Posted on 11/21/2005 7:42:47 PM PST by Natty Bumppo@frontier.net
For over two weeks, Americans have been viewing scenes of chaos and carnage, as the French children of North African immigrants have rampaged through French towns with sticks, rocks, and Molotov cocktails. Aside from a frisson of well-deserved schadenfreude, what does this upheaval tell us? As many pundits have suggested, maybe the French don’t understand multiculturalism.
As the kids would say nowadays, "Duh."
What other country actually has an agency to preserve the purity of language, like the Academie Francaise? Or a Culture Ministry that issues edicts banning the use of the “foreign” word “e-mail” in French government emails. To say that the French are xenophobic would be like saying … well, that the French are xenophobic.
But columnists have been drawing all kinds of conclusions from this revelation. Eugene Robinson, for example, didn’t lose a moment in declaring the United States to be every bit the xenophobe as France, and urging us to all learn Spanish in order to avoid what has happened across the Atlantic. At the other end of the spectrum, Mark Steyn cites the riots as proof that French secularist values have failed, and become yet another form of surrender.
Well, it may be true that France has a Minister of Culture, but no Ministry of Multi-Culturalism. Certainly, the adherence to a mythic pure Gallic culture has precipitated this crisis. On the other hand, France would do well to avoid falling for the Culture Club trap that seems to suffuse American political thought.
The Culture Club is all about separation, and not about inclusion. The current vision of multiculturalism celebrates the preservation of separate cultures within a society, and not the fusion of them. It is about labels, and it can lead to some amusing and confusing outcomes.
Last week, a CNN anchor referred to the French-Tunisian teens whose deaths sparked the riots as “African-American,” a term which has been generally accepted here to replace the label “black,” but nonetheless has little meaning when discussing French-Tunisians.
But it is precisely the kind of linguistic sleight of hand that masks the real issues. The riots have been attributed to poverty, but the rioters in France are not “poor”, although many are unemployed. They are quite adequately endowed by the French welfare state.
Some have attributed the riots to Muslim fundamentalism, but the rioters are not religious extremists, even if most are Muslim. In secularist France, religion rarely rears its head.
What the riots are about is multiculturalism. The French brand of the Culture Club simply pretends to ignore the cultural differences, which, while unlike the American brand which seeks to accommodate every difference, is essentially equally as damaging to society.
When an ethnically homogeneous group is isolated within its own culture, in its own neighborhoods and communities, dependent on the public dole, but refusing to assimilate into the host culture, it is a matter of time before the dependents turn on the host, no differently than any biological pathogen.
You can argue whether the failure to assimilate is forced, as in France, or simply abetted, as in the United States, but the fact remains that unassimilated populations fester.
The Culture Club would have us believe that multi-lingual schools promote harmony, and discount the years of experience in assimilation that have made American English the pliable dialect of a melting pot society that is enriched by the additions each wave of immigration provides.
The Culture Club would have us believe that preserving rather than adapting these cultures is an act of respect, and that to expect new citizens to adopt the ways of their new country is somehow unreasonable. To the contrary, allowing citizens to live outside the national culture is deadly, as the French have discovered.
The Culture Club would have us believe that the road to assimilation is separation – of maintaining the purity of the cultures and languages and customs rather than fitting them into the great pastiche that has always been America. After all, they reason, if it works in Eurotopia, it should work here, shouldn’t it?
As the French might say: Au contraire.
"What the riots are about is multiculturalism."
I prefer cultimulchuralism.
BTTT
Got to love the empty CNN skirt that called them African-Americans.
I saw the father of the "French-Tunisian teens" on TV and he didn't look Tunision to me. Tunisions are known to be the most resonable of the North-african immigrants and generally don't go rioting in the streets. Maybe I'm wrong, at any rate CNN is so bad. It's not even propaganda, it's just stupid. Isn't there an official body that sanctions news stations?
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