Charles Krauthammer has an article in Time Magazine about the recent protests in France.
And now, in a new act of revolutionary creativity, the French are at it again. Millions of young people and trade unionists, joined by some underclass opportunists looking for a good night out, have taken to the streets again. To rise up against what? In massive protest against a law that would allow employers to fire an employee less than 26 years old in the first two years of his contract.
. . .
That is something very new. And it is not just a long way from the ideals of 1789. It is the very antithesis. It represents an escape from freedom, a demand for an arbitrary powerful state in whose bosom you can settle for life.
Nor are the current riots about equality. On the contrary. Their effect would be to enforce inequality. The unemployment rate in France is 10%. For young people under 26 it is 23%, and almost 1 in 10 kids who leave high school don't have a job five years after taking the baccalaureate. Much of that unemployment encompasses those of the alienated immigrant underclass, who are less educated, less acculturated and less likely ever to be hired than the mostly native student rioters. And these young rioters want to keep things just that way–to rely not just on their advantages of class, education and ethnicity but also on an absolute guarantee from the state that their very first job will be for life, with no one to challenge them for it.
Ironically, the better imitation of the spirit of 1789 came from precisely those immigrant challengers kept locked away in France's satellite suburbs. It is those poor ambitious huddled masses who late last year lit up the country for three weeks with nights of burning cars. Those underclass riots were politically inchoate, but they did represent the fury of people desperate to escape the marginality imposed on them by their ethnicity and the rigidity of the French bureaucratic state. Those immigrant riots, which had an equal touch of the existential anarchy of the student revolution of 1968, were, if anything, a revolt for precariousness–for risk, danger, upheaval.
Mr. Krauthammer is only partially accurate in his assessment of the situation in France. He is correct that France has major problems right now, but he is incorrect in his belief that the current revolution is different from France's great revolutions of the past. His confusion in this article is based on the fact that he imputes his familiarity with the American Revolution on the French Revolution. However, in reality, these were two very different revolutions. The American Revolution was a search for freedom that was based on respect for God as the source of human dignity and human rights. This is why the Declaration of Independence says, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." The Declaration also affirmed "a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence . . . ." The American Revolution was for the most part a humble revolution that was rooted in respect for God as the source of human dignity.
The search for freedom in the French Revolution involved embracing a secular, naturalistic, scientific, rationalistic, and humanistic outlook on reality. It involved a hostile and bitter rejection of any supernatural forces as unenlightened myths of the past. Freedom for Europe involved removing every influential vestige of religion from society. Religion, at best, would be a private affair that would not influence one's outlook on life in general and certainly not on politics. According to the Library of Universal History, after the French Revolution of 1793, the National Convention eliminated the "Christian era" as the calendar and replaced it with the birthday of the French Republic, which was September 22, 1792. The National Convention abolished the Sabbath in order to dethrone both God and earthly kings. The National Convention abolished the Christian religion in France and substituted it with the worship of reason. A young and beautiful prostitute was placed in the Cathedral of Notre Dame to symbolize the Goddess of Reason, and she was worshipped by the people that made up the National Convention and the Paris Commune.
The wake of the American Revolution and the French Revolution are still felt today. According to the European Values Study, which polls the attitudes of people in 32 European countries, only 21% of Europeans say that religion is important to them. A survey by the Pew Forum revealed that 59% of Americans say their faith is very important to them. According to a Gallup Poll, 44% of Americans attend a place of worship weekly, but only 15% of Europeans do.
The recent French uprising was completely in the spirit of the French Revolution. Since the French eliminated any role for God in society, they had to replace the spiritual salvation of the past with a humanistic conception of salvation. If salvation could not come from God, salvation must come from the state. Therefore, the French have attempted to construct their own personal utopia or heaven on earth through the French state in their effort to create a society without God. The state guarantees the people of France their five week vacations, their jobs for life without the possibility of layoff, their government funded health care, and their generous government funded retirement benefits. The French have placed their faith in an extremely intricate bureaucratic state that is their source of meaning, security, and salvation.
There is a problem with putting one's faith in the state. Jesus revealed this to us in Matthew when he said, "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." (6:19-21) Jesus said that it was dangerous to put our faith in the things of this world because there is only one true source of security, which is God. Putting your faith in anything but God will produce only insecurity. This is the problem that the French are facing. The French have placed their faith in a dream far more irrational and outlandish than that of a supernatural being. Since the French depend on the state for their salvation, they blind themselves to reality. They cannot admit that their state is failing because that would be a blasphemous denial of their source of meaning and salvation. Therefore, the French will not acknowledge the purely scientific fact that their Goddess of Reason is breaking apart at the seems and their salvation was nothing but a facade.
Even though this system that they have established is unsustainable, they will riot against even the most incremental changes, which might take away their source of salvation. The French have taught us that in reality it is not the religious people of this world that are irrational and blind to reality. It is the arrogant atheist who thinks that s/he does not need God, which is blind to the facts of this world. The situation in France is dangerous because the French are about to see their source of meaning and salvation collapse before their very eyes, and when that happens, someone will have to pay for the death of the French god. The result will be bloody violence in France unlike Europe has seen since WW II.
There were two revolutions that occurred centuries ago. One saw religion as the source of freedom. One saw hostility toward religion as the source of freedom. We now today get to see a scientific experiment occur before our very eyes that will test the fruitfulness of these two revolutions. On the American side, despite its flaws, it remains the most innovative, prosperous, stable, free, and strong nation on the planet. On the European side, one sees nothing but dying nations that cannot repopulate themselves, cannot fund their government created utopias, cannot maintain stability within their nations, cannot grow economically, cannot defend themselves militarily, and cannot prevent themselves from being taken over by Islamic forces before long through either internal population growth or external military aggression. It is important to recognize the existence of these two competing revolutions because some in America want to take the United States in the direction of the French Revolution. These people use revisionist history in order to make the American Revolution appear more like the French Revolution. This is why it is necessary to document Europe's decline because doing so may be the best hope of ensuring that these loyalists to the French Revolution in the United States are firmly discredited. Choose your revolution!
(Posted by Trask)
