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Rod Dreher asks, "I don’t understand why the government doesn’t deploy the army and shoot rioters until they stop. Philippe Lemoine, a Frenchman, says it’s not that simple."
Excerpt:
"We have let things rot for so long that, at this point, relying primarily on force to restore order would require a degree of violence far greater than what people realize and what is politically feasible.
It's possible to contain a riot using only moderate force when the number of police officers is high relative to the number of rioters, but when riots are so widespread and involve so many people because you have allowed this kind of things to happen for so long, that's just not possible and you have to use extreme violence to make up for the lack of manpower.
I know people on the Internet will say that it doesn't matter and that we should just do it, but the reality is that most of the people in charge are not prepared to use that kind of force and neither would most ordinary people if they saw videos of 16-year-old kids having their brains blown out by cops."
Dreher: "But what if it comes to that, though? What if the only thing that will stop the violence is deadly force? Are the French prepared for that? This is what civil war would be, in the sense David Betz has been patiently explaining for two years or more. This is why Betz also warns people that they should not be under any illusions about what would happen if it did turn into a general civil war, à la Lebanon in the 1980s, or Yugoslavia in the 1990s. “Millions will die,” I heard him say to an audience a couple of years ago.
That we are even having to have this conversation is a damning indictment of the ruling class in France, and all across western Europe. Fifty years of feckless governments of the Left and the Right have brought France to this point. France is also on the brink of fiscal catastrophe; older Frenchmen won’t give up their generous pensions and social services, but France can’t afford them anymore, and the young are feeling dispossessed and trapped in a stagnant economy. Last month at a conference in Switzerland, before the riots started this time, a senior French journalist told me that the mood in his country felt “pre-revolutionary.”
Even Marine Le Pen’s recent statements track this line: personal Islamic practice is compatible with the Republic; replacing French law with Sharia is not. French Muslims who are simply citizens practicing their "religious faith" “have no reason to worry” about a Le Pen election victory.
But can one be a practicing Muslim without demanding and practicing Sharia?
Eph 3:20 Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us,
Eph 3:21 to Him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.
Serious numbers of migrants arrived in Massachusetts from 1630 - 1640. Roughly 21,000. By 1700 they had become 91,000. Their immediate priorities: having families, building farms, forming towns, and building institutions Old England never developed on local levels. But the new Americans didn’t just reproduce the country they left. They built institutions England didn’t yet have.
Year 1 — a seagoing vessel launched at Medford, 4 July 1631. The shipwrights had been sent out in 1629, ahead of the fleet.
Year 4 — representative government. Elected deputies sitting in the General Court.
Year 6 — Harvard. £400 voted for “a schoale or colledge.”
Year 8 — a printing press, the only one in British North America. Glover died on the voyage out; his widow Elizabeth moved the operation to Cambridge and got it running.
Year 10 — the Bay Psalm Book, the first book printed in America.
Year 11 — the Body of Liberties, read aloud at every General Court.
Year 12 — the 1642 law: every ...
