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Republique Francaise Exposition 1931

 

 

The bloodletting suffered by France this year is horrendous and inhumane. The perpetrators should meet full judgment for their heinous acts.

 

France, just as other great European colonial powers and the United States, is finding that it cannot escape its history:

· The U.S. is learning that the rug under which it has swept the embarrassing remnants of its history has become worn and tattered, exposing those discarded shreds.

· Great Britain is finding out that an empire upon which the sun never used to set can become quite tiresome once the sun finally goes down.

· It took Spain almost half a year to reach its remote colony, "Las Islas Filipinas," named for Felipe II. The kingdom that once ruled most of the American Continent, today is one of the poor PIGS of the European Union, struggling to beat off starving denizens from its former African holdings.

 

France recently had lost Haiti. Napoleon practically made a gift to Thomas Jefferson of what would become the huge center of the U.S. map. Those were the fertile lands France had intended to be the breadbasket for its rich sugar island.

 

French stamp 1912

 

By 1815, Napoleon was finished. In 1830, France was revolution-weary and in decline. It decided to get a new start by transferring French life and agriculture to an area of North Africa known as, "Algeria." First, it had to bend that Arabic/Islamic populace to its colonial will. The battle was bloody, but eventually the Algerians buckled under a superior military force.

 

French Empire 1919 1939

 

When, "Pepe LeMoko: says, "Meet me at the Casbah," he is referring to an impenetrable part of Algiers, the capital of Algeria. After one hundred years, Algeria had become francophone and steeped in French culture. It was ready grist for the nascent Hollywood film mill. As it was the wont of the movies in the area of White Supremacy, the public received only part of the story. The society the French created in Algeria placed themselves on the top and the dark Algerians on the bottom. These latter began to reside in the motherland, where they remained on the bottom – where they still find themselves today!

 

After World War II, a strain of independence movements ran rampant among the former European colonies. It took Algeria from 1954 to 1962 to wrench its independence from France. The battle was bitter, bloody and brutal, on both sides. The bitter aftertaste runs in today's headlines. France has the largest Muslim population in Europe.

 

Guerre dAlgérie

 

A few years back, Paris literally was burning with a multitude of cars set ablaze by Muslim youths from a ghetto in Paris, where the police dare not enter without prior notice. This weeks-long phenomenon should have been a warning. This ghetto exists because Arabs – Muslim or not – are not welcome to live elsewhere. These are French citizens, born, reared and educated in France. They are unable to gain decent employment, regardless of qualification. They have no hope of being accepted or advancing in France's institutions.

 

Along comes the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL). Who best to tap this long-simmering, still-in-your-face injustice? Who better to supply the weapons desired to seek vengeance for countless decades of hurt. They are French in culture and language, but are also Arab in language and culture, and Muslim as well. They are pissed-off ready to utilize the, "new religion," that new sense of worth, to turn upon those who consider them as worthless. The ghettos of France and next-door Belgium are ready recruiting fields for ISIS, as can be noted in the news.

 

Thus it is, France. You cannot change the past, but you certainly could make a stab at saving your ass by changing the present!

 

***** ***** *****

A Frenchman, one day, met a man

Who said, "I can do what you can."

"Why not, said the Frog;

"You are not a dog."

"Then, why disdain my non-sun tan?"

 

 

Curtis W. Long

Curtis W. Long

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  • The usual response to events like Paris, Ferguson, 9/11 are usually about 'what just happened' and 'who did this" and 'We are going to get THOSE guys". Rarely does the majority actually try to even understand the back story. And there is always a back story. A story that goes back quite awhile. Like the war in Iraq, the back story goes all the way to WWI when the Allies chopped up the Middle East with no regard to the culture and tribal relationships. The Treaty of Versailles virtually guaranteed WII would happen. The generations of mistreatment, racism, inequality in Ferguson erupted in the riots we saw last summer. As with the events in Paris- it isn't, "They shouldn't have let those Syrian refugees in". That doesn't just gloss over the back story and what drove those people to do what they did, it contributes to burying it deep in the dirt. If we don't understand 'why' we can't resolve it. It will be there simmering until it explodes. Again.