Does Hollande’s Rhetoric in Response to the Paris Attacks Mark a Turning Point for Europe?

François Hollande, the French President, describes the attack on Paris by Islamic State terrorists as “an act of war.” This is new. Previous Islamist attacks in other cities killed as many or more people and were treated as aberrations, something brought about by “radicalization,” whatever that might be. Nothing consequential was to be made of it — as though the violence was ephemeral, much like random illness or psychological disturbance and required doctors with treatment rather than well-armed troops.

This false representation of reality is a legacy from the 20th century. No doubt sincere, politicians in Germany and France, and the Mediterranean and Nordic countries as well, set about creating conditions in which there was to be no more war. For the purpose, they persuaded themselves that conferences and negotiations could resolve all clashes of interest and war therefore had become an anachronism. Human nature, in short, was supposed to have undergone a complete transformation.

Illusion that it was, the assumption held good even when Muslims began to arrive and settle in large numbers in the countries of the continent. They were thought to be happily increasing the work force, and to be willing fodder for the consumer society. Irresponsibility, pure and simple, has been the political hallmark. Nobody even wondered whether people with such conflicting religious faith, customs, and opinions could adopt the quite different identity of the natives. And in the event, they have hardly integrated anywhere, remaining defiantly apart.

It is hard to decide whether the fecklessness of politicians plays a greater role than their mendacity. The many terrorist outrages perpetrated by Muslims testify that the multicultural world we are invited to live in is a willful fiction. Candle-lit vigils, linked-arm demonstrations, and tricolor floodlights on architectural monuments merely decorate the fiction, and encourage Islamists to raise the stakes and kill to win the war they know they are waging. Is Hollande, is anyone, able and willing to take to the field, recognize that we are who we are and enforce reality in self-defense? Otherwise, without war the best we can expect is a future Edward Gibbon, whose book The Decline and Fall of Europe will be explaining how and why this unnecessary catastrophe occurred.