My reply to Dvorak Uncensored, "Identity Soup - Intolerance or Tradition"
Joseph Dunphy
Blog post: http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=4427
Let's see if this post gets approved. This was my immediate gut
reaction, subject as all gut reactions are to later reversal. Unlike
some, I make no claims to infallibility and offer no apologies for the
fact that I occasionally change my mind. However, as gut reactions go,
I think this is a sound one, if not very fashionable.
Oh, and in case you were wondering if I'd be so nonprogressive as to
say something like this - yes, I'm opposed to open borders, and I
think that the European Union is an extremely bad idea, one that keeps
on getting worse, and France isn't the only large country whose
central government I'd like to see very seriously weakened. After the
antics that we've seen out of our own government during the last few
decades, here in the United States (Ruby Ridge, anybody), I think
there are a few forbidden questions that we need to start asking
ourselves, and pretty darned soon, before it's too late.
That much having been said, if I were to start giving away BLTs to the
poor, as pushy as Washington has become, I can't really picture our
government, even at its most overreaching, daring to make that its
business. Yet, in the supposedly tolerant country of France, we have
the absurd spectacle of the federal government there seriously
considering doing something not that different.
And here you were thinking that the phrase "sensitivity nazis" was a
gross exaggeration, right? :)
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Lou - Democracy as a real political force died in the West a long time
ago, to be replaced by the Nixon era concept of "toughing it out" -
ie., the government stonewalling popular discontent over unpopular
policies, as it counts on the natural human tendency to become
resigned to all changes that linger long enough, and to eventually
mistake that resignation for enthusiasm. When you say that doing
something like this as a political statement is wrong and then speak
of your support for democracy, on a basic level you're just not
getting it, because the only way of effectively resisting this
strategy of "wear the masses down" is for somebody to occasionally
shove back and make a statement through his actions, one of defiance
directed toward the status quo, and toward those trends some would
have us take as destiny.
Aside from that, your comment is just simply wrongheaded because it
ignores what some would call "the libertarian principle of democracy",
one that goes back to the days of the founding fathers of the American
Republic. While policy, as carried out by the state, is to be subject
to the majority will within limits, individual expression (within
limits) is not; the very attempt to make it so shortcircuits the very
process of discussion and consciousness raising that makes any sort of
democracy more than a facade. Make freedom of expression negotiable,
and what one ends up with, in effect, is an oligarchy, not any sort of
democracy, because these creatures called "demogogues" will arise, and
in co-opting the process of discussion, one which occurs through
actions as well as words, succeed in co-opting the democratic process
itself, as they guide the masses as a shepherd would guide a flock of
sheep.
When we get to the point at which we feel that people must answer to
others for their motives in taking an action as inherently
nonaggressive as the serving of a traditional French soup in France,
of all places, then we are at that point at which the freedom to make
a statement has become unacceptably negotiable. I would also say that
if the so-called Far Right in France was trying to make the point that
immigration is a threat to French culture through these soup
giveaways, that they have won the argument through means so simple as
to be brilliant. What else can one call it, when a traditional French
dish can not be served in France because of how people in the Middle
East feel about it, but an attempt to impose Middle Eastern culture on
the French, at least in part? To defend this response on the
government's part on the basis that the government is fighting
intolerance is, to say the least, humorously ironic; who is trying to
deny whose freedom?
If our soup providers were holding French Jews down and force feeding
them pork soup, that would be intolerance, but I don't see anybody
being forced to eat this soup. The only force being used in this case
is being used by the multiculturalists and their base of support.
What, after all, is to keep the French Jewish population from doing as
Jewish populations have done for centuries, and providing relief for
its own poor, providing kosher food to its own indigent population so
that it need not choose between kashrut and survival? What, other than
the fact that so many of its members have chosen to attack the Jewish
population of France that Muslim immigrants are greeted with
understandable fear by much of France's large Jewish population, keeps
the Muslims from turning to what probably would have been a very
sympathetic Jewish community that would have been very supportive of
their desire to adhere to what they would see as being G-d's law, and
follow the dietary laws of their people?
What we're left with, then, is the absurd proposal that because an
unruly immigrant population has so alienated its natural base of
support as to need a share of every handout available, that those who
have lived in a country for millenia should be forced, at gunpoint, to
cease and desist from holding onto a piece of their own culture - and
let's not pretend for a second that food is not an important part of
French culture. This is an imposition of Islamic law on a non-muslim
population, and that is outrageous. If the government in Paris wishes
to go this far, suppressing personal liberty and part of the
indigenous culture, excusing this on the basis that rioters must be
appeased, in other words, that lawlessness should be rewarded, then
maybe the time has long since come for the provinces to consider a
forbidden question.
Maybe France, as a unified country, has outlived its usefulness. The
heavyhandedness and intrusiveness of the government in Paris has
become notorious, arousing comment even in George Bush's America,
where the expectations of personal liberty have certainly seen serious
erosion. The provinces are, in many cases, more than large enough to
be respectable small countries in their own right, and Western Europe
is hardly so turbulent a place as to place any small nation living in
it at peril. A government that will not respect its people's right to
live life on their own terms is a government that needs to be
abandoned by that people.
Maybe watching the borders of a once powerful nation retreat until
they barely extend past the ends of the Champ Elysees is the
abandonment a particular government needs, and for anybody wishes to
say that this is an unrealistic suggestion, I close with this
incomplete list of countries that have become independent in the last
few years, some of them splitting off from governments a lot nastier
and more willing to deal ruthlessly than that of Paris, some of which
were "inevitably" going to be assimilated out of existence, not so
very long ago.
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Croatia,
Slovenia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Ukraine
That's the funny thing about the inevitable future we're also supposed
to accept with resignation - it keeps changing, and people don't seem
to notice the fact.
Joseph Dunphy
Joseph Dunphy
On Jun 13, 12:16 am, I wrote:
> Blog post:http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=4427
>
> Let's see if this post gets approved.
Hmmm ... I submitted the comment on the 13th, just after Midnight (so,
basically very late on the 12th), it is now the afternoon of the 15th,
and comments are processed within 24 hours according to a note on the
blog. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that my post isn't going
to get approved.
Not that I'm really surprised.
Joseph Dunphy
This thread relates to this post on my Yahoo 360 blog that can be
reached through this page
http://groups.google.com/group/joseph_dunphy/web/soup-redirection