and its concurrent disassociation from the idea of the West (which is, despite themselves, a sine qua non of French values), my confidence is low.
Popularity: 12% [?]
With every night that France’s rundown suburbs burn, officials grow increasingly convinced that drug traffickers and Islamist militants are using frustrated youths to challenge law and order here.
It is the tenth night of the intifada in France.
As the battles drag on, their insurrectionary character becomes ever more stark. It is no longer a question of a few Parisian suburbs: every community in France with a significant Muslim population, “from Rouen in Normandy to Bordeaux in the southwest to Strasbourg near the German border,” is under threat. As that threat expands, so too does the rhetoric change:
One police-union leader, writing to Interior Minister Sarkozy, declared, “A civil war is unfolding in Clichy-sous-Bois. We cannot handle the challenge any longer. Only the Army, trained and equipped for this type of mission, can intervene to stabilize the situation.”
Why war? Warfare is distinguished from riot or disturbance by organization and aforethought. The evidence for this is mounting, as acts of violence are increasingly marked by careful planning and deliberation.
In quiet Acheres, on the edge of the St. Germain forest west of Paris, arsonists burned a nursery school, where part of the roof caved in, and about a dozen cars in attacks the mayor described as “perfectly organized.”
The mayor of Acheres is hardly alone in his realization that the troubles are moving swiftly toward an insurrectionary character:
Police trade union official Gilles Petit said the rioters would ’stop at nothing’ in their attacks on state and council property: ‘They are organised into attack units that move around very quickly with tear gas and petrol to sow terror.’
And again:
“Without question what is taking place bears all the hallmarks of being coordinated,” Yves Bot, the Paris public prosecutor, told Europe 1 radio.
Why is this happening? Why would France come under attack from Islamists when it has played the dhimmi game so assiduously for so long? France stood firm against the war in Iraq — for amoral motives, surely, but the Muslim masses hardly care. Prior to the ascent of Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy, it has been more than accommodating to its Islamists at home, allowing the development of:
….a parallel society with its own laws in spite of the lip service that government officials continually pay to the notion of integration. Women are often forced to wear veils. In one district a municipal swimming pool was persuaded to offer a period of “women only” bathing each day to satisfy a fundamentalist imam.
The dhimmi act buys time, not respect, and certainly not friendship. Indeed, there is evidence that the pre-Iraq war pandering to Islamic opinion immeasurably harmed France in the eyes of the intended audience. Certainly it did nothing to help dissuade those Muslims now who set forth to transform the cities of la belle France into Baghdad.
Shamefully, the more debased elements of the French ruling class are seizing upon the abasement of the French Muslim leadership to attack their own political enemies. Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, familiar to Americans through his vigorous defense of the Ba’athist regime in Iraq during the 2002-2003 run-up to that war, convened a ministerial meeting attended by the imam of the Great Mosque of Paris, Dalil Boubakeur, after which the imam gave de Villepin what the latter wanted — a jab at de Villepin’s rival to the right, Nicholas Sarkozy:
….Boubakeur launched a veiled attack on Sarkozy’s outbursts, in which he has called the disaffected young men on housing estates ‘louts’. Boubakeur called on the government to ‘pronounce words of peace‘.
Sarkozy’s response was a model of cravenness. “We are trying to be firm and avoid any provocation,” he said. Who, in this tenth night of rampage and destruction, is provoking whom?
Meanwhile, the President of the Republic, Jacques Chirac, who hates Sarkozy as his rival and probable successor on the French right, is content to be silent during the greatest domestic crisis of his too-long tenure. His silence is not mere apathy: it is more malevolent than that. Why speak when to do so would take the spotlight off Sarkozy? Why speak when one values political maneuvering so much more than one does one’s own countrymen?
The Fifth Republic burns. To become inflammable, first it had to rot.
Popularity: 13% [?]
Sunday, November 11, 2007
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