THE LEGION OF SLOWLY BOILING FROGS

by Daniel Barge

France has pulled out the stops to honour Lieutenant Colonel Arnaud Beltrame for his heroism in exchanging his own life for that of a hostage in the latest terrorist incident in France. Here's the Independent:

"Tributes have been paid across France to the police officer who sacrificed himself to save a hostage during an Islamist attack on a supermarket. Lieutenant Colonel Arnaud Beltrame 'symbolised the French spirit of resistance,' said the country’s president Emmanuel Macron as he delivered his eulogy at Invalides military museum in Paris. As rain poured down on the French capital, the officer’s coffin had earlier wound its way through the city’s streets from the Pantheon – a secular mausoleum for French heroes. Hundreds lined the streets despite the weather."

Notice anything, yet? Yes, only "hundreds" lined the street.

Rather than expressing a vast outpouring of national grief and the firm resolution to ensure that Beltram's death was not in vain, it seems that this funeral, with all its Napoleonic pageantry, is mainly being done for the TV cameras, in order to provide something uplifting and reassuring to a barely engaged TV audience, keen to move past this unpleasant blip in the news cycle, and return to whatever it is that slowly boiling frogs do to kill the time until they are well and truly cooked.

Beltrame is also getting the Legion d’Honneur, France’s highest medal.

"To accept to die so the innocent can live: that is the essence of what it means to be a soldier," Macron eulogised. "Others, even many who are brave, would have wavered or hesitated."

Elsewhere in the speech I heard Macron saying something about Beltrame's name being remembered forever, while that of the terrorist who killed him is "already forgotten." Judging history this fast is never wise.

The point of all these funeral theatrics is to supposedly unite all citizens of France around an heroic act, and for the terrorists to be shamed into disappearing.

Really? Has anyone run this concept through a computer?

Beltrame

I hate to be blunt so soon after a sombre funeral for a brave man, but there is a real possibility that Beltrame's Legion d’Honneur medal could be posthumously stripped from him and instead awarded to his killer, who, according to some people, also died a heroic death, and, indeed, a much less passive one.

But how could such a thing be possible? The D-word, Demographics. Here read this:

Within 40 years, given current demographic trends, the white population in France and the rest of old Europe will recede, creating a Muslim majority, a French researcher says. Charles Gave, an economist, fund manager and political commentator, published his conclusions this month on the webpage of his think tank, Institute des Libertes. He writes of the “disappearance of the European populations” as native populations shrink and Muslims continue to exhibit a robust fertility rate...

The paper, titled “The White Plague,” is dangerous, Mr. Gave said, “for my personal respectability and my chance to be heard in our beautiful democracy.”

The financier draws his conclusion from demographics. He assesses France’s white, or native, birthrate at 1.4 children per woman, compared with a Muslim rate of 3.4 to 4 children. France’s population today is 67 million. Unlike the U.S., France does not conduct a census on ethnic origin, but based on outside polling, some researchers, including Mr. Gave, believe the French population is already 10 percent Muslim, with 6.7 million people. France’s official birthrate is 1.9 per woman, but Mr. Gave’s calculations put the native rate at 1.4. Overall, the European birthrate is a low 1.6 per woman.

Mr. Gave extrapolates those numbers, a declining white population and a growing Muslim population, and concludes that France will have a Muslim majority by 2057.

More disturbingly, Gave's calculations are only based on disparate birth rates, and don't even take account of renewed waves of migrants from the Third World in the coming decades.

So, when France becomes majority Muslim in 39 years or less, how will Lieutenant Colonel Arnaud Beltrame's heroic act of self sacrifice be viewed? The chances are it will simply be forgotten as irrelevant. But, if it is remembered at all, you can be sure that French Muslims will view it very differently from the narrative currently being promoted.

Inevitably they will feel much more sympathy for Beltrame's killer than for Beltrame himself. By then the French policeman will be viewed as having stood on the "wrong side of history;" and nothing would make this point clearer than re-awarding his medal to his killer. In fact, why wouldn't they do this as a means of legitimising the demographic and cultural shift in the nation? Beltrame's grave, now so honoured, could also suffer in this affirmation of the New Order.

If the people change, so do the heroes. That is unavoidable. The greatest curse that modernity has inflicted on us, then, is that it robs our heroes of meaning and makes cowardice seem common sense.