site banner
PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28386 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

11
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Did the Speaker of the House of Commons alter precedent because he was worried MPs would be murdered if he didn’t?

[Link to BBC live thread]

Parliamentary procedure in Britain is labyrinthine and extremely boring, so I will attempt to summarize briefly the procedure under which the events occurred. To simplify, the Conservative government has a large majority in Parliament, but there are still designated days where opposition parties can put forward motions that will almost certainly never affect government policy but which they want to ‘discuss’ (i.e. use to grandstand to supporters, media and potential voters) in front of the legislature.

Yesterday, it was the Scottish National Party’s turn to discuss a motion calling for (implicitly) a unilateral ceasefire by Israel on Gaza. The SNP’s leader, Humza Yousaf (who is not an MP) has spoken regularly about Palestine, is himself Muslim and has a wife who is Palestinian with family in Gaza. But Scotland itself has only a very small and electorally insignificant Muslim population. The primary reason for the SNP’s motion was that, after various major scandals on everything from transwomen to embezzlement, their grip on Scotland and its fifty parliamentary seats is likely to be significantly weakened at the next general election, with Labour likely to reclaim many seats from them. Labour has not committed itself to a ceasefire in this way, but has called for a “humanitarian pause”, which both sides have admitted is largely a semantic distinction, but a distinction nonetheless. The SNP intended that many pro-Palestinian Labour MPs would vote with them on the motion (which again was seen as having had no chance of actually passing), going against the wishes of their party, making the Labour leader look weak, and hopefully therefore gaining some ground on them ahead of the election.

In a surprise move, the Speaker (who was formerly a Labour MP but must remain officially neutral) allowed Labour to hijack the SNP’s ‘opposition day’ by first allowing a vote on a Labour amendment before the vote on the SNP’s motion. The Labour amendment was largely the same but clarified that Israel ‘could not be expected’ to cease fire until all hostages were released. By convention, one opposition party would not be able to table an amendment to another opposition party’s motion on such a day, only the government can. The procedural details are complicated but essentially the action ensured in practice that the SNP felt their motion wouldn’t come to a vote the way they intended (this is confusing for me, but so much of British parliamentary procedure is essentially arbitrary and malleable that I suppose this is explained by something). The SNP and the Conservatives both walked out in protest (the latter opportunistically, because it allowed them to sidestep the whole ceasefire vote for now, and because they may have been worried their amendment wouldn’t pass), and harshly criticized the speaker, Hoyle, who it turned out was warned by his own clerks that this would happen.

But the question remains why Hoyle, who despite being ex-Labour has retained a relatively positive reputation in the House, accepted Labour’s request for an unprecedented amendment insertion into the SNP’s opposition day motion. What did Starmer (the Labour leader) say to him? This morning, rumors swirled that Starmer had ‘extorted’ Hoyle in some way. There are two ways of interpreting that allegation, if it has any substance.

The first is that Starmer transparently reminded Hoyle of the fact that the speaker is re-elected by each incoming parliament, and that Starmer will almost certainly be the next Prime Minister with a large majority at his disposal. And ultimately, whatever the reason, the act avoided any nasty Labour infighting over the SNP motion that would otherwise have been expected. This seems to be the SNP allegation, that Hoyle did Starmer a political favor both to take the wind out of the SNP’s sails and to avoid discontent in his own party, in exchange for job security at the next election. (Note that if Hoyle was removed as Speaker, he would presumably return to being a Labour MP under Starmer).

The second possibility is darker, and has been alleged openly by many Conservative politicians today. Supposedly, Hoyle is a mild-mannered man who considers himself responsible in part for the safety of MPs. Per this narrative Starmer supposedly showed or related to him death threats made by Muslim constituents to Labour MPs and their families if they didn’t vote for a ceasefire, and suggested on that basis that Hoyle must allow the amendment or, presumably, any assassinations of MPs would be on him. It is only two years since the last MP was assassinated by an Islamist constituent, who explicitly said he did so because he held said MP responsible for the death of Muslims, so Hoyle allegedly went over the advice of his clerks to try to prevent it happening again by letting Labour table their amendment. Of course, this in and of itself could easily just be a manipulation tactic by Labour.

As it is likely in neither Hoyle nor Starmer’s interest to reveal what happened (and if either did, it is questionable whether they could be trusted), the events - for now - are likely to remain the subject of great speculation.

One thing that I don't understand is how countries like France, with a larger and often more radicalised muslim population, doesn't seem to have the same problems. Sweden also has a larger muslim population (in proportionate terms) and while Jews in Sweden are under concurrent attack, at least elite institutions seem to weather the pressure fairly well. Their PM is openly saying things like immigrants from MENA have problems with antisemitism and even questioning their loyalty.

Perhaps it's a combination of two things. First, many Islamist radicals are not poor and downtrodden but often well-educated and from relatively more affluent families. Britain's status as a magnet for relatively more prosperous migrants from non-EU sources could perhaps account for this. Second, perhaps the British state itself has been a bit more hands-off rather than the forceful French assimilationist approach. I can't say that it seems like the French have succeeded with their attempts to assimilate these groups, but perhaps an inadvertent side benefit is that they have greater control over various radicals.

As a final note, in a sane society these remote Middle-Eastern squabbles should not have been a major issue in the domestic politics of various Western countries. But we are now well past that point in Europe.

One thing that I don't understand is how countries like France, with a larger and often more radicalised muslim population, doesn't seem to have the same problems.

The first difference is that in the UK individual PMs are a bit more exposed to the public than in continental Europe.

Second, the UK never was shaped by the nazi occupation like continental Europe was, so the taboos about the involvement of the state in antisemitism are a bit different.

The UK seems to have an extreme version of the humanist slave morality that is in fashion across the west (this stated reason being given by Ian Hislop for why he wouldn't publish the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, as it would be "punching down"). It is the prevailing viewpoint of most people who work for the civil service, as well as the centrist or left wing media class. Dom Cummings once pointed out that the people who live or work in the SW1 postcode care immensely about their perception among their peers. Unlike the US, there is no temporing influence among anyone in power - all major parties largely agree on the same things, with the sole difference being that tories pretend to be right wing in order to win the vote of ultra-right shire boomers, who never seem to notice that the tories don't deliver anything they promise.

The only difference in the US is that the open primary system (both for congressional seats and the presidency) means that the equivalent of Nigel Farage can be elected, but is still powerlessly beholden to the bureaucracy.

As a final note, in a sane society these remote Middle-Eastern squabbles should not have been a major issue in the domestic politics of various Western countries. But we are now well past that point in Europe.

The UK chose to get involved in this particular conflict a hundred years ago. Don't blame this on Muslim immigrants.

Why did Russia invade Ukraine? You see, in 862 AD, the East Slavs called upon the Varangian Rus to rule over them, choosing three brothers: Rurik, Sineus and Truvor.

As amusing as I find this, I believe that things that happened 100-140 years ago are still fairly relevant to us today, much more so than in medieval times. I think I've said as much before here, and I'd like to point to a comment made earlier this week about how we arguably haven't had enough time for the effects of the end of Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Act et. al to fully cash out.

100 years ago is not terribly long ago on the generational scale.

I was not trying to create any kind of general debate about the history of the conflict. I was only making a very narrow point: that "remote Middle-Eastern squabbles" have been causing political controversy in the UK since long before any significant Muslim immigration.

You'd think giving up the Empire would free you from having to deal with the squabbles. And yet.

And yet, despite visiting great injustice upon Muslim lands (freeing Greece, invading and occupying the Ottoman capital, ruling the numerical majority of the world’s Muslims from West Africa to India to Malaya, arguably giving Israel to the Jews) it was only after mass immigration started that things like this began happening domestically.

The fate of the newly liberated Arab lands after World War I was most certainly a political issue in the UK. There was much debate both among politicians and in the public. The British public was apparently very sympathetic due to the Arabs' contribution to the victory so official British support for Zionism was in fact very controversial, as was the Anglo-French partition and occupation. All this with the number of Muslims actually living in the UK being a rounding error.

It was a minor internal issue due to the longstanding Arabist sympathies of some upper class British in the foreign office, sure. But few of any people were getting killed about it in Britain, it wasn’t a civil conflict.

I'm not sure about the Swedes, but for the the British and the French I think a good part of it is in the national temperament. The British are legalists. They will only consider solutions to their predicament that paint inside the lines, even if the lines are so restrictive as to bind them from responding effectively to intimidation. While the French can be at any specific moment more or less accepting than the British, as a people if the wind changes they would be willing to take bolder actions. I can't ever imagine the British going for "repatriation" for any reason; from their perspective British citizens are all equal, period, and even permanent residents have rights and cannot be discriminated against directly. Any law to resolve these issues would have to be a carefully thought out meta-level law that doesn't single out anything in particular. But if the muslim population pushes the French the wrong way a couple more times, they might find these kind of solutions on the table. The French are willing to make object-level laws specifically against things they don't like, even if it's "unfair". See, law against the islamic veil. It's not going to stop youths from lashing out, but it might make more organized attempts at bullying the local population less attractive, as it tends to make the french hate muslims, not hold hands and sing "Don't Look Back In Anger" while decrying hatred in all its forms.

I think it's class-related. Many upper-class (mostly countryside) people I know are appalled by what's going on, but they will under no circumstances go into territory that is not what 'people like us' think. Nigel Farage is 'a horrid little man' and any negative talk about immigrants puts you risk of being 'one of those awful people' who wave flags and don't like foreigners. They are willing to get very upset about anti-semitism and Free Palestine marches, but they don't like discussing the causes of those phenomena if at all possible and any suggestions for solving it are absolutely verboten.

I should also note that there is a long-standing pride in Britain about never having a serious Fascist movement and people are very, very unwilling to go anywhere near the space of anti-immigrant sentiment. It's associated with skinheads, 'Go Home Paki' slogans, and English Defence League marchers spitting at innocent people who 'come over here and work jolly hard'. The only time it got remotely close to mainstream politics was Enoch Powell, who was a political outsider and (I'm told from someone sympathetic to his ideals who met him by chance) incredibly arrogant and unpleasant.

In short, it's true that Brits are legalistic but we're usually at least somewhat pragmatic. The main obstacle is deep, visceral, reflexive cringe to nationalist sentiment among the ruling classes.

EDIT: There is also strong suspicion of the native working classes among upper-class people of a certain age. English socialists did their level best to wipe out the upper and upper-middle classes in the 60s and 70s and at their height came quite close to succeeding. One of my relatives was spat on in the street for having the wrong (posh) accent.

I think it’s different. The French are at their core less racist but more hostile to Islam than the English or Germans, who care less about Islam but do often have to some extent a primal conception of their ethnos, even if this is subjugated to progressive modernity for now.

Around all but the most PC people in Britain, ‘English’ is a race. If you meet someone and tell someone else about it and they ask quietly ‘well, is he English?’ they are asking whether he is a native, not whether he grew up in England and has a British passport.

By contrast French in France does not only mean ethnic French, and in fact the Francophone wignats had to invent a specific term (‘Francais de souche’ ie ‘French of the [tree] trunk’) to refer to ethnic Frenchmen, a term by the way that even Le Pen explicitly disavowed. The same is true in Germany as in England, ‘ist er Deutsch’ would be understood by most Germans as an ethnic question, not one of nationality.

IIRC one of the main reasons the French granted the West African states independence was that they had full representation in the legislature, and their population was increasing so rapidly that the ethnic French deputies would be outnumbered/outvoted by the African deputies very soon.

Tail wagging the dog so to speak.

Wikipedia says otherwise.

In reality, the colonial areas had representation [in the Assembly of the Union,] but all power remained in the [Metropolitan] French Parliament and thus was centralized.

The French-language article provides some more detail (via Google Translate):

The Assembly of the French Union is consulted on projects or proposals by the National Assembly [(the lower house of the Metropolitan Parliament)], the French government or the associated states. It can transmit proposals to the National Assembly or the government but it does not adopt laws.

From my limited interactions with French people, the French seem to have an unshakeable faith in the superiority of French-ness that exceeds us Americans for national pride. French food (wine especially), French art, the French language, French architecture, French fashion, French philosophy, French culture overall is the pinnacle of human achievement. I wonder if this conviction drives French lack of patience for Islamic antics in a way that more oikophobic countries can't replicate.

That sentiment is real, but the lack of patience finds a more plausible source in our history. France is a very historically Catholic country and has fought itself extremely bitterly over the separation of church and state.

So on one hand you have a left wing that can't bear to sacrifice a hard fought win over the church, and on the other hand you have a right that's not keen to let a foreign religion get the upper hand. Aristide Briand and Charles Martel united in spirit, if you will.

So all that leaves in favor is the usual center-left pole of bleeding heart bourgeois that gets so much press around these parts. But that only gets you so far. Mélenchon has in the recent years tried to walk the tightrope of courting muslims, but I think the reaction to the Israel-Hamas war has made that too difficult for even him.

By contrast French in France does not only mean ethnic French, and in fact the Francophone wignats had to invent a specific term (‘Francais de souche’ ie ‘French of the [tree] trunk’) to refer to ethnic Frenchmen, a term by the way that even Le Pen explicitly disavowed.

I wonder if the Finnish term "kantasuomalainen" (means exactly the same expect for Finns, both etymologically and in meaning, expect commonly used even in liberal media with generally only the most committed anti-racists complaining) is a direct loan from French or if there's some other common linguistic ancestor from elsewhere.

Or possibly the French is a calque of the Finnish.

Zoom in a little. Muslim immigrants are not homogeneous. Persians might well be a net positive for their host countries. Pakistanis, in the aggregate, very much aren’t. Most other nationalities fall somewhere in between.

In the US, Persians definitely are a net positive.

Iranian brain drain selects for the talented and secular.

I wholly agree, and chose to make a weaker statement because I’m not familiar with the Persian diaspora outside the US.

It’s more about the class of immigrant. Compare American vs British Pakistanis and British vs German Turks.

American Pakistanis largely come from the upper-middle class, do well financially and are often relatively secular. The San Bernardino attack is the major Islamist attack perpetrated by Pakistani-Americans, but most of the others like the Boston Bombing and Pulse nightclub weren’t (afaik). British Pakistanis are much poorer and more religiously conservative because they almost all hail from the small rural city of Mirpur and the surrounding area of Azad Kashmir in Pakistan.

The same dynamic plays out with Turks between the UK (and US) and Germany. Anglosphere Turks are largely secularized middle class immigrants who - in Turkish elections - overwhelmingly vote for secular candidates. German Turks are descended from poor Anatolian peasant laborers, and overwhelmingly vote for the Islamist Erdogan.

It’s less about country of origin and more about class of origin when it comes to Muslim immigrants.

Anglosphere Turks are largely secularized middle class immigrants who - in Turkish elections - overwhelmingly vote for secular candidates. German Turks are descended from poor Anatolian peasant laborers, and overwhelmingly vote for the Islamist Erdogan.

And all are actually ethnic Greeks.

It’s surely more accurate to say that Greeks are either Slavs or ethnic Turks, as @Pasha suggested last week.

That’s not what I was suggesting. I was suggesting Greeks are culturally and politically Balkan/Anatolian people pretending to be Western Europeans.

Ethnically the comment above has a point in that when you get down to it people of Turkey are not very ethnically Turkic. It’s more accurate to say some locals of Anatolia and balkan converted to Islam and admixed with genetically small amounts of steppe ancestry. They didn’t even necessarily speak Turkish. Then they found their way to modern Turkey either during the many population transfers of Ottoman administration or through the ethnic cleansings of the modern era (for every Turks ethnically cleansed this and that peoples story, there is usually a comparable group of Muslims being ethnically cleansed into Anatolia around the same time. Balkan and Caucasus didn’t end up so homogenous by accident).

So yeah, if you have a Quick Look at higher echelons of secular Turkish society it’s typical to find more white/slav/caucusus/greek ancestry people as they always had a more secular culture. Atatürk himself was a blond blue eyes army officer whose family was ethically cleansed from Macedonia and Thessaloniki. That doesn’t make them any less Turkish

It’s not much actual Turkic ancestry. My understanding is that there is a huge genetic overlap between the Balkans, Greece, and Turkey, and the latter two try to pretend otherwise.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8433500/

I don’t think it makes a big difference. After 9/11 and 7/7 there were a huge number of commentators lauding the French approach of laicite, saying that the French handled Muslim assimilation much better than the Anglos, who had not only invaded Iraq but had clearly done something wrong to be subject to terrorist attacks domestically too.

Then, just a few years later, France became the epicenter of Islamist terrorism in Europe with the Charlie Hebdo attack, the 2015 Paris attacks, the 2016 Nice attack, the Toulouse attack on a Jewish school, the teacher beheading, the priest almost-beheading and so on. Of course, both the US and UK also saw Islamist terror attacks including the Pulse club, the Ariana Grande concert and so on, but France has had both a higher number of incidents and a much higher casualty count. Then, if people remember 2016, the Anglo-American approach of live and let live was widely lauded (especially by the center-left in France, which is pretty rare), whereas the French, who had supposedly discriminated against and annoyed their Muslim population, were criticized for stoking social tensions with burqa bans and tolerating ‘hate speech’ with Charlie Hebdo’s trolling that would have been banned in the UK and would simply not have been published by a mainstream publication in the US.

It doesn’t seem like the approach to assimilation really matters, unless you go Full Xinjiang.

(By the way, while France has a proportionally larger Muslim populations I don’t think it’s “more radicalized”. Some Arab French are radicalized, but the intermarriage rate is much higher, as is the percentage (iirc) who drink. There are millions of entirely secularized French Maghrebis, whereas most British Pakistanis and Bangladeshis remain socially conservative and pretty insular.)

For what it's worth, I think the French approach is less of a failure than the Anglo one, even if it evidently is a failure.

We have, in our country, a large contingent of well integrated immigrants and children of immigrants, people who have so adopted the values of the Republic that a lot of them are actually joining political parties that are most radical in opposing islamism.

Forcing the issue of integration has radicalized both those that would and those that wouldn't integrate, which makes the problem a lot more visible than the multicultural approach where multilateral tact is the rule.

Neither approach has managed to prevent the problem, owing I think mostly to the size of the flow, but I think the more forceful approach is less vulnerable to a complete dissolution of values. France will endure even if the ethnic French do not, this is not something I can say about England.

France will endure even if the ethnic French do not

Inch'Allah! So far, it has always been that way, but islam(ism) has shown not only a great resistance to assimilation, but an ability to counter-assimilate parts of the population.

AFAIK immigration in France has only become a hot topic because of immigrants mainly being Muslims. Nobody I know seems to worry about any negative impact from non-muslim immigrants (with the notable exception of Roms from Eastern Europe).

Inch'Allah! So far, it has always been that way, but islam(ism) has shown not only a great resistance to assimilation, but an ability to counter-assimilate parts of the population.

Not according to this, at least.

While there are many reasons for overinflated estimates of religious minority population sizes, several key factors contribute to this overestimation. First of all, any projections like that vastly underestimate intergenerational attrition of religious affiliation and simply assume that all immigrants from Muslim-majority countries and their descendants are Muslim and are going to remain Muslim. However, in the particular case of France, such an assumption doesn’t even remotely reflect reality. For example, North Africa is the most common region of origin for French Muslims. However, only 64% of the descendants of immigrants from Algeria and 65% of descendants of immigrants from Morocco and Tunisia currently identify as Muslim (INSEE, 2023b, Figure 2). Moreover, the survey also found that religiosity declines over time even among those who remain Muslim (INSEE, 2023b, Figure 4).

However, only 64% of the descendants of immigrants from Algeria and 65% of descendants of immigrants from Morocco and Tunisia currently identify as Muslim.

Surely this is either (a) because pieds-noirs (ie colonial white French who settled in North Africa and returned after / during independence) are included and/or (b) because almost the entire Christian and Jewish population of Francophone North Africa decamped to France at the same time?

I checked the source and the numbers, for example, for descendants of Algerians are 32 % no religion - 3 % Catholic - 1 % Other Christian - 64 % Muslim. If pieds-noirs were included I daresay there would be at least double numbers rate of Catholics.

Define "descendents of". If it includes people with X% Muslim ancestry, we should only expect X% of that subgroup to identify as Muslims. If greater than X% do, then Islam is actually growing among that subgroup even though X is less than 100.

I think the difference is that the great majority of immigration to France (certainly ex-EU immigration) has been Islamic, whereas Britain has seen a great deal of immigrants from other places like India’s Hindu and Sikh communities, China, Nigeria’s Igbos and so on. Most black African immigrants to France are from the French-speaking Muslim Sahel, most to Britain are from Christian West Africa and the largely-Christian Caribbean. What you describe has therefore resulted in the same splitting of immigrant communities, but it just happened between groups rather than within them. Muslims (be they black, Arab or South Asian) vote for and join Labour, while Hindus, Jews and Chinese vote for and increasingly join the Conservatives. Black Caribbean voters are still a core Labour constituency, although Christian Africans are more diverse and several prominent Tory MPs including the Home Secretary (interior minister) and business secretary are black African.

In France the conception is therefore more binary. There is a native French bloc, a few largely irrelevant tradcaths and a Muslim bloc, and so Muslims who assimilate essentially ‘become’ French in the Napoleonic way, having abandoned their previous identity largely. In Britain, it’s more multilateral, with the growing number of senior Indian conservatives like Sunak, Patel, Braverman and so on often perceived as more hostile to Muslims and a Labour Party increasingly reliant on both the Muslim vote and the arguably substantially ‘Islamophobic’ native working class.

France will endure even if the ethnic French do not

This is self-contradictory. What is France if not the home of the ethnic French? Is it just an economic/geopolitical administrative zone? What are “the values of the Republic” and why is the existence of an Arab country 150 years from now which pays lip service to those supposed values something worth preserving?

I guess you're not French, so you don't understand the specificity of French nationalism.

Unlike, say, the German nation which is ostensibly based on blood, the French nation acquired, through our sustained political troubles, a distinctly ideological, cultural and linguistic character.

An ethnic Frenchman who is unable to quote from Molière, Voltaire, etc; or doesn't speak French, or speaks it with a weird accent would very ostensibly be regarded as not or less French than a sub-saharan African who can do this.

And while in other places you may regard this as left wing subversive nonsense, this is actually true here.

Consider for instance the case of Charles Maurras, one of the towering figures of the French far right, someone who is more worthy of the title of nationalist than anyone, and one of our more notorious antisemites, whose only real problem with Jews had been and remained their cultural integration, and nothing else.

The French do not care much for blood. Though one must recognize that genetics are a real thing that plays a real part in shaping who we are, it is not a part of our national conception and hasn't been so for a very long time.

This has puzzled Anglo-americans numerous times, such as when we won the FIFA World Cup and some of your pundits found proper to opine that "Africa won" because a lot of the team was ethnically African, and our Ambassador had to write a letter to request that you stop trying to force your weird Anglo race obsessions on us. Or the oft remarked upon fact that ethnic statistics are illegal to produce here as they're regarded as means to sow division, which seems nonsensical to Anglo outsiders, but makes perfect sense from within.

What are “the values of the Republic”

This is too vast a topic for me to give a succinct answer, but I will say that when I say this I mean a lot more than the mere organization or even civic religion of a political entity. Frenchness is down to even small habits of character and weird quirks that are acquired culturally such as our simultaneous interest and detachment with philosophy, our gastronomic tastes or the outsized amount of prestige rendered upon literature.

An ethnic Frenchman who is unable to quote from Molière, Voltaire, etc; or doesn't speak French, or speaks it with a weird accent would very ostensibly be regarded as not or less French than a sub-saharan African who can do this.

Aujourd’hui j’ai appris que je suis plus francaise que la grande majorite des habitants de France metropolitaine, meme si je n’y suis jamais allee.

Comme le disait Don Juan de Moliere: «Non, non, la naissance n'est rien ou la vertu n'est pas. Aussi nous n'avons part a la gloire de nos ancetres, qu'autant que nous nous efforcons de leur ressembler»

And while in other places you may regard this as left wing subversive nonsense, this is actually true here.

Or perhaps it's just old left wing subversive nonsense? Now French 'conservatives' herald this old subversive nonsense as the ideology they are nostalgic about, while calling 'reactionaries' or 'ultra-mecha-final-form far-right' those calling it left wing nonsense.

This has puzzled Anglo-americans numerous times, such as when we won the FIFA World Cup and some of your pundits found proper to opine that "Africa won" because a lot of the team was ethnically African, and our Ambassador had to write a letter to request that you stop trying to force your weird Anglo race obsessions on us.

That was a cope.

The French do not care much for blood.

That type of French does not seem to be reproducing much.

An ethnic Frenchman who is unable to quote from Molière, Voltaire, etc; or doesn't speak French, or speaks it with a weird accent would very ostensibly be regarded as not or less French than a sub-saharan African who can do this.

Who can quote Voltaire ?

“The Jews are an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred for every people by whom they are tolerated and enriched.”

That'd probably get you jailed, better not try it.

Why not the Bible? In Latin? French people used to be Catholic.

Most foreigners who care about the so-called 'French culture' don't seem to really care about the modern, left-wing stuff in my experience. Tourists come for Versailles, Le Louvre, Notre Dame... Perhaps they are interested in Napoleon's achievements.

Nobody's buying a 'French' brand of globohomo that they can get straight from the tap almost anywhere now.

The biggest cultural achievement of the 'values of the Republic' seems to be convincing a large share of the French people that they are a significant human achievement, better than their competitors, worth preserving and expanding the world over. But not by breeding. Just writing strongly worded letters about their 'diverse' sports teams.

White, mainstream French people likely have the highest fertility rate of any secular whites in western Europe. Yes, the Faroese and laestadians and Dutch Calvinists and tradcaths are all higher, but secular mainstream French probably have a higher tfr than any other secular mainstream group in Western Europe.

Who can quote Voltaire ?

I'd imagine a good 1/4+ of people here could quote at least two things from Voltaire off the top of their head.

That bit about the last king being strangled with the entrails of the last priest; was that him or Robespierre?

More comments

You seem to be under the strange impression that these things, Napoleon, the Ancien Régime, la fille aînée de l'Eglise, that these are somehow separate from the Republic and the Nation, that these achievements, good and bad, are not part of an unbroken through-line that is entirely recognized as our patrimony.

Napoléon c'est la France, Robespierre c'est la France, Louis c'est la France, Gambetta c'est la France, Maurras c'est la France, la Commune c'est la France.

One can deplore the sorry state of our country and how much we have erred over the centuries or in recent times, but even the ultra-mecha-final-form far-right would immediately detect a silly American infiltrator in one that would deny this proposition. The best you'll get is people saying the continuation of the ethnic French stock is necessary for the continuation of the French culture, and I don't even disagree with this, but no self respecting Frenchman would deny Alexandre Dumas nationhood.

And to get back to the original point, I don't think we should take lessons on solutions from people who haven't solved the problem either.

You seem to be under the strange impression that these things, Napoleon, the Ancien Régime, la fille aînée de l'Eglise, that these are somehow separate from the Republic and the Nation

They necessarily are, considering the Republic and the Nation came much later and are killing these other things.

Napoléon c'est la France, Robespierre c'est la France, Louis c'est la France, Gambetta c'est la France, Maurras c'est la France, la Commune c'est la France.

Not really. Why not add the soccer team to that? Or Vichy? Or Algeria? Somehow Vichy which gave current France its retirement system is not 'la France'. Nicely played!

You can't have both absolute monarchy and republic at the same time, for example.

If you're going to include everything and anything into your patriotism, why restrict yourself to some arbitrary borders from a thousand years ago or so? At least the early French saw themselves as people of God, in communion with a greater Christian community, from Rome to Byzantium.

The best you'll get is people saying the continuation of the ethnic French stock is necessary for the continuation of the French culture, and I don't even disagree with this

Why are you so triumphant about a culture that is sterilizing that very people then?

but no self respecting Frenchman would deny Alexandre Dumas nationhood.

Do you include the millions of Frenchmen that lived and died before Alexandre Dumas ever wrote a word?

More comments

Wow, I had no idea you were French. This is coming straight out of left bank, so to speak. Do you live now in UK or US?

I travel quite a lot which is the supreme irony of my life: I'm a truly cosmopolitan chauvinist.

Did the ambassador check whether the soccer team could quote Moliere and Voltaire before he wrote his letter? If he really thinks that you have to assimilate to be French then he should have. If not then in practice you he just believes that everyone with French citizenship is French which is the same as every western country.

I'm fairly sure most of them were force marched through Candide as schoolboys, same as I was, so he didn't really have to.

But if you think the social stigma I'm describing isn't real, you need only take a look at the humiliation Frédéric Lefebvre suffered for saying in a interview that his favorite book was "Zadig et Voltaire" confusing the name of the book with that of a fancy clothing brand.

France is a country where politicians have to get books ghostwritten if they want to be taken seriously. I'm not saying we're all scholars or anything, but culture is something we take very seriously.

The French do not care much for blood. Though one must recognize that genetics are a real thing that plays a real part in shaping who we are, it is not a part of our national conception at this time.

Buddy, this is the same stuff I’ve heard about “what it is to be an American” my entire life. It’s as fake and subversive here as it is in France. If a country has no genetic/ancestral continuity with its founding population, it is a completely new and fundamentally different entity. Just because you’ve been psyopped into believing it, doesn’t mean it’s “true”.

I’m not saying that France should not allow anyone to live here who is not 100% ancestrally French. (And I’m well aware of the complicated nature of what “ancestrally French” means.) But “becoming” French should mean, at a bare minimum, being married to an ethnically French person, having a child with at least two ethnically-French grandparents, and changing one’s name (given name and surname!) to a historically French name. This, of course, means that few if any Arab individuals living in your country are currently French; perhaps they will become French if they truly and sincerely want to be - or at least their children will - but it’s going to take a hell of a lot more effort than what’s being undertaken right now.

But “becoming” French should mean, at a bare minimum, being married to an ethnically French person, having a child with at least two ethnically-French grandparents, and changing one’s name (given name and surname!) to a historically French name.

Français par le sang verse seems like a reasonable additional alternative.

Just because you’ve been psyopped into believing it, doesn’t mean it’s “true”.

The problem with the view that ethno-nationalism is "truer" than civic nationalism is that French ethnogenesis is something that actually happened. The France of Louis XIV was a dynastic-religious state where elites had to speak French in order to communicate with the Court, but Louis didn't care what his Breton, Norman, Gascon etc. subjects spoke or identified as as long as they paid their taxes and were good Catholics. The France of Emmanuel Macron is a nation-state where everyone (except unassimilated immigrants) speaks French and identifies as French. This change happened because someone (mostly Napoleon) made it happen.

And the way it was done was the way IGI-111 says it was done, which is why IGI-111 thinks about his Frenchness in the way he does.

The same process happened in the US and other Western countries. German or Japanese immigrants had to learn to integrate one way or another. There aren't many French speakers left from the old Louisiana purchase either.

The France of Emmanuel Macron is a nation-state where everyone (except unassimilated immigrants) speaks French and identifies as French. This change happened because someone (mostly Napoleon) made it happen.

That France is only a couple centuries old, and it's riding on the coattails of a much more glorious past. What are the achievements of Democratic France? Colonizing sub-Saharan Africa? Getting colonized by America?

It may be that that process is currently slowing down, as much like Louis XVI, French (prospective) teachers have to first think about 'keeping' their head on their shoulders before too aggressively pushing for cultural changes.

It’s cultural nationalism. I think that allowing mass migration from Africa and the Arab world is a bad move, no matter how well assimilated they become, but many black Frenchmen speak French with a Parisian accent(eww), cook French food, raise their children to believe in the values of the French Republic, etc. It does not seem unreasonable to call them French, and nearly everyone else who’s culturally French agrees that they are.

Yes, I understand that French people at this time generally believe that. I simply believe they’re wrong and that their naïvety about this issue is creating a ticking time-bomb.

this is the same stuff I’ve heard about “what it is to be an American” my entire life

I know, propositional nation and all that, and in part you've inherited this from us and not England (Tocqueville talked about this). But it's also more true in France than it ever was in the United States.

We really really really don't give a shit about race compared to Americans. And we very much care about culture. The French have a reputation for being racists, but it's inaccurate, we're just extremely convinced of the primacy of our own culture, and the rest is accessory.

To give you an idea, even a whiff of something like your university race quotas would be a government shattering scandal over here. It's one of many cultural differences, much like we give zero shits about sexual impropriety whilst you regard it as a career ender.

But “becoming” French should mean

Yeah I think we're in charge of deciding what we are and what our own criterions for group affiliation are, thank you very much. We've hated the Germans longer than your nation has even existed over this particular thing.

it’s going to take a hell of a lot more effort than what’s being undertaken right now

That much is evident.

But the objections even at the furthest right never are about the genetic makeup of these people, it's that they, sacrilegiously, do not regard themselves as French and do not behave like Frenchmen. It (almost) never has anything to do with their ancestry.

The thing is, if you believe that culture is downstream of citizens' personalities and proclivities (which I think it must be) and that those proclivities are at least somewhat genetic in origin, you run a real risk that a change in ethnicity will ultimately result in the death of the culture.

We really really really don't give a shit about race compared to Americans.

If you find the time, would you care to talk a bit about the Dreyfus Affair? I'm quite curious about how it's interpreted in modern France.

More comments

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats