We may be witnessing the beginning of the end of Europe.

It's October 18, 2026, as I write; who knows what more will have happened in European cities by the time you read this? Since yesterday, rioters have burned down much of the 143-year-old town hall in Limoges, France. In Milan, masked mobs have looted stores, set fires, and battled police in the square outside the magnificent Duomo cathedral.

It's like watching your cousins' house burn while the arsonists laugh and your cousins argue over whether to call the firefighters.

In Paris, cars burn and shops are ransacked. In some of the most chaotic footage, badly outnumbered police appear to be in retreat, their vehicles speeding through smoke-filled streets as masked rioters chase them and hurl objects at the cars.

Even Joan of Arc wasn't spared. In Paris, masked demonstrators climbed the statue of France's patron saint and plastered it with political stickers. In Toulouse, rioters draped another statue of Joan in a yellow vest and hung a Palestinian flag from it.

Nearly 2,400 people were arrested across France. Historic buildings have been torched, businesses looted, and hundreds of police officers injured. The authorities themselves have acknowledged that radical far-left groups and criminals are exploiting the unrest.

'C'est pas la cause!'

And what does the mainstream media call this spectacle? A "protest against the rising cost of living," or a show of frustration with educational inequality. The Guardian explains that the movement began with complaints about teacher shortages and deteriorating schools before expanding into nationwide demonstrations against inequality and falling living standards.

Perhaps that's how the protests began. But what does a shortage of teachers have to do with burning down a 19th-century town hall? How does smashing the windows of a luxury boutique improve conditions in a classroom?

Take a look at the footage of looters helping themselves to luxury goods. Whatever grievances brought people into the streets, there is nothing remotely political or principled about this. It's theft, vandalism, and destruction, committed by people who apparently believe that anything they can seize or smash is theirs for the taking.

One particularly miserable video from Paris shows a woman desperately trying to stop a group of looters from destroying a shop. "C'est pas la cause!" she cries repeatedly — roughly, "That's not what this cause is about!" The men ignore her, laughing as they continue ransacking the place. She seems genuinely bewildered that anyone claiming to protest injustice would behave this way.

Against civilization

The rioters aren't merely destroying property. They're attacking the physical inheritance of a civilization. In Limoges, the town hall survived two world wars before a mob set it ablaze. In Paris, monuments and public spaces that have belonged to generations of French citizens become stages for intimidation and disorder.

And France is hardly alone. This weekend, violent clashes have also erupted in Belgium and Italy, while student riots in Albania earlier in the week left government buildings in flames. The grievances vary, but the scenes have become disturbingly familiar: burning barricades, ransacked businesses, and police struggling to contain mobs that seem to regard every public grievance as an invitation to destruction.

As in the Black Lives Matter riots in America in 2020, "protest" has become an all-purpose excuse for criminality. We are expected to regard the wreckage as an unfortunate side effect of people demanding justice, rather than evidence of a society losing its ability to enforce the most basic rules of civilized life.

And what of Europe's leaders? French President Emmanuel Macron has condemned the rioters, promised arrests and punishment, and authorized additional security measures. Fine. But why were mobs able to overwhelm police, loot businesses, and burn public buildings in the first place? How is it possible that a historic town hall, with people still inside, could be invaded and deliberately set on fire?

Diversity's downside

The media does not like to mention this, but it's obvious to anyone with eyes: Watch these videos and you'll see crowds made up predominantly of young men who appear to be of sub-Saharan African, North African, or Middle Eastern descent. Which raises another question: To what extent is this failure of public order the result of years of unchecked mass immigration from third-world Muslim countries?

France's leaders have spent decades celebrating diversity and invoking the supposedly universal values of the French Republic. Macron has likened French culture to a river fed by many tributaries. But a river can only absorb so much before it changes course. French soil has no magical properties that automatically instill centuries of traditions and values in anyone who sets foot on it.

And the numbers are hardly trivial. France had 9.3 million foreign-born residents in 2024, up 21% from a decade earlier. A French Senate investigation this July identified nearly €2 billion (about $2.2 billion) in asylum-related spending last year, without counting certain health, education, and welfare expenses. The same report complained that failed asylum-seekers frequently remain in the country despite orders to leave. This is an enormous undertaking for a state already struggling to provide the services its citizens expect.

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'New' France

And why is it that so many of those who are supposed to be assimilating into French society seem instead to be embracing the politics of the global far left, with its loyalties and grievances extending far beyond France?

Jean-Luc Mélenchon's radical-left France Unbowed party has discovered a powerful constituency in the immigrant-heavy suburbs. In the 2024 European elections, the party made the Palestinian cause a centerpiece of its campaign, and 62% of Muslim voters backed its list. Mélenchon celebrated the emergence of what he called a "new France". But what holds this new France together? What shared loyalties, traditions, or obligations bind it to the old one? Those questions deserve more than another sermon about the virtues of diversity.

Time will tell, but it looks increasingly as though Europe's political leadership has lost the will to defend what it governs. Most of us have watched an elderly relative lose the will to live. When that happens, the person usually dies in short order. Something similar seems to have overtaken Europe's governing class.

Maybe it's too early to deliver a eulogy. But what is "too soon" today may be too late tomorrow.

Death in the family

How else but with rage and grief is one supposed to react to watching the world he knew being destroyed?

Europe and the United Kingdom are, in a sense, part of an American's patrimony and of any Westerner's. America is a descendant, now a cousin, of England. France lent us help in the American Revolution. Enlightenment ideas that built the modern West flowed between us.

To see the destruction in Europe is not like watching a distant star go supernova. It's like watching your cousins' house burn while the arsonists laugh and your cousins argue over whether to call the firefighters.

Are we witnessing the end of what the 20th century left us? That was an era in which we at least tried to preserve the best of our physical and political heritage, building on top of it as times progressed. We understood that civilization required active stewardship. Borders needed policing, laws needed enforcing, and the inheritance of previous generations needed protecting.

Now the police are struggling to hold the streets, and the guardians of Europe's cultural treasures appear powerless to stop their destruction.

I'm from the 20th century. No one in my cohort or above could ever have imagined we would live to see such times. We were foolish to believe that our first-world West would tick along without active stewardship, and now we're experiencing the sorrow of our folly.

Think of the final scene in the original "Planet of the Apes." Charlton Heston's character, believing himself stranded on an alien planet, comes upon the ruins of the Statue of Liberty, half-buried in the sand. He realizes he has been on Earth all along. Everything that made it home has been destroyed — by his own people.

"We finally really did it," he says, before collapsing to his knees and cursing those responsible.

Watching Europe today feels like living through that scene. Except this isn't a movie. And it's terrible.