November 19, 2021 - 2:15pm
For months, exasperated Parisians have waged an online battle against City Hall under the hashtag #saccageparis (#wreckingparis). They complain, with telling pictures, that under Socialist Mayor Anne Hidalgo the city has become a hell of concrete bollards, unswept streets, entire squares given up to crack addicts and dealers, overflowing rubbish bins, massacred street furniture (including decapitated or even sawn-off historic lamp posts on Place de la Concorde), dried-up crabgrass in untended parks, street lights held together by duct tape and concrete blocks, over one thousand trees torn off every year, and much more.
The most recent voice condemning the sorry state of the City of Lights has come from an unlikely corner. “Paris has become an unbearable rubbish-bin,” thundered the star television presenter and personal friend of Brigitte and Emmanuel Macron, Stéphane Bern, in an interview to the most-read Parisian tabloid, Le Parisien, announcing that he was leaving the city for good.
It takes a lot to lose Stéphane Bern, France’s most emollient, twinkly-eyed, gently loquacious celebrity host. He is equally at ease chronicling the sentimental travails of Prince Albert and Princess Charlene of Monaco, or retracing the costly parties and art-purchasing of Gilded Age American robber barons in his peak-rated “Secrets d’Histoire” documentaries (full disclosure: I took part in one in 2013). Bern, 58, has perfected a kind of smiling, ideal-son-in-law personality. In short, there is no-one more agreeable in France.
Curiously, Bern’s television fame and passion for popular history has much in common with the abrasive, controversial would-be presidential candidate Éric Zemmour, 62. Both are the sons of displaced Jewish families (French-Algerian for Zemmour, Polish for Bern); both are self-taught historians (Zemmour flunked the examination to the elite government school ENA; Bern flunked entrance into Sciences-Po). And both believe in the very French notion of “assimilation”, versus “integration”: it’s Bern who says (to the Left-wing daily Libération in 2016):
(Where Zemmour wants to send them back, Bern believes that immigrants could help revive depopulated French regions.)
In many ways, this latest controversy illustrates the battle for the soul of France. Both Bern and Zemmour have for France, her history and her heritage, the misty-eyed love of a Joseph Roth, the Galician exile, for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They both reject what the French call the Anglo-Saxon model in which identity politics reigns supreme.
Both are hugely popular in France, a country whose best-loved personalities have for decades regularly been headed by similar French figures: the tennis player Yannick Noah, the popular singer Jean-Jacques Goldman, the former Justice minister, European Parliament president and Auschwitz survivor Simone Veil; the actor Omar Sy.
Éric Zemmour is speaking tonight to the French of London, officially on a book tour; in reality seeking approval (and funds) for his almost certain presidential run. Bern will not vote for him. But it is ironic that the object of #saccageparis’s ire, the woman who booted Stéphane Bern out of Paris, the Spanish-born Mayor Hidalgo, is another of those French citizens who thank the Republic for having given their refugee parents shelter; and themselves their best life. Yet above all else, what is clear is that, as Zemmour’s latest book’s title proclaims, “France Hasn’t Yet Said Her Last Word”.
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Subscribe“Where Zemmour wants to send them back, Bern believes that immigrants could help revive depopulated French regions.”
This sentence makes it easy to pick: Zemmour over Bern every time! Messr. Bern is deluding himself if he thinks that “immigrants” will do anything but harm France.
Now let’s look at the world “immigrants“ and how it is used here, really in many places. When the word “immigrant” is used, are we referring to a Swedish chef who opens a restaurant in Paris? Are we referring to an Austrian tech worker who moves to Lille? I think not. Given that the EU permits freedom of movement–within the bloc–it’s not clear to me if the word “immigrant” is even correct; no American moving from California to Texas would ever be described as an “immigrant.”
Gentle Reader, perhaps the word “immigrant,” as used here, there, and everywhere, refers to a member of the invading, non-European hordes that we seen the Polish-Belarus border and the US souther border (actually, there is no border, or if there is, it is open. [Let’s Go Brandon!]).
These scammers seek to invade and economically undermine a society that they despise, want to live in but do not want to be a part of. Their presence, their refusal to assimilate, and the constant replenishing of their communities make the presence of even one of them toxic to the indigenous, like any invasive species. In the US, without these invading hordes in huge numbers, there would be no terrorist members of Congress who marry a brother to secure even more immigrants to the US, no “squad,” as few reasonable Americans would vote for these terrorists. Ilhan Omar would be fetching water in a refugee camp in Africa–where she belongs–instead of actively seeking–and largely succeeding–in destroying the US.
May I offer a third choice to the two options described by the author above: eliminate immigration from the Third World? There is nothing to be gained from their presence. So in addition to sending as many back as possible (anything less than 99% must be deemed a failure), accepting zero immigrants from the Third World is key, lest these invasive species wipe out the native ecosystem.
Think I’m kidding? Pythons in Florida.
Although immigration policy and especially control has been too lax and there is a problem with integration of some communities, the great majority of the people you call immigrants were born in Europe.
And your suggestion that the majority of these communities are terrorist sympathisers, or trying in some way to ‘destroy’ our society or should be compared to ‘toxic’ weeds or something is ludicrous and grotesque.
We originally invited people in from the sub continent and the West Indies, because of labour shortages. Since then you can hardly blame migrants for this country’s failure to reduce immigration, if as it has said often enough, it wished to. People come here overwhelmingly to work and improve their lot. Uber seems to be rather dependent on them, as one obvious daily example, and they all the people I encounter seem to be perfectly decent.
As for the Belarus – Poland border, Lukashenko is transporting and deliberately encouraging migrants to assemble at the border to punish the EU.
‘Eliminating’ immigration, which isn’t going to happen anyway, will do nothing for the existing Muslim etc communities. In their case there is nowhere else to send them to – you would need the agreement of the would be countries of return, which you are not going to get.
So in summary – ‘sending back’ 99% of these people is simply not going to happen. I know a lot of right wingers get terribly excited about this, but your views are so far out from most people’s, you are doomed to enormous disappointment.
“We originally invited people in from the sub continent and the West Indies.” Can you be precise; who is this ‘we’?
Assume “the English.”
I said it, I meant it, I stand behind it.
I think “invasive species” was the term you were looking for. Things always end badly when invasive species are introduced–which is why they are called “invasive.” They don’t belong where they end up. Do you think the Native Americans agree with me or with you? Happy Thanksgiving, by the way, or should I say Happy Indigenous People’s Day?
As per the excellent point Colin makes below, who is the we? The elites, not the majority, not real Americans or Western Europeans. I could write for pages about the so-called Immigration Reform Act of 1965–how the US was deliberately bamboozled and this law opened the floodgates to the flotsam and jetsam of the Third World. A huge majority was against this, and it was only forced on the US through lies and deception similar to the Vietnam War and other wars of choice.
I agree that I may be disappointed that 99% of these invaders are not returned (and zero accepted), but it is still worth advocating for. A revolution is needed to return power to the people and away from the posh elites.
Invite Shamina Begum back. “You” invited her to live in the UK–you deserve her, mate!
It’s curious, but I have never heard anyone compare immigration to colonisation.
No doubt Bern voted for Hidalgo and now wants to escape the nightmare he helped create.
Friends who live in Lewes describe something similar there. Escapees from Brighton who voted for the Green Party which transformed Brighton into a sh1thole now voting for the same party in Lewes. Where will they escape to ruin next?
‘Both Bern and Zemmour have for France, her history and her heritage, the misty-eyed love of a Joseph Roth, the Galician exile, for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They both reject what the French call the Anglo-Saxon model in which identity politics reigns supreme.’
But what is this love of France but identity politics? See Francis Fuukyama Identity: the demand for dignity and the Politics of Resentment (2018) who points out the ‘essentialism’ that characterises both the ‘identity liberalism’ that determines the agenda in university arts departments and the ethnically defined nationalisms that have sprung up across the world.
Zemmour more than Bern exemplifies the latter.
“They both reject what the French call the Anglo-Saxon model in which identity politics reigns supreme.’”
“But what is this love of France but identity politics?” NO, no Patriotism is Not Identity Politics!
Or as a Liberal would put it, ‘Why are they not intelligent enough to loathe their Gender, Race, Nation, Culture, and Privilege’ like us enlightened do? Identity Politics is NOT Patriotism, like Anorexia-Nerovsa is NOT dieting, they are pathologies.
From Wiki:
“Many contemporary advocates of identity politics take an intersectional perspective, which accounts for the range of interacting systems of oppression that may affect their lives and come from their various identities. According to many who describe themselves as advocates of identity politics, it centers the lived experiences of those facing systemic oppression; the purpose is to better understand the interplay of racial, economic, sex-based, and gender-based oppression (among others) and to ensure no one group is disproportionately affected by political actions, present and future. Such contemporary applications of identity politics describe people of specific race, ethnicity, sex, gender, sex, sexual identity, age, economic class, disability status, education, religion, language, profession, political party, veteran status, and geographic location. These identity labels are not mutually exclusive but are in many cases compounded into one when describing hyper-specific groups. An example is that of African-American-Woman, who constitute a particular hyper-specific identity class”
Identity Politics is Oppressor-Oppressed based on a collage of ‘Identities’ one possesses, which are immutable, and that ALL relations between people is Oppressor/Oppressed based on those identities. The Liberal/Lefty only moral answer to this ‘Intersectionality’ is “Equity” where that all with more – irrespective of how hard they worked, and how little the receiver did, have their $ and Position taken from them and given to the Identity with less. Identity Politics = Neo-Marxism = social destruction.