The riots in France are not surprising. France has seen civil unrest every few years since the Revolution — some eighty national riots over roughly 240 years. But their postcolonial, anti-Israeli and seemingly intergenerational character signals something new: France is trapped in a strange war between conservative-secularism which has no real nationalistic depth to speak of and Islamic progressivism.
If France was once locked in a struggle between royalist conservatism and democratic liberalism, or between one kind of imperialism and another, after Algeria it finds itself somewhere else entirely.
Progressivism and Islam are working together to externally socialize France while internally preparing it for Islam, while conservatism seeks to go on secularizing it moderately as it has done for the last 100 years — even as it knows it is in a crisis of values and cannot provide content that can transcend empty slogans of culture and identity.
For the idea of the race has died with Hitler as much as the idea of the European nation died once it was fully disconnected from race, and as much as the idea of the Church-state died with the Revolution.
For conservatives, without race, church, or nation, all which remains is a dying, technocratic culture of symbols and identity that are merely contrarian to the thrust of Islam and the confident march of progressivism.
As Barak Hess puts it, the thirst for new values is visible precisely within progressivism. The Marxist structure demands and is open to new classes. Having emptied and narrowed European content into futile race-wars and socialized policies via secularized idealism of class and power (1917-1945) and intellectual nihilism discourse (1946-and ongoing) the believers and enablers of socialism or post colonialism (I.e racialized brown statism/socialism) must now pour new blood, into a political mold to ensure societal progression and continue this trans-civilizational thrust.
Islam offers in that a real possibility, even if part of the price is Zionism. (Interesting to note that in that respect, the Jews are siding with the conservative forces that are void conceptually - not only demographically.)
Philosophically one can see in Islam the perfect mix of a universal and particular, a nation, but a transcendent universal belief system, a minority, but a large collective, a force being oppressed, but with a constant bubbling of a need to be redeemed, a secured electorate of the left, but a class that demands its consciousness be known, and by that they can be formed into any socialist dialectic (national/universal) and act from every tactical position at any given moment of reading the historical process. And their presence as a political actor is thus extremely elegant and dynamic.
Moreover, Marxism and socialism can always create new iterations, conservatives, due to their anti-dialectic, non-eschatological, and binary Aristotelian maxims, are willing to relinquish and reduce their own ideological projects, and find themselves minimizing the scope of claim about a true essence of nation, race, religion, that exists beyond symbolic heritage, culture, identity, or representation. In that sense, one can actually say that right-wing intellectuals take left-wing intellectuals more seriously than left-wing intellectuals.
In other words the capacity to be a true believer in the concepts of the right, is harder if you continue the tradition of rational enlightenment, then when continuing the tradition of Platonic dialectics from the left. (Islam/Hegel/Marx). Moreover, with the great nihilistic tradition of structuralism and post-structuralism, which enables a new form of idealism in the form of cultural relativism and postcolonialism, enable a reunion where Islam and Marx meet again once the old guard of ideas are already dead and acknowledged to be so by the conservatives and moderates themselves.
And so while conservatives are willing to concede that some of their concepts are not whole, and can be penetrated by pernicious actors (Royalists, Nazis, Fascists), and thus move "left", into economic and philosophical compromises with and within liberalism and socialism, all that the Platonic dialecticians and their Islamic proletarian need to do, is redefine a narrative within a partition of a new or different struggle (good race , not even capital), and produce new populations to enact them. Thus, they look at past reenactments of class or race (1917- and on) as nothing more than instances which can be used to reframe history as a continually realized struggle moving from one level of understanding to another, in which ideas and struggles were developing , only to reach realization in the serving of a new global southern class, now coming to life in the European continent. After the right already buried European race, royalty or nation.
Thus they become the left become the new royalists of a sacred mob, after the old ideas stemming from blood, nation, and royalism died. In fact Whiteness, Christianity, themselves become the necessary sacrificial atonement of the new world not only through identity positioning by the left, but also intellectually as it is admitted by the conservative right at this stage.
Meanwhile the progressives and their allies can also call themselves liberal and even claim this glorious tradition from the so-called conservative. (Especially giving the radical nature of French liberalism compared to the conservative English liberal tradition)
The point is that the French content is currently dear to only one side, and that side cannot actually ascribe deep meaning to it beyond representation and identity, and thus has reached the end of its ideological road as an independent force.
The socialists and Islamists, comprising about a third of France, but holding another third of the center by different organs (tactically) have no interest in European civilization; they emptied that civilization earlier with two socialist regimes which dehumanized millions, brought it to a premature end by ending imperialism, and therefore must see the future in a slave revolt that will finally uproot and end what the Paris Commune started, despite that very final act of this slave revolt will be using methods and language that were used to start the beginning of this over 150 years ago in Paris itself.
The truth is that ideologically the idea of the nation within conservative secularism — is itself enslaved.
All it holds is form, whose content is trapped between the shock of Nazism on one side, an aversion towards royalism on the other side, absolute fear of racism in between, and a defensive crouch against (justified) liberal critique.
Even without immigrants, the conservative project would struggle to justify its fossilized soul in a technological age. And the stagnation is magnified by a European system that is anyway suffocating bureaucratically and economically any real innovation.
Conservatism, then, continues in its servitude to the Left and to Islam, which long ago became the masters of values — in a process of inevitable collapse.
One may reasonably argue that the 18th century French fantasies of Noble savages and General Will, have come to life with the help of 19th century German philosophers, 20th century Russian Political thinkers, and 21st century African peoples.
One can only guess how that European collapse would have unfolded without Muslim immigration, though its foundations were already visible in 1917 and 1933, even if they only came to light in France during World War II, and following the war of Algeria, and are now burning in the streets of Paris.
