[ExI] The polticial spectrum about French immigration [was: What the France!?]

Stefano Vaj stefano.vaj at gmail.com
Mon Apr 6 10:55:44 UTC 2009


On Sun, Apr 5, 2009 at 11:57 AM, Eschatoon Magic <eschatoon at gmail.com>
wrote:
> Many Muslim residents of France are citizens -- on which legal basis
> could, or should, be expelled?
>
> There is no defendable legal basis of course. There is only one
> precedent in the modern history of Europe for expelling and abusing
> citizens based on their religion and ethnic origin, and I hope we have
> learned the lesson and don't wish to repeat it.

Actually, what a some Frenchmen, including a few Jews, have in mind is more
similar to the expulsion of Algerians of French ethnicity (including
third-generation residents) when the country achieved independence, that of
German-speaking... majorities from East Prussia (namely from Gdansk/Danzig
and Kaliningrad/Koenigsberg) after the end of WWII, of, going backward in
time, the Spanish Reconquista.

For instance, Guillaume Faye thinks, or used to think, along lines very
similar to those of Mirco and Lee on this subject, as it is made clear in *
Archéofuturisme* and in *La colonisation de l'Europe. Discours vrai sur
l'immigration et l'Islam*, the full text of the latter being online
here<http://www.uomo-libero.com/articolo.php?id=312>(however, in a
text <http://www.uomo-libero.com/articolo.php?id=312#SOLUTION>, "La solution
de Prométhée", which in its Italian version become the afterword to one of
my books, he asks rhetorically whether such scenario would really have still
sense in a post-singularity, or even a merely transhumanist, society).

The official ideology of the French government, however, can better be
defined as "authoritarian integrationism", that is "Integrate! Or else".
Muslim immigrants are in principle forced to conform entirely to a social,
political and legal system that is theoretically and allegedly "abstract"
and "impartial", but in fact accomodates the christian and jewish beliefs,
ethics, worship, language, mentalities, customs and habits (including their
secularised forms) and not so well their Islamic equivalents.

This on the line of a tradition of a very high centralisation of power,
coming down through Louis XIV the Sun King, Robespierre and De Gaulle, which
was employed first to crush without pity any temptation by French provinces
to protect a modicum of cultural identity and self-government, then as the
French colonialistic policy. Where the English colonists and administrators
were inclined to keep in place a kind of social and cultural apartheid in
Africa and Asia, the Frenchmen did their best to assimilate natives,
imposing in full French law and customs even in affairs of no relevance to
the colonial administration or to the the interest of metropolitan France,
as was the case for the school system (a common joke still exists in France
about the Senegal primary-school children forced by their schoolmasters'
whip to chant all together by heart "Ils étaient grands, ils étaient blonds,
nos ancetres, les Gaulois": they were big, they were blond, our ancestors,
the Gauls). Thus, Mr. Sarkozy as a minister had no qualms whatsoever in
dealing with the ethnical unrest in the Paris outer ring as if the latter
were a war zone in a foreign country, probably sealing its future presidency
in the process.

Needless to say, this form of "forced assimilation" may well involve a
suspension, or at least an open domestication, of the democratic process in
all instances where muslims become a majority or would otherwise obtain a
political clout.

Lastly, a third position is that of much of the French Left and of the
French so-called Nouvelle Droite, which can be called "multiculturalism".
The general idea here is that muslims should be allowed to regulate their
affairs as they see it best, even when such regulations would collide with
French laws and traditions (say, chadors, poligamy, school system and
programmes, sexual mutilations, sha'riah tribunals, Islamic banking,
multilinguism, etc.), but at the same time they should be barred from
imposing their views and ways of life on the citizens of a "French
ethnicity". This would restore the early-middle ages system where the law
governing the life of an individual did not depend on the territory the
individual concerned lived in, but on the community he belonged to (the
former Roman citizens', a given barbaric tribe, etc.).

Many immigrants "officially" support the third solution. In fact, many of
them may instead see it just as a temporary solution in view of a future
fondamentalist takeover on the basis of sheer numbers; or at the opposite
cherish the relative anarchy where they are escape to an extent from
ordinary French rules and at the same time are not really subject to the
possibly harsher rules that would be imposed on them were a "multicultural"
system really implemented.

All in all, none of those "solutions" has any chance of working at all
unless the flow of new immigrants is first slowed down. To say the least,
because latent or not-so-latent conflicts already exist that are not between
muslims and "ethnical French", but amongst the immigrant communities
themselves (which are far from being religiously or ethnically or
linguistically homogenous), and because a growing mass of illegal immigrants
is obviously not very prone to expulsion, assimilation or even
self-government on the French territory, as it effectively escapes the
controls that all such policies would require in the first place.

-- 
Stefano Vaj
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