Aggression and a lack of self-defense

In liberal France, the state's monopoly on exerting violence is lost, and the millions of foreign thugs, arsonists, and a mob of communists have become the main threat.

French police officers patrol as demonstrators fill the street in the Champs Elysees area of Paris on July 1, 2023, five days after a 17-year-old man was killed by police in Nanterre, a western suburb of Paris. French police arrested 1311 people nationwide during a fourth consecutive night of rioting over the killing of a teenager by police, the interior ministry said on July 1, 2023. France had deployed 45,000 officers overnight backed by light armoured vehicles and crack police units to quell the violence over the death of 17-year-old Nahel, killed during a traffic stop in a Paris suburb on June 27, 2023. (Photo by Ludovic MARIN / AFP) Fotó: Europress/AFP/Ludovic Marin

The strengthening of centralised power manifested itself in many ways, with localism disappearing with increasing speed in the second half of the 19th century, only to be followed by the emergence of mass communication and the birth of the modern state, eventually implying that all local matters had to be resolved on the basis of national customs, laws and, above all, abstract and total ideologies. Everything -  in the literal sense - changed and the state totalising its monopoly of violence, among many other things, was one important element of this everything. The state told people: no more can you or the local structures you maintain do anything that would qualify as violence when it comes to protecting yourselves. The state will protect you, although many times this will not take place there and then when you are attacked, but the perpetrator will be found and punished subsequently.

Authorities alone have the right to use physical force. This works in a society that is largely homogeneous in the cultural and religious sense, and does not have too many outcasts. At the time of rapid urbanisation, old towns and communities, and the masses flowing or being forced into cities still retained the discipline of peasant localism and maintained it over two or three generations albeit in a weakening form.  Over the past fifty years, however, fewer and fewer people equipped with this adaptability have come to cities in Europe.

This is completely incomprehensible for people coming from outside of Europe. They have never heard of the state's monopoly on violence, of impersonal officialdom. They come from a world where the strong are right and they must demonstrate their strength to this end. Failing to show that you are the stronger is the automatic admission that the other is the dominant one

When ordinary European citizens meet the police and authorities of their country, they have the opportunity to deal with matters in an interaction of equals. However, two people being equal exists only in European culture. And even here, this has existed barely for fifty or seventy-five years. Everywhere else in the world, people are either above or below each other by default. An Arab youth does not experience a traffic stop as an interaction in which he is an equal partner, as cooperation for traffic and public safety, but as a humiliation of a Muslim by an inferior white man. This is a feeling that an average thug can also feel in Hungary, for example, but statistically speaking, such things very rarely escalate into violence. Of course, the proportions can only be estimated, but only a small proportion of gypsy groups in Hungary have built up a counterculture, and it is much less brutal than the one in France. There, millions of young non-French men are involved.

The religion of Islam is also a political ideology, which is incomprehensible from a Christian cultural perspective.

Masses of Muslims in France blame the French for all their ills. They are fighting for and raging against everything in the same way as the extreme left-wing, extreme liberal groups, and it is no coincidence that they have found each other on certain issues.

 (It is just like when the Nazis and the Communists both fought against the legitimate German government before 1933.) The ethnic difference will only become interesting after the French state and the remnants of normality have been defeated. After that, the question will be whether France should have a system of anarchist socialism or become an Islamic caliphate. It is important to understand that those who are rebelling are already in their own country now. For them, the French people are the foreigners.

The decline of the French state, like any other Western state, started with the general rise of liberalism. It gave up defending normality and only defended human rights, mainly from itself, for example from police excesses. It has become part of the immigrant culture that every encounter with French authorities must be experienced as aggression and as such, responded to also with uncontrolled aggression.

The powers of the police were constantly being chipped away. Then came their self-confidence. The French police could only count on political and press support if they took brutal action against the right-wing opposition to the regime. Police officers and commanders who dared to take a firm stand against ethnic-based criminal groups or Antifa were hunted down. Without any concrete information, the officers and the police were automatically blamed for the death of an Arab youth who was committing a criminal act. Because violence against a policeman is (quite rightly) a crime for a white man. For an immigrant, however, it is not, as only a few of the many tens of thousands of cases are punished at most.

In political terms, the French state today protects immigrants as a religious and ethnic community from French culture, from the legal system, from Christianity, and from the police and all authorities in general.

The state does not ask for any compensation either for that or for the extreme exploitation of the country's social system. In this case, Macron's fear is based on the fact that his country has long been teetering on the brink of a situation in which the French population would start thinking of returning to self-defense, since their state is no longer doing its job. But then, based on the doctrine in force so far

the police would have to fight immigrants, far left and far right forces, and also the public self-defense groups organized in the face of the imminent threat to the members’ lives.

Strange as it may seem to us normal people, the main threat to the liberal rule of law, according to liberals, is not the millions of ethnically different vandals and arsonists, or the liberal and communist mobs that attack the state, but the normal people who want to take back from the state the right to defend themselves by force. human rights, minorities have a basic right to express themselves and their protests 'against oppression', even by violence, but the minority, assumed to be the majority, does not even have the right to self-defense.

This is what we find today where France used to be. Let us learn from it.

The author is a sociologist

Cover photo: rioting protesters and police near the Champs Elysees in Paris (Photo: Ludovic Marin / AFP)