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Raise a Glass to France!
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Dudnote
Posts: 1805
Joined: Nov. 13 2007
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 RE: Raise a Glass to France! (in reply to Johnc)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Johnc
quote:
It fragments and destroys what was a previously cohesive community
you mean like during WWI and WWII?
Battle of the Medway, 43
Hastings, 1066
Naseby, 14 June 1645
Blenheim, 13 August 1704
Culloden, 16 April 1746
Waterloo, 18 June 1815
Balaclava, 25 October 1854
The Somme, July – November 1916
El Alamein, 23 October – 4 November 1942
Rorke’s Drift, 22-23 January 1879
D-Day: Normandy, 6 June 1944
Etc etc
ah yes the good old days of cohesion, when cousins could copulate with cousins and nations never ventured beyond their own well defined and self imposed boundaries.
To paraphrase our own Stephan Faulks ... ignorance is ignorance is ignorance is ignorance.
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Ay compañerita de mi alma
tú ahora no me conoces.
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Date May 8 2017 15:13:47
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Piwin
Posts: 3559
Joined: Feb. 9 2016
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RE: Raise a Glass to France! (in reply to Ricardo)
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Ricardo,
tldr: yes it's blown out of proportion.
well I can only speak for what I've seen in France (and obviously even there it's just my own subjective opinion).
But the idea that some would put forward, that people voted FN (that is still classified as extreme right by any neutral institution, even if those of that political tendency would have us think otherwise) because of immigration is way overblown, if not even just a myth. One needs merely look at a map and compare where people voted FN and where the immigrants are. And there's no real correlation at the obvious exception of Calais. What emerges is that the areas where the FN got the highest results are those where unemployment is high, the French rust belt basically. It's like Leopold Sedar Senghor wrote: "racists are just people who are angry at the wrong thing".
Now regarding immigration per say, obviously you can discard the ideas spread by the likes of Foxnews according to which there are "no-go zones". The first time they talked about no-gone zones were during the urban riots about a decade ago. I lived in one of those areas and remember laughing at how it was being described as a war zone. A pretty similar reaction than what the Swedish had recently when Trump announced they were apparently under attack when they clearly weren't aware of anything happening...since nothing was happening! It's quite simple, there's simply no area, neighbourhood or district in France where the crime rates come anywhere near what they are in the worst areas of the US.
That's obviously not to say that there aren't areas that are less safe than others since there obviously are. And anyone who tries to create a correlation between crime in those areas and indicators like race or religion are merely doing so based on subjective perception. Why? Because it's illegal in France to compile any statistics based on race or religion. So you simply can't have the data to support a claim that there is more crime or whatever else in areas that are predominantly (add whatever race or religion you want). That data simply doesn't exist.
I have one friend who is a Berber Christian who told me he had been threatened several times by his Muslim neighbours but that's the only case I know of.
A few years ago, Foxnews relayed a video by a Jewish Israeli allegedly showing how unsafe it was for him to walk around Paris for an hour, how Muslim youths were threatening him etc. etc.. We'll pass on the ties this guy has to an organisation promoting the return of all Jews to Israel, so clearly he had some motivation for his video. After that video, a French Jewish journalist went around for 6 months in Paris and in the rest of France, including in some of the sketchiest neighbourhoods, wearing a kippa. He came back with Nothing bad at all, no threats, no one spitting on him, just hours of footage of Muslim women saying "shalom, is that how you say it?" to which he'd replied "yeah thanks, salam!" or youths wearing hoodies (OMG HOODIES!!) inviting to sit for a cup of tea. Of course this never made it on Foxnews.
Observers in the US tend to map on to Europe the free speech issues they're having in some of their universities, but that simply does not apply in France. Different history, different culture and different laws. As someone said above, there has been an effort by the FN to "normalise" itself, to distance itself from its past. This has been done not by changing any of their policies, which are still very much the same as they've always been, but by trying to soften some of their language. In a way, they did exactly what the intelligent design campaign did in the states. It's still creationism, but we'll change the words and see if we can make that constitutional. And now that they have this brand new vocabulary, their approach has been basically to depict any conflicting opinion as an attempt to bully them into silence. They don't want free speech, they have it. It's enshrined in the Constitution. What they want is for people to just shrug when they're acting like a dick instead of saying "hey, you're acting like a dick". So the alleged bullying they're suffering from is really just a political ploy to try and shift the moral standard down a degree so that their ideas seem socially acceptable when they're really not. It's also a way to divert the discussion away from the actual programme they're proposing and bring it only on this non-existent free speech issue. Le Pen showed what this is about during the debate last Thursday. She spent all her time attacking her opponent and complaining about how she was being misrepresented instead of actually talking about her programme. And the reason is simple: her programme is as extreme right as it always was.
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Date May 8 2017 15:16:13
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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RE: Raise a Glass to France! (in reply to hamia)
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quote:
FN's policies are not particularly 'far right' - many are actually rather socialist. Le Pen gets looked down on because of two things. Her father - from whom she has made credible efforts to distance herself. And the fact that she wants to stop immigration. Looking at the state of France these days who can blame her? Anyone wanting to stop immigration is labelled a nazi these days. In my opinion multiculturalism is the greatest disaster to hit Europe. It fragments and destroys what was a previously cohesive community, breaking down trust and common ground between residents. You can see this in many UK and European cities. Take the East End of London as an example. This is not to say the immigrants are inherently 'bad' but some cultures are too far apart to integrate successfully.
Hamia, the immigration question is only a part of her program that puts le Pen on the Far Right. She does not want France to be in a globalized economy and wants to go back to a 1930s-style "nationalist" system; she wants to pull France out of the European Union; she wants to pull France out of NATO, the most successful alliance in history; she harks back to a "France" that probably never existed. In short, if you substituted "Italy" for "France" and the year 1922 for 2017, you would have thought it was Mussolini running for office.
I do think that France, Italy, and other European countries have to get a grip on the unchecked illegal migrants that come from everywhere, from Syria to a half dozen African countries. It is not Europe's responsibility to take them all in just because they show up on the shores of Italy and Greece, many of them are just seeking economic opportunity. Nevertheless, le Pen doesn't want much to do with legal immigration either. She is a staunch "nationalist" of the old Mussolini-style Fascist brand. That is not good for France, not good for Europe, and indeed not good for the entire Western World.
Bill
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And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date May 8 2017 17:33:23
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Piwin
Posts: 3559
Joined: Feb. 9 2016
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RE: Raise a Glass to France! (in reply to Paul Magnussen)
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quote:
Trying to squelch debate by making any factual basis for it impossible? Couldn’t that backfire? And doesn't it have alarming effects on disciplines like sociology and ethnology? Not to mention genetics, medicine etc.
No the intent was never to squelch debate. The intent was to prevent any form of discrimination or stigmatisation of minorities. Whether that's the way to go or not, I don't know. I do think it's helped focus the public debate on things that actually matter. When I look at public discourse on crime in some countries and how it's stalling on the issue of race when it's clearly a matter of poverty, well I'm kind of glad we can cut to the chase here. Note, some people who want positive discrimination also want this law to fall so that they can set up their brand of identity politics in France.
There are exceptions granted for research purposes but there are very stringent rules on how that research must be conducted. That mainly concerns sociological studies since the harder sciences require stringent definition, which "ethnic group", "race", or other such terms simply are not.
Not too long ago, I saw one of those feel-good young-leftist video with a young woman dressing up in the garb of different ethnic groups and reading through her "genetic profile". I am 12% this, or 15% that, concluding with the motto "I am immigration". It was all well and good but oh so American. The reaction on the French forum I was on was basically this: "right. so you're 12% Italian. so you're saying that if we go back far enough in your genealogy we're going to find someone who's 100% Italian? So pure Italian huh? Pure races huh... Do you realize who you sound like? Besides, what does any of it even mean? and where's the breaking point because obviously if you go back far enough you can just drop your percentage and say we're all African right?"
I think they would have agreed with the overall message she was trying to convey that we're all the result of some form of immigration somewhere in our past, but man that whole genetic percentages thing did no go down well!
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"Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix."
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Date May 9 2017 6:34:35
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