[Macron said] “When France was attacked five years ago, every nation in the world supported us.... So when I see, in that context, several newspapers which I believe are from countries that share our values — journalists who write in a country that is the heir to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution — when I see them legitimizing this violence, and saying that the heart of the problem is that France is racist and Islamophobic, then I say the founding principles have been lost.”
Smith proceeds to speculate that Macron is adjusting his message because he is likely to face "the far-right leader Marine Le Pen" in the next election, in 2022.
A skeptical Washington Post analysis from its Paris correspondent, James McAuley, “Instead of fighting systemic racism, France wants to ‘reform Islam,’” drew heated objections for its raised eyebrow at the idea that “instead of addressing the alienation of French Muslims,” the French government “aims to influence the practice of a 1,400-year-old faith.” The New York Times drew a contrast between Mr. Macron’s ideological response and the Austrian chancellor’s more “conciliatory” address after a terror attack, and noted that the isolated young men carrying out attacks don’t neatly fit into the government’s focus on extremist networks. In the Times opinion pages, an op-ed asked bluntly, “Is France Fueling Muslim Terrorism by Trying to Prevent It?”...
Mr. Macron argues... “There is a sort of misunderstanding about what the European model is, and the French model in particular... American society used to be segregationist before it moved to a multiculturalist model, which is essentially about coexistence of different ethnicities and religions next to one another.” “Our model is universalist, not multiculturalist,” he said, outlining France’s longstanding insistence that its citizens not be categorized by identity. “In our society, I don’t care whether someone is Black, yellow or white, whether they are Catholic or Muslim, a person is first and foremost a citizen.”...
[R]eactionary French commentators have gone further than Mr. Macron in attacking the U.S. media, drawing energy from the American culture wars. A flame-throwing article in the French magazine Marianne blasted U.S. coverage and then appeared in English in Tablet with an added American flourish denouncing “simplistic woke morality plays.”...
More detail on Macron's views in "The Macron Doctrine/A Conversation with the French President" (Groupe D'Etudes Géopolitiques) — video in French and transcript translated into English. Excerpt:
[W]e have rights : freedom of expression, of caricature, which has set so much ink flowing. Five years ago, when those who drew the caricatures were killed, the whole world marched in Paris and defended these rights. This year, a teacher’s throat was slit, other people’s throats were slit. Many condolences were discreet and we had, in a structured way, political and religious leaders from one part of the Muslim world – who intimidated the other side, I must say – saying, « They should just change their laws. » That shocks me, and as a leader, I do not want to shock anyone. I am for respect for cultures, for civilisations, but I am not going to change our laws because they shock elsewhere.
And it is precisely because hatred is forbidden under our European values and that the dignity of the human person prevails over all else, that I can shock you, because you can shock me in return. We can discuss it and argue because we will never come to blows, since that is prohibited and human dignity is paramount. And here we are accepting that leaders, religious leaders, should draw a line of equivalence between what shocks and a representation, and the death of a man and a terrorist act – they have done it – and that we should be intimidated enough not to dare to condemn that.
That says one thing to me. The combat of our generation in Europe will be a combat for our freedoms. Because they are being overturned. And so it will not be the reinvention of the Enlightenment, but we will have to defend the Enlightenment against obscurantism. That is for sure. And let’s not get stuck in the camp of those who disrespect differences. This is a false accusation and a manipulation of history. Respect is only possible if human dignity is paramount, but respect cannot be at the expense of the freedom of expression. Otherwise, it is not real respect, it is basically walking away from the discussion and the potential conflict in the discussion and the debate. That is what they want. Here, Europe has a responsibility. So I believe that the second fight to be fought is the fight for our values. That word seems generic, but it is the fight for Enlightenment....
Posts
84 comments:
He's not wrong.
"heir to the French Revolution"
If you're going to criticize widescale violence and terrorism, I'd leave that part out.
"The combat of our generation in Europe will be a combat for our freedoms."
Certainly not just in Europe. The battle to destroy freedom of speech is being fought in North America, and most institutions now have lists of correct viewpoints. If your opinion isn't approved, you don't have the right to express it.
Maybe with a Frenchman saying it, our media will finally decide the rejoin the Enlightenment world and stand up for human rights and liberties again. But if past is prologue, the French will suddenly fall out of favour.
It is all about messaging to the Leftist Collectivists.
They prefer lies to reality.
Civil strife sells clicks and viewers. Clicks and viewers drives advertising revenue. Don’t expect any company operating on that business model to be responsible to anyone but their masters the shareholders and the shareholders agents, the CEO and the CFO. They have no interest in the public getting along and having a nice discussion. That doesn’t drive revenue.
Once the camel nose snuck under the tent and got us all to use the ubiquitous "n word" to limit our freedom of speech, there is nothing that wont offend someone. Who decides?
He is about to taunt us a second time.
Yes, we stupid American pig-dogs.
When people are strikingly different, they congregate with their own, and (if there are enough) attempt to change the culture that welcomed them with good intentions. France is being overwhelmed, and the citizens will eventually rebel against the attempt to destroy their culture.
“Instead of fighting systemic racism, France wants to ‘reform Islam,’”
And what are American liberals trying to do to Christianity? I'd say they'd like to reform it.
Truth-seeking zingers are the answer.
"The combat of our generation in Europe will be a combat for our freedoms. Because they are being overturned. And so it will not be the reinvention of the Enlightenment, but we will have to defend the Enlightenment against obscurantism."
He is correct.
Furthermore, the 'analysis' from the Washington Post is wrong and destructive in it's incorrectness when they state: “...instead of addressing the alienation of French Muslims,” the French government “aims to influence the practice of a 1,400-year-old faith.”.
Muslims as a group, not all, but as a group seem to tend to resist assimilating into their new cultures. They not only resist assimilation, they look to do the opposite. They, as a group, are playing the long game. Looking instead to get the existing culture to submit to them. They are not changing, nor are they looking to change. They are looking for us- Western Civilization, to submit and change. In America, Muslims have assimilated to an extent, but also many many pockets where the Muslims simply run their own country within the country. Ever been to Dearborn, MI? Such was the case, ever briefly, in the early 1900s in New York, Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh and other great US cities, when groups of Irish, Greek, Italians, Germans, Norwegians, Catholics and Protestants among them, and Jews- came to America in droves, settled in their own communities, but worked hard to assimilate, learn the language and create a life for their future generations based on becoming "American". Not the Muslim community. Yes, there are individual cases and many of them who have assimilated. But as a group, they have a different goal.
And this applies in Europe. Maybe twofold over there. Muslims are pushing the Jewish community out of Europe. From France, Sweden, Belgium, and others. And they are working on pushing the 'French' out of France, the English out of England, the Swedish out of Sweden. To blame the French for the acts of Muslims who hate the French is preposterous. It is so emblematic of the thinking of the progressive left. They curiously think they will be immune to the hate directed at Western Civilization as long as they don't blame the attackers of it.
Bridge of Spies (2015) Tom Hanks as lawyer Donovan explaining to CIA guy Hoffman why he won't rat on his client. Hanks apparently didn't take the lines to heart but that's another matter. Lesson, Muslims can't be US citizens without Islam reform.
Hoffman: Don't go "Boy Scout" on me. We don't have a rule book, here.
Donovan: You're Agent Hoffman, yeah?
H: Yeah.
D: German extraction.
H: Yeah, so?
D: My name's Donovan. Irish. Both sides, mother and father. I'm Irish, you're German. But what makes us both Americans? Just one thing. One, one, one.
The rule book. We call it the Constitution, and we agree to the rules, and that's what makes us Americans. It's all that makes us Americans so don't tell me there's no rule book; and don't nod at me like that, you son of a bitch.
H: Do we need to worry about you?
D: Not if I'm left alone to do my job.
Hanks apparently didn't take the lines to heart...
OW. rhardin with the scathe..
French President Macron accuses American media — with its critique of systemic racism — of legitimizing terrorism.
Isn't that what most people have been saying on this site for years?
About 200 years ago, the ancestors of these north african terrorism
St were extorting shipping in the med, thats why there was ultimately an expedition in 1830,
Macron is young, but he is an old style elitist. He may support progressive policies, but he does so for the same reason the German Empire had Bismarckian "state socialism." He absolutely has not drunk the progressive kool-aid. Remember his comments about how Africa has a civilisational problem?
Macron is focusing on actual behavior and declaring it unacceptable in French society if people are to live together. The Washington Post is focusing on what they are pretending Islam is, because it would be better if that were true. The religion is 1400 years old? What the hell does that have to do with anything?
They are not in any way loyal to Islam, of course. They are loyal to anything that kicks Christians in the balls. And now kicking Jews again aw well. I am amazed I have lived unto a time where Hitler is still regarded as the Worst Human Ever, but mistreating Jews is becoming okay. Rather like what the Soviets believed.
French President Macron accuses American media — with its critique of systemic racism — of legitimizing terrorism.
And yet he praised it for stealing the election from President Trump.
Heir to the French Revolution? Seriously? Ours preceded theirs by a couple of decades.
2022 should be an interesting year.
Every now and then Macron says something true. That puts him ahead of most politicians.
If Macron would spend a year studying Burke and Bastiat he might actually turn into a worthy statesman.
Vive la France.
How hard is it to come out and say - "You cannot kill people because you are offended... by a cartoon" This is western free speech 101. (ah - but free speech is dying in America)
American left cannot be bothered taking a stand on the right side of history. No way. American Left identify more with the Islamic supremacists. Feelings. The American left feel that slicing off your head for the crime of offending someone is OK. After all, if you offend a leftist, they would probably like to go that far in return.
Sort of like Impeaching Trump for Biden's real crimes. The American left are backwards.
You think the corrupt woke left care about a few brutal murders at the hands of Islamic supremacists? 'Come on man, that cartoon was offensive.'
Macron is right - American leftists do not care about freedom of expression. The woke left do not care about the outrageous acts of murder at the hands of the offended.
To the left, the cartoon is the problem. Free speech is the problem. Again- the American left identify with that superior feeling of "I'm offended so I get to hurt you. burn you down. harass you..."
That's what Antifa is all about.
&
making it illegal to know:
***See Biden family international grift.
"...our media will finally decide the rejoin the Enlightenment world and stand up for human rights and liberties again."
They can't do it, because they don't know it. The Enlightenment is hard.
journalists who write in a country that is the heir to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution — when I see them legitimizing this violence,
That’s a rather bizarre sentence.
The French Revolution pretty much epitomizes violence? A socialist revolution in which mass murder was used as a political tool.
A predecessor to Lenin, stalin, Mao, Hitler, Chavez, Pol pot and every other socialist that gets into power.
John Henry
Attempts at shaming people who have no shame are bound to fail.
This distinction between “multiculturalism” and “universalism” is quite interesting, profound even. But I don’t get it. Is he saying we French celebrate the individual, not the group identity? Does he believe these other identities — skin, religion, gender — are to be subsumed by the respect for the human being alone? Really, his argument was not clear to me.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed his dismissal tone of America flipping from segregation to multiculturalism, two sides of the same coin.
The French made a profound mistake in taking the side of "musselmen" in their competition with England going back to Napoleon. Algeria should have taught them that Muslims will not integrate. Instead they have allowed millions to move to France and build their own colonies where police do not go. Every year there is terrorism. Macron is 100 years too late.
Europe seems more intellectually free than the United States to me these days. Maybe it’s similar to the phenomenon of South Florida Hispanics voting against this wokegasm that has been seizing the US, as they have “been down that road.”
I am happy to pay higher taxes, ect, if there is more intellectual freedom. The UK seems to be under the same Anglosphere rot that has infected the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It looks like maybe the socialists have successfully stuck a stick in “the Five Eyes."
"And it is precisely because hatred is forbidden under our European values"
Hopefully the 'hatred is forbidden' thing a bad translation. Given everything else he says, I think that is the case. He argues that people can 'shock' (which I think means to offend) each other and as long as they do not come to blows, which is as it should be. So I don't think he's advocating that 'hatred' (which is a personal feeling) be forbidden (by force of law) but simply that acting upon that hatred is what is not allowed, which is of course the way we used to think of here before the 'silence is violence' crowd took power.
"The French Revolution pretty much epitomizes violence?”
I still think that the French were only able to lop off the heads of their aristocracy after Molière made them ridiculous in his plays. Shakespeare probably kept the same thing from happening in England by making their aristocracy look somewhat exalted. It’s probably more accurate to say that the American Revolution drew heavily on the same thinkers who inspired the French Revolution, after all the French Revolution started in the same year that our constitution was finalized and long after our own revolution, 1789.
The heirs of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution should feel free to attack the Catholic Church. Crush the infamous thing. However, such a stance does not give them the right to attack Islam. This needs to be spelled out more explicitly in French laws. I can understand Macron's confusion, but he's got it wrong.....Also which course of action is easier: reform the populace so that they do not pass fake twenties or reform the police so they act with precise restraint in any confrontation they might have while arresting such criminals?
The US press likes Macron, so they have to explain him by bringing up the very frightening Marine Le Pen. Haha! If Trump is our middle finger, she is theirs. #MarineLePen2022
Also, France is busy banning Mass. But don't worry about trying to change a religion older than that spunky Islam.
The press is tedious. France is getting interesting.
related:
THE ACLU IS A CORRUPT, PARTISAN ORGANIZATION WITH NO REAL CONNECTION TO CIVIL LIBERTIES ANYMORE
The corrupt woke left - where free speech goes to die.
@tim in vermont: The English aristocrats were in fact grander than the French, German, and Russian ones. What with primogeniture, there was only one aristocrat. His children, with the exception of the eldest son, were Mr. instead of De or Von and became part of the general populace. I read somewhere that there were a million and a half Russian aristocrats at the time of the Russian revolution....I'm reading a biography of Lord North. The author states that there were only 190 titled aristocrats in Lord North's day and that some of them were lunatics or Catholics and thus didn't really count in the management of government.
Assistant Village Idiot said...
The religion is 1400 years old? What the hell does that have to do with anything?
I have no specific examples, but I'm pretty sure your average journalist doesn't understand that Christianity and Judaism both predate Islam.
Remember his comments about how Africa has a civilisational problem?
The WaPoo informs us that using the word "civilization" is a "white-nationalist dog whistle" and that -
"The word “civilization”, when used in discussions of economic or political development, often serves as a code, implying that a nation’s successes and failures can be attributed to immutable, essentialist characteristics of its people. There’s a long, shameful history of nations invoking civilizational difference to justify colonialism, war and racial oppression."
Not to mention justifying USAID, etc.
The left is arguing for genocide. I mean that is what it boils down to.
If it's okay to saw off a person's head because they've criticized Islam, then surely it's okay to shoot a person because they are white skinned.
This is nothing new. This is most of human history.
Not to be outdone in the blame department the Mayor of London, a Mr Khan, issued a statement saying it has never been a worse time to be a Muslim and blamed this on Trump.
We now know why the term "Euro-trash" was coined.
I think it’s pretty clear to the French people too that Muslims working in the “forest” section of the Notre Dame cathedral probably lit the fire, same as fires have been happening in other grand cathedrals which have always been a source of French national pride. I am thinking of heading to Europe as a refugee. Someplace where they understand that wokeism is the enemy of the Enlightenment, which is a comment I have made here probably a dozen times or more.
Maybe Macron doesn't want to influence 1400 years worth of Muslims, or even all 1 billion plus Muslims today. Maybe he only wants to influence the dozens who want to bomb or cut off heads of French citizens.
Or does the Washington Post believe that 1400 years worth of Muslims, all and only wanted to kill innocent people? Boy, now that's a slander!
Islam is religious fascism. The goal of Islam is to spread across the globe with everyone becoming muslim and praising Allah. They will never be able to attain a uniform Islam since right at the start, Islam split into Shi'ite and Sunni, with later splits occurring.
Islam can never be reformed. The ideal muslim is Mohammed. Mohammed was a bandit, murderer, an oath-breaker and a pedofile, to name just a few of his positive characteristics. The Koran along with its hadiths is considered to be perfect, and perfection cannot be improved by definition. So, all of the murderous offenses in the Koran can never be removed, but must be honored.
When a muslim tells you that he's going to kill you, believe him.
>>This distinction between “multiculturalism” and “universalism” is quite interesting, profound even.
It's not that profound. We used to call it "the melting pot", where if you came to the US, you came to become an American. My grandparents moved here, and would never really be Americans, but they knew their children (all 9 of them) would be.
In multiculturalism, we tell people that if you move here, you can keep your language, customs, and culture, and be a separate identity within the USA.
As Dr. Phil would say, "And how's that working out for you?"
Not being privy to what the American press is saying about France, I cannot comment on the specifics. However, having watched the American press blatantly lie about dozens if not hundreds of topics over the past 4 years, display a level of hypocrisy that would make con men blush, and actively support censorship, sure, why not. Lie about one thing, lie about everything.
Let's hear it for Presly O'Bannon!!!
Jess said
“ When people are strikingly different, they congregate with their own, and (if there are enough) attempt to change the culture that welcomed them with good intentions. France is being overwhelmed, and the citizens will eventually rebel against the attempt to destroy their culture.”
They were a day late and a dollar short with the Germans in the 30’s. No reason to think this time is different. And we had to give them their country back then. Can’t do it this time.
Islam is centuries overdue for a reformation.
But it won't happen because Muslims believe that their prophet wrote about Jew-hating and killing non-believers.
It's the core of their founding document. There's no way they can take that out or modify it.
That would be like Americans taking the 2nd amendment and changing it to mean something different even though the wording is plain.
Oh, Wait.
If Macron would spend a year studying Burke and Bastiat he might actually turn into a worthy statesman.
I'm sure the curriculum was French-heavy, but I'd be surprised if Macron and other Ecole Superior types were not better than any of our statesmen. The problem with them is not intelligence or reading. It's something else.
In his novels Anthony Burgess would sometimes put a strong serious argument into the mouth of a dubious character, like the bishop in A Clockwork Orange. That's what this feels like to me: important ideas, but expressed by weaselly bankster puppet Macron.
The American Press are blaming the victim as the cause of their predicament.
Our model is universalist, not multiculturalist,
Multiculturalism is really a byproduct of liberal universalism and multi-ethnic nation-states. It's current meaning essentially starts in the 1970s when European countries began adopting it as official policy.
And so it will not be the reinvention of the Enlightenment, but we will have to defend the Enlightenment against obscurantism.
Conservatism begins as a Whig critique of revolution and the Enlightenment's rejection of tradition and desire to put human reason rather than monarchic or ecclesiastical authority at the center of social order.
While the western world was spouting liberal philosophy in the 19th century, it was practicing ethnic chauvinism. However, liberal ideas ultimately led to the dismantling of global European supremacy over the course of the 20th century, culminating with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1992 and apartheid in South Africa in 1994. Since then, the global spread of liberal capitalism has been the primary interest of the Western powers.
Hello? Macron's Government practices censorship, and puts people in Jail and fines them for publishing old books or making so-called antisemtic remarks or for "questioning the holocaust". There is no FREE SPEECH in France. And never has been. At the start of WW2 the French Government outlawed antisemitic remarks AND the communist party, which had its newspapers shut down.
So, Macron can go to hell. Why shouldn't the Muslim's have the same benefit as other "Protected Groups".
Annnnnnnd, it's the NYT, which I despise, detest, and totally distrust.
The first requirement to winning the future is to be there. Many countries around the world, including most of the ones in western Europe, have birthrates below the replacement rate for their native populations. At the same time, they've invited in millions of people with different values who have little hesitation about having large families. It might take a few decades, but the native populations are on the way to becoming minorities in their own countries. It's simple math. Children not born today won't be 30 year old adults in 2050. Once that happens, all it will take is an election or two and those countries will find themselves living under very different rules.
Interesting that anyone not left of Lenin is considered 'far right'.
Another chance to quote Hosea: "For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind"
>>So, Macron can go to hell. Why shouldn't the Muslim's have the same benefit as other "Protected Groups".
French communists (and there are many) don't go randomly stabbing and beheading people, and running into crowds with tractor-trailer trucks.
They are French first, then communists.
Way back in high school, my French teacher [who really was French] warned Algerian independence would come back to haunt France one day. [I'm so glad I went to school in the 'good old days'. ;-) ]
Different countries had different versions of the Enlightenment. The French Enlightenment was very opposed to traditional religion and culminated in the Revolution, leaving behind a heritage of militant secularism. The British Enlightenment was more moderate. It didn't hate religion and didn't aim at violent revolution and instituting centralized power, in part because Britain had already had its revolution and in part because the French Revolution so terrified British society.
So Macron is speaking from a long tradition of militant secularism that many Americans would find uncongenial. But he may have a point here: America's live and let live attitude towards religion (inherited from the milder Anglo-American Enlightenment) may leave us unprepared to deal with militant Islam. It was snarky of EMac to put in the dig about segregation, but the way that the US went from melting pot to multiculturalism is something that Americans haven't seriously studied and evaluated.
Way back in high school, my French teacher [who really was French] warned Algerian independence would come back to haunt France one day. [I'm so glad I went to school in the 'good old days'. ;-) ]
Was Algerian independence the problem, or was it French colonialism?
Great, we can bash Muzzies AND Frogs!
Vive la Republique. I'll leave the grosser form of historical ignorance on display here and just make a few points that haven't been made yet, or have been made in partial terms.
The 19th C European empires, not just the French in Algeria, all chose to impose their mission civilisatrice on areas of the globe that had been powerful and independent in their own right before the vast, great, liberatory energies of the industrial and French Revs changed everything.
The Brits and French both craved and depended on Muslim soldiers to maintain their empires; in WW I they brought African, South Asian, and Asian colonial troops--many of them Muslims--to Europe, and non-white colonials made up large proportions in all other theaters. (Most of the "Germans" under Lettow-Vorbeck in East Africa were African Muslims.)
The same was true in Hitler's war also, as far as the Brits especially were concerned.
It says a lot about the B and F empires that they acknowledged a sort of debt to the people they had dragged into their stupid quarrels, by affording them a route to the metropole; but as history teaches, no good deed goes unpunished.
Narr
Vive le secularisme!
So the American mediaswine are enemies of the French people too?
And of course Smith “speculates” about Macron’s motives. The conceit of the leftmediaswine is that their delusions explain the motives of their intellectual superiors.
Sort of like promoting and protecting BLM/Antifa beating up people after a peaceful protest in Washington. And the democrat propaganda outlets either smearing the victims or ignoring it altogether.
I’m shocked Twitter/Facebook haven’t censored anyone highlighting it, but who knows maybe they have.
I know, let's let a bunch of illiterate, 7th-century savages who don't speak our language into the country; give them welfare and free housing (but no jobs) and see how it goes.
What could possibly go wrong?
Btw, might be wise for someone to include a minaret in the Notre Dame Cathedral rebuild.
"They are French first, then communists."
This is the most unintentionally hilarious remark ever. I assume its satire. But if you're serious, go read Marx or Lenin.
The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.
National differences and antagonism between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.
The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster. United action, of the leading civilised countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.
National differences and antagonism between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.
This is certainly true. This process has alternately been identified as "westernization' or "Americanization." Marx had many important insights into the nature of capitalism and its effects. He predicted the phenomenon now called "globalization," the cause of the current global populist backlash.
>> This is the most unintentionally hilarious remark ever.
Thanks, where do I go to collect my prize?
>>I assume its satire.
No, it is not. Does that mean I don't get the prize?
I have talked to a number of French communists in France. None of them has ever quoted Marx or Lenin to me, even while they espouse what is essentially Marxism.
The one interesting thing to me is that within the first sentence or two, they make it clear they don't want anything at all like Soviet communism, and like decent people everywhere they consider Stalin and Mao to be monsters.
The French believe from birth in the superiority of French culture. Their communists have no doubt that the French could make communism work, regardless of it's failures elsewhere.
Granted, my sample size is small, but none of them mentioned anything about internationalism.
"They are French first, then communists."
They French are not communists or any other Marxist derivatives. Their social outlook is informed by a Christian religion (i.e. moral philosophy), with the usual "secular" cutouts. They do weigh the merits of public and private smoothing functions, and where we favor the latter, they favor the former. It's worth considering. In theory, a dynamic market should outperform a single/central expert-driven model.
>>The French are not communists or any other Marxist derivatives.
I was referring only to those French men and women that say they are communists. And they are not terribly rare, in my experience. They claim to be one of the top 4 or 5 political parties in France.
Macron has never looked better.
And the American media has never looked worse. Maybe all the SJW reporters whose knowledge of France is a couple of vacations there in upscale hotels, should just STFU.
"we will have to defend the Enlightenment against obscurantism"
Appreciate Macron's anti-wokeness, but no defense can succeed that fails to identify the enemy properly.
J. Farmer asks: Was Algerian independence the problem, or was it French colonialism?
Colonialism was never the problem. The guilt-driven stupidity of the French that demanded they open their doors to unlimited numbers of 'refugees' was and is the problem.
If it wasn't for the failures of French colonialism, we would never had Pho restaurants.
The USA is not the heir to the French Revolution at all; check the calendar.
The current woke mobs do owe much to the Reign of Terror.
@mockturtle:
Colonialism was never the problem. The guilt-driven stupidity of the French that demanded they open their doors to unlimited numbers of 'refugees' was and is the problem.
The refugee and asylum problem is a relatively recent phenomenon. Macron has been pushing immigration restriction for a couple years now. Most of France's Muslim population is descended from North African migrants who came to Europe in the post-war period during decolonization, the conflict in Algeria, and the need for laborers to help rebuild the country. They have a large North African population for the same reason that we have a large Latino population. After the global financial disruptions in the 70s, European countries moved to more restrictive immigration policies. Most immigration since then has been either family reunification or asylum/refugee claims. Undoubtedly the system is riddled with abuse, but the French have intervened militarily numerous times in North Africa and the Middle East in operations that have destabilized the region and caused major refugee problems.
The French still try to maintain their sphere of influence in west- and Saharan Africa, and that won't change any time soon I think.
The large-scale importation of labor into postwar Europe had little to nothing to do with a need for labor to rebuild in either France or Germany, it was neoliberal desire for cheap labor to do jobs Frenchmen and Germans no longer wanted to do after most of the rebuilding was done.
German in-migration was miniscule until 1960 and continued strong until '75, picked up again in '85, blew through the roof in 1990-95 and was still strong until 2000. Very little until 2010 and then a big boom again. The 1960-75 cohort was the famous Turkish wave; the other booms have obvious explanations.
The French had lower overall numbers but again the pattern has little relationship to postwar rebuilding needs. It's tiny until 1950-55, spikes from 55 to 60, and continues at a good clip through 1975.
I'll leave the more recent decades be.
Like good Western liberal and neoliberal corporatist wonks, the elites of Europe saw populations as units of labor value and arranged things on that basis as much as they could. Long term thinking about cultural realities never entered the picture, and that may become an even more costly error than it has shown so far.
Narr
The "Rome" that "fell" in 378 AD was full of barbarians already
"I have talked to a number of French communists in France. None of them has ever quoted Marx or Lenin to me, even while they espouse what is essentially Marxism."
Of course. why care about what Marxism is or what the Communist Party and officials say or do. Just give us a couple unknown people. What would you say if someone said:
"Nazis don't have anything against Jews. I knew a couple in 1936 and they liked Jews."
That's about the worth of your "rebuttal".
The French communist's aren't really communists. Once you accept that, you can speculate endlessly.
The large-scale importation of labor into postwar Europe had little to nothing to do with a need for labor to rebuild in either France or Germany, it was neoliberal desire for cheap labor to do jobs Frenchmen and Germans no longer wanted to do after most of the rebuilding was done.
Certainly, Germans didn't want to have to sweep and mop up after themselves, but many of the immigrants were taken in for the expansion of industry. It wasn't that Germans didn't want to do those jobs. They did. But so many had been killed during the war that the country didn't have the manpower to be the industrial giant that they wanted to be. The rebuilding of society and the cities was underway before the Greeks and Turks came, but Volkswagen wasn't yet the international giant it became. Ditto for other German firms. I could be wrong about that, but postwar Germans didn't have the aversion to industrial labor that many in the developed world now have.
French Communists? When you have a party that gets as many votes as the French or Italian Communists did, most of the voters aren't likely to be ideologues or party members. They don't like America or the bosses, but they may not follow the "politically correct" line of Marxist ideologues. Since so many French Communists have moved to the rightist parties, like LePen's, they must have had more than a little French nationalism in them for some time.
>>That's about the worth of your "rebuttal".
You did see that I specifically mentioned that I had a very small sample size, yes? It wasn't intended as a rebuttal of anything, I was just sharing my experience with actual French communists.
>>The French communist's aren't really communists. Once you accept that, you can speculate endlessly.
The ones I have met are most definitely communists. They just don't seem to care about the worldwide proletariat, only rather remedying what they see as injustices in France.
Jess @ 6:44 AM,
He Who Is Too Deplorable To Be Named puts it much more succinctly: "Diversity + proximity = war."
Joe Smith @ 9:38am,
Islam has had its Reformation. Unfortunately, it's called Wahhabism.
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