Jay Reding.com

Angela Merkel was supposed to bring a breath of fresh free market air into the increasingly statist and creaking German economy. Sadly, she’s well on her way to making things far worse:

The new German Government is launching one of the boldest experiments ever undertaken in the history of economics — or rather anti-economics. Germany in the past three years has been the world’s most depressed economy, with the weakest growth in economic activity and consumption. The coalition partners — representing, as they do, the opposite ends of the political spectrum — found it hard to find common ground on most issues, but on one point they could emphatically and enthusiastically agree: the way to stimulate an economy suffering from mass unemployment and stagnant consumption is to increase tax.

Germany’s plan to cure its self-confessed economic failure by doing exactly the opposite to what modern economics would suggest is certainly a bold and novel idea. Jim O’Neill, the chief international economist of Goldman Sachs, remarked on television last week that German politicians are acting as if they had never seen an economics textbook, much less understood one.

Germany has been called a “tax hell” - and for good reason. Germany has some of the most punitive tax policies in the EU. Even worse, the German labor market is horrendously ossified, meaning that unemployment has been in the double digits for some time. Even if the economy were to pick up, German firms wouldn’t engage in a rounds of hiring for fear that the next contraction would leave them with payrolls they couldn’t afford - so they simply don’t hire new workers. Germany is caught in an economic catch-22 - their economy can’t recover without jobs, but employers aren’t willing to hire with all the economic uncertainty.

Merkel’s new “grand coalition” has taken the least popular approaches of both the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats. They’re hiking the top tax rates from 42% to 45%, while simultaneously increasing consumption taxes and eliminating deductions. In essence, everyone will see a higher tax bill as Germany tries to tax its way out of its massive structural debts. That plan is one that is absolutely doomed to failure:

Germany’s booming industrial exports have made it the world’s largest exporter but the sullen refusal of its own consumers to open their wallets has thwarted hopes across the continent of a revival in Europe’s dominant economy.

The German Institute of Labour and Economics said the coalition negotiators had displayed “economic illiteracy” by ignoring the importance of consumer spending and deciding to rein in the government’s budget deficit at the risk of tipping the economy into recession.

As Anatole Kaletsky notes in the Times piece, this is exactly the kind of strategy that brought the Japanese economy into recession:

Experience suggests success in stimulating the economy through higher taxes is very unlikely, but not entirely impossible. Let me begin with the bad news. The closest analogy for what Germany is now attempting is the rise in consumption-tax imposed by the Hashimoto Government on Japan in 1997. The Japanese economy had already been depressed for five years before this tax increase (just as the German economy has been depressed since 2001), but still Japanese consumption grew by an average of 2.3 per cent annually from 1991 to 1996. In the year following the tax increase, Japanese consumption collapsed by 3 per cent and consumption growth in the following five-year period averaged a meagre 0.2 per cent.

This collapse in Japanese consumption from 1997 onwards triggered the Asian financial crisis and the huge economic dislocations that went with it. In other words, the 1997 tax increase was arguably the most disastrous economic measure imposed by any major government since the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1931.

The German tax hikes have the potential to be much worse. If the ECB would adjust interest rates downwards, it would give Germany a chance to gain some valuable liquidity that would at least soften their economic crash. However, the ECB has signaled that they may raise interest rates in the near future.

Merkel’s disastrous economic plan is a recipe for 1970s-style stagflation which could easily spread economic chaos throughout the Eurozone and beyond. A financial crash like the Asian flu of 1997 in Europe would have an even more devastating effect on the world’s markets.

The Bush Administration has finally decided to get off its ass and call out the Democrats by name when they make irresponsible statements about the war and try to rewrite history.

It’s about time. The White House has allowed these stupid attacks to continue and has done almost nothing to fight back. In public opinion, you cannot let a lie go un-countered, and the fact that Bush has waited until that lie has been repeated ad nauseam before striking it down is inexcusable.

However, the Democrats are exceptionally stupid to pursue this line of attack, and it seems to me that the only reason they are is because the radical antiwar left has seized control of the Democratic Party. First of all, these attacks unite the Republican base. After the Miers debacle, a smart party would have sought to further the divides in the Republican party - and as Bob Krumm finds, when you take national security away, the Republicans are very divided - but the Democrats are playing right to Bush’s key issue.

Secondly, even if the Democrats win, they lose. The Democrats can’t get a mulligan on their vote for war. They voted to approve force in Iraq - and that’s a matter of record. Furthermore, they’re own statements make it quite clear that they believed that Saddam Hussein had WMDs and was a threat. They can’t escape their own records, and the Democrats are on record as saying things that not even the Bush Administration was willing to say. They can jump up and down and talk about how they were “misled”, but all that gets them is the tacit acknowledgment that they didn’t do their homework.

The argument that Bush “lied” about WMDs is a deeply stupid one - and yet that’s the argument that the American people keep hearing.

Finally, the Democrats are once again putting themselves as the party that is totally out of alignment with American values. According to the whining about their “patriotism” being attacked - while at the same time viciously attacking anyone who doesn’t drink their particular brand of Kool-Aid. However, even John McCain is going after the revisionists and the “Bush Lied!” crowd. It’s one thing to try and impugn the President - it’s another thing when John McCain is calling the Democrats’ bluff.

I think Glenn Reynolds hits it right on the head when he notes:

…this illustrates that the “Bush lied” issue has more to do with anti-Bush sentiment than with anything having to do with the merits of the war.

But it’s not “dissent” that’s unpatriotic, something I’ve been at pains to note in the past. It’s putting one’s own political positions first, even if doing so encourages our enemies, as this sort of talk is sure to do. And that’s what I think is going on with the sudden surge of “Bush Lied” stuff from Congressional Democrats.

Of course, outrage over questioning of patriotism is kind of one-sided. You can say that Bush and Cheney started the war with a bunch of lies to enrich their buddies at Halliburton, and that their supporters are all a bunch of chickenhawks on the White House payroll. But that’s different because — because Bush is anti-evolution, and doesn’t support gay marriage! Or something.

That’s precisely it. The debate over the war in Iraq has little to do with war, Iraq, or anything else. It’s all about attacking George W. Bush. In fact, it’s virtually impossible to talk about the war in Iraq with an anti-war activist without it turning into a litany of reasons why George W. Bush is an evil person.

The problem with all this is that in the long run, talking about the man rather than the policies is stupid. The Democrats are trying to indulge an increasingly fanatical side of their base whose dripping hatred for the President outweighs anything else - and the whole rhetoric of the Iraq War has been shifted to a substantive discussion about politics, strategy, tactics, and the Middle East into a referendum solely on one individual. All this debate has generated a lot of heat, but no light. The fact is that the Democrats are behaving in a profoundly irresponsible way, and they deserve to have that behavior criticized.

As the old saying goes, “patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels” and the fact that the Democrats are trying to simultaneously say that any criticism of their position is impugning their patriotism while viciously attacking the patriotism of their attackers isn’t going to work. The GOP is finally willing to stand up and fight, and the Democrats’ arguments just aren’t going to fly.

What will happen is that the vast majority of Americans are simply going to do what any responsible citizen would do - tune the whole stupid pissing match out. And who can blame them? Neither party is particularly adept at advancing anything other than partisanship. Saying that Congress spends money like drunken sailors would be an insult to the fiscal habits of drunken sailors. The American people are quite rightly fed up with the state of American politics and both parties are going to suffer because of it.

The Democrats are embracing a losing strategy of debating the issues of 2002 rather than 2005. The Republicans are pissing off their base with their fiscal irresponsibility and a sense of institutional arrogance. President Bush would do well to appear above the fray, but for too long he’s abrogated the bully pulpit to do that now.

It’s good that President Bush is fighting back against the baseless charges of an increasingly irresponsible Democratic Party. It’s bad that he’s waited so long to do it. It’s horrendous that he has to do it all.

CNN reports on the antiterrorist rallies happening across Jordan as angry Jordanians tell Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi to “burn in hell”.

Al-Qaeda has long been pissing away their legitimacy with their fellow Muslims, but I have a feeling that this will be the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. It’s one thing to attack Westerners, but to walk into the midst of a Muslim wedding party and execute dozen of your fellow Muslims is enough to give every Muslim in the Middle East pause. If you do anything that these theocratic fascists don’t like, you’re as much a target as the Americans or the Iraqis.

Al-Qaeda is burning the candle at both ends. They’re facing the US military and losing dozens of terrorists in every attack - including members of their leadership. In the war of attrition in Iraq, the only hope al-Qaeda has is that they can force an American withdrawal before the Iraqis can step up and take their place. However, each day makes that a less simple solution. When the Americans and others do leave, they’ll leave behind a cadre of trained and effective Iraqi officers who can in turn train others. No doubt the Iraqis will also have top-of-the-line American equipment as well.

The fact that al-Qaeda just murdered several Palestinian officials was also a major mistake on their part. Al-Qaeda has long used the Palestinians as bloody shirts - now that blood is on their hands. It’s quite possible that the Palestinians may start using their own terrorist connections to hunt down and kill Zarqawi in retribution for his foolishness. Certainly this will create strains between the Salafist jihadis and the Palestinians. The only thing that binds them together is their hatred of the West, but even that may not be enough to keep the jihadi movement stable.

The events of this week have shown the Arab world that al-Qaeda doesn’t care about them. This isn’t about protecting the ummah from the West - al-Qaeda will kill Muslims as easily as they try to kill Westerners. It’s one thing to support terrorism against the Other, but when it strikes your own home you’re less likely to see it as some kind of noble abstraction. Al-Qaeda’s inchoate rage is divorcing themselves from the rest of the Arab world - and it wouldn’t at all surprise me if Zarqawi is betrayed by the bin Laden or Zawahiri axis of al-Qaeda in order to keep him from tearing their terrorist network apart.

Michelle Malkin has a whole host of links on the results of yesterday’s elections. Fortunately for the GOP, mid-season elections like this rarely portend much. Unfortunately for the GOP, the lackluster Kilgore campaign is a sign that despite a very well-organized GOTV campaign, the GOP is in trouble. Part of it was the fact that Kilgore didn’t run a great campaign and Kaine got extra momentum in October. However, it is also quite clear that Republicans can’t afford complacency in the slightest. Virginia is a red state, and if Kilgore couldn’t defeat somone like Tim Kaine, that does not bode well.

The California ballot initiatives went down in flames, a blow to the Governator - but the George Soros-backed Ohio ballot initiatives also went down in flames. This seems to me to be less a story about which ideological side won and lost and more about how a raft of confusing ballot initiatives will turn off the electorate. The power to use initiatives and referendums can be an effective way of making state and local governments more democratic, but they also tend to do badly when presented as special elections. Ballot initiatives are often confusing, and people don’t tend to pay much attention to politics in off years - and many don’t pay attention to politics at all.

2006 is a year away, and midterm elections are influenced as much by candidates and circumstances as national politics. However, the loss of Jerry Kilgore in Virginia should be a wakeup call to the national GOP leadership - who have shown a lack of leadership and conviction in the past year. If Americans are going to get a GOP that’s only slightly less willing to spend than the Democrats, why not vote for divided government? The Republicans alienated the middle with the Schiavo affair, and alienated the conservative base with their fiscal irresponsibility. This has been an annus horribilus for the GOP, and many of their wounds are self-inflicted.

However, 2006 is another year, and if the GOP can get its act together, things can change. The question is how much real leadership can the party summon in order to present a coherent platform and how well the GOP can attract strong candidates to carry that message forward. If those things don’t play out as needed, the improvements to the GOP’s GOTV efforts may not be enough.

UPDATE: Michael Barone offers some analysis of the election results:

Democrats, after their victories in the gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey, are arguing that these results, together with the national polls, show a repudiation of the Bush administration. Republicans are arguing that these were just local contests, with no national implications. They’re both right and both wrong.

As always, Barone has some of the best analysis in the business.

Stephen Green has an incredibly astute essay on the current state of the Global War on Terrorism that touches on a number of exceptionally important ideas. His analysis of the war is dead-on - we’re fighting a very different kind of war. Yes, the tactics of military power haven’t changed all that much, but the environment in which our soldiers fight has. As Green notes:

Previously, I wrote that in order to win the Terror War, we must “prove the enemy ideology to be ineffective,” just as we did in the Cold War. In that conflict, we did so in three ways: by fighting where we had to while maintaining our freedoms, but most importantly by out-growing the Communist economies. I argued that similar methods would win the Terror War. We’d have to fight, we’d have to maintain our freedoms, but the primary key to victory in the Current Mess is taking the initiative.

What I didn’t see then - but what I do see today - is what “taking the initiative” really means.

It means, fighting a media war. It means, turning the enemy’s one great strength into our own. Broadcast words, sounds, and images are the arm of decision in today’s world.

And if that assessment is correct, then we’re losing this war and badly.

Sadly, I’m inclined to agree with him. And this time, the blame rightly belongs with the Bush Administration. They have ceded the initiative to the enemy - and the enemy is using our own media and intelligentsia as a weapon against us. Why is the President letting the Democrats keep hammering him with the same stupid lies about African uranium? Why is the Administration not firing on all cylinders to get the real story out on Iraq? Why is it that every time some left-wing blowhard prattles on about how this was some “illegal” and “immoral” war they’re not reminded of the hundreds of mass graves in Iraq? How come they’re not asked if someone who filled acres of ground with dead children still clutching their toys shouldn’t be removed from power? This is a media war, and we’re barely in the battle at all.

Make no mistake. Our troops are the best in the world. Nobody even comes close. The Iraqis are learning quickly because they’re learning from the best there is. The military gets knocked for being the dregs of American high schools - and that’s a pile of horse crap. Given the choice of working side by side with a former US Marine or working side by side with some preening Ivy League blowhard, I’ll pick the former any day - and I suspect most Americans would. Not only is our military capable, but they’re working under desert condition against a ruthless and evil enemy who blends in with the civilian population, and they have a media that sees the only good soldier as a dead or disillusioned one. And despite all their immense effort, despite the fact that they’re walking around in triple-digit heat with full body armor and still find time to help rebuild schools and give candy to Iraqi kids, they still have to deal with the fact that the majority of Americans never seem to get why they’re in Iraq in the first place.

It isn’t their job to explain that, it’s the job of the Administration. And they’re still asleep at the wheel when it comes to defending their own policies. As Green explains:

Washington was geared up right for the Blitz to Baghdad in 2003. Instead of the broad front of a “stuff” war, our digital troops raced north with almost reckless abandon, heedless of their flanks – and MSM embeds went along for the ride. As a result, reporting was, for a few short weeks, “fair and balanced.” Their lives quite literally on the line, frontline reporters filed their featured bylines with everything from admiration to honest criticism. And they did so virtually always as Westerners first, reporters second.

Today, too many reporters report from the relative safety of Baghdad hotels. Their reports – and the public’s understanding of the war – have suffered as a result. And too few of the original embeds remain reporting for duty. When reporters who don’t see what going on write stories without context, they fail to steel the public for bad news and to put the good news in perspective.

It’s fair to ask if the Iraq Campaign was a necessary component to the Terror War. It isn’t fair to compare Iraq to Vietnam, when the two wars have nothing, zero, nada in common. It’s fair to ask if our soldier are dying in vain, or because of stupid policy, or because of inferior equipment. It’s not fair to run headlines like “Battle Deaths Continue to Mount.” No shit, Sherlock? A real story would be, “Battle Deaths Decline as Fallen Soldiers Miraculously Resurrected.” It’s fair to question Bush’s policies. It’s not fair to act as a conduit for enemy propaganda. It’s fair to ask if Iraq is draining resources from our efforts in Afghanistan. It’s not fair to complain that Afghanistan isn’t perfect yet. It’s fair to complain about indecencies at Abu Ghraib. It’s not fair to virtually ignore atrocities committed by the other side everywhere else in Iraq.

But our media, aware of their power but ignorant as to its uses, would rather play “gotcha” than provide critical perspective.

Germany lost WWI because they couldn’t match our manpower. They lost again in 1945, because they couldn’t match Allied productive might. We could very well lose this war, because our leadership has so far failed to recognize the power of the media. We might also lose because our enemies are oftentimes more media-savvy than we are. We could lose also because our mainstream media seems to find terrorists less unattractive than having a conservative Texan in the White House.

The media has lost credibility with the vast majority of the American public A recent study from the John F. Kennedy Center for Government at Harvard University found that the press ranked the lowest in the list of trusted institutions in America - and the military ranked the highest. Yet the media is influencing the war in Iraq as much, if not more, as our military is. The bravery and valor of our troops in Iraq is being met with the cowardly and snide criticism of our mainstream media.

Green notes why the media should sit up and pay attention to all of this:

There is no “fixing” the American mainstream media, unless change comes organically. When I wrote last year that we can’t win this war by giving up our freedoms, I wasn’t kidding – without a free press, we’re doomed.

But I do mean to serve notice to the MSM.

When a nation loses a war, it looks to punish the people it believes are to blame. After Vietnam, neither Washington nor our Armed Forces were ever the same again. But if we lose this Terror War, our media will be seen as largely to blame. They’ll suffer blame for their ignorance and for their petulance. They’ll suffer blame for seeing al Jazeera as comrades closer than the privates and NCOs and officers fighting to protect the First Amendment. They’ll suffer blame for putting their hatred of a Republican President before their love of country. Whether that assessment is fair or not, it is how the public will see things.

Then the public would demand changes. And they’d probably get them, courtesy of a government looking for scapegoats, real or imagined. Should that day come, we’d lose our free press, and we’d lose our freedoms. We’d lose our country.

I don’t mean to imply that the MSM needs to hop on board the bandwagon and cheerlead for any President along any military campaign, no matter how foolhardy – far from it. In case you hadn’t noticed, I used a good portion of this essay to complain about Washington, and that’s something the media can do a whole lot more effectively than one small blogger. Criticism is just necessary, it’s a necessary good. But the MSM needs to relearn constructive criticism, and they need to remember which country defends their rights, and which group of people would gleefully slit their throats.

And therein lies the problem. The media and the left wing are all fixated on George W. Bush. Come January 2009, no matter what, Bush is gone. When Bush is gone, the media will finally have gotten what they wanted. They might even get one of their favored party’s officials in the Oval Office.

But that won’t help us if Iraq is a cesspool of terrorism. That won’t help us if the media’s gotten their way and al-Qaeda was handed the biggest victory they’ve ever had. That would be cold comfort to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who would inevitably killed in the conflagration. All the progress in the Middle East - the liberation of Lebanon from Syria control, the burgeoning pro-democracy movements across the region, the fear of the autocrats that they could end up just like Saddam - all of that will disappear if Iraq fails.

It doesn’t matter if you’re Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative, black or white, we can’t afford failure in Iraq.

Yet the media would be all too happy to report on the last US helicopter leaving the Green Zone as al-Zarqawis thugs start their rape of the Iraqi people. What does that tell us about the state of this war? Furthermore, what does that tell us of the loyalties of the media and many within the left these days? It’s one thing to argue that the war is being fought incorrectly and we need to change strategy. Kerry flirted with that idea, but never fully developed it, and his proposed solutions were incredibly naïve - Europe has neither the will nor the strength to bail us out in Iraq. However, the vast majority on the left want us to leave, no questions asked. That position is simply idiotic, and would lead to vast repercussions worldwide - not to mention the near certainty of genocide in Iraq.

So far, the enemy has been allowed to seize the initiative in the media war. The Bush Administration has barely been able to hold their own, and public dissatisfaction is rising. For all the talk about GOP talking points and some vast right-wing conspiracy that secretly controls the media, the Administration has utterly abrogated the key task of keeping the American people informed of the real progress in Iraq and the real reasons behind the war. This is partially due to the fact that the CIA utterly dropped the ball on our WMD intelligence, and had Bush made the humanitarian case stronger than he did, he could have avoided much of the flack.

Great leaders aren’t afraid to step into the spotlight and defend themselves. President Bush showed great leadership after 9/11 - yet today he’s completely unable to win the war at home. Perhaps it’s the stresses of the constant and vicious attacks of the rabidly partisan left. Perhaps it’s the strain of great responsibility. Whatever it may be, the President needs to be on the front lines of the media war, making sure that the American people are reminded time and time again of why we fight and what we’re fighting for.

The fates of Iraq and America are linked, and we dare not throw the people of Iraq to the wolves. We are in a battle against a foe that knows our weaknesses, and they’ve been exploiting them constantly. Al-Qaeda’s leaders know that the American military can never be defeated on the battlefield. But we can be defeated at home, and as our soldiers win the war on the ground in Iraq, we dare not lose the battle at home.

Gregory Djerjian has an excellent backgrounder to the escalating violence in Paris and what it means for Europe. Already the violence in France has spread across the banlieues of Paris into cities like Nantes, Nice, and Cannes. Muslims in Denmark are also beginning to protest, and other European governments are wary that their own population of unassimilated Muslim immigrants may also begin to engage in riots.

However, Djerjian doesn’t see this wave of violence as the beginning of Eurabia, but the result of decades of state socialism failing in its very goal of class equality:

Now, I am not one who believes that some pan-Eurabian intifada is in the offing, or that the implications of these riots rival 9/11, or that Shamil Basayev’s guerilla tactics are being adopted off la Place de la Republique–as breathless, under-informed ‘commentary’ has it in some quarters of the blogosphere. But we certainly have a pivot point here, one where the ruling elite’s inefficacy and ineptness is being laid crudely bare for all the world to see. They have been tone-deaf and caught off guard by the depth of the alienation in their midst, and it has now caught them very much unawares and seemingly clueless on how next to respond.

The conditions in the cités are deplorable - and France has long since wagged their fingers at the “racism” and “inequality” of America while their own country festered. The fact is that this should very well be a wakeup call to liberals here in the United States. The state socialist model doesn’t work -it’s failing in Paris right now. The subsidies and welfare benefits provided to residents of the cités did nothing to stem the tide of alienation and resentment among an underclass who had little to no chance at finding work in a society that strictly managed every facet of their labor market and economy.

While it’s certain that radical Muslims are taking advantage of this situation, it wasn’t radical Islam that started it - it was the failure of the French social model that provided a perfect breeding ground for this terrorism. A state with an unemployment rate in the double digits cannot expect to have a stable and prosperous society. A society in which enterprise is systematically stifled by paternalistic regulations cannot hope to keep their level of unemployment down. A state with a low birth rate cannot sustain its economic base, but importing foreign labor and not assimilating them into society creates tensions. Everything about the current French societal model has led to this breakdown, and after 11 days the government is still looking powerless and confused.

For all the Gallic moaning about the terrors of the “Anglo-Saxon” model, their supposedly more “humanistic” French model has produced vast concrete ghettoes with levels of unemployment that makes the American inner city look positively prosperous in comparison. The state socialist model is failing in France, it’s failing in Germany, and the most prosperous parts of Europe are that way precisely because they’re either too small to experience the shocks of their larger siblings, or they’ve abandoned state socialism for free market reform.

Europe must now realize that their social contract is failing. The state cannot afford the benefits they promised for everyone. In order to create a more equitable society, a society in which vast swathes of angry and unassimilated immigrants are treated as children by a paternalistic and disinterested society, France and the rest of Europe must step back from the road to serfdom - and make no mistake about it, the inhabitants of the banlieues are treated as little more then serfs - the spirit of entrepreneurialism that lifts people up out of poverty has been drained from France. Why should a company bother to hire a Maghreb immigrant when French labor laws mean that even a minimum-wage worker is virtually impossible to fire and has a prohibitively high labor cost? No employer can afford to take that chance, so the level of unemployment in the immigrant community is double that of the rest of the country - as high as Saudi Arabia’s. If someone can’t get even an entry-level position, how can one expect to move up the economic ladder? The residents of France’s soulless cités are mired in life in which the escape of economic improvement is fleeting at best.

The paternalism of welfare can never serve as a substitute for economic opportunity, and the situation in France is a warning of what happens when a state fails to understand that simple precept. A country that prides itself on liberté, egalité, et fraternité is finding that its system pays only lip service to those values. Putting down the riots will be easy compared to repairing the fractures to French and European civil society - the key question being whether the European intelligentsia has the strength of will necessary to correctly understand and fix the problem in the first place.

The great and brilliant sociologist James Q. Wilson noted that communities that tolerated small crimes, petty theft, vandalism, and the like were often quickly finding themselves facing worse crimes - and indeed, the last 7 nights of increasingly violent riots in Paris prove his point. The culture of lawlessness in France is paying out its terrible dividend as the ethnic ghettoes of the Parisian banlieues explode into anarchy.

Theodore Dalrymple has an excellent piece in City Journal that explores the decline of civil order across France:

The average visitor gives not a moment’s thought to these Cités of Darkness as he speeds from the airport to the City of Light. But they are huge and important—and what the visitor would find there, if he bothered to go, would terrify him.

A kind of anti-society has grown up in them—a population that derives the meaning of its life from the hatred it bears for the other, “official,” society in France. This alienation, this gulf of mistrust—greater than any I have encountered anywhere else in the world, including in the black townships of South Africa during the apartheid years—is written on the faces of the young men, most of them permanently unemployed, who hang out in the pocked and potholed open spaces between their logements. When you approach to speak to them, their immobile faces betray not a flicker of recognition of your shared humanity; they make no gesture to smooth social intercourse. If you are not one of them, you are against them.

Their hatred of official France manifests itself in many ways that scar everything around them. Young men risk life and limb to adorn the most inaccessible surfaces of concrete with graffiti—BAISE LA POLICE, fuck the police, being the favorite theme. The iconography of the cités is that of uncompromising hatred and aggression: a burned-out and destroyed community-meeting place in the Les Tarterets project, for example, has a picture of a science-fiction humanoid, his fist clenched as if to spring at the person who looks at him, while to his right is an admiring portrait of a huge slavering pit bull, a dog by temperament and training capable of tearing out a man’s throat—the only breed of dog I saw in the cités, paraded with menacing swagger by their owners.

There are burned-out and eviscerated carcasses of cars everywhere. Fire is now fashionable in the cités: in Les Tarterets, residents had torched and looted every store—with the exceptions of one government-subsidized supermarket and a pharmacy. The underground parking lot, charred and blackened by smoke like a vault in an urban hell, is permanently closed.

Places like the Sarcelles, Les Tarterets, and the other ghettoes in which hundreds of thousands of Maghreb and Arab immigrants were locked into soul-crushing logements have become breeding grounds for both social alienation and terrorism. They are places where al-Qaeda can find as much purchase as they could in Fallujah, Ramadi, or Baghdad. They are home to France’s alienated underclass, areas of apartheid in a society that prides itself on the values of egalité, liberté, and fraternité. Unassimilated, angry, and hopeless, the inhabitants of the cités are inundated with violence and hatred.

French culture has consistently appeased the means of its own ongoing destruction. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote lovingly of the violent narcissism of Franz Fanon, who stated that “Violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.” The violence in France is merely putting that bloody idea into practice.

France’s combination of paternalism and racism have turned the 800 zones sensibles (”sensitive zones” in true Orwellian fashion) into hotbeds of violence and terrorism. The cités attempt to inculcate French culture into their inhabitants betray the fact that for all France’s justifiable pride in their centuries of achievement, France is no longer truly willing to defend itself. La Zone is a no-go zone for French police, and when they try to enter into these centers of the French insurgency, they are pelted with rocks and Molotov cocktails. Law and order is completely absent in La Zone, and the violence that has resulted is a direct consequence of that cultural abandonment. The people of the cités are kept in a state of apartheid not out of direct racism, but out of a doctrinaire adherents to an extreme form of multiculturalism. France is trying to atone for its colonialist past by ignoring the problems which threaten to wash away their very cultural identity.

France has been one of the lights of the Western world. French writers, artists, and intellectuals have produced some of the greatest works in human history. Paris is still considered one of the greatest of the world’s great cities. At the same time, no one should whitewash or brush aside the way in which France’s glorious culture is being slowly eroded into nothingness - and indeed, the problems in the cités are fueling a pushback from radical and even neo-Nazi elements like the racist National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen. It is sad that the only public figures in France who have been willing to point out the brewing problems have been the hatemongers. The Chirac government has done little to nothing to change the horrid conditions of the cités until recently. Despite France’s draconian anti-terrorism laws, places like the Sarcelles are ideal recruiting grounds for al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

The situation in France is not something that anyone should gloat about or take pleasure in. Our own unwillingness to assimilate immigrants and defend our cultural values could very well lead us to the same fate as the cités. We have an obligation to not only welcome those seeking a new life here in the United States, but to protect and defend the culture that made us that beacon of freedom worldwide. American animosity towards France should not make us forget that there but the grace of God go we all.