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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 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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