Programming note: Tonight, Tuesday, I'll be here with another episode of our latest Tale for Our Time. Tomorrow, Wednesday, we'll have our regular Clubland Q&A with questions from Steyn Club members live around the planet at 3pm North American Eastern - which is 8pm Greenwich Mean Time/9pm Central European. Hope you can swing by.
~The Spectator, whose headlines are lazy and terrible and an embarrassment to a once great publication, had a particularly bad example the other day:
How many more knife attacks can France take?
Well, as noted in the very first sentence of the article, there are currently 120 "knife attacks" every day in France. A generation ago it would have been inconceivable that the French would accept with a collective Gallic shrug 850 "knife attacks" per week.
Yet they do. So would they be able to "take" a thousand per week? Check back with me later this year. Fifteen hundred? Two thousand? That's the way to bet.
The French state, like other Continental countries, has certain advantages when it comes to holding the lid on things. For example, just a few days ago, Elias, 14, was leaving footie practice when he was impeded and told to cough up his cellphone. He refused. So they stabbed him. Elias was taken to hospital, but died the following day.
This didn't happen in some distant provincial town the French elites don't care about, but in the fourteenth arrondissement of Paris, as Elias was leaving the Jules Noël stadium, which has hosted prestigious international sporting events. So, unlike the other 119 "knife attacks" that day, it made the national news, and put officialdom on the backfoot. Thus, last Saturday, the Fédération française de football ordered a minute's silence in Elias's memory at all matches in Paris and across the country.
And, even as the nation rose in dignified hommage to fourteen-year-old Elias, just ten miles south the gendarmes were securing a crime scene in the woods at Épinay-sur-Orge, where the body of eleven-year-old Louise had just been discovered. She had been intercepted while leaving school the previous day, and found with more than a dozen stab wounds.
By now you may be wondering: Elias who? Louise who? Well, under the prevailing rules in France, as in Germany, the full names of the deceased cannot be published in the media. Unlike, say, the three little girls slaughtered by the Welsh choir boy in Southport. Which rule, very conveniently for the authorities, renders the victims all but anonymous even in death. All the things that were once standard in journalism - interviewing the old lady at the house next door, etc - cannot be done in French newspapers, so the dead never quite swim into focus. We know Louise's last name - Lasalle - only because, when she didn't come home on the Friday, her sister posted an alert on her social media. But that surname does not appear in the French papers. The same veil descends on the suspects, too. The particular character of a "knife attack" has to be discerned through generalities: Jean-Pierre A has died of his wounds; Mohammed Z has been taken into custody.
Look at that sweetly innocent little girl above. That's the picture her sister posted when she was missing and her fate was not yet known. In some French media outlets poor Louise is only shown with her face blurred, as if she has entered the witness protection programme. Alas, in France, there is no witness protection programme. For an old-school newspaperman such as the late David English, the poignancy of that photograph alone would have commanded the full-court Daily Mail treatment. But fourteen-year-old Elias and eleven-year-old Louise are already fading into the vast general blur: to modify Stalin, one stabbed kid is a tragedy, a million are a statistic. So the answer to The Spectator's lousy headline is my own from last month:
I Have Seen the Future and It's Stabbed
News is not news because it affects the thirty-seven people who knew the nine-year-old boy or six-year-old girl or whoever's next. It's news because it's relevant to tens of millions of people who had never heard of the poor child until she was killed. Western Europe is a stabber's paradise as a consequence of public policy that has turned once peaceable polities such as France and Sweden into low-trust fractious hellholes. And the leadership class, whether preening metrosexuals like Macron or cold unfeeling bastards like Starmer, are insistent that nothing can be changed.
This is why Tommy Robinson exists. Because the politico-media complex sees the latest child sacrifice on the altar of diversity, and decides that nonetheless it cannot be permitted to disturb the narrative.
From Gavin Mortimer's column under the Speccie's woeful header:
France's Interior Minister, Bruno Retailleau, expressed his horror at the death of Elias, and reiterated his determination to make France 'a country where parents no longer have to fear seeing their child murdered for nothing'. He added that it 'will be a long and difficult road' and will require an end to the culture of excuses which 'has plunged some of our young people into a deep sense of impunity'.
And here's the kicker:
Some on the left accuse Retailleau of hyperbole, of playing the game of the 'far right'.
Really? All that agonising about "long and difficult roads" and "cultures of excuses" sounds like just the usual evasive pansy talk to me. To return to that original Spectator headline:
How many more knife attacks can France take?
If you bet, as I do, that having been conditioned to accept 120 knife attacks per day the citizenry will raise no great objection to 150 or 200 per day, the question then arises: what next? As longtime readers know, for me demography explains most things: in Afghanistan the side whose families have five sons thinks about war differently from the side whose families have one son. That is one reason I would like to know more about the stabbed children of France than the code of media omertà will permit: was the stabbed kid what we used to call an "only child"? Born to a thirty-nine-year-old mum, who raised him with tender loving care until the age of twelve, when he went off to footie practice and never came home?
And will that make more French couples decide that, in such a world, M Macron and so many others in the European leadership class have the right idea and it's best to forego the whole child-rearing thing entirely? Or will they develop the same fatality about dead moppets as parents had before the west conquered infant mortality?
Mandatory As-I-said-twenty-years-ago moment, from my boffo demographic bestseller America Alone (2006):
Why is the world we live in the way it is? Why is this book written in the language of a tiny island off the coast of northern Europe? Why is English the language of global business, of the Internet, of the paramount power of the age and of dozens of other countries from Belize to Botswana, Nigeria to Nauru? Why does Canada share its queen with Papua New Guinea? Why does a quarter of the world's population belong to the British Commonwealth and enjoy to one degree or another English Common Law and Westminster parliamentary traditions?
Because in the early 19th century the first nation to conquer infant mortality was England. Hitherto, the British Isles had been like the rest of the world: you had a big bunch of kids and a lot of them died before they could be of economic benefit to you or society. But by 1820 medical progress and improvements in basic hygiene had so transformed British life that half the population was under the age of 15. In sheer numbers, the country was still a pipsqueak cluster of North Atlantic islands with 28 million people compared to China's 320 million. But it was the underlying demographic trend that proved decisive in the century ahead. Britain had the surplus manpower not just to settle Canada, Australia and New Zealand but to provide the administrative and business class in the West Indies, Africa, India and the Pacific. And, fortunately for the world, this demographic transformation occurred in a culture that even then had a long established system of law, property rights and personal freedom.
By the way, that country where "half the population was under the age of 15"? The UK median age is now 40.7. In France it's 42.3. And they're accustomising the people to their kids not making it through high school...
For a nation to give a massive Gallic shrug and normalise child-stabbing is not a small thing. For all his sob-sister sappiness about "a country where parents no longer have to fear seeing their child murdered for nothing", M Retailleau is happy to preside over a new French terror.
EXIT QUESTION: Another nine persons were stabbed at a football match on Sunday. Is that counted as nine "knife attacks"? Or just the one?
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