Tuesday, November 22, 2005

The Riots in France: Looking East or West?

Here a article from Jeff Sommers on the riots in France. Who's the inspiration Tupac or Asama?
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1 comment:

Fons said...

At the peak of events in France a couple weaks ago I was driving in Chicago and was only able to receive AM radio stations so it was either sports talk or RUSH! He seemed to be on every other station. Regardless of his total lack of any "knowledge" (he actually talks like a post-modernist in many ways) of the history, culture, economy, etc... of France, Rush was going to tell us EXACTLY what the problem was. For Rush the issue was very simple, it came down to socialism and immigration. In other words socialism=poverty and too many brown people. The Right will use any opportunity to try to discredit any form of economic democracy even its milder form; Social Democracy. Add in a little Iraq War chauvinism and anti-intellectualism, he constantly refered to Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin as a "poet," and you have a neat segment on why France is BAD.

To Jeff and Derk's article: I think that they are right in saying that to point to the American model of race and employment is so patently absurd it show's their ideological agenda thus Rush's crude use. But they seem to gloss over France's schizophrenic nature when it comes to people of the empire. During the colonial days official policy was to make "little Frenchmen" out of the North Africans, Southeast Asians and island nations that had been incoporated into greater France. The paternalism of this official policy was clear but it also, like in our own republican experiment, nodded in the direction of equality for all. This is a problem when you have pervasive racism like we do. The problem is that you lecture others all the time on freedom and liberty but rarely measure up at home.

France has invited more people of color into their society than any other European nation but has not dealt with the hard question of power sharing and at its core this is a question of ethnicity. They don't want to give up power to the browns. Without asking some hard questions, and this is made difficult by out right racism/neo-fascism in the form of Le Penism, France will continue to have uprisings because the minority community cannot continue live in RELATIVE poverty particularly in a time of EU/globalizing belt tightning.

So, I like the article but ethnicity should have received a little more focus. This from the CLASS guy.

9:44 AM

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