Barbarians At The Gates Of The West

After his speeches before the Roman Senate, Cato the Elder became famous for repeatedly returning to one warning: Carthago delenda est — Carthage must be destroyed.

Cato witnessed the darkest days of the Second Punic War and saw how close the mighty Hannibal came to ending the Roman Republic. The statesman knew an enemy so hostile to Rome could not simply be managed forever.

It is worth keeping Cato in mind while Americans watch the inferno consuming one of Rome’s greatest heirs.

France has been in a state of utter chaos for more than a month, as repeated clashes between police and rioters cause untold destruction across the country. Most recently, Limoges’ city hall, a grand building that stood for nearly a century and a half and survived both World Wars, burned to the ground after rioters threw explosives into it.

Could any image of France and the West’s decline be clearer than this? It was not the Kaiser’s forces nor Adolf Hitler’s army who destroyed the symbol of Limoges’ greatness, but a destructive cadre of barbarians.

Like the Vandals who discovered Rome’s gates were no longer impregnable, a Red-Green alliance of the radical Left and Islamist fellow travelers who share little but a desire to see the West burn and have learned to exploit every fracture in the French state; an axis of communists and Islamists has taken advantage of the chaos to inflict maximal damage.

The mayor of Limoges accused organized far-left militants of preparing the assault on city hall in advance, describing rioters arriving with mortars and a battering ram. In case of any doubt as to the source of such destruction, its vanguard bore the dual symbols of modern barbarism: the black anarchist emblem flanked by Palestinian flags.

If a movement is judged by what it produces, these riots must be seen as an act of war on par with the destructive campaign waged by Rome’s ancestral enemy.

But Rome is gone, and France lies across an ocean. The flames of Limoges certainly cannot reach our shores. Why should Americans care about the destruction of France’s cultural patrimony?

Because we have seen a taste of this leftist imbroglio before. The riots following George Floyd’s death produced enormous destruction led by the very same Red-Green coalition currently burning France. Though the protests were ostensibly focused on nebulous terms of racial justice, it quickly became apparent the real target was the American order itself.

Across the country, statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were torn from their plinths by iconoclasts who wanted to erase American history. Democrats eagerly looked on, the flames reflected gleefully in their eyes as once great cities burned to the ground.

The modern West has spent decades indulging those hostile to its history and national identity. They paint Western civilization as an endless catalog of oppression and violence against the world’s have-nots.

Carried through Rome and inherited by her progeny across Europe and America, the West cannot survive if it responds tepidly to those who despise it with every fiber of their being.

Cato eventually convinced his senatorial colleagues that Rome existed in an existential dichotomy. It was either the Roman Republic or the Carthaginian hordes.

Civilizations eventually must recognize enemies seeking their destruction and summon the will to destroy them. The rioters in France now, as the 2020 rioters in America then, cannot be tolerated and must face the full force of the law.

Leftist leaders like Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Abdul El-Sayed cannot be permitted to seize power, and attempts by Islamists and socialist organizations to join the political project must be blocked at every turn.

The alternative is utter annihilation: the root and stem of the greatest civilizations on Earth torn from the ground.

Sinistra delenda est. The Left must be destroyed if the West is to survive.

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Blair is press manager at Heritage Action for America.