They were Western-educated Francophones who read deeply in the European canon, who believed in the “miracle of Greek civilization,” who drew on Plato and Virgil and Pascal and Goethe. At the same time, they argued for their own race’s civilizational genius, for a negritudethat turned a derogatory label into a celebration of African cultural distinctiveness.
.. And finally they believed that part of the West’s tradition, the universalist ideals they associated with French republicanism and Marxism, could be used to create a political canopy — a transnational union — beneath which humanity could be (to quote Césaire) “more than ever united and diverse, multiple and harmonious.”
This vision was rejected by both the colonized and the colonizers. But in certain ways it was revived by global elites after the Cold War’s end, with neoliberalism substituted for Marxism, and a different set of transnational projects — the European Union, the Pax Americana — taking the place of the pan-ethnic, multicultural French Union envisioned by Césaire and Senghor.
.. it is hard enough to for a political union to reconcile the different branches of the West — German and Mediterranean, French and Anglo-Saxon. It becomes harder when that same union is trying to manage a society so multicultural — as European nations under the pressure of mass migration may become — as to lack religious or linguistic or historical common ground. And it becomes harder still when your ruling elite’s cosmopolitanism is essentially superficial, more “eating ethnic food and cheering for Obama” than “celebrating negritude while reading Goethe.”
.. Today’s Western nationalists argue, also plausibly, that many European distinctives are unlikely to survive if nation-states are weak, mass immigration constant, Christianity and Judaism replaced by indifferentism and Islam, and young elites educated as global citizens without knowing their own home.
This nationalist argument comes in racist forms, but it need not be the white nationalism that Trump’s liberal critics read into his speech. It can just be a species of conservatism, which prefers to conduct cultural exchange carefully and forge new societies slowly, lest stability suffer, memory fail and important things be lost.
Controversial Ontario MPP Jack MacLaren kicked out of Tory caucus
A controversial Progressive Conservative politician has been kicked out of the caucus after a video from 2012 emerged showing him hinting at a hidden agenda and making comments about Franco-Ontarians.
The video, posted online by Ottawa radio station CFRA, shows Jack MacLaren talking to a group of people and agreeing with people lamenting French language rights in eastern Ontario.
.. Progressive Conservative Leader Patrick Brown says in a statement that the video is the final straw with MacLaren.
Brown says each time MacLaren is caught making disparaging remarks he asks for forgiveness and second, third and fourth chances, but it’s clearly part of a pattern.