Victor Davis Hanson
We recently witnessed days of riot, arson, and mayhem in France.
Sweden is also mired in immigrant crime and violence—and immigrant contempt for Swedish culture. Sweden’s embassies are sources of threatened violence by Islamists upset that a Swedish immigrant from the Middle East burned a Koran. (Would Christians worldwide protest at Turkish embassies if a Christian burned a bible in Istanbul without legal consequence?)
Here in the United States the same disconnect prevails. Illegal immigrants are now furious at Florida for its renewed enforcement of American immigration law—apparently on the theory that the uninvited and illegal immigrant, not the lawful citizen, has the right to establish what is legal and what not in the land of his host.
The violence in Europe is so often perpetrated by angry immigrant and second-generation immigrant youth over perceived ill-treatment from French or Swedish authorities or Europeans in general.
Their unspoken subtext is that immigrants, mostly from Europe’s former colonial possessions, after long ago throwing out the Europeans as colonial and imperialist interlopers, subsequently wished to follow them back to their own country. Ditto the British colonial experience as well.
Imagine the burdens of such logic: “We hated you so much in our country that we demanded to join you in yours.”
(I could understand a different, more unfortunately human, and nasty rationale for flooding Europe from across the Mediterranean: “We hated you so much for your ancestors’ efforts to profit from our country, that we have now come to yours to destroy it as generational payback”.)
Once in Europe, it proved difficult—as it always does for any minority—for the poor and unskilled immigrant from impoverished countries to compete successfully with an entrenched European majority citizenry, especially given:
1) the leftwing dogma that all inequality is due to systemic racism and oppression and not culture, or inheritance or health or bad luck or sloth or the impossibility of achieving parity in a single generation. Such blame-gaming is far easier than ego-shattering assimilation and integration and emulating the host whose house one has chosen to crash.
And 2) the guest, out of insecurities, clings to his own culture and religion—on the dubious premise that what he had eagerly left behind and once faulted for his poverty, he now also wished to retain and accentuate, but only once he was safely distant from it—and as long as he did not have to return to home to it.
This schizophrenia reminds me of a former student of decades past who was on campus where I was teaching, participating in a student protest around burning of the U.S. flag.
I asked him why he was destroying the symbol of the country he certainly demanded to stay in but was waving the Mexican flag of the country that he dared not return to—all in protest of then Proposition 187.
His answer? He shrugged…as if to concede, “I don’t yet have the confidence to say I am lucky to reside, even if illegally, in this country, and so lash out in irrational ways at the mere hint I would have to return to the country I do not wish to live in.”
This incoherence is analogous to the current furor at the recent Supreme Court’s abolition of affirmative action that runs something like this: “It is demeaning to minorities to end special race-based hiring and admissions to return to a meritocracy that might end the condescension and stereotyping that talented minorities cannot compete just as well on the basis of merit.”
There is also yet one more assumption of the now demonstrating and violent immigrant in the West. He concluded that his inert European or American flabby host would never really respond to his violence or his demands upon the host. The neurotic affluent Westerner is deemed either too obsessed in satisfying his abundant material appetites to care much about a few billion euros in torched stuff, or too guilt-ridden to ever marshal the confidence or intelligence to defend his own civilization.
The rioter then deduces that no Frenchman or Swede will ever instruct him that he, the guest, chose freely and indeed illegally and uninvited to come to Europe. And if he finds the decision now distasteful, then surely, he can return to Algeria or the Sudan or Morocco anytime he pleases to enjoy his superior culture that he once forsook.
Of course, the rioters or angry illegal immigrants, here and in Europe, also conclude the West is dying, or rather committing collective suicide. It is aging. Its people get more worked up over limiting partial-birth abortion than they do existential fertility rates that are nosediving.
They champion and idolize cutting-aged transgenderism, not the staid mom and pop who have three kids, stay married, work nonstop, and keep the country viable.
The murderous in Chicago are victims, the victimizers are in East Palestine, Ohio. And on and on.
Discussion (8)
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Log In to CommentWhat a self-destructive excess of (otherwise admirable) guilt, what a self-serving inversion from gratitude. Balance needed here.
There are a number of variables in play with the riots in Europe as well as the ones we have already been through and the fact is there will be more riots in the future. Earlier immigrants, both legal and illegal, had political or religious reasons. In Algeria and other North African countries the revolutions that saw the removal of the former European colonists meant that any 'non colonial citizen' who had worked with or supported the foreign government or business was now suspect to reprisals by the revolutionists. Those citizens who left for Europe still carried their religious faith and culture to the new refuge. Later we find so many of the immigrants leaving their old countries for economic reasons, the welfare benefits and no need to show allegiance to their new country in order to obtain such benefits. Hence they have established their own 'country' based on their own culture and social values. The question is not why won't they change, but why should they?
How nice that would be. But you forget what your wish would actually entail: bullets and blood. Not all 50 million illegals, and don't be fooled since they were saying 20 million 20 years ago, would acquiescence and go back, nor would their nations take them. I used to run work crews compromised of poor Mexican and central American guys, and I also speak spanish...not that all of them spoke it. Anyways, I was regaled with many tales of how they worked under the table, shared housing, and sent $ and - get this - entire barrels of WIC/Government cheese stuff back home so that their relatives could run convenience stores selling the stuff for profit. Thats alot of leeches and alot of beneficiaries, and I think we'd have quite the problem deporting even a fraction of them. Besides, like the end-stage Romans, our border patrol/military is loaded with the very people we would be trying to get rid of.
Thank you Professor Hanson
You could add Canada to your list of examples of a country bent on erasing its past, its founding principles and traditions, all to accommodate half-educated, ungrateful, and cynical group advocates or politicians who all mouth the same cliches no matter what country they're in. One grievance fits all. And in the meantime I notice that successful people (of all backgrounds) are steadily removing their children from the public education system, tuning out the media, and creating their own worlds where they can block out the poison seeping in from the institutions that should be fighting it tooth and nail. Once again, Mr Hanson, you have given us a troubling but necessary diagnosis.
As always, excellent analysis. This always precludes the question: if the USA is misogynistic, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, and in general such an awful place, why have 7 million people decided to come here illegally? Oh that's right. Because we will house them, feed them, clothe them, give them smart phones, free medical care and free education, for which they then take menial jobs and then send most of the money back home because so many of their expenses are taken care of. Who wouldn't want this gig, especially if menial work back home means you have zero rights, no welfare benefits, no free education for your kids, no free health care, no free food and no free housing? This is the no brainer of no brainers. Meanwhile their corrupt and racist societies have a great safety valve for their potential revolutionaries and a great source of foreign currency. The question is: why are we so stupid to put up with all of this nonsense?
As a high school student in the late 1960's, I would hear the slogan "America: Love it or Leave it", which was criticized as being too jingoistic, etc. May be too simplistic, but I'm beginning to believe that the USA and the European countries Victor mentions should adopt this exact attitude and tell the disaffected immigrants to return to their native countries. Of course this would require some intestinal fortitude on the part of the (RSP) Really Smart People (my acronym) in charge. I would say the politicians need to "grow a pair", but that would be considered sexist. No offense intended to the lady readers here; but is "lady" an insult too?
Covid proved my countrymen more docile, gullible, and weak than i could have previously imagined. So many lining up for their "medication", so many full of hate for the dreaded unvaccinated. Jobs, livelihoods lost and families broken. For what? A lie and a curse. We all know someone that succumbed to the fear and pressure and got theirs. To what end? "Long covid"? Heart attacks and cancer? Infertility? Covid broke much, yet there were more lemmings than eagles, and here we are. So, in conclusion, there will be no "snap", only fire.