France Today, and Howard (Moorcock?) Theories of History

[nalpak retrac]

I read the following, er, right-leaning editorial on the current situation in France...

http://www.suntimes.com/output/steyn/cs...eyn06.html

...and it struck me that under-girding the writer's point was a view of history that you get from Robert E. Howard, and perhaps also from the original Elric series. The key factors are mobs/hoards, weak and self-serving politicians, and also a hostile cosmos given over to catastrophe--balance is more often established through clashing extremes than through foresight and wise policy making.

I haven't traveled around enough in France to know it. What is going on there? Prognosis?

[Anonymous]

One aspect of the situation that I am only just learning of are these so-called "No-Go" zones.

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/429

Clearly, more cultural sensitivity training will solve the problem.

Ahem? Oo! Wake up? Did I doze off? Urp! A little little too much to drink, maybe? Urp! Ah.... As I was saying, this phenomenon of No-Go zones is very interesting. Anybody know about these areas?

In A Clockwork Orange Anthony Burgess suggsts that permitting gangs of violent youths to run amok terrorizing the contryside is a way for an authoritarian government to establish and maintan crisis in a country, and so enhance the powers of the ruling party. Hmm. Urp! Does this sound like France, with its elite "intellectuals" running the show, what? "Crisis management" indeed. With these No-Go zones you can turn the "crisis" on and off like a water faucet....

Clever, these French chaps. Urp!

A few more years of sensitivity training and the American and British volk will be on the No-Go grid too. Ah, that's what I should like call "progress!"

Well, I am off for my college. Must jiffy up and get back soon, you know. The streets of Oxford can get rather dodgy after dark. Urp! Yes, yes. I hear the new security cameras have been installed, and I wish to try my new sub-cutaneous ID chip in the college gate.... Nitey nite.

[Miqque]

C'mon! Let's everybody sing!

ohhhhhh....

It's the end of the world as we know it ...
It's the end of the world as we know it ...
It's the end of the world as we know it ...
... and I feel fine ...

[Michael Moorcock]

I think the French, like the Brits and Yanks sometimes, have been in a kind of cultural denial, thinking things are better than they were, at least for a large group of citizens. Because at one time they probably were better. There's a tendency for the middle classes to rest on laurels earned by earlier generations. Now that they're aware of the problem my guess is that they'll start tackling it. Not as fast as the frustrated have-nots would like, but they WILL start addressing a problem they've tended to deny existed until now. Remember the Notting Hill riots ? Remember Watts ? Things don't improve all at once but they DO improve, in modern democracies, bit by bit. The privileged don't usually volunteer to give up or share their privileges until they get a bit alarmed by the alternatives. Of course rioters should be taken seriously, and of course they only represent a small section of the frustrated people (who have demonstrated against further violence, you'll note), but this is how things are made to move in reasonably just democracies. Nothing's perfect. The French have some waking up to do, but things would have to get a LOT worse before any sort of apocalyptic theory would seem reasonable. All that nonsense about vital barbarian blood smacks of Mussolinism and Hitlerism to me and while it was very popular in Howard's day, our experiencve has shown that it's really a nonsense. Often even the so-called 'barbarians' who attacked 'decadent' Rome were no such thing, certainly in their own eyes. Increasingly, history shows that the waves of 'barbarians' were only that in the opinion of the privileged who had stopped facing the realities.

[JM Lofficier]

For an amusing take on the French riots, may I recommend the following essay:

Paris Riots show superiority of America.

JM

[JM Lofficier]

http://one-salient-oversight.blogspo...iority-of.html