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If you were to ponder which world leader would be the most likely to take a strong stance against the statue-smashing, book-burning, cancelling, New Cultural Revolution, no doubt Emmanuel Macron would be somewhere at the back of the list with Jacinda Ardern.
But, no! Le Petit Souffle has risen to the challenge with Gallic élan.
French President Emmanuel Macron announced on Sunday that his country would combat racism and bigotry but would not let violent rioters destroy statues or “rewrite” France’s history.
The French, of course, are nothing if not zealously protective of their history and culture. This is, after all, the nation which has its Académie Française, which has rigorously maintained the purity of the national language for 400 years – and especially guarding against incursion by Les Franglais.
“We will be inflexible when it comes to tackling racism, anti-Semitism and discrimination, and new strong decisions will be made to reinforce the egality of chances,” Macron said, according to a translation provided by TIME. “But this noble fight is perverted when it turns into communitarianism, into a false rewriting of history.”
[…]I tell you very clearly tonight my dear fellow citizens, the Republic will not erase any trace or name from its history,” Macron continued. “It will not forget any of its deeds or take down any statue. What we need to do is to look all together with lucidity on all of our history and all our memory. Our relation to Africa in particular so we can build a present and a possible future from one to the other side of Mediterranean.”
Across the Channel, it’s a different story. If the wogs begin at Calais, then the cowards begin at Dover.
As reported by Politico, Macron has come under increased pressure over the last two weeks to “bring down statues and revisit other works of art that honor French historical figures involved in slavery and France’s colonial history amid protests against police brutality and racism.” This radical movement to tear down any references to colonial history has swept other European countries, including Belgium and the U.K., where authorities have had to take measures to protect some of the nations’ monuments.
“The statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square is a permanent reminder of his achievement in saving this country – and the whole of Europe – from a fascist and racist tyranny,” Prime Minister Boris Johnson said in a tweet. “It is absurd and shameful that this national monument should today be at risk of attack by violent protestors. Yes, he sometimes expressed opinions that were and are unacceptable to us today, but he was a hero, and he fully deserves his memorial.”
“We cannot now try to edit or censor our past. We cannot pretend to have a different history. The statues in our cities and towns were put up by previous generations,” Johnson continued. “They had different perspectives, different understandings of right and wrong. But those statues teach us about our past, with all its faults. To tear them down would be to lie about our history, and impoverish the education of generations to come.”
“But it is clear that the protests have been sadly hijacked by extremists intent on violence. The attacks on the police and indiscriminate acts of violence which we have witnessed over the last week are intolerable and they are abhorrent,” Johnson concluded.
Fine words, but native British, watching their heritage being smashed and vandalised by colonisers and invaders, must be wondering what use a supposedly Conservative government really is.
Although, to be fair, the most egregious actions of officialdom are largely out of Johnson’s hands. It was the Met who stood aside and watched as the barbarian hordes defaced the monument to the man who defeated Nazism – and the Met is largely under the rubric of a London Mayor who has almost no claim on Britain’s history. Sadiq Khan’s parents did not even arrive in England until three years after Churchill’s death – and a quarter-century after Churchill lead the defence of the world against Hitler.
This is not his, nor the vandals of cultural Marxism’s, history to destroy.
At least Emmanuel Macron owns the history of his ancestors, the Gauls – and it shows.
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