PrintJune 12, 2017
Is Today's Britain Like Post-WWI France?
As the dust settles on the just concluded election in Great Britain, the Conservative Party under Theresa May received 48.9% of the vote, compared to Labour's 40.3% under Jeremy Corbyn. Furthermore, although the conservatives lost seats in parliament and its outright majority there, Mrs. May will still remain prime minister by forming a coalition government with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).
But even with that said, this June 8th election should be viewed as a disaster for what it might very well foreshadow.
To begin with Jeremy Corbyn is not just your run-of-the-mill leftist. He has been called a madman with good reason. Old Jeremy is a Marxist, unabashedly pro-Muslim, and a close friend of Hamas and Iran. Compared to Mr. Corbyn, Crazy Bernie Sanders comes across as normal and Hillary R. Clinton looks like the Goldwater-girl she once was before turning to the Dark Side of liberalism.
So it's bad enough that Great Britain gave someone like Mr. Corbyn 40 percent of the vote. But a deeper problem is where Labour drew so much of its support.
Polls show that two thirds of voters between the ages of 18- and 24-years of age voted Labour while half of those between the ages of 25- and 34-years old also did. Furthermore, this youth vote was energized. Almost 250,000 young people registered to vote ahead of the deadline. This is up from 137,000 on the last day of registration in 2015.
Now mind you, these youth voted for Islamic apologist Jeremy Corbyn in the fresh aftermath of Islamic terror attacks 1) in the Manchester Arena on May 22, with 22 young people, mostly females, killed and 2) the London attack on June 3 which left eight or nine innocent people dead. It's as if the Millennials are saying to the Islamic terrorists: 'No hard feelings. We understand. We'll adjust.'
Youth is the future. The way young people voted in this election could be a harbinger of Great Britain's outright surrender to the backward ideology of Islam in the years ahead. Not that long ago, I thought such a prospect was ridiculous and out of the question. I no longer believe that.
How can this be? How can young adults be so misguided? Perhaps a look at France in the aftermath of World War I might shed a light on such disturbing questions with the understanding that no analogy is perfect. In discussing post-WWI France, I will draw from Thomas Sowell's Intellectuals and Society.
Sowell writes that France suffered horrific casualities in World War I. More than one out of four of Frenchmen between the ages of 18 and 27 were killed, with many of those lives squandered by incompetent political and military leadership. And the hardship did not end with the war. Another factor, not cited by Sowell, is that as many as 280,000 mostly young French citizens died during the 1918-1919 flu epidemic. Sowell notes that because of the depletion of Frenchmen, more than a million women in the prime of their lives could not fulfill their expectations of becoming wives and mothers. Accordingly, during the 1930s, not enough babies were born in France to replace those who died during that decade. A gloom set over France.
In this environment and with the intellectuals in the vanguard, pacifism came to dominate the country's thinking. The artistic movement known as 'Dada' was highly attuned to this sort of nihilism. A view that prevailed was that war itself was the enemy, not other nations or emerging ideologies, and that patriotism and nationalism must be superseded by internationalism. These opinions of the intellectuals soon filtered down into the schools.
Sowell reports that Anatole France, a leading French poet, journalist, and novelist, addressing school teachers in 1919 said, "The teacher must make the child love peace and its works; he must teach him to detest war; he will banish from education all that excites hate for the stranger, even the hatred of the enemy of yesterday." He added that "we must become citizens of the world." (Sound familiar?)
Such advice was taken to heart by the education establishment. The French teachers' unions began organizing campaigns in the 1920s objecting textbooks that depicted French soldiers who defended their homeland from foreign invaders (the Germans) as being heroic, calling such textbooks to be banned as being 'bellicose.'
Sowell writes:
The once-epic story of French soldiers' heroic defense at Verdun, despite the massive causalities they suffered, was now transformed into a story of horrible suffering by all soldiers at Verdun. ... In short, men who had once been honored as patriotic heroes for having sacrificed their lives in a desperate struggle to hold off the invaders of their country were now verbally reduced to victims, and put on the same plane or other victims among the invaders. Ceremonies
Swimming vainly against the pacifist tide was the like of Marshal Philippe Petain who said in 1934 that French teachers were out to "raise our sons in ignorance of or in contempt of our fatherland." How right he was, but Petain was viewed as part of the problem, not the solution, by much of France.
Such a pacifist sentiment makes sense in a Utopian world, but not the real one. Within a generation, the wolf was back at the French door. And he didn't knock. He blitzkrieged through riding on Panzers of steel to inflict a total French defeat in a mere six weeks in 1940.
This humiliating French collapse took most of the the world by surprise ... but not everyone. Winston Churchill had said ominously as far back as 1932 that "France, though armed to the teeth, was pacifist to the core." And indeed, an ill-prepared and ill-equipped Germany attacked mighty France because Adolph Hitler had studied the public opinion in both France and Britain. The words and deeds of both politicians and pacifists in those countries went into Hitler's decision to invade France in May 1940. And as it turned out, Hitler's assessment was right on the money while the conventional wisdom of the time was woefully wrong. .
Back to the present.
One has to wonder if today's Muslim terrorists haven't taken the measure of Western Europe and have concluded, as Hitler did in 1940, that the countries there were ripe for the taking? Of course they have. They can see that patriotism is rapidly waning in Europe, replaced by multiculturalism. In much of Europe, patriotism and pride of one's nation and even civilization is following Christianity into grave of irrelevance.
Evidence abounds. Leaders in Western Europe (and even in the United State) trip over themselves least they give the slightest offense to muslim sensitivities. Even outright terror acts by avowed Muslims are often greeting with either an avalanche of excuses, denial or blame shifting. If ISIS was to set off a nuclear bomb in the heart of a European capital, I half expect the elite opinion in Western Europe, to navel-gaze and wonder what they did to provoke such a rash act, and then quickly conclude that America and/or Israel were to blame for the calamity.
The youth vote in the just concluded British election shows the poisoning effects of years of indoctrination in multiculturalism the schools and the greater culture. Like the pacifism that dominated French thought and the schools in the post-WWI era, multiculturalism can only lead to a tragic end in Europe. As the years roll by, the most likely options for Europe will be either civil war or submission. That is said not as a hyperbole.
And I conclude with two additional bits of history regarding France in 1940. First, more than a few of the French were active collaborators with their Nazi occupiers. And why not? That is where the logic of pacifism leads.
And second, France never freed itself from the yoke of the Germany's National Socialist Party -- i.e., the Nazis. In spite of Gallic mythology, France was liberated by citizen soldiers drawn from the cities, farms, and town of America. Will the fates deem that to be America's role again in the future? Only time will tell.
