By Louis van Wyk
The civil unrest that broke out in Nanterre, France on June 27, 2023 should serve as a warning to Western civilization at large of what may be coming. The riots broke out after a police officer shot dead the 17-year-old teenager, Nahel Merzouk, in his car.
It’s an incident that is being investigated and therefore I will not judge who was right or wrong from a legal point of view until a court ruling is made. It would be ridiculous if I (like most social media users) made such a decision based on hearsay and a small piece of footage. However, I am fully prepared to express my opinion sharply and without hesitation regarding the West’s core problem.
The extremity and violence of the riots suggest that it extends beyond the death of the teenager. It’s an attack on the French government and the wider society as a whole, which suggests that reconciliation and civilized coexistence between French civilization and the communities that came into existence mainly through immigration has completely failed.
But France and the West’s political and social problems are not so much external as they are internal. Western civilization’s right to exist is threatened by a broad macro-feeling and mentality of guilt, mostly over the West’s history that includes oppression and slavery. And a feeling of guilt’s greatest danger is that it can be exploited by your opponent. The first step is that you acknowledge your guilt and the second is that you must realize that acknowledgment is not enough, you must now offer compensation.
Europe’s sense of guilt has already spilled over into compensation when it opened its borders to millions of immigrants in particular in 2015. The so-called “compensation” by the West did not stop there. In the New York Post-article dated February 13, 2021, writes Ayaan Hirsi Ali: “In Europe, the multicultural approach has often meant turning a blind eye to human rights abuses such as female genital mutilation and child marriage. After all, why risk offending?”.
This exaggerated political correctness is then applied in parallel with the extremely dangerous liberalism of the 21st century. It is important to focus on this specific liberalism and not to use the term only left and right as a beating stick. The extreme liberalism that the West is dealing with here is mainly based on the idea that cultural groups, communities and peoples that share common elements and characteristics such as language, faith and traditions are old-fashioned and that society really only consists of individuals and people who are universally the same.
And thus the West, for example, began to give up its national Christian identity, something that had been one of its strongest pillars for a millennium. If Western civilization wants to survive, it will have to make the following move: That what is Western must be cherished and protected. You can tear down and give up your identity under the pressure of guilt and political correctness, but don’t think for one moment that the leaders leading the riots in France will be willing to do the same.
