https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/france-the-sick-man-of-europe
rance’s ambassador to Poland Pierre Levy has said he was “surprised, even shocked,” by the Polish foreign minister, Jacek Czaputowicz, declaring that “something’s not right” with France, and that was “sad because France is the sick man of Europe, dragging Europe down.” M. Levy went on to make an astonishing statement which only confirmed that the Pole was right.
Talking to the media shortly before Christmas, Mr. Czaputowicz said that the protests in recent weeks and the Strasbourg Christmas market attack by a Muslim reflected France’s overall decrepitude. His reference to the jihadist attack was particularly significant—and irksome to the French ambassador—because it clearly alluded to Poland’s refusal to accept any Muslim refugees from Greece and Italy under EU quotas. That position is shared by the other three members of the Visegrad Group, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic.
Levy warned that populism and “fringe forces” threatened European interests. As for the Strasbourg attack, he said that “the investigation into its roots and causes had not yet been completed.” Levy further asserted that most of the perpetrators of past attacks were motivated by the same forces of economic inequality that gave rise to the yellow vest riots: “The attacks were acts of . . . people who, for various reasons, found themselves on the margins [of society], and who adopted the badge of Islamic radicals, even though, in reality, they weren’t radicals at all.”
This is reminiscent of any number of old jokes where, by trying to establish his rationality, the patient confirms that he is utterly insane.
Writing in these pages three years ago, I diagnosed the disorder which is on such blatant display in Pierre Levy’s statement: members of the elite class “treat the jihadist mindset as a pathology that can and should be treated by treating causes external to Islam itself.”
But M. Levy’s task is to represent his country’s government, which in France’s case primarily means President Emanuel Macron. As it happens, Macron is a paradigmatic pastiche—almost a caricature—of Europe’s postmodern, transnational elite. He is an Islamophile open-borders globalist. Two years ago he told the Süddeutsche Zeitung that critics of Angela Merkel’s open-door migration policy were guilty of “disgraceful oversimplification.” By allowing over a million aliens into the country, “Merkel and German society as a whole exemplified our common European values. They saved our collective dignity by accepting, accommodating and educating distressed refugees.” He subsequently lampooned Donald Trump’s promise to protect America’s southern border by promising never to build a wall of any kind.
