Re: Like I've said before, Europe is America in the 1960s.
Well, not quite. For all the immigrant/ghetto youths' anger at French society, 2006 France is not 1956 Eisenhower America! You don't have signs that read "blacks and colored served in rear" in Marseille's cafés... White Frenchmen don't picket schools and universities to protest the admittance of black and arab students. So, France's starting point is somewhat higher up on the scale of segregation/racism --much higher than Jim Crow, anyway. That said, political/social/cultural aspirations of minorities in 2006 are also much, much higher than those of African-Americans in the 1960s --just as are those of today's Latino immigrants:
4. Unlike the immigrants of old, who bade farewell to their native lands forever, millions of Mexicans have no desire to learn English or become U.S. citizens. America is not their home; they are here to earn money. They remain proud Mexicans. Rather than assimilate, they create their own radio and TV stations, newspapers, films, and magazines. They are becoming a nation within a nation.
5. These waves of Mexican immigrants are also arriving in a different America than did the old immigrants. A belief in racial rights and ethnic entitlements has taken root among America’s minorities and liberal elites. Today, ethnic enclaves are encouraged and ethnic chauvinism is rife in the barrios. Anyone quoting Calvin Coolidge’s declaration that “America must remain American” today would be charged with a hate crime.
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Excerpted from:
taemag.com
As I said, what (white) Europeans failed to grasp is that colonialism and its evils is not a political regime that belongs to a bygone space-time, that could only happen over there, in faraway colonies.... Most, if not all, Europeans conceive of colonialism as an historically dated aberration that resulted mainly from the fact that white settlers were a minority (in Congo, Algeria, Indochina, India,...) and that the exploitation of the colonies' riches was labor-intensive (cash crops, goldmines, rubber,...). Hence the need for a few Europeans to lord it over teeming masses of swarthy drudges.
But the whole sorry affair of colonialism is now settled and over: after a worldwide wave of independence wars in the 1950s and 1960s, Europe's colonial empires were dismantled and their former colonies granted freedom and political sovereignty... So, Europeans' reasoning goes, how on earth could colonialism rear its ugly head again in Europe proper?!? The cradle of human rights! The soft power and antithesis of the American bully! And yet, it does... as Europe's metropolises, through swelling waves of nonwhite immigration, are gradually morphing into the Leopoldvilles, Saigons, Algiers and Stanleyvilles of yore....
Americans face a similar challenge today since they, too, deny that the US could behave like a colonial empire --abroad. Algeria?! Oh no! We, Americans, are not like the French... we don't intend to "colonize" Iraq... we don't plan to settle over there! We're on a short-term mission to mop up evildoers, enforce a regime change and... away we go!
Gus |
