[lit-ideas] Re: At War with Ourselves
- From: "JUDITH EVANS" <judithevans1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 3 Mar 2006 02:38:04 -0000
LH>A multicultural society means that the society accepts multiple cultures
*At last* -- and, agreed.
LH> If you go to France you don't' have to strive to be like other Frenchmen,
learn the language, learn LH>French history, or learn French politics.
France set its face against such policies (*hence the banning of headscarves --
and Jewish religious emblems -- in schools there*). The French tradition of
integration is that one is, whatever else one is, primarily and above all else,
*French*. The "Jacobin tradition" is of a unitary culture.
LH> You can be a Muslim and continue to speak Arabic and it's okay.
so I should bloody well think -- even Jacobinism allows that. What the French
tradiion seeks to ban and in some instances does is the intrusion of Muslim
tradition into the public sphere and the secular state (*e.g. headscarves in
schools*).
LH>Muslims were not tasked with become Frenchmen and women.
NONSENSE
LH>I'm surprised all you liberals are having so much trouble with this.
I'm having problems with your ignorance about France.
LH>You should be saying, "oh yes, it will work."
I'm saying it hasn't really been tried in France.
LH> Isn't it racist to say that multiculturalism won't work?
LH>Do you think it's okay for those French Caucasians to tell those
dark-skinned Arabs that they have LH>to be just like them?
French "colour-etc. blindness", integrationism, is a noble liberal ideal that
has failed, of recent decades, in that immigrant groups have become and
remained socially disadvantaged, marginalized, excluded. They live in ghettoes
like those of the US. The British and American political-liberal ideal, more
pluralist, has perhaps coped better. But I admire the universalist
notion/ideal that says a black Frenchman and a white Frenchman are French
first and foremost, that would refuse a hyphenation if it could.
Judy Evans, Cardiff
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