THE FRENCH DISEASE

On August 3, 1492, Christopher Columbus departed the Spanish port of Palos at the mouth of the Rio Tinto.  After discovering islands he named San Salvador (in the Bahamas), Juana (Cuba), and Hispaniola on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, he returned from his epochal voyage, reaching Palos on March 15, 1493.  According to the journal of Spanish physician Ruy Diaz de l’Isla, the pilot of Columbus’s ship had contracted a previously unknown disease marked by severe fever and frightful skin eruptions.

The pilot wasn’t the only one.  By the time Columbus reached Barcelona, several of his sailors had come down with this strange new disease and were treated by the mystified Dr. de l’Isla.  Unbeknownst to them, the sailors had acquired the disease through cohabitation with infected native "Indian" women on the discovered islands.[1]

A number of these sailors were from Naples, and upon their return, the infection spread throughout the city.  Naples was the capital of the Kingdom of Naples which controlled the entire southern half of Italy.  When the young King of France, Charles VIII (1470-1498) decided to conquer it, entering Naples with a massive army in February of 1495, the infection was rampant.

As always, the first goal of a conquering soldier is as many liaisons as possible with the local women.  This time such liaisons proved lethal.  The new disease devastated Charles’s army, which suffered a disastrous defeat at Fornovo in July.  As the French army retreated across western Europe, the disease spread in its wake.

Europe had finally begun to recover from the Black Death of the bubonic plague in the middle 1300’s, which had killed fully half of all Europeans.  Once again, Europe was ravaged by a plague now known as morbus gallicus, the French Disease.  It would kill one third of the entire population of Europe.

In 1521, Girolamo Francastoro, an Italian poet, wrote a poem about the disease, which he named after a shepherd in Greek mythology who refused to worship Apollo and was infected by the vengeful god with ulcerous sores all over his body.  The name of the shepherd was Syphilis.

Today we are witnessing the effects of another French Disease on the streets of Paris and on the campuses of dozens of universities throughout France.  The social disease of the French Anti-Capitalist Welfare State has obviously caused severe brain damage among French students.

France’s archaic anti-capitalist labor laws make it excruciatingly difficult for an employer to fire an employee.  The obvious result is massive unemployment.  Especially among kids in their 20s, who have an average unemployment rate of 23% in France as a whole, but it’s over 50% in many areas.

So naturally, when French Prime Minister Dominque de Villepin authorizes a new law that allows an employer to fire an employee under 26 years old, French students erupted in protest.  Tens of thousands of them are demonstrating daily in Paris, hundreds of thousands throughout the country, they’ve shut down the Sorbonne along with 18 other universities, and their violence is escalating.

Further confirmation that anti-capitalism causes brain rot.

If they didn’t suffer from anti-capitalist brain rot, they would clearly grasp that if you can’t be fired, you’re not going to be hired.  They would celebrate the new law as an opportunity, not denounce it as "slavery." 

Once this law goes into effect, there will be an explosion of jobs suddenly offered to kids under 26.  If they’re smart, they’ll see their new job as a chance to prove their value to their employer, and become too valuable for him to fire (or want to lose to a competitor). 

Most likely they’ll stay socialist-stupid, resent their slave-job, despise their bourgeois tyrant-boss, and get their butts kicked back out on the street.  Then they can go back to chatting in cafés and arrogantly begging the government for handouts.

It’s become a commonplace observation that a majority of French have a gloomy outlook on their country’s future (83% in a recent poll).  French President Jacques Chirac has publicly complained about "a culture of pessimism" in his country. 

Such pessimism is an inevitable symptom of the French Disease of Anti-Capitalism.

This  is most dramatically shown by research released today (Thursday 3/23) by the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes.  Polls were conducted in 20 countries around the world asking people if they agreed or disagreed with this question:

The free enterprise system and free market economy is the best system on which to base the future of the world.

In the US, 71% said yes.  In India, 70%.  Germany, 65%.  Kenya, 59%.  The highest yes vote was China at 74% (take that, Mao!).  Of all 20 countries, in only one did a majority of people say no, with only 36% saying yes, the lowest yes score of all:  France.

Until the French see the causal connection between their pessimism and anti-capitalism, they don’t stand a wisp of a chance in competing in the global economy with China, India, and yes, the United States.  The truth of my friend Ralph Peters’ comment on France will become ever more stark.

"I love France," he tells me.  "It’s one of my favorite museums."

Then again, we shouldn’t be smug and complacent.  After all, America has large numbers of people suffering from the French Disease of Anti-Capitalism.  They’re called Democrats.

[1] .  Liberals have desperately searched in vain for evidence of syphilis in Europe before Columbus so as to disprove its American Indian origin.  Smallpox wiping out many American aboriginal tribes has always been for liberals the ultimate malevolent evidence of evil White Man.  Conclusive research shows however that syphilis is a New World mutation of yaws, existing among American aboriginals for many centuries before Columbus.  An American Indian disease wiped out a third of Europe, to the great embarrassment of liberals.  See Origins of Syphilis.