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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   29231 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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I'm not sure about the Swedes, but for the the British and the French I think a good part of it is in the national temperament. The British are legalists. They will only consider solutions to their predicament that paint inside the lines, even if the lines are so restrictive as to bind them from responding effectively to intimidation. While the French can be at any specific moment more or less accepting than the British, as a people if the wind changes they would be willing to take bolder actions. I can't ever imagine the British going for "repatriation" for any reason; from their perspective British citizens are all equal, period, and even permanent residents have rights and cannot be discriminated against directly. Any law to resolve these issues would have to be a carefully thought out meta-level law that doesn't single out anything in particular. But if the muslim population pushes the French the wrong way a couple more times, they might find these kind of solutions on the table. The French are willing to make object-level laws specifically against things they don't like, even if it's "unfair". See, law against the islamic veil. It's not going to stop youths from lashing out, but it might make more organized attempts at bullying the local population less attractive, as it tends to make the french hate muslims, not hold hands and sing "Don't Look Back In Anger" while decrying hatred in all its forms.

I think it's class-related. Many upper-class (mostly countryside) people I know are appalled by what's going on, but they will under no circumstances go into territory that is not what 'people like us' think. Nigel Farage is 'a horrid little man' and any negative talk about immigrants puts you risk of being 'one of those awful people' who wave flags and don't like foreigners. They are willing to get very upset about anti-semitism and Free Palestine marches, but they don't like discussing the causes of those phenomena if at all possible and any suggestions for solving it are absolutely verboten.

I should also note that there is a long-standing pride in Britain about never having a serious Fascist movement and people are very, very unwilling to go anywhere near the space of anti-immigrant sentiment. It's associated with skinheads, 'Go Home Paki' slogans, and English Defence League marchers spitting at innocent people who 'come over here and work jolly hard'. The only time it got remotely close to mainstream politics was Enoch Powell, who was a political outsider and (I'm told from someone sympathetic to his ideals who met him by chance) incredibly arrogant and unpleasant.

In short, it's true that Brits are legalistic but we're usually at least somewhat pragmatic. The main obstacle is deep, visceral, reflexive cringe to nationalist sentiment among the ruling classes.

EDIT: There is also strong suspicion of the native working classes among upper-class people of a certain age. English socialists did their level best to wipe out the upper and upper-middle classes in the 60s and 70s and at their height came quite close to succeeding. One of my relatives was spat on in the street for having the wrong (posh) accent.

I think it’s different. The French are at their core less racist but more hostile to Islam than the English or Germans, who care less about Islam but do often have to some extent a primal conception of their ethnos, even if this is subjugated to progressive modernity for now.

Around all but the most PC people in Britain, ‘English’ is a race. If you meet someone and tell someone else about it and they ask quietly ‘well, is he English?’ they are asking whether he is a native, not whether he grew up in England and has a British passport.

By contrast French in France does not only mean ethnic French, and in fact the Francophone wignats had to invent a specific term (‘Francais de souche’ ie ‘French of the [tree] trunk’) to refer to ethnic Frenchmen, a term by the way that even Le Pen explicitly disavowed. The same is true in Germany as in England, ‘ist er Deutsch’ would be understood by most Germans as an ethnic question, not one of nationality.

IIRC one of the main reasons the French granted the West African states independence was that they had full representation in the legislature, and their population was increasing so rapidly that the ethnic French deputies would be outnumbered/outvoted by the African deputies very soon.

Tail wagging the dog so to speak.

Wikipedia says otherwise.

In reality, the colonial areas had representation [in the Assembly of the Union,] but all power remained in the [Metropolitan] French Parliament and thus was centralized.

The French-language article provides some more detail (via Google Translate):

The Assembly of the French Union is consulted on projects or proposals by the National Assembly [(the lower house of the Metropolitan Parliament)], the French government or the associated states. It can transmit proposals to the National Assembly or the government but it does not adopt laws.

From my limited interactions with French people, the French seem to have an unshakeable faith in the superiority of French-ness that exceeds us Americans for national pride. French food (wine especially), French art, the French language, French architecture, French fashion, French philosophy, French culture overall is the pinnacle of human achievement. I wonder if this conviction drives French lack of patience for Islamic antics in a way that more oikophobic countries can't replicate.

That sentiment is real, but the lack of patience finds a more plausible source in our history. France is a very historically Catholic country and has fought itself extremely bitterly over the separation of church and state.

So on one hand you have a left wing that can't bear to sacrifice a hard fought win over the church, and on the other hand you have a right that's not keen to let a foreign religion get the upper hand. Aristide Briand and Charles Martel united in spirit, if you will.

So all that leaves in favor is the usual center-left pole of bleeding heart bourgeois that gets so much press around these parts. But that only gets you so far. Mélenchon has in the recent years tried to walk the tightrope of courting muslims, but I think the reaction to the Israel-Hamas war has made that too difficult for even him.

By contrast French in France does not only mean ethnic French, and in fact the Francophone wignats had to invent a specific term (‘Francais de souche’ ie ‘French of the [tree] trunk’) to refer to ethnic Frenchmen, a term by the way that even Le Pen explicitly disavowed.

I wonder if the Finnish term "kantasuomalainen" (means exactly the same expect for Finns, both etymologically and in meaning, expect commonly used even in liberal media with generally only the most committed anti-racists complaining) is a direct loan from French or if there's some other common linguistic ancestor from elsewhere.

Or possibly the French is a calque of the Finnish.

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