France is convulsed by a horror that cuts to the bone. Lyhanna, 11 years old, was found murdered in a forest near Paris, her body bearing the marks of a savage assault. The nation is not merely shocked but winded, as if struck in the gut. And now the predictable chorus rises: the government must crack down. But crack down on what? On whom? The answer, as ever, lies in the rotting core of a society that has lost its moral compass.
Let us not mince words. The suspect, a 23-year-old Algerian national with a history of psychiatric issues and a pending deportation order, was known to the authorities. He had been expelled from Germany and was awaiting removal from France. Yet he was free to wander, free to kill. This is not a failure of policing but a systemic collapse. The French state, in its bureaucratic paralysis, chose the illusion of human rights over the safety of its citizens. The result is a child's corpse.
We have seen this before. The fall of Rome was not a sudden cataclysm but a slow decay of institutions, a loss of nerve among the elite. The same pattern recurs in modern Europe. Our leaders, steeped in a decadent intellectualism that worships abstract ideals over concrete realities, have forgotten the first duty of the state: to protect the innocent. They speak of multiculturalism, of integration, of compassion for the marginalized. But compassion without discrimination is a suicide pact.
Lyhanna's murder is not an isolated incident. It is the logical endpoint of a culture that has abandoned the distinction between citizen and foreigner, between lawful and lawless. The French Republic once understood this. It expelled vagabonds, disciplined the unruly, and defended its children with the full force of the law. Now it hesitates, caught in a web of legal niceties and postcolonial guilt. The result is a society where predators walk among us, and children pay the price.
The calls for a crackdown are naive. A crackdown implies a temporary measure, a burst of energy that will fade once the cameras leave. What is needed is a wholesale reimagining of the social contract. That means borders that are not merely lines on a map but shields. It means a legal system that punishes not with slaps on the wrist but with iron resolve. It means a culture that dares to name evil when it sees it, without the qualifiers of 'the suspect suffered from mental illness' or 'the community feels targeted.'
But such a transformation requires a courage that our elites lack. They are children of the enlightenment, forever believing that reason and dialogue can tame the beast. Yet the beast is not reasoning; it is hungry. And it will feast on our children while we debate the proper terminology.
Lyhanna's death is a mirror. In it, we see not a single monster but a system that enabled him. The question is whether France will look away, as it has done so many times before, or whether it will finally shatter the glass. I suspect the former. After all, the fall of Rome took centuries. We have only just begun our decline.
