A Frenchwoman makes a stand for her nation and gets torched by teens who have no qualms doing so. No one around her steps up. It's almost as if she had committed a horrendous crime and deserved the fire in her face. The question is how did we get to this point? Like America, France underwent a moral collapse in the 1950s or so as it reckoned with its colonial empire. Algiers ousted France. And this was on top of its WWII cowardice. Many of the French became addled with white guilt and sought to escape the colonialist, racist stigma by turning on their own nation. In 1961, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in his preface to Frantz Fanon's "The Wretched of the Earth" that "to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remain a dead man, and a free man." This Frenchman, whose writings I've read and admired here and there but not in this instance, told the world that violence against his own people was liberation. Today, a Frenchwoman's face is sprayed with fire, and no one comes to her rescue. Sartre's belief was not fringe. Generations French students, especially the elites, embraced it. France opened its borders out of penance, and its demands for assimilation never went far enough. After all, if a nation is permanently guilty for its racist past, then what moral authority does it have to demand anything of its young people? There was no demand for basic civility, the respect of teachers, and even the simple rule that you do not set your school on fire. But the absence of standards is not compassion or social justice -- it is the loss of standards. That is why we cannot see values of any kind on display as teenagers torch a Frenchwoman who dared to stand for her country. The teens act with impunity, knowing that the woke adults will explain away their violence. White guilt always promises redemption and always delivers the same result. The people of the West are left with the ashes.