"They tried to force some of our Christians to convert to Islam. They also tried to force my wife and our four children to convert to Islam, but when they refused to convert, they shot my wife in the head while our four children were cut into pieces with a Somali sword. — Morningstar News, Democratic Republic of Congo.

"Islamic militants turned a village soccer field in northern Mozambique into an execution ground when they beheaded more than 50 people during three days of savage violence.... More than 2,000 people have been killed and about 430,000 left homeless in the region since 2017." — Barnabas Aid, Mozambique.

For two months after kidnapping a deaf and mute Christian teenage girl her, five Muslim men repeatedly gang-raped and tortured her. All this time, police ignored the parents' pleas to intervene. It was only when a local authority took up the case, and only after months of court meetings, that the girl was located and returned to her parents. One of the kidnappers insisted the girl had willingly converted to Islam and married him. — British Pakistani Christian Association, Pakistan.

One remembers lazy afternoons spent discussing the fate of mankind and providing answers to non-existent existential questions, and warm evenings visiting exhibitions of structuralist paintings with no structure, rounding up all that at sunrise with a generous bowl of onion soup in the fruit and vegetable market in Les Halles.

Having nowhere to go and nothing interesting to do, being in Paris these days feels like being in Moscow in the 1960s when the only excitement was provided by rumors about the arrival of new supplies of potatoes or a one-day availability of hot chocolate in Cafe Pushkin.

The roots of this unbelievable population control, something even Lenin could not dream of, may be found in the culture of dirgisme (overall control) that assumes the governments know best even when they admit they don't.