Following the long trend of attacks by Muslims upon French Jews, Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel has called for all French Jews to relocate to Israel, and has called for an alteration of his country’s immigration policies to permit the migration.

In response, PM Hollande of France has promised to defend Jewish property with the French army if necessary, and has opposed Netanyahu’s proposal, which would have the same impact as exile from France. It would affect the 500,000 Jews still living in France.

By comparison, there are roughly 4.1 million Muslims in the country, out of a total population of about 66 million, of which roughly 45 million are Catholic.

In this way, small networks of Islamic guerrillas operating across national borders will have achieved at least some of their strategic objectives. Netanyahu’s statement is also an embarrassment to the might of the French state, which has proven itself incapable of deterring spectacular attacks of this nature, and has, indeed, encouraged these attacks by encouraging Islamic migration to France in enormous numbers.

It is quite difficult, perhaps impossible to determine what the French government actually wants to achieve. As far as the administrators of the government are concerned, the more occasions that it has to spend more money on extravagances like military guards for delis and synagogues along with more welfare offices to tend to Islamic immigrants, the better for them.

The suffering caused to the people by misgovernment, on the other hand, is not something that Prime Ministers, taken as a class, seems to barely factor into the decisions that they make.

The irony here is that it would be the left who would be responsible for the exile of the Jews from France, and not the right. The right wing parties are often likened to the Nazis for their opposition to open immigration. Hollande may achieve what Hitler could not, largely because of their support for open immigration, which has made formerly tolerable living arrangements intolerable.

The other day, Michael Anissimov at More Right wrote about adaptive advantages to authoritarian government:

In a certain sense, democracies are like cattle; slow, pondering, systematic, gregarious, perpetually hungry, and with a short attention span. They are adaptive in circumstances where there is an all-powerful titanic nuclear hegemon (the United States) that subsidizes and protects their sheltered existence. In an unstable multipolar world, however (which is where we are headed), it is not necessarily the most adaptive social or governmental strategy.

We can see this in the way that Middle East “democracies” have the unfortunate habit of evolving into authoritarian states. Middle East states don’t have much of a choice of being a democracy or authoritarian state so much as they have a choice of being a secular authoritarian state or an Islamic authoritarian state. This is because authoritarianism is an adaptive solution for states in that part of the world with that particular geopolitical ecology.

As the ideological and cultural unity of the West fades away in favor of multiculturalism and relativism, the adaptive utility of authoritarian governments here is likely to rise. The question is, will this be something forced on us by abrupt, bloody events, or something we deliberately choose and engineer in advance? I prefer the latter over the former.

Democracies have short attention-spans in part because of electoral turnover. The other reason is that they are beholden to the shifting consensus of the electorate. As the electorate changes its composition and opinions continually, the character of the state must also change substantially with it.

When you add in substantial immigration, this further adds to the instability, shifting attention, and continually changing priorities of the democratic state. To further add to the difficulty, foreign states must change their diplomatic approaches as each democracy changes based on its changing electorate.

As we see with the United States’ role in foreign policy, this also encourages the dominant power to meddle frequently in elections, both directly and indirectly, managing public opinion and values even in countries that it has no formal sovereignty over, even despite international treaties forbidding the practice.

Rather than a system of stable states, with stable rulers, stable characters, and stable peoples, we have a jumble of states that are continually shifting in an unpredictable way.