I'm not saying that "woke American ideas" would be a solution, but France somehow manages to be even worse at handling its societal divisions than America. The US has the American dream - something which is and has always been completely disconnected from reality, but at least it gives people hope. What does France have? Laïcité for thee but not for me, an extremely centralist state and an elitist political and cultural class that refuses to acknowledge that discrimination exists. No wonder that France has a massive radicalization problem. If you create a class of people that are consistently discriminated against and yelled at every day from all sides about how they don't belong there and how it's impossible for them to ever integrate, well of course they're gonna get angry and some of them will turn into extremists.
It's an excellent example of magical thinking, really. It's as if waving a wand and punishing people for speaking Occitan (as it was in the past) or wearing a hijab (as it is now) will suddenly turn a deeply fractured country into France une et indivisible.
Honestly, after seeing a magazine publish an article where some old white guy fantasized about selling a black politician into slavery, I've been convinced that American SJWism can't be worse than whatever is happening in France now.
It's instructive to note that British Muslims largely hail from places that are far more "conservative" than the ancestral homes of French Muslims (Pakistan as opposed to the Maghreb), and yet Muslims are thoroughly integrated into British society while they remain perpetually on the margins of French society. French might argue that this is because these outsiders are unworthy of their superior culture or that they have some kind of special respect for human dignity, but all of the rest of us can see this for what it is. Credulous foreigners will accept anything if you dress it up as anti-Americanism, as you can see in the moronic statement immediately above this one, as if France is not already "broken apart".
A comment posted on the LRB blog a few months ago is indicative of the French form of racism:
Also as it happens, after moving from the UK to the US and living there for many years (where I taught feminist theory among other things), I moved to France and am now a French citizen. I can certainly testify to the knee-jerk anti-Americanism of many French academics (whatever their politics), and also to the conviction that 'becoming French' requires rejecting your former culture - that French culture is a precious gift bestowed on the deserving but benighted immigrant. Anecdotally, I recall having an argument some time ago with one of the people who signed the Manifesto of 100, who was convinced that living in France meant recognizing that French culture and values were superior and superseded everything else. (This was in the context of a government proposal to offer Arabic classes in the schools, which he vehemently opposed.) But when I said that I didn't see why I should reject Shakespeare and Purcell, or for that matter the Beatles and Martin Amis, he was quite taken aback - he knew perfectly well that he was arguing with a white 'Anglo-Saxon', but his entire position presupposed that the newly French person was Arab, African, or from some other place with no 'culture' to speak of. A purely colonial attitude, as Raul Zweiregen points out. He literally had no answer to my objection, since he knew perfectly well that he couldn't say 'Oh, but I didn't mean you' without exposing himself as a hypocrite.
https://blog.lrb.co.uk/blog/2020/november/the-fish-rots-from-the-head
It is not enough that France has already colonized these places; the minds of their people must remain colonized forever.
I remember someone once said to me the difference between the British and French empires is that the British wanted to colonise land whilst the French wanted to colonise minds. The French wanted to erase all the cultures of the lands they colonised and make the people French, whilst the British didn’t really care what people did as long as they paid their taxes - that’s obviously a simplification, but it serves to explain the differences that immigrants in both countries experience.
Though to be fair Britain has had its fair share of Islamic extremists.
