Atlantic Unhinged: Europe, Don't Be European
Buchanan's Fault, obviously
"Multiculturalism" and affirmative action contribute to cultural fragmentation, or so conservative polemic contends. They also contribute to social stability, or so an American following the rioting in France might conclude.
The French "model" of integration is the American conservative ideal. The Republic does not recognize groups; the census includes no box to indicate race or ethnicity. France recognizes individuals only. France is officially "color blind."
[MBD:snip]
To preserve the fiction of "fraternity" the French ignore difference. Notoriously, Muslim girls can't wear head scarves to public schools. You can bet French history textbooks concede nothing to multiculturalism. Sounds like your kind of place, Pat Buchanan—too bad it's France.
[MBD:snip]
The rioting in any case looks to have fed an anti-immigrant backlash, not to have provoked second thoughts about the French model, much less a debate over adopting ours.
Bill Clinton, who insisted that the American experiment in prizing diversity over homogeneity offered a lesson for a world riven by ethnic, racial, and religious conflict, thinks we may be in the midst of our "third great revolution," one testing the proposition whether "we can live without having a dominant European culture." - Jack Beatty, Atlantic Unbound (subscription required)
Jack Beatty's ditty in the online Atlantic magazine is not only facile, bratty and wrongheaded it reveals a couple of terrible assumptions. The kerfluffle regarding headscarves speaks alot less to France' incipient Buchananism than to it's ham-handed attempt to "do something" in the wake of growing unease about the lack of assimilation. It also emerges from the French secularist anticlerical tradition.
It is just too easy to ridicule the liberal baby talk about diversity. You know, diversity - that thing people living in the lily-white Virginia suburbs of D.C. congratulate themselves on. Or Northhampton Mass - one of the most liberal places in America - yet it looks like an America invented by David Duke. What the hell does "prizing diversity over homogeneity" mean? Not much.
Hilarious that an American would take pot-shots at France's rioting problem after the disaster in New Orleans.
Michael Brendan Dougherty
in Religion, Culture
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Source: Pat Buchanan's Utopia"France is not a country like others," Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin declared in his speech last week before the French Chamber of Deputies. "It will never accept that citizens live separately with different opportunities and unequal futures." Official France denies reality to preserve the fiction of "equality." It has no "positive discrimination" policies—that is, affirmative action—because it has no negative discrimination based on race, religion, or ethnicity to overcome. Tell that to
Reader Comments (1)
I hate, hate, HATE liberal anti-racists.