Saturday, August 03, 2019

France is Sinking into Chaos and Authoritarianism

  • President Macron never says he is sorry for those who have lost an eye or a hand... from extreme police brutality. Instead, he asked the French parliament to pass a law that almost completely abolishes the right to protest and the presumption of innocence, and that allows the arrest of anyone, anywhere, even without cause. The law was passed.
  • In June, the French parliament passed another law, severely punishing anyone who says or writes something that might contain "hate speech". The law is so vague that an American legal scholar, Jonathan Turley, felt compelled to react. "France", he wrote, "has now become one of the biggest international threats to freedom of speech".
  • The main concern of Macron and the French government seems not to be the risk of riots, the public's discontent, the disappearance of Christianity, the disastrous economic situation, or Islamization and its consequences. Instead, it is climate change.
  • "The West no longer knows what it is, because it does not know and does not want to know what shaped it, what constituted it, what it was and what it is. (...) This self-asphyxiation leads naturally to a decadence that opens the way to new barbaric civilizations." — Cardinal Robert Sarah, in Le soir approche et déjà le jour baisse ("The Evening Comes, and already the Light Darkens").

Read the rest here.

2 comments:

  1. France undoubtedly has its share of very serious problems. It's a social democracy struggling with the same issues that are challenging all Western democracies.

    I was surprised by the vehemence of the anti-French feelings expressed in the comments following the original article, though I suppose I shouldn't have been.

    But instead of indulging in too much schadenfreude about our their crises we Americans shouldn't look away from our own pathologies. Since I can hardly bear to repeat it in English, I'll just give the headline from La Monde:

    Une fusillade dans un supermarché du Texas fait vingt morts

    Un homme de vingt-et-un ans a été arrêté et placé en détention, a annoncé la police d’El Paso, ville située à la frontière avec le Mexique.

    ReplyDelete
  2. France and teh US are both heavily engaged in what Enoch Powell called "preventable evils."

    ReplyDelete

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