Liberty Bell me manda el link a un artículo sobre la caída de Francia. Según el autor, de seguir el modelo “multiculturalista” y la inmigración masiva desde países musulmanes, básicamente se manejan dos escenarios:
- la progresiva conversión de Francia en un estado islamita
- la balcanización del país
El artículo sostiene que esto se daría no tanto por la fortaleza de los oponentes sino por la debilidad de occidente.
Desde mi punto de vista, aún si continua el volumen actual de inmigrantes de origen islámico a Francia y a Europa, no está escrito que la situación debe terminar así necesariamente.
Creo que lo mejor que le puede pasar a un inmigrante es asimilarse cuanto antes. Esto no implica dejar de lado su identidad, pero si aceptar los valores de la sociedad que los recibe. ¿Estamos diciendo que los inmigrantes de origen musulmán no son capaces de hacerlo? ¿O, lo que es peor, que Occidente es incapaz de asimilar a personas de esa cultura?
Todo un tema, ¿el Islam, como cultura, es incompatible con la modernidad o se puede ser parte de Islam y abrazar los valores occidentales al mismo tiempo?
Tal vez ese destino sea inevitable si no se avanza con reformas promercado en países como Francia. Sería interesante considerar qué pasaría con los inmigrantes, musulmanes o no, si en lugar de ser marginados tuvieran acceso a puestos de trabajo y a la ciudadanía de sus países anfitriones.
hola luis
ReplyDeletedesde hace un tiempo publicas comentarios sobre francia, muy atinados, etc...
yo vivo en francia desde hace un tiempo y tengo una vision bastante amplia, (argentino que crecio en un ambiente anglophono, madre irlandesa)es decir una buena mezcla como casi todos nosotros.
esto viene a cuento de que me parece las simplificaciones, generalizaciones, querer definir un pais en treinta lineas (en los articulos comentando la actualidad francesa)son siempre peligrosas.
vivo aca decia, y no me parece que la cosa sea tan como la cuentan...
como no se escribir te copio dos articulos del 2003, de cuando francia estaba en la picota
(mucha agua ha pasado bajo el puente, mas de uno debiera ponerse colorado) para ilustran lo que por lo menos yo siento viviendo aca (en avignon)
time is a kind friend, el tiempo pondra la actualidad francesa en perspectiva, y veremos si sobrevivimos al iceberg
un abrazo, muy bueno el blog!
los articulos son del Independent de londres
perdon por la falta de acentos
The French should be heard, not vilified
An argument between allies has been turned into a parody of the worst kind of dirty US primary campaign
By John Lichfield
12 February 2003
It's better to be a "cheese-eating surrender monkey" than a "peanut-butter scoffing, gun-totin', thousand-pound gorilla".
That is the problem with insults. They immobilise rational argument; they force you to respond with insults. The buckets of foul invective poured over the French – "surrender monkeys", "wimps", "rats", "weasels" – in the American and British press in recent days are no longer a distraction from the problem of the Iraqi crisis. They are the problem.
The insults may have been carried to inventive heights by the American right-wing, but they began with the US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and his jibe against "old Europe". What could have been a political and diplomatic argument between allies – with some right on both sides – has been turned into a parody of the worst kind of dirty US primary campaign. Opponents are not just opposed, they are vilified; they are destroyed by association with straw villains (in France and Germany's case, anti-Semitism and Nazism).
This is not the sole reason why France will refuse to toe the American line in the UN security council next week – but it is one of the reasons. President Jacques Chirac seemed to many observers to be leaving his options open last week. No longer. It would now be politically suicidal for him to seem to bow to the will of the US – a country that, in the name of democracy, refuses to tolerate dissent among its friends.
The transatlantic alliance is threatened with collapse not because three countries (France, Germany and Belgium) refuse to go along with America's war planning. There have been more fundamental disagreements in Nato, such as De Gaulle's defection from the military wing in the 1960s. And yet this is clearly the most terrible row in Nato's history. The alliance is in danger because the temperature of the argument has been deliberately raised to a destructive level.
It did not have to be so. Just take a step back a moment.
The US believes that, after 12 years of procrastination, Saddam Hussein must be stripped of his weapons of mass destruction immediately, by armed intervention. Washington argues, with some reason, that United Nations weapons inspections have been tried and have failed, and that Iraq can never be trusted while Saddam is in power. France believes that Saddam should be disarmed but that there is no overriding case to justify a war that could kill thousands of innocent people and compound the terrorism-breeding hatred of the West in the Islamic world.
The majority of European Union and Nato governments agree with the United States. Does that put France out on some cynical, self-serving, cowardly, anti-Semitic, cheese-eating limb? Hardly.
The French viewpoint is shared by the vast majority of public opinion in all European countries, including Britain. It is endorsed by the majority on the UN Security Council. It is shared, almost word for word, by the Secretary General of the UN, Kofi Annan. It is even accepted by 40 to 50 per cent of public opinion in the US itself. The French may be wrong. They may be right. The point is that they have a rational and valid argument, which deserves to be heard, not vilified.
Behind, the immediate arguments over Iraq, France has deeper concerns – about the US. It may be true that, as a judge of America, France is an unreliable witness, or at least a persistent critic. It may be that France has selfish reasons (as a permanent member of the Security Council) to wish to preserve the post-war consensus that the United Nations is the best guarantor of semi-civilised behaviour.
However, it is not the French alone who have been – or should be – alarmed by the "Dubya doctrine" of America's proper role in the world post-11 September. President Bush does not argue that might is right. He argues that America has overwhelming might and that it is always right, because it is America. If the UN Security Council is to survive at all, it must survive in the post 9/11 world, as a kind of international supreme soviet, whose duty is to endorse the American view. Ditto Nato.
You do not have to be an Americophobe (I lived in the US happily for five years; my son has an American passport) to find this approach scary. I believe that many people in America also find it scary. I believe that the British Government finds it just as scary as the French. The vicious moral absolutism of the attacks on friendly opponents proves how scary it is.
Tony Blair seems to believe that the best way to control the gun-totin' thousand-pound gorilla is to ride on its back. The French have tried coaxing and distracting the gorilla. Neither approach has worked. Nato lies in ruins. The UN may be next. And the war has not even started yet.
Our Man In Paris: It's all about the cheese
By John Lichfield
17 February 2003
A grateful transatlantic reader writes: "You limey saddo. Who gives a shit about your dreary little island and what you hypocrites think..." Such is, broadly, the tone of several e-messages that I received from the United States after I defended France's right to have its own opinion on Iraq. There have also been nastier ones and many intelligent ones, on both sides of the argument. However, the nastiest blow of all was landed by the far- right American propagandist who wrote a column that dismissed the French as "cheese-eating surrender monkeys". When I read that phrase, I knew that the arguments had gone beyond Iraq or Saddam Hussein or oil or terrorism or George Bush's re-election. We had entered a transatlantic clash of civilisations, and I was on the side of the cheese-eaters.
There are many similarities between France and the US, which explains why the two countries love to hate each other so much. Both are large, empty countries, founded on abstract principles. Both believe that they have universal lessons to teach the world.
There are also profound differences between the two countries, and those differences are symbolised by cheese. In its (roughly) 800 years of existence as a nation, France has generated 176 different kinds of cheese. (Charles de Gaulle put the figure at 258 and said that it was impossible to govern a country with so many; Gérard Poulard, France's foremost cheese-waiter, says that there are more than 1,000, if you count all the varieties of one-farm goat cheeses.) The US, in its more than 200 years of existence, has developed only 24 kinds of cheese. One of them – the most common – is called "American Cheese".
The website Cheese.com reports: "American Cheese is smooth, with light, yellow or orange color. The cheese is usually cut into square slices and it does not separate when melted. It has a mild taste."
Iraq, as befits a totalitarian country, has only one kind of cheese: meira. Cheese.com says: "Meira is made of sheep's milk. The curds are cut into strips and matured in a sheepskin bag for six up to 12 months." It sounds as if it should be listed among Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
The US is a country that believes passionately in freedom, ingenuity and free enterprise. It has produced only two dozen kinds of cheese (some of which are excellent copies of French and British cheeses). However, if you walk into any American supermarket, you will see that the US has produced more than 50 kinds of peanut butter. They all taste the same but they have radically different labels.
France is a country that is overtaxed and over-administered by a suffocating bureaucracy. It has somehow managed to create 176 (or 258 or 1,000) different kinds of cheese, all of which are subtly different from one another. A lait cru (raw milk) camembert, eaten at just the right moment (when there is only a thin layer of dry cheese in the centre) is one of the great achievements of humanity. Ditto roquefort; and St-Nectaire; and cantal; and chaource; and so on and on (and on).
According to the Wall Street Journal book of political and economic orthodoxy, the American Way produces enterprise, variety and choice. The French Way produces stultification. Cheese defies that ideology. No wonder that cheese-eating is a term of insult for American right-wingers.
If we are being offered a choice between a cheese-eating civilisation and a peanut-butter-eating civilisation, I am with the cheese-eaters. Post-September 11, US politics – and even US journalism – seems to be going the way of peanut butter. There is room for endless freedom of choice between labels. The contents of the ideas are not allowed to vary.
America – the real America – is not just a peanut-butter civilisation, though. Figures produced by the US Department of Agriculture point to a subversive, and extremely encouraging, fact. The number of card-carrying cheese-eaters in the US is growing sharply. Americans now consume almost 13kg of cheese per person per year (half as much as the French, but 50 per cent more than the British). French cheese-consumption is growing gently. Unpatriotic American cheese-eating has doubled in the past 25 years.
Christian, Muchas gracias por tu comentario. Espero sinceramente que Occidente reaccione a tiempo. Pero todo esto me hace acordar mucho a las gloriosas épocas del "better red than dead", cuando millones de personas en Occidente consideraban que no valía la pena defender la libertad y los derechos individuales ante la amenaza del colectivismo soviético.
ReplyDeleteI seldom leave comments on blogs, but the ideas really rocks, also I have a few questions like to ask, what's your contact details?
ReplyDelete-Johnson