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The article wonders what is the difference between the policy of former president Nicolas Sarkozy and the policy of Manuel Valls about the Roma.
The answer is simple : with Sarkozy the aim was only to dismantle the camps, without any other measures, whereas now, whith the left government, the local authorities have to find solutions for these people, as regards employment, new decent accommodation, school for children...
To conclude, the policy now takes into account the fact that we are dealing with human beings, and not with animals we have to chase away violently.
'You must be kidding. Expats in Nigeria flock to neighboring French-speaking countries for stress-free holidays or week-ends . . . . Congo-Brazza is paradise next to Nigeria.' [Dominique II]
Young and presumptuous as I am, allow me please to teach grandmother to suck eggs.
The stress-free attractions of Françafrique may have something to do with their state of development. Lack of infrastructure, a poor corporate culture and bad governance mean that French-speaking Sub-Saharan Africa [SSA] lags embarrassingly behind English-speaking African countries, even if we discount South Africa's might. Sloth stretches from Yaoundé to Kinshasa and Dakar; Accra, Lagos, and Nairobi throb with activity.
Setting aside the dismal results of Zimbabwe, Francophone African countries produce 19% of SSA's GDP, while Anglophone countries – excluding South Africa – produce 47%. Member countries of the mainly Francophone Economic and Monetary Union of West Africa (UEMOA) have grown over the last decade by 3.4% per annum; those of the mainly English-speaking East Africa Community (EAC), 5.4 %. In Anglophone Africa, it is easier to start a business, clear imports, and obtain payment for money owed. 7 of the 10 countries worst ranked by the United Nations development Programme are Francophone African states, and three bring up the rear: DRC, Niger, and Burundi.
Why the poor performance? One reason is the common currency, the CFA franc. This was previously, the 'franc des Colonies françaises d'Afrique' [French African Colonies' franc], today it is the African Financial Community franc. As is the case with the euro and the Club Med countries, the overvalued common currency CFA franc – pegged as it is to the euro – impedes exports and sensible development. ("[T]he overvalued CFA franc has been very negative, and its particularly disempowering characteristic has been harmful, because it is controlled by its former colonial power." [Serge Michailof, professor at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris])
Infrastructure is lacking in most French-speaking countries: water, energy, and transport policies are unambitious. There is also the size of the market: French-speaking countries are small and sparsely populated, living in isolation, and prevented, by regulatory barriers and transport costs, from exporting. Then there is ethos…
English-speaking African countries tend to be more business-conscious and entrepreneurial; less enslaved to the dream of becoming a civil servant and desk-wallah. The training of elites imparts the idea that private business is essential for national development. For Serge Michailof, "The left-wing oriented training provided by French teachers is a polar opposite". Linked is the funding system which lends itself to inefficiencies and corruption: "In [Francophone] West African countries where revenue generated from natural resources is omnipresent, money does not go through the citizenry, but rather directly channelled to the government by mining and oil companies. This process provides manifold opportunities to re-route revenue in a very opaque system" [Shanta Devarajan].
It doesn't require an Einstein to deduce that many of Francophone Africa's problems are linked with Paris.
Thank God you spared me the eulogy of "vibrant" economies. One of the most annoying buzzwords of the neoliberal elite.
I only stated a fact, independently of economy grading. In the same way as Parisians will leave their "vibrant" city for the quietness of the countryside, and African city dwellers will head to "the village" at the drop of a hat, some people (a majority) choose to limit their exposure to the mayhem, hazards and plain unpleasantness which "vibrant" economies bestow with wild abandon upon those who toil at their service (walled communities and lofty office buildings being careful to spare themselves those indignities while staying on the spot). So Francophone Africa is backwards by your standards? why not. After all, the roads and streets in Nigeria are almost as full of potholes as America's, a constant bemusement to my West African French-speaking friends, who had inherited the French obsession with smooth macadam. (things may have changed, of course).
I am afraid that most of your African diatribe is only remotely related to personal experience. Books and magazines are an unending source of prejudice, going both ways I should add. Not that everything is wrong - I myself left a room in disgust after telling a roomful of African students, all furious that their hopes of becoming Ministry Directors were being quashed, that I was ashamed to hold the same degree they did. But to draw a linguistic boundary - Lord Kitchener's ghost again? What Michailof (a devoted World Bank orthodoxy zealot, with a hand in all major donor mistakes and crimes) says of French-speaking Africa about natural resources applies with a vengeance to Nigerian or Equato-Guinean oil!!!
Allow me a personal remembrance - sitting next to me on the plane from Freetown to Abidjan were two of these admirable NGO ladies who play such an ambivalent role in today's Third World - as we began our descent at night, one of them gushed: "oh look! A real city!"
I think I agree about the 'admirable NGO ladies who play such an ambivalent role in today's Third World'. Or could it be that - forced by circumstances to fall back on the lingua franca - they were bound to produce banalities?
They were speaking to each other and in English. Which made sense since Sierra Leone is one of those vibrant Anglophone economies (blood diamonds, convenience flags, fishing licenses, lively trade in prostheses).
Ouch! "(Blood) money makes the world go round"...
Have you read the (most informative) article 'In the pits' in TE?
In the Hollandian universe nobody has to make moral compromises; in the Hollandian universe ineffectiveness holds sway.
You land – seem to land, for my experience is rusty! – a number of good counter-punches, Dominique. My source was:
Now you can poo-poo it! From the very little that I learn of Africa today – I left a bit of my heart there without so much as scratching the surface of that opaque place – nothing, or very little has changed in the decades since we left. That is infinitely depressing. Yet, according to the article above, things are even worse in Francophone Africa? That takes some believing. So please don't think I swallowed the piece lock, stock, and barrel. We spent two very happy years in the bush, enjoying privations, avoiding a mad French RC priest, catching la 'la fièvre du dingue' [dengue fever], before going to the Copperbelt… ugh! At one point, I had an attractive and super-sharp assistant, a recent graduate. She was supposed to repay her degree by working for the State. A month or two after she arrived, she got a job with the Mines: dad or an uncle must have pulled strings.
Am I completely wrong-headed in two or three assumptions: One, African development would have been a much more manageable task if the birth-rate had not sky-rocketed, thanks to the Vatican's baleful efforts. Two, CdG and Jacques Foccard, c/o The Basement, Élysee Palace, Paris, had a deleterious effect on African development. Key example: the treatment of la Guinea; message: behave or we drop you in the merde. Three, you are scathing about NGOs; don't we have to sift the genuine and effective from the bogus and self-deluding? Along the Lusaka to Chipata Great East Road, the wrecks of broken-down-left-to-die vehicles were strewn km after km of them. I wonder if they're still there.
I'm plagued by micro-power cuts so I'll be terser than usual.
Missionaries were useful as protein. Soldiers were by and large much more useful to the populations.
Your assumptions hold truth yet need qualifying. Ours is not a black and white world. I know you agree.
Demography: don't overestimate Vatican influence. Africans usually take religion with a big pinch of salt, adapting it to their needs rather than the reverse (except, of course, in lovely Nigeria). Like all RCs in the world, African RCs kiss the Pope's slippers but heed him not when he presumes to dictate bedroom behavior (priests routinely marry, they only are encouraged not to go polygamous). When I was in Burundi assessing HIV prevalence in the countryside, I found local church ladies very busy handing out rubbers to the peasantry, with Monsignor's blessing. Rocketing (now slowing down) demographics were more the result of the meeting of modern medicine (drop in infantile mortality) and ancestral need for abundant offspring as workforce and retirement insurance. Never forget that African customs which sound backward to us saw them, our close grandparents, through vastly more thousands of years than ours did.
Nefarious French influence: Guinea was not dropped, it was made to walk the plank with a cannonball around its neck. It then happily swam vigorously to the bottom, where it started walking away from the shore. Neigboring Côte d'Ivoire, with none of Guinea's huge resources, was singled out for demonstrating the rewards of good behavior. It was coddled, yes, but its very real success came more from hard work and sound policies. Almost alone in that day's Africa, it created a well-to-do farming middle class and an embryonic industrial fabric, where end products (of excellent quality) had a completely domestic value chain. French influence was nefarious on the political side, with incestuous relationships which are hard to shake off.
You mentioned the CFA franc: yes it was the pet peeve of the US-dominated World Bank, and it may have impeded exports up to a point. Yet having a robust currency proved to be an attraction to investors, and (for example) a large part of Côte d'Ivoire's cocoa (its main export then) actually was smuggled from neighboring Anglophone countries where farmers did not care for the miserable local currencies (cedi, naira, whatever). And when, at the US and World Bank's orders, the FCFA was devaluated by a huge 50% (incidentally robbing millions of their savings), the effect on local cost of living was immediate, but the much touted effect on exports remained mainly virtual - because exports were hindered much more by US/EU protectionism than by exchange rates. I could tell you a few horror stories about sugar or cotton. France should have been a bulwark for Africa in this, it surrendered miserably to the triumphant Reaganite creed of "do as I tell, not as I do".
NGOs: I'm ambivalent, not scathing. When NGOs act as implementing agencies for specific development projects which have been designed with the country and are internationally funded, they are the best choice - dedicated, efficient, barebones. The nominal bosses lord it over from air conditioned offices in the city, while the young people (a lot of them female) who zoom on motorbikes from village to village, making things happen, lead very interesting and useful lives. Where I am very wary is about NGOs on their own, especially religious ones. They've more or less killed rural credit, among other deeds. They're OK in humanitarian relief activities, if strictly supervised, but they have to be kept out of development. Many countries have grown wise to this.
Car wrecks: count yourself lucky. In a certain African country I won't name again, it's corpses which remain unpicked for weeks along the roads.
Despite a lot of drawbacks Africa is improving. Unfortunately it is doing so on the neoliberal bandwagon, with increasing inequalities (whereas solidarity was very much an indigenous value, often equivalent to a stifling 90% informal taxation rate). The recent outrage in South Africa is but one example.
I'm confident Africa will survive, and probably improve; I'm not so sure about ourselves.
Dominique, Sydia Touré, a former finances minister in Ivory coast was my school comrad
in Brittany, then he went to Guinea when the president died, and become there another time finances minister, he had to flee when revolts chased the government, he's living in Paris trying to connect with opponants to the actual Guinea government
I read from your comments, that you're a "Toubab", is it that you're one of the whitey gods born there?
'I'm confident Africa will survive, and probably improve; I'm not so sure about ourselves.' [Dominique II]
Indeed, we are rather 'high-maintenance', aren't we?
We know that you, the Brits, do everything better than the French, cuz you're so intelligent, hmm except for tha australians and the New zealanders, who rather see you as school brats that think they have inherited of their divine power from a God save the queen
Sydia Touré was no Finance Minister in RCI, but assistant director at the treasury, then close collaborator to the Minister of Planning and Industry. I was working at that ministry but in fact industry was a special, separate Secretariat of State under Bernard Ehui.
Toubab (plur. toubabou) merely means white in the dioula vernacular lingua franca... nothing godlike... and I was not born in Africa.
My wife, who always had some animals with her that Africans were afraid of, and had very white skin, was seen by some as a water nymph (Mamie Wata, coming from "Mamie Water"). Good anti-burglar insurance, almost as good as having a live python in the living room.
BTW DRC and Burundi never were French and never used FCFA.
Yup, Gwitty, and we're plain hopeless at vituperation. Funny thing about you, Gwitty: you bring out the inner Brit in me. God Save the Queen was an amusing little tune by Lully.
ah thanks for the precision on Sydia Touré, I didn't ask him exactly what he was doing, got to hear from him in the last Ivory Coast strikes (2004?) I inquiried what happenend to him then
Also, my man pasted his youth until 7 in Ivory Coast and Guinea, his father was building bridges and airports there.
So he knows well how to get along with Africans, he's been bred by a "boy"
sure, just reading your posts makes me rise my banner to
oh BTW, your crown motto is written in French too, so much you picked from us
'Unfortunately it is doing so on the neoliberal bandwagon, with increasing inequalities (whereas solidarity was very much an indigenous value, often equivalent to a stifling 90% informal taxation rate). The recent outrage in South Africa is but one example.' [Dominique II]
The recent outrage in South Africa is far from straightforward:
'…But in the days following the killings, Mr Mathunjwa's Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu) union has come under mounting scrutiny as a blame game for the bloodshed continues. / Fingers are pointing not only at the police, the role of Lonmin and the government's response, but also at unions. / In South Africa's platinum sector – the world's biggest – a bitter rivalry between Amcu, which has only recently come to prominence, and the dominant National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) has been brewing for months. / As well as complicating companies' efforts to resolve labour disputes, this has raised tensions and led to allegations of intimidation and violence in industrial disputes. / Four people died in violence during a six-week strike at Impala Platinum earlier this year, and days before police opened fire on Lonmin's strikers on August 16, 10 people, including two policemen, were killed in clashes linked to the wildcat strike at Lonmin's Marikana mine complex. / Mr Mathunjwa, who set up Amcu after falling out with the NUM in 1998, has repeatedly denied that his organisation, which has a 21 per cent representation in Lonmin's workforce, bears any responsibility for the violence. [FT, 26-8-12]
It's all very well to pontificate about neo-liberalism, Dominique, but what credibility does a Frenchman have on the matter of trade unions? A reminder: 8% (no typo: EIGHT PER CENT) of French wage-earners belong to a trade union. This makes South African split-off Amcu into some kind of model of democratic representativeness, I'd say. If only its bargaining had been realistic.
If you read the rest of the article, you'll discover that the present impoverished state of the SA mining industry is due to excessive government interference which has brought the industry to its knees. That is the opposite of what you call neo-liberalism, I think. If this strike has gone on so long it's because of excessive demands by the junior union. And inter-union intimidation. Of course NUM and ANC have reached some kind of none-too-honourable modus vivendi. Better that, I suggest, than disorder. P.S. The police shot because nobody had told them to bring their riot-control gear. This is Africa, man, [Plazidus uses his cod-Afrikaaner accent 'ere]. Cock-up and conspiracy.
There is no riot gear to speak of. The whole country has 10 water cannons, and about 10,000 sensitive street situations any day in the week.
Any FT article is bound to indict government interference on any issue. Welcome to the new Pravda.
The industry is on its knees? Lonmin is on its knees? Maybe it is. I don't know. TE's readership must be deemed competent enough to read and interpret a balance sheet. I've never judged a company before having seen its balance sheet. But obviously the trade unions' bad manners are more important news than researching Lonmin's health. And the FT is so well placed to pontificate on the excessiveness of union demands - they're always excessive, old chap.
Did you notice that in the photos of the aftermath, there were white and black policemen - black cops with riot guns, white ones with machine pistols. Did you notice that in the audio file which went viral, the dominant feature is long, repeated automatic fire. This is very disturbing. Simplistic explanations, yours or mine, don't fit. 'This is Africa'? I could even laugh over that one.
What an odd parallel universe you French inhabit.
'There is no riot gear to speak of. The whole country has 10 water cannons, and about 10,000 sensitive street situations any day in the week. [Dominique II]
Forgive me for doubting that the number of water cannon deployable is a reliable indicator of the state of preparedness of the SA police to contain disorder.
'Any FT article is bound to indict government interference on any issue. Welcome to the new Pravda.' [Dominique II]
Rather a jejune observation, I'd say. Au contraire, the article surveys the issue from several points of view and what emerges – from a judicious reading – is a typically African situation of manifold ambiguities. Calling the FT 'the new Pravda' is rather like announcing to the world and his girlfriend that one is a rampant conspiracy theorist.
'The industry is on its knees? Lonmin is on its knees? Maybe it is. I don't know.' [Dominique II]
Me neither, particularly since I expressed no such opinion.
'And the FT is so well placed to pontificate on the excessiveness of union demands - they're always excessive, old chap.' [Dominique II]
If you write stuff like this, Dominique, people will suspect – quite wrongly, I rush to add! – that you are a shade naïve.
'Simplistic explanations, yours or mine, don't fit. 'This is Africa'? I could even laugh over that one.' [Dominique II]
Please re-read my words. I stand humble and agape at the complexity of the situation. I adopt the joke-persona of an Afrikaaner pedagogue to 'boint out dat very fect'. Not the smallest of the ambiguities: Cyril Ramaphosa, leader of a huge strike (11 fatalities) in the 1980s, is now a member of Lonmin's board of directors.
Before criticising the neighbour's garden shouldn't we look to our own? Now, what is the rate of trade union membership in France? And what is the unemployment rate?
Have a look at Lonmin's half-year report, downloaded from this link (bottom of the page).
Basically it's "dear shareholders, we're doing well, don't you worry".
Figures however do show profits have been tanking and are now in the red.
Financial expenses (ie interest on debt, which seems to be mainly a $300M mid-term credit facility) more than account for that net loss, and management is politely concerned, calling for tighter debt management.
Labour unrest is mentioned as a cause for slowing production at key sites, and therefore for disappointing operating profit.
What is not mentioned is the actual amount of labor-related expenses in the income sheet. Yet if labor unrest is key to current income problems, it would make sense to investigate the cost and risk of investing into easier labor relations. Which depends mainly on whether platinum mining is labor-intensive or capital-intensive. An issue which the report simply never mentions.
As usual, the devil is in the missing details.
Good reading though. Euphemisms are a joy to behold.
The usual suspects are not happy with this.
About France... we don't shoot miners, do we.
I repeat that I expressed no opinion on the financial health of Lonmin. Nor on a 'fair' wage settlement.
You merely told me the FT had an opinion I should follow...
what? the Brits are all placide people?
Did I? Permit me to quote myself (and you):
''Unfortunately it is doing so on the neoliberal bandwagon, with increasing inequalities (whereas solidarity was very much an indigenous value, often equivalent to a stifling 90% informal taxation rate). The recent outrage in South Africa is but one example.' [Dominique II]
The recent outrage in South Africa is far from straightforward:'
The whole point of the FT extract was to reinforce what you and I are agreed upon: the endless ambiguities which bedevil all attempts to make sense of events in Africa. The 'Financial Times' is not some kind of one-dimensional propaganda sheet. The very idea of it. There are some good writers. And it is an organ of some authority. Just like TE.
I would love to be able to believe that 66% of Brits were NOT racist. This would be a yet more slender hope in the case of the exemplary yet exceptional republic on the other side of the moat.
Granted that such was your intention... Yet
(1) Explanations based on "well, this is Africa" are very much wanting; they are a manner of intellectual sloth. Declining to understand what one has scant knowledge of is not the stuff of good journalism. In Europe or America, all issues including business ones would have been picked to the bone - remember Enron or Parmalat. Here: duh...
(2) Oh but Pravda had prestigious signatures, was well written and carefully proofread, you niekulturny you. So is, I concur, FT (and WSJ and TE).
(3) An organ of some authority? wonderful formula! Even in English, "authority" can mean "the power that be" or "peer-recognized reliability". Being the organ of the former while claiming the latter is as old as the printing press.
'Most people who've never lived in an invaded country, that is. / The loftier the mansion, the more brand-new the flags at the windows. / Trust our memories about that (note the plural). (I personally met a gentleman who put his life at risk demonstrating on the Champs-Elysées in the first year of occupation on July 14 with fellow students. They were rightists and he still was a conservative. But he was something of a rare bird. Charming old gent.)' [Dominique II]
I think your judgement on the matter might be swayed, Dominique, by the tendency of French conservatives and notables - after the Popular Front experience - to heed the message of repentance and flock to the Marshal-pastor in 1940. That said, I have no compelling reason to believe that the Brits of 1940 would have behaved much more honourably.
I would caution against your sweeping judgement that there is a special affinity between patriotism and left-wing political sympathies. Look to the family background and circumstances of the founders of the first Resistance movements. Bear in mind that the natural defenders of the working classes went to ground, with honourable exceptions, until Hitler broke the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact by invading Russia. Your working-class patriots awaited their orders from Stalin. Thereafter, their tactic of assassinating members of the occupying forces was anything but patriotic.
Cynically, the Communist Resistance sought by this means to provoke reprisals, thus provoking insurrectional circumstances which – by the action of a vicious or virtuous circle – would provoke further mass killings of hostages. This may have been effective in raising political consciousness, in provoking and diverting the war-effort of the Occupant's forces, but they were following the orders of Moscow.
Worse, the Communists tended to infiltrate other Resistance groups. If, on 25 August 1944, Charles de Gaulle gave such short shrift to the resistance leaders at the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, it was because he was the anti-revolutionary bulwark. Look at what was happening in Toulouse, Marseille, Bordeaux at the time.
You won't get me to defend the Communists, who did all this and worse. Moreover I was always a bit skeptical about their left wing credentials - they did claim to stand for the people, but so did all major populist movements of the time, most of which were firmly right wing; more importantly, the personality cult, rabid militarism and murderous secret police which came to be associated with Communism certainly have more to do with your run-of-the-mill Caudillo than with truly revolutionary aspirations. The conversion of the Soviet Union and China to the most brutal capitalism, of North Korea and Belarus to medieval hereditary tyrannies, all happened in a perfectly seamless way, because there was no real change in the regime's nature. Also remember how our own Maoist luminaries quickly joined Sarkozy, or your own Trotskyites sold their souls to American military imperialism. Simple, innocent love of the jackboot and the truncheon.
The one silver lining on the malodorous cloud is the sincere and often heroic abnegation of the rank and file.
Humiliation of France being kicked out of Vietnam and Vietnamese communists.
Not kicked out of Vietnam, but votée out by the parliament, which had other things to thing about, BTW, thé starting algeria war
Don't bother, plazidius is only making rethorical controversy he must be the cleverest
Am a she so get facts right and why you are at it get your facts right about
the massacre of tens of thousands of FRENCH JEWS and yes am a brit thank god
and thank my grandfather for coming to the UK
you're a obsessed troll that keeps on spamming
Most Brits can write English.
You have forgotten to mention that France put 75000
of its own citizens to death,By rounding them up and putting them in camps in
france and sent them on there way to germany to there deaths,Who also made laws in france against JEWS
french JEWS.Just hate the truth and one of them who died was my grand mother
and 37 members of my family After war my grand father came to GB where he
started a new life and was save to practise his religion in peace and with
our any fear of being killed and yes he was a camp survivor.
yeah, and you're a truth teller of course
the Jews that emigrated to UK were Germans and Austrians, and it was before 1940, after that the Brits borders were closed, or scarlely openned to those that had means to create a business and or t those that wanted to work as "servant" in Brit families
When the war ended, the Brit government was at quasi war with the sionnist government in Palestine, no Jews were allowed in Britain, or for reaching Israel under Brit rules, thaose that managed it did it from french and Italian harbours
check your facts
you aren't a french Jew, but a French basher from whatever country that hate the French
There's not much future in knocking France, I'd say:
'While it is certain that the Vichy government and a large number of its high administration collaborated in the implementation of the Holocaust, the exact level of such cooperation is still debated. Compared with the Jewish communities established in other countries invaded by Germany, French Jews suffered proportionately lighter losses . . . although, starting in 1942, repression and deportations struck French Jews as well as foreign Jews. Former Vichy officials later claimed that they did as much as they could to minimize the impact of the Nazi policies, although mainstream French historians contend that the Vichy regime went beyond the Nazi expectations.'
More BS from you i see.
First of all only 2000 french jews came back so there you go some facts for you,
Work as a servant no my grandfather joined the BRIT army and was in it for ten years.
As to Palestine yes the French armed the Jewish terrorist from Syria
No am not French AM a VERY PROUD BRIT and my grandfather taken UK citizenship and has never been back to France since living through the death camps
No am not a French basher am stating facts about the French state where French citizens who rounded up French Jews and sent them to there deaths. Something France does not like to admit
1942 happenned after Wannsee conference (january 1942) when the final solution was decided, and where no French "vichyst" politican was attending the conference
and does Eichman ring a bell for you? he who ordered that 100 000 french Jews should be deported from summer 1942, but his design was ruined only a quater of it was, and from the hundreds trains, 10 per cents were passing as after this dramatic summer the French made it difficult to deport more Jews
Knocking france tell me are you french by chance.
French Jews suffered proportionately lighter losses . . . although, starting in 1942, repression and deportations struck French Jews as well as foreign Jews. REALLY do you no how many came back or one who went back to france
Try asking my grand father then and his views getting off light.Try seeing your sister and her two daughters dragged off to the gas chambers and then being burnt,At least i pray the they died with each other and not alone.Very simple France committed mass murder of its citizens
Yes and french gladly rounded them up for the NAZI masters,Each time you back track dont you,Blame others and not your selfs
It was 76000 FRENCH JEWS BY THE WAY and another 75000 thousand non french who went to france to escape the NAZI ok they where sent to there deaths by the French also
oh you join the Brit army good, but 33 % of the French Jews were resistants too and didn't join the british army, nor they spit on the French
as you pretend to be a french, then you must understand Serge Klarsfeld, a son of a French Jew that was the lawer of the French Jews at Barbie's trial
and what a french historian says (he is living in Israel, thus not allowed to tell BS
oh do you know that France and the US supported the creation of Israel, but not Britain (though at the origin of the Balfour declaration though), that Ben Gourion was living in Paris from august 1944 until 1948?
silly boy who endorses the Brit propaganda
do you know, my grand fathers were cannon meat in the war with Germany since generations?
My mother contribuate to feed some displaced Jews in Brittany with her parents farm products
33% of the resistant fighters where french JEWS really where your proof then.Really are talking complete rubbish.
in Holocaust historian books
Calm down, Gwitty, I agree with you: 350,000 Jewish people were living in France at the time of the Invasion, "only" 75,000 were deported. That sheds a different light upon the French people's actions.
Better learn to read them then you are full of so much BS.
proove to me 350000 jews where living in france then because there where not.
Only 75000 where sent to death camps,75000 where french and only 2000 lived to tell the tale,Only 75000 you make it sound like a small number who where mass murdered.Frances shame.
Oshin1, I very much regret that you are a very poor defender of your cause. What you are writing and your way of doing so just alienate people. Good night.
To be clear, the Vichy regime implemented a racial discrimination and persecution policy on its own, pretty much out of the blackness of its far right conservative heart. Recent finds in historical documentation show how Pétain, in his own hand, hardened the dispositions of the infamous Code Juif. The legend of a benevolent Petainist shield for French and Jews is a thorough lie. What can be disputed is the extent to which the final fate of deported Jews was known in collaborationist inner circles; it was a Nazi secret, but how secret? Some French writers made no bones of their calls to genocide, which they later tried to clothe with the respectable veil of poetic licence. Hah.
The relatively high survival rate of French Jews can be traced to two factors.
One, the French population as a whole disapproved of Vichy's antisemitic policy, and actively shielded individuals and families. The much heralded denunciations remained a marginal phenomenon. In neighboring Netherlands, where informing the police was (and still is) second nature and civic duty, the Jewish population was all but exterminated.
And two, the German authority was mainly Wehrmacht and racial purity was not a priority. France was a rest and recreation destination. The Gestapo had its hands full with intelligence and police work against the Resistance, and there were no Einsatzgruppen or similar Himmler toys. Antisemitic zeal was mainly that of French rightists and common criminals, gratefully or reluctantly accepted by the Germans but not really urged on, and enabled by bureaucratic subservience.
Thank you Mr. Oshin for allowing Plazidus and myself to "vous mettre le nez dans votre caca" (A French Jew like you will understand, nicht wahr?)
How do you rate the churchmen's interventions - first the Protestants, then Cardinal Saliege - in raising consciousness?
Julian Jackson ('France, the Dark Years') makes the following distinction in his chapter 'Vichy and the Jews':
'French Society and the Jews 1940-1942: Indifference and Hostility'
'French Society and the Jews 1942-1944: Solidarity and Rescue'.
No i dont regret you one who can not defend France what it did to its French Jews and had ten of thousands murdered what did you say it only sent 75000 jews sent to the death camps,plus another 75000 thousand who tried to get asylum in France,like your good friend Gwitreg you both really can not back up your facts can you.I mean there where 350000 jews in France you said and you can back that DATA can you,All in all your two should get your facts right all ready no mine and as my grand father is one of a couple of thousand who lived that is French Jews who lived.Good night.
Dominique, those that were the most zealous Elite in Vichy policies were the "lefties"
oh and Petain wasn't worried of the Jews fate but of the French military POW, but he wasn't the alone leader of the era that didn't care, Roosevelt , churchill too, that knew of the Jews's fate in Germany, and that as soon the war ended didn't want to have more Jews immigrating into their lands. Truman changed this happening in the US, as he was the only one with france to support a Israel creation.
"A new biography on Marshall Philippe Petain says the head of the World War II French collaborationist government may have tried to surrender to the British in 1943, only to be flatly rejected.
Author and historian Charles Williams says that newly discovered "top secret" documents in the British national archives show that Petain proposed to leave Vichy and sign a peace agreement with the free French government based in Algiers.
The offer, which never even made it to the desk of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, was apparently brushed aside by Harold Macmillan, a young British minister who later became prime minister and was working at the time at allied headquarters in the Mediterranean.
"Petain seemed ready to go anywhere except north Africa," says the new biography, "making it known that if he left France the French army would be released of any allegiance to him."
The "Victor of Verdun" made contact with the British with the help of a mysterious go-between known as "Monsieur Schneider."
While it was not the first time Petain would approach the British in 1943, it was apparently the only time he offered to surrender"
what does that mean?
The allies found him useful for ther big afterwar scheme !!!
"In the city of Vichy, the French Senate and Chamber of Deputies conferred on the 84-year-old general the title of "Chief of State," making him a virtual dictator–although one controlled by Berlin. Petain believed that he could negotiate a better deal for his country–for example, obtaining the release of prisoners of war–by cooperating with, or as some would say, appeasing, the Germans.
But Petain proved to be too clever by half. While he fought against a close Franco-German military collaboration, and fired his vice premier, Pierre Laval, for advocating it, and secretly urged Spain's dictator Francisco Franco to refuse passage of the German army to North Africa, his attempts to undermine the Axis while maintaining an official posture of neutrality did not go unnoticed by Hitler, who ordered that Laval be reinstated as vice premier. Petain acquiesced, but refused to resign in protest because of fear that France would come under direct German rule if he were not there to act as a buffer. But he soon became little more than a figurehead, despite efforts to manipulate events behind the scenes that would advance the Free French cause (then publicly denying, even denouncing, those events when they came to light)."
p'tain, there are still things that aren't explained, because of their "hot" topic, and because the whole generation that wrote the legend of the winners isn't dead, see what the next dcades historians will write
Like my mother, I can't figure that people were deported for their belonging to a religion, she who rided on a bicycle under the bombs to see what was happening o her sister living in a city half uined by the bombs, and she wasn't a "courageous" french lady, she ws rather submitted to her parents and to her husband
Don't try to put the Protestants as the first rightful people, you're repeating the brit BS, the northeners (aka protestants) vs the southeners (aka catholics) in the euro crisis defined by your conservative medias
if the French weren't these people, none of your correligion fellows would have survived, see why only 5% of them survived in the other occupied countries
The french urban dictionary because
Your telling me to shut my mouth and using of the name is also C--T and calling me a A---S H---E and other nasty words because you can not argue the point with me so you have to use ABUSE and use perforation.She have shown your true colours using profanity
no need to search on the Net, it's evident
Once again this person is using hate she should be banned from TE for border line racist,
This is how this individual responds to criticism. No need to get upset. The so called French politeness is a myth and once they don't get what they want many of them revert to name calling. As far as getting her (This is a woman mind you) banned, it is in the works believe me. Other than that I would simply ignore her. She is irrelevant. I know France and I know that these kinds of people try to get on other peoples nerves. But you have to understand that when they have no other argumentation to make they simply revert to name calling like schoolchildren.
Don't assume Oshin is Jewish. He only claims he is. He would be the shame of any religion anyway.
Some figures to feed his greedy little maw:
"For scholars of the Holocaust, the low survival rate of the Jews from the Netherlands remains a mystery. Of the 140,000 people (native and immigrant) whom the Nazis considered "full" Jews in 1941, only 27 percent survived the occupation. Yet in Belgium, 60 percent of the approximately 66,000 Jews survived, and in France, 75 percent of the approximately 320,000 Jews escaped death at the hands of the Nazis.
Given the comparative weakness of antisemitism in the Netherlands, how can this remarkably low survival rate be explained?"
An authentic Jewish source, not like Comrade Oshin.
it says a lot of your mind
The RACIST is you
He is she and yes am from Jewish heritage so what make you a expert on Judaism,The only thing bothering you is that am quoting facts what french did to 75000 french jews and had them rounded up by French Gestapo and gendarmes and to the camp at Struthof,Then on to eastern europe where most of jewish population where mass murdered.So please your attempted at making france look like a victim is futile.Tell me as where only 2000 Jewish French survivors you lucky to have a french jewish friend very rare indeed.
Read your comments about the germans and brits and how you spout on about all other peoples.Makes look like you dont like any one only when there French
Thank you for your response as to being banned what was she none as before the TE banned her.
Interventions from the pulpit certainly played a part. But I understand that witnessing actual persecution was reason enough for most. The fate of the children seems to have been a clincher - ironical enough since deporting children was a French initiative.
this site is generous with the Netherlands and Belgium, the average opnion of Aipac would attibute them far lesser benefit
as the average opinion of collaborating with the Nazis was much higher as far contribution to the Wehrmacht and to the SS gruppen
The French weren't hold as serious figheters in the nazy army
another official source for collaboration with the Nazis
you aren't quoting facts but using them for your own agenda, antifrench agenda
persons like you? I wonder why we she have cared, you aren't humans, but hatemongers
My man ruled a Hotel in a french cure Ort, where in august, most of the people spoke yidish, and I could understand most what they said, because I learnt German in my grammar school, and we were all joking together, fees paid by the german embassy
Some of these persons wanted to follow my husband career positions, but couldn't afford it, for good reasons, Germany wouldn't have paid for it
you're a salopard, that isn't trying to appease the quarrels but to ignify them
Don't worry, the french Jews will never follow you, they are french since our Revolution, even if Israel is trying to attract them for repopulating a country drowned with neighbours offsprings, with susbsidies, the frendh Jews feel FRENCH, and they are in all our politician organisations
you're a bitter loser, get a life, see if the Pakisanese will listen to your recriminations
Oh Dear you could not understand what they where saying as they where speaking Yiddish because you learnt german what that got to do with the time of day do really think i care ever thought speaking Hebrew.As to a anti french agenda that your paranoid state of mind as you are the one who comes out with the anti agenda about other countries like about the germans and the brits for two.All am saying is fact france had ten of thousand of jews sent to the the death camps and the French jews where rounded up and held by the French until they where sent for slaughter to eastern europe.I think i no who you are now and yes you where banned for causing trouble you are Claude Marie.Not a lot you can say about what france did in the war is there,Leave you with something to read.There you can really feel the shame.
ol right, stay on your old clichés while humanity is going beyond your feet
poorretardedcoonhard (and I'mg enerous, see what does that mean in Louisiana) LMAO
clincher, a french initiative, because none dared to separate the families, you know we weren't all post modernists then, families was the basic support of our society
So TE why have not removed the above comment
juff you know, I woundn't mind that he tPA would smah you, youere such a rubbish of the humanity
As I understand it, Pétain was prepared to fall in with Giraud and Poniatovski's plans for him except in one trifling yet vital detail: there was no aircraft for the flight from Corsica to North Africa that was equipped with appropriate WC facilities… the Maréchal's incontinence. If he had been able to swallow his pride to the extent of availing himself of a potty, who knows?
French Protestants live in the south, traditionally, Gwitty.
This sounds more than likely.
It usually takes them about 48 hours but in general they remove offensive comments
Hi Rivierarocket 30 comments where removed last night one still remains how ever with words poorretardedcoonhard or poor retarded coonhard TE has not removed this reverts and insults about people who are coloured i find if that is typical of french mentality and the comments on this blog i wounder why so many french jews died and racism must be still prevalent in french way of life and genes.
I systematically have the comments removed and will continue to do so. Please continue also. I just reported another 3. I am writing to the editor today so please do so yourself today and I suggest any others who are tired of posting on this site due to this blogger's remarks should do likewise and mention to the editor that they are outraged that a site of this stature would permit such constant insults and obscenity. By "coonhard" I believe she means "connard" but is trying to be sneaky. However I see thru it and I report the comment with an explanation. In any case, I think it is obvious that this blogger is not playing with a full deck. Not to worry. Change takes time but I believe we will prevail.
"French Protestants live in the south, traditionally"
they live anywhere, especially numerous in Poitou-Charrentes
south of Vienne, Deux-Sèvres, we can see some graves amid farms, during the religion war, the protestants weren't allowed to bury their deads in the official cemetary,
funny how the bugs are fitting each others
Below is one reason you shouldn't give any credit to what Gwitreg writes. I almost died laughing when I read this.
Gwitreg. in reply to ralphmalph Aug 16th, 21:45
Carlos Sainz (a Spanish) the head of Renault
French big corporation have always a foreign manager abroad
The truth is
Carlos Sainz is a race car driver. Carlos Ghosn is both Brazilian and French and is the head of Renault. She got her Carlos' mixed up but at least she didn't think that Carlos Santana was head of Renault or even worse Carlos the jackal.
She seems to have a problem between driving a car and being the President of a company. That is if your name is Carlos.
and you aren't paid for your job !
Yes i will reply and thank you for your help you have been most kind, Amazed how some are allowed to get away this there vile insults,What the saying what goes around comes around,
Yes i had seen it i was laughing so much when i was reading it,I nearly replied but thought better of it,Some people have no idea
Oh do pipe down, please.
"I systematically have the comments removed and will continue to do so. Please continue also. I just reported another 3"
So Oshin had a French Jewish granddad and from your confession, you must have had a Dutch Gentile granddad, being an informant runs in the blood.
Now please report me too. You must itch to do so. You'd be a precious gift to any totalitarian regime. Ever thought of learning Mandarin?
Yes you dont like people reporting the truth about how France acted against some of its citizens in the war do you,Well every was in the resistance when Germans where the occupying force.
Since you claim to be a Brit, would it be too much to ask from you to try and write in English? Deciphering your gobbledygook far exceeds my patience.
Reading your BS makes me laugh tell me have you been a legend in your own mind very long
@Dominique II.
Fortunately I had an education that taught me to respect the rules. I suppose yours has taught you to flaunt the rules and try to get around them as much as possible. As for the comments. Yes, I will continue to report comments directed at me or others which do not respect the rules of this blog. Obscenity especially when it is written in French for example. Rules are made to be respected which may be a very difficult concept for you to understand as you are most certainly hardwired to try to get around them. As I don't particularly follow your comments and I am more amused by "La femme à 6000 commentaires", I really haven't looked at your comments too much. You can make all of the comments about collaboration etc that you wish. I have lived in France long enough to understand that the first French "art of war" (If that phrase is not an oxymoron in itself) whether it be on the battle field or in debate is to "tchatcher un max" and then roll over and play the victim. I don't do long useless debates just to prove I am right. Fortunately I was educated with a sense of self worth not with an inferiority and victimization complex which obliges me to respond to each and every comment that appears on this blog.
My "granddad" as you say, was from "Ukraine" and immigrated to the United States at the turn of the 20th century. Had he remained in Ukraine he would have certainly been taken into a field with my grandmother and shot in the back of the head by the Einsatzgruppen. Hardly what I would call a Dutch Gentile Informant.
If you would like to continue insulting me, please go ahead. It really doesn't bother me, as you can see by the low number of responses that I make. (You get this one and that's all folks). I don't get into these totally useless and endless French debates simply to prove you are right. However when you fall back on that learned reflex to strike out at members of one's family out of a lack of reasoned logic, please make sure of your facts before speaking. I thought the French were the world's most cultured people.
Sorry, not interested. Keep bashing the French, I could not care less. I'm past the urge to educate.
Socialism in affluent Europe transfers wealth from the rich to the middle class. It is vital to keep poor people out of the system, as their presence either lessens the middle class's spoils, or reveals the moral bankrupcy of a system that spoils the middle class at the expense of the poor and the long-term unemployed. If taxes went to help the poor, the middle class would be left to fend for themselves. Mon Dieu! Quelle catastrophe!
'The issue is not Roma or Gypsies, it is the imbecile (or engineered) EU enlargement which was MEANT to flood "real" Europe with low wage earners, so as to lower labor costs (a red herring, which is only peripheral to Europe's competitiveness woes) and improve profits (that it did). [Dominique II]
Of course, the issue is Roma and France's 'difficult' outer suburb community. That is what the article is about, old chap. The problem is that France had neither the will nor the means adequately to look after her immigrant community, particularly when it came to the second and third generations.
As for the Roma, or Sinti, or Gypsies, I think you are standing on ground as shaky as a derelict Romany caravan left abandoned. This is an issue of considerable importance to Roma and the EU both and poo-pooing it is really rather naughty of you, Dominique.
Anybody who states that wage-levels are largely irrelevant ('a red herring') to 'Europe's competitiveness' has a slender acquaintance with open societies, open economies, and an open mind. Of course it does.
'Well, it so happens that those countries with low-paid workforces also have an abysmal standard of education, law enforcement and social security nets. Hence the Roma child molesters, the Albanian pimps and other gifts from the enlightened free-trade ideologues.' [Dominique II]
It is also true to state, as a general rule, that those countries which 'have an abysmal standard of education, law enforcement and social security nets' would expect – in all honesty – to be countries where wages are low. I fail to see the relevance of such statements of the blooming obvious to the point at issue. IS Albania in the EU? Should Romania have been albeit partially admitted?
You give a most convincing impression, Dominique, of a NIMBY [not-in-my-back-yard] Frenchman who feels threatened by the wider world. You yearn tearfully for the pre-reunification days of Germany when Europe was divided by an Iron Curtain. Those were the days, my friend. France was cock of the roost, lording it over the Latins, bullying the guilt-tormented German, and being insufferable to the rest of Benelux. (At the Bonn summit of 18 July 1961, Charles de Gaulle proposed that the capital of the new Europe should be Paris.) Needless to say, this myopic vision – how thick were Big Charles' glasses? – excluded the single European country with claims to be a useful all-rounder and bit of a world-player.
Diddums, France felt threatened. Still does.
'Now, you probably belong to the monetarist faith which holds that only countries with equivalent economies should enter into a monetary union, and thus would gladly expel the oldest European country from the Eurozone. I happen to think only countries with similar human development should enter into a population union, which is the EU.' [Dominique II]
If you believe that Greece and France are 'countries with similar human development', then I'm a Dutchman.
'Sure the EU should help retarded countries to catch up, but not by giving them free access with only token obligation to improve - trickle-down civilization does not work any better than trickle-down economy.' [Dominique II]
I'm sorry, Dominique, but to my jaundiced eye 'retarded nations', as you term them, might well encompass several of the 15 EU members in 1995. I'll give you a clue: Look South. Standards, you see, had already plunged long before there was any question of admitting Poland, Hungary, or Czechoslovakia.
'If you see no connection between free-trade sectarians (as opposed to intelligent trade management) and the flooding of some areas by shadowy characters, it's very simple…' [Dominique II]
Sectarian, yourself, it seems. What you write about 'free-trade' suggests that you understand 'free-trade' to mean some kind of 'law of the jungle' Darwinian 'survival of the roughest, wildest' state of affairs. This is a rather silly misconception. There IS no 'free-trade' without strict regulation to ensure that the rules of 'free-trade', precisely, are enforced. 'Trade management', I suspect, is code for all manner of restrictive, protectionist, anti-competitive tendencies.
"Of course, the issue is Roma and France's 'difficult' outer suburb community. That is what the article is about, old chap. The problem is that France had neither the will nor the means adequately to look after her immigrant community, particularly when it came to the second and third generations."
oh sure these bloody French are the sinners, hey, in Germany, Italy, Spain....and Britain the same problems exist, but aren't singled as for France, who bizarrely always gets the medias attention
"who feels threatened by the wider world"
didn't notice that, just that he has convictions
tell me how Britain isn't feeling threatened by a wider world, when it didn't sign the Schengen agreement?
"You yearn tearfully for the pre-reunification days of Germany when Europe was divided by an Iron Curtain. Those were the days, my friend. France was cock of the roost, lording it over the Latins, bullying the guilt-tormented German, and being insufferable to the rest of Benelux. (At the Bonn summit of 18 July 1961, Charles de Gaulle proposed that the capital of the new Europe should be Paris.)"
ah that old DT argumentation about Germany 's guiltiness
and your peculiar admiration for de Gaulle
in 1961, there was no forecasting that the two Germany were going to reunify soon, Paris was the de facto political capital, would you think that Bonn could become Washington bis?
"Was Margaret Thatcher right to fear a united Germany?
Documents published last week highlight the former prime minister's concern that the fall of the Berlin Wall could be a risk to Britain's national security."
yet it was France who feared such a reunification, LMAO
not what a german historian wrote though:
"If you believe that Greece and France are 'countries with similar human development', then I'm a Dutchman"
yet the comparison of France with Greece is in all your favorite Brit medias, I wonder why, ach Ja, because can't be of this famous northern club, so praised by your opinionists
you could be that Dutman by your DNA, who were the Britains original settlers?
"Look South. Standards, you see, had already plunged long before there was any question of admitting Poland, Hungary, or Czechoslovakia"
BS, spanish growth rate was one of the most promising' before the 2008 Lehmans & Brothers crash
like spanish debt was one of the EU lowest's
Greece was still sustainable, unfortunately the OG added more debt to its level
we'll see how Britain will absorb the OG debt soon too
" There IS no 'free-trade' without strict regulation to ensure that the rules of 'free-trade', precisely, are enforced. "
blah blah, capitalism of nowadays isn't capitalism it's communism for the richest elite
Schengen agreement? sorry how many years did you ban eastern Europeans from working in france,Chirac and the polish le plumber taking jobs and reason why brits did not sign up to Schengen agreement? simple really we could not trust the french to control illegal aliens from entering the UK.
sorry but the polish plumber wasn't a specific France problem, Germny... and the UK had it too.
There's not such a distinction of workers when their enterprises respect our laws, which wasn't the case when these "plumbers" were operating in our western countries. Their polish bosses won markets by dealing them with polish wages, which were much lower than for our nationals, which was a disloyal concurrence for our (the western countries) enterprises, problem that has been solved since then
Chirac isn't associated with the polish plumber but with the Katzcinski brothers, telling them that they missed the opportunity to STFU when zealous polish soldiers found a french WMD in Irak, which was in reality a old exocet missile sold in 1981, also which wasn't manufactured since 1993 anymore.
oh and Schengen isn't the argument for illegal aliens, that the French still stop in Calais
Remind me to tell Holllande to make your government paying our gendarmerie for that
Really may i correct you http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9d5d703a-cf14-11d9-8cb5-00000e2511c8.html#axzz... once again you talk utter BS and the UK and Ireland where the only ones to open up there labour markets to the eastern Europeans and Germany and France had them closed.Yep typical france keep a expensive closed shop and charge what you can as in to much.CHIRAC WAS AGAINST THE POLISH PLUMBER IN EVERY SENSE.
blah blah, count on your press to tell the whole truth, which isn't facts reports but opinions on facts
ask cutters what he thinks of the polish plumbers in UK, they weren't loved too
Are really can not be asked to ask some one called cutter about the professionalism of polish plumbers in any form in fact i have used two and they did a first class job thank you very much.As to reporting facts you find the FT first class,You just dont like some one showing you up do you
glad you appreciated the polish plumbers, sure they can do a good job as much as their Brit colleagues, even if their bill was significantly lighter, which made you chose them rather than a Brit enterprise, don't be shy tell us !
I think you're run out of ammunition... or the will to defend la belle Farce?
really, don't telll me that you're defending your great Joke as rightful
'Hollande Daze' [The Times]
A not inappropriate title. Oh, and it seems that la Trierweiler is quite a drain on the taxpayers' resources...
I am not the first to note that, with Hollande, the French got much less than they expected.
boff, you're a easy medias target
Hollande isn't what the "lefties" used to describe as "flanby", but a war machine for winning, ie the last book from a lefty on him
"La chance de Hollande, c'est que la crise, c'est une guerre. On est en guerre ! Hollande, c'est un combattant. C'est tout sauf un hasard s'il est arrivé là. Ce mec, c'est un guerrier."
It seems that Hollande broke the german way of dealing with the crisis, in setting Italy and Spain as major players too... not what la Merkel had in mind
Flanby's trump card was the fact his name doesn't have an S, R, K, or Y in it. Everything about the bloke's manner spells 'I-am-a-push-over', don't you think? I'm all in favour of un-electing incumbent presidents but the French made a dire gaffe in allowing their dislike get the better of good sense.
They where cheaper and made more money
still trolling ?
" you understand 'free-trade' to mean some kind of 'law of the jungle' Darwinian 'survival of the roughest, wildest' state of affairs"
Actually I don't. I've worked all my life as an economist, not academic but on the field, and always implementing and promoting freer trade. I oppose protectionism when it is a policy, as opposed to protection when it is mandated by circumstances. Those who (wholly on purpose) make the confusion between free trade and trade darwinism (as you drolly say) are those who, while claiming to stand for the former, actually push for the latter. False flag economics, so to speak.
Remember that the shameful and criminal opium wars, which France had the dishonor to join in, were waged in the name of free trade, at the same time Britain was imposing the strictest mercantilism on its Indian empire. Today nobody would argue these wars were in defence of free trade - more of international piracy.
We seem to agree on the necessity of strict regulation as a component of true competition. But when the regulation is visibly skewed and/or ignored, when the WTO hobbles a set of countries while giving free rein to another, your support for regulation quickly is revealed for what it is - a smokescreen.
Please credit me with never attacking free trade as such. I always take care to finger free trade high priests, fanatics, whatever - those who would have us think that their brand of state-supported piracy is free trade. Thus giving it a bad name, which I am the first to regret.
Hush! Don't break Hollande's cover. What our 'friends' don't understand won't harm us.
'Actually I don't. I've worked all my life as an economist, not academic but on the field, and always implementing and promoting freer trade. I oppose protectionism when it is a policy, as opposed to protection when it is mandated by circumstances. Those who (wholly on purpose) make the confusion between free trade and trade darwinism (as you drolly say) are those who, while claiming to stand for the former, actually push for the latter. False flag economics, so to speak.' [Dominique II]
I believe you, Dominique, and grant that you can claim to have practised what you preach with sincerity, and in a manner which armchair theoreticians like me can but admire.
That said, I wonder why Charlemagne wrote a piece on 24 March this year called 'Unfree Trade' and illustrated by a picture of a man - of average size, I emphasise! - standing behind a half raised drawbridge. Above the portcullis is a banner reading, 'Europe welcomes Free Trade', while, perceptible on the underside of the drawbridge, is a second banner on which is written, 'NON!'
In the Wikipedia (French) entry on 'Protectionnisme' [Protectionism], the justification for protecting trade is made exclusively by recourse to a word in what the eminent daily, 'Libération', is pleased to call 'Anglo-Saxon'. The word is 'dumping'. See for yourself, Dominique:
I'll tell you what free trade is not, Dominique: Unilever > Fralib, or SeaFrance > My Sea Link.
you're so busy to denigrate anything French that you miss the intrinsic meaning of the facts, that haven't a english mind explanation
I know that SeaFrance was a joke, Gwitty. All those strikes! All the pilfering! All the rackets! Like those SNCM ferries linking Marseille and Toulon to Corsica.
I know too that French working people are so neurotic on the subject of redundancy that all manner of un-heroic behaviours are the consequence. (As a matter of fact I immodestly regard myself as something of an authority on the inner mental life of genus Frenchman... Frenchwomen are rather more complex and I'm still working on them.)
tell me, no strike in your Holly land? oh and Britain is such a wealthy country in spite of them !
BS, read your DT blogs, unrests in british suburbs aren't rare, corruption in your finances, no more british label own their label anymore, the Germans, the french own them...
I am sure that a coolly analytical debunking of many pretension of Great Britain is perfectly possible. Have you read the pages of 'The Economist'? I'd give them greater credence than 'Daily Torygraph' coverage. The fact is, Gwitty, I have few illusions with regard to the UK.
That said, your buck-shot, scatter-gun attack is seriously non-harmful.
try to remember whith whom you are related
chear animal
the problem isn't what you're believing it, it's
my perception which was off writen, ie that you aka jewd weren't imune wiihin the whole process
I hope the problem soon goes away. As the proverb goes, 'Qui aime bien chie bien' [She whose attachment is real is prompt to shed her burden].
There are many things in the British way of life, mentality, and past experiences in which I can take some pride. I cannot say the same for France. Worse, only France merits my weary invocation on crossing the national threshold: "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate" [Abandon hope, ye who enter here].
"Worse, only France merits my weary invocation on crossing the national threshold: "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate""
I see you've never been to Nigeria. Ahem.
This being said, it is obvious Dante made his Inferno a much more interesting place to visit than Heavens. (following the Arabic authors he took part of his inspiration from...)
Oh, and the way you take advantage of the moderator's hapless ignorance of colloquial French is precious. Much brilliance there. You should be ashamed.
We spent a very happy near-three years in Zambia. So I know something about the N-factor. Spare not my blushes, Dominique, is Nigeria SO MUCH worse than several FrancAfrique countries? My daughter spent time in Congo-Brazzaville, a place surely far closer to Dante's Inferno than Nigeria.
You must be kidding. Expats in Nigeria flock to neighboring French-speaking countries for stress-free holidays or week-ends. Citizens from neighboring African countries of all linguistic affinities go to Nigeria for trafficking but with fear-wrenched guts, so corrupt and brutal is the police. Congo-Brazza is paradise next to Nigeria. Congo-Kinshasha is supposed to be a contender, but in my experience, as corrupt as it is, it is nowhere as brutal or stressful, in peacetime that is. Zambia does not in any way prepare you for the Nigerian experience.
Well it can be any worse than Algeria can it tell me another humiliation for the French and retreat and a very nasty civil war and use of state torture and terrorism by the French once again like Vietnam you got your back sides beaten,Well at least with Nigeria if they cant handle independence there citizens can go where they like it called a free world and many have come to the UK and are 3 and 4 generation BRITS have a pleasant day and enjoy your weekend.
'You must be kidding. Expats in Nigeria flock to neighboring French-speaking countries for stress-free holidays or week-ends . . . . Congo-Brazza is paradise next to Nigeria.' [Dominique II]
No doubt you're right. This is probably because Francophone Africa is being outperformed by Anglophone and Portuguese-speaking Africa. It's all rather embarrassing really.
Yeah, thé brit superior culture, we saw how thé arabs appreciated it in Irak
African francophone countries weren't all french colonies
Besides, can't say that obama's grand father was happy with your rules, nor sierra leone, Nigeria , southern africa, hey who invented the concentration camps? Not the french, YOU did !
'Yeah, thé brit superior culture, we saw how thé arabs appreciated it in Irak. African francophone countries weren't all french colonies. Besides, can't say that obama's grand father was happy with your rules, nor sierra leone, Nigeria , southern africa, hey who invented the concentration camps? Not the french, YOU did !' [Bobonne]
This scatter-gun approach reminds me fondly of lost Gwitty. Oh, where is she? On France Inter this morning, the presenters found funny the report from [German] 'Der Spiegel' according to which the French have an inferiority complex vis-à-vis the Germans. I agree with them: the French don't have a complex.
Bon dimanche [have a happy Sunday], Dominique, I've started a new thread: there is too much world around here, as you say.
"But the policy is essentially the same. And those on the left are surprisingly quiescent. Christiane Taubira, justice minister and a member of the Radical Party of the Left (PRG), demurred when asked to compare Mr Valls's policies to Mr Sarkozy's."
Says it all. The 'harsh' Sarkozy treatment of the Roma was a main plank of the Hollande election campaign. The French left.. full of hypocrisy as usual
Taubira is besides her feet, Hollande will priviledge Vals, hey he represents the true "socialists"
Prior to bashing a country, it is a minimal courtesy to hoist your own flag, if you have one (conservatives being notoriously economic with patriotism).
Anyway the EU Commissioner who saw shadows of the forties in Sarkozy's methods, to the international right's outraged dismay, had no such words for Valls, who met her, or Hollande. And she's neither French nor Socialist.
A real 'Dominiquism': 'conservatives being notoriously economic with patriotism'. Brilliant.
I note your sarcasm on the form, and your implicit acquiescence on the substance.
You are far too subtle for me, Dominique II; and sarcasm doesn't travel relying, as it must, on shared linguistic-cultural assumptions.
Admittedly, the matter is subjective. I had thought that you were being a little pompous ('it is a minimal courtesy to...').
And most people would agree with me that patriotism is a 'conservative' strength while internationalism is a 'progressive' one.
Please believe that I wrote 'Brilliant' with a broad smile on my face and mean-spirited sneer. No hurt was intended.
too polite for being honnest
Do you mean, 'trop poli pour etre honnete'? [= Excessive unmanly politeness prevents you being manly i.e. undeceitfully rude]. Not so, Geronimo.
"most people would agree with me that patriotism is a 'conservative' strength while internationalism is a 'progressive' one"
Most people who've never lived in an invaded country, that is.
The loftier the mansion, the more brand-new the flags at the windows.
Trust our memories about that (note the plural).
(I personally met a gentleman who put his life at risk demonstrating on the Champs-Elysées in the first year of occupation on July 14 with fellow students. They were rightists and he still was a conservative. But he was something of a rare bird. Charming old gent.)
What you write, Dominique, is so interesting that I have started a thread on the matter. (See above... or below). If, by Resistance, we have in mind acts of physical violence, it is impossible to discuss the matter without giving pride of place to the moral/coercive force of Moscow; as well as the material and logistical support of the SOE.
It might be useful to remind people that the Roma (gypsies) came originally from India and spread across Europe in the 1400s together with the arrival of the Turks. "When the Roma people arrived in Europe, the initial curiosity of its residents soon changed to hostility against the newcomers...they were subject to ethnic cleansing, abduction of their children, and forced labor. In England, Roma were sometimes hanged or expelled from small communities; in France, they were branded and their heads were shaved; in Moravia and Bohemia, the women were marked by their ears being severed. As a result, large groups of the Roma moved to the East, toward Poland, which was more tolerant, and Russia, where the Romani were treated more fairly as long as they paid the annual taxes."
The Roma are found mostly in Eastern Europe (BG and RO, in particular) simply because this is where they felt safe throughout the centuries. In a similar manner, when Jews were persecuted and expelled from the West back in the Middle Ages (e.g. England, France, Spain) they found refuge in Eastern Europe. During WWII, unlike the French and many other West Europeans, the brave Bulgarians defied their German masters and saved all their Jews AND Gypsies from the death camps. Now we have a situation of a common home - the EU with freedom of movement of people and goods. We are not back in the Middle Ages and cannot burn the Roma people at the stake. Not allowing them into an EU country would be against the EU laws. Now is the time for West Europeans, instead of lecturing BG and RO on tolerance and integration of minorities etc. to learn how to live with the Roma. Communism gave the Roma positive discrimination, free housing and mandatory education. Few of them actually changed. Now is the turn of the mature western democracies to try their innovative ways. Good luck!
I am sorry, but your conclusion is wrong. It is a statement often heard from Romanians and Bulgarians, which try to throw away the ball to Western Europe's yard. This is not fair. I believe that it is good for Ro and Bg to try to obtain help from the other memebers of the EU on this matter, especially by asking council. It is good for those 2 countries to try to explain and make known to the west the difficulties they encounter. It is good that they try to make EU public opinion realise that the gipsies are minorities in these 2 countries and try to avoid being labeled as gipsy countries. But, at the end of the day, history, political context, ethics, etc, cannot be invoked by Romania, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, etc in order for tem to avoid responsability for the current state of the gipsy minorities in their countries. They can explain their situation, they can ask for some sympathy, but the responsability lies ultimately with the country of origin of those Gipsies. Eastern European countries should invest more effort, time and money in order to improve Gipsies' situation at home. If that means giving them more facilities for free, well, that's that, they'll have to do it, even to the detriment of projects of infastructure, for instance. These countries can't go on with the reffrain: ''you take care of them, 'cause we couldn't...now you'll see how it is to deal with those gipsies''. That attiude won't lead anywhere. By saying that, people from Ro, Bg, etc, all they will achieve is to stirr the hate of hotheads in France, Italy. Gipsies are an ethnical minority in Europe which should be on of the main focuses of the EU states in order to tackle their plight, their ancient wrong cultural habits and as long the nation states won't take the bull by the horns this situation will go on like in the past.
I am afraid you missed the main point. The approach that you describe belongs to an earlier era (e.g. the Middle Ages but certainly pre-2008) and to a legal situation which no longer exists. According to the EU laws, member states cannot deny entry to citizens of another member state. Do you comprehend what this means? Gypsies are free to settle ANYWHERE. It is their freedom of choice. Period. You write: "Eastern European countries should invest more effort, time and money in order to improve Gipsies' situation at home." Why only East Europeans? How do you define "home"? All of the EU is our and their home. France can be selective and deny entry (or send back to Africa/Asia) any non-EU citizens, but not people holding BG or RO or SK passports. Can you imagine that the US state of Virginia for example sends back to Louisiana some black US citizens because they are poor or illiterate?
My friend, you're talking of an EU that doesn't exist. In our passports it is not written ''nationality: European Union'' but: French, German, Italian, Bulgarian, etc. I'm not saying that liberty of mouvement should or could be restrained, I believe freedom of movement inside EU is a good thing. What I say is that the responsability for the actual situation of the gipsies belongs to the country they come from. Romanian gipsies, those 15 thousand who bother the French, well, the fact that they are mostly beggars and thieves, is not France's fault but Romania's, because they bear Romanian passport and Romania seems incapable of educating and integrating a fraction of its population. They decided to go to France and start bad things there, well, that reflects bad on the country they come from. Now, what it remains to be debated is: is it France's duty to take care of these wanderers as they now decided to stay there? Can or will France take care of them, integrate them, give them subsidies, etc? It depends on the patience, the humanity, the good will of France. Of course, once they're in EU it is illegal to deport them, but it is illegal for the gipsies to squat on public or privat property in France. You see, the situation is complex and various groups of people can see this matter in different ways. But, what you have to aknowledge is that nationality inside EU still matters, that when overqualified people from Romania or other poorer countries go to France, Germany, etc, nobody complains about ''invasion'' and the free circulation is good...when mall chains open inside Romania and others, coming from France or other richer country, closig down smaller local stores, well, that's a good thing and no Frenchman is complaining. They don't complain that EU takes care of the French farmers to the detriment of those in Poland, Romania, Slovakia. They only complain when they lose jobs to delocalisation, when they lose jobs to people coming to their country willing to work more for less or they're complaining when gipsies come and steal their wallets and beg in the square. What you have to understand is that EU is a place where older and richer members make the rules, they ''are more equal'' than the other members and the poorer have to submit and try to rise economically in time as to have a say too in the Union's politics.
EU isn't United States, in Europe nationality matters very much and especially countries like Ro and Bg are espected not to bother the seniors, to keep opening their border to big daddy's businesses and laws and quotas, to keep sending good brains to work there when needed but to keep at home gipsies and the like. You see? All your fantasy EU is just that: a fantasy.
Blah blah...
"Bulgarians saved their country's Jews in exchange for the Jews of the other territories under their control,"
13 000 Macedonian Jew from "old Bulgarian territory were sent to treblinka
The Romas were the people that were well accepted in !romania when they served the power there, now they are a charege in moden times, you welcomed them, take care of them !
oh BTW, during WW2, no French Roma was sent to deportations camsps, I wonder why, since everybody thinks that they are unuseful to modern societies !
Don't discharge your responsabilities on us. you should have programmed Education for them, hey some say that they are gifted for musics, like some of our compatriots thinks that the Blacks are gifted for sport
"According to the EU laws, member states cannot deny entry to citizens of another member state. Do you comprehend what this means? Gypsies are free to settle ANYWHERE."
the Gypsies have a 3 month authorisation to visit the EU countries, besides that, if they can't justify of legal revenues, they must leave, like poeple of Africa visiting their parents in western countries
Your government found it very easy to discharge its responsabilities towards the Gypsies
In the US, you can't enter in if you haven't got a Labour a preresquisite contract before, if you aren't a tourist
you're spreading lies
Yes, of course, "it is illegal for the gipsies to squat on public or privat property in France". Did I say otherwise? If break the law they are to be punished. People may complain about anything (losing their jobs to foreigners, crime due to ...). This is not the issue. The issue is about legal rights. Holders of EU passports (regardless of nationality) have the freedom to move. I know many westerners don't like that but if they don't and would prefer to be selective, change the EU Treaties et voila. Europe is the US but in fact many of aspects of a federal state are already there. Should I start with the euro debacle? If France does not like BG and RO gypsies, it is free to leave the EU. It is an economic drag on the EU not because of the gypsies but because of the unrealistic socialist expectations of its own populace.
For the record: The Macedonian Jews were never issued BG passports. They were NOT Bulgarian citizens. Macedonia was never part of Bulgaria proper. Macedonia was promised by the Germans to be delivered to Bulgaria only AFTER the war. During the war, Macedonia was administered by the Nazis, not the Bulgarians. Therefore, its Jews could not have benefited from being BG citizens and to be saved.
In contrast to the Bulgarians, most Europeans were all too happy to get rid of their Jewish neighbors and to deliver them to the Nazis. Denmark is the only known exception to the rule. However, its 2000 Jews were not kept within the country, the way the 55000 BG Jews were. The Danish simply shipped them all off to safety in Sweden, which was not as difficult to do as to keep them safe with the Nazis around.
The head of the BG Orthodox Church decided to wear himself the yellow star of David in support of the Jews. We all know what the Catholic church did during the war. We all know that since the 4th Lateran Council in the 1200s, the Catholic church decided to use the Jews as an example how one would be treated if one doesn't follow its doctrine. As a result, Jews found refuge in Eastern Europe. Similar to the treatment of Jews is the current treatment of Gypsies.
You write: "Don't discharge your responsabilities on us. you should have programmed Education." As I already said: "Communism gave the Roma positive discrimination, free housing and mandatory education." Are you aware of that? Few of them actually changed. Due to the formation of the EU-wide policies, now it is an EU-wide issue.
Please check the EU laws. Gypsies from EU member states are NOT like "people of Africa visiting their parents in western countries". Also, please read more carefully because I see you are confused. In my post I was referring to movement of people from one US state to another (Louisiana to Virginia). Not about entry into the US from the outside.
"If France does not like BG and RO gypsies, it is free to leave the EU. It is an economic drag on the EU not because of the gypsies but because of the unrealistic socialist expectations of its own populace."
not necessary, just steppingout of the Schengen aera agreement would do it
"For the record: The Macedonian Jews were never issued BG passports. They were NOT Bulgarian citizens."
of course, they couldn't for good reasons, they were "delocated"
"During the war, Macedonia was administered by the Nazis, not the Bulgarians.", yet the Bg troops were doing the Nazis occupation job
"In contrast to the Bulgarians, most Europeans were all too happy to get rid of their Jewish neighbors and to deliver them to the Nazis."
NO, they were forced to, as occupied countries with Nazy troops
"Denmark is the only known exception to the rule"
Danemark had a special statute in Nazis regards, it was considered as a Aryan brother nation, and because of this reason it could aministrate it like a autonome region, therefore with its own government, though when the "final solution" for the Jews was decided in Wannsee (january 1942), the Danish jews wouldn't be spared anymore too, though the danish government of the era had freehand to organise their retreat to a neighbour island (under swedish rule, I believe, which was safe from occupation.
in the other european occupied countries, there wasn't such a possibility, since the US and Britain closed their border to such flights too
"Communism gave the Roma positive discrimination, free housing and mandatory education." Are you aware of that? Few of them actually changed. Due to the formation of the EU-wide policies, now it is an EU-wide issue."
Ol right, but why would this duty only befall on the French then
you still have your part of responsability
hmm in the EU laws, Bulgaria and Romania aren't in the Schengen aera, therefore the populations of these two countries are considered as "foreign" as far as "movements"
The EU still isn't a Federation of states like the US, if it was, there wouldn't be this DEBT problem
Final Solution
Dear Gwitreg, you do not know too much about how this Schengen functions. Look: Romanian citizens, if they want to get to another EU country, all that have to do is to show an ID card, just show it, at the border, an operation that takes 10 seconds, and they enter the Schengen area. Lorries with merchandise wgen entering Schengen, have to stop at the border and present some documentation, it is not douane. It is just a simple formality as to check that he person entering Schengen has proper documentation and that the person isn't the citizen of a tertiary country, illegal inmigrants,etc, which is why Ro wasn't received in the Schengen for the moment, because the EU officials feared that the border weren't properly guarded yet. being member of EU but not of Schengen means very few inconveniences for the people willing to travel to EU..it means a few minutes delay as they have a look at your ID.
Uk wanted not to be a member of Schengen because like that they have the right to still maintain border and check IDs and see if all the persons entering UK are EU citizens or are illigal inmigrants, which is why you have so many extracomunitaires at Calais...I find it unfair that UK was permited to enjoy all the advantages but was granted the right to opt out, among others, from Schengen.
So, populations of RO and BG, as those of UK, Ireland, Cyprus, are not considered foreign at all. They have the same right of mouvement inside EU as you Frnchguy have, except for the small formality of showing an ID card before entering Schengen, without being checked or anything. When you get out of RO or BG into Schengen,by car, you just hace to show your ID through the windows of the car and you're good to go. Hope that this small lecture I gave you will help you understand better this Schengen stuff. You exagerate its importance.
"all that have to do is to show an ID card, just show it, at the border"
while we don't
when we cross borders for going to Spain, Portugal, Luxemburg, Belgium, Germany, Italy... we aren't requested to show our ID
I know that you thick head...I'm just saying that showing that ID at teh border is a mere formality, nobody checks your records, nobody can stop you at the border, as long as you have an EU id card. that is why nobody can stop gipsies. That's why Ro and Bg nationals have the same rights as the other EU members who are also Schengen members. They have the same legal situaton as you the French have, except thta by enetering Schengen 1st time, they show that document, a mere forrmalilty. I do not see why you have to tell me that you do not have to show your ID...didn't you guess I know that already, didn'you already realised I live in W Europe, that I travelled to many countries, that I know so many people? I was just illustarting to you that Schengen has no power on RO or BG nationals. If France were only left out of the Schengen but would still be inside EU, France could not legally stop gipsies from entering it...she could only ask the gipsies to show an Id upon entering, that's it. I started this explanation on Schengen because you seem to attribute too much importance to it, whereas in reality it is not in anyway molesting to Ro gipsies, which was your annoyance in the first place.
You wrote:
"NO, they were forced to, as occupied countries with Nazy troops".
Oh, yes, this is the narrative created by the non-Germans to justify their own passivity and lack of courage. Sorry, but no one forced the AVERAGE citizen in the non-occupied and occupied countries like the Baltics, the Hungarians, the Croats, the French, the Ukrainians, the Poles, the Czechs or the Romanians to REMAIN SILENT knowing the fate of their Jewish population. Some even rejoiced and couldn't wait to move into the apartments left when Jews were rounded up. Most non-German Europeans were willing participants in the Holocaust. This is a well-documented historical fact. There is no country in Europe whose populace (as a whole) stood up in defense of their Jews the way the BG did. In fact. blaming only the Nazi Germans for the Holocaust is a convenient excuse. The truth is that the average European during that time was rather anti-Semitic and happy to oblige with the German orders. Even the US refused to admit ships full of thousands of Jewish refugees from Europe and turned them back to the concentration camps.
"hmm in the EU laws, Bulgaria and Romania aren't in the Schengen aera, therefore the populations of these two countries are considered as "foreign" as far as "movements"
If you think that "these two countries are considered as "foreign" as far as "movements", then you are obviously clueless about the meaning of the Schengen agreement. The Schengen has precious little to do with the free movement of people holding EU passports. It is only about border controls. To have them or not to have them. Please educate yourself:
For example, there was a point when Denmark wanted to abandon SCHENGEN and to reinstate border controls. This does not mean that the Danish visiting Germany will be considered "foreign" as far as "movements". Sheer nonsense. The free movement of people is enshrined in the EU Treaty. You may or may not have border controls. This is irrelevant. But you always have freedom of movement of people and goods within the EU, with or without border controls.
you must be such a subtil dude with that thin head, alll the Europeans can all travel for tourism purpose, but if they want to stay in a country, whether they have a special "permis" like for the nomads in France
or a labour contract
I believe that Germany and France have the intention to retablish controls for security purpose, cuz not only Romas can travel across the different borders, but also any criminal and or terrorist, so expect a change in these rules for the next years
Sorry, Gwitreg, all that legislation on 'staying in a country'' is of no purpose here. Gypsies will not abide to that, so France sents them home and they can come back undisturbedly and infinitely, as there is no legislation to keep them home or stop them from comming. I know the laws, they are supposed to stay for three months and then declare a domicile, ask for documents to be issued that they live there and they're supposed to have a legal means of living. Granted, most citizens of EU, including easterners, abide to that, but not so the gipsies. Also, I knew Germans in Spain who were living there the whole year and didn't bother to declare to the authorities their staying, 'cause nobody would deport them, 'cause they're not gipsies, right? all the more that they were spending their retirement pay to live there in official campings and they were not begging or stealing.
As for how things will change, well, hell knows how many changes in EU are waiting on the corner, with The Economist saying as much as 7 countries should be evicted from the Euro, saying that a collapse of the EU is possible, etc. This is why, this worry of yours for the 15.000 gipsies who are evicted and keep comming on and on seems like a tempest in a glass of water, with so many tremendous things on the verge of happening inside EU. But if we here like to have onanist discussions, for a lack of other better things to do, well...
"to REMAIN SILENT knowing the fate of their Jewish population."
Really? the Jews' fate in Germany's camps wasn't know until 1942 by the Allies governments, and almost ignored by the populations until 1944
Though, in France, priests in churches preached against the Jews deportation after the Vel D'hiv operation of 1942 summer, it was inacceptable that kids were deported to what were still officially known as "labour camps", there's very little complaints on french Jews stolen homes
"Some even rejoiced and couldn't wait to move into the apartments left when Jews were rounded up. Most non-German Europeans were willing participants in the Holocaust"
hmm, check in your former COMECOM republics
"There is no country in Europe whose populace (as a whole) stood up in defense of their Jews the way the BG did'
BS, Franco and Mussolini did, but also they were Nazis allies like Bulgaria was too
Freedom of movement for sane people, no problem
In case EU doesn't fall and we go back to pre 1950's, all that Francer will do will be to impose some sort of border controls but I doubt they will check people's records, or do any extensive research: that will mean the end of free circulation with terrible delay times in travelling. They will do smthing like UK, where I've been several times, which is some formality checks, with no consequence for the EU members. As for the gipsies, maybe they'll ask their purpose in entering France and they'll say they're turists, they will be let in and after the legal 3 months, if they still stay there without official means of subsistence they will be invited out, and so on....no change here, just some more people employed at the borders...that's it.
In conclusion, it s free movement of people, sane or insane, rich or poor...it is almost impossible to kepp undisired EU element to travel to other EU countries, unless you modify treaties and chage what EU is. More feasbale to seems for France to pressure tremendoulsy Romania to improve gipsies status at home and for France to make life unbearable to squatters, beggars and robbers, by making laws much tougher, by punishing vagrancy tougher, by makin it impossible to bega or squat on French soil. Fines and detentio for all beggars, squatters and co, and when they're Romanian for instance, sign with Romania some sort of inside EU treaties as to oblige Ro to take to its prisons its nationals who are convicted in France...things like that. make it unbearable for gipsies to do what they do and eductae mayors not to aloow sqatters un their lands and educate French citizens as to not condon beggary, to denounce them to an effective police force and you'll se in a few months the beggars moving to more innefective countries until no innefective country on this aspect will be left and those unadaptable gipsies they'l have to adapt.
I see that you would like to believe in favorable national narratives. Nothing wrong here. Every nation does that. I agree with you that Italy also spared most (if not all, the way BG did) of its Jewish population.
About Franco you seem to be incorrect:
The truth is that nearly all Europeans (including the French) swam in an anti-Semitic culture for many centuries. They acted on that with periodic expulsions and persecutions. Please check:
Like everybody else, the French became more tolerant (after the 18th century) but the essential hostility remained as part of the Catholic identity and led to this:
"Antisemitism was particularly virulent in Vichy France during WWII. The Vichy government openly collaborated with the Nazi occupiers to identify Jews for deportation and transportation to the death camps (about 75.000 were killed). As early as October 1940, WITHOUT ANY REQUEST from the Germans, the Vichy government began passing anti-Jewish measures (the Statute on Jews), prohibiting them from moving, and limiting their access to public places and most professional activities. In 1941, the Vichy government established a Commissariat général aux questions juives (1941-1944), which worked with the Gestapo to begin rounding up Jews for the concentration camps in 1942, including the notorious Vel' d'Hiv Roundup on 16 and 17 July of that year. Between 1942 and July 1944, nearly 76,000 Jews were deported to concentration camps from France, of which only 2,500 survived. Drancy, outside of Paris, was the primary camp for Jews being deported to the Nazi German death camps in Poland and Eastern Europe."
one more EU failure
I do not thik free mouvement is a failure...these unpleasant aspects like gipsies migration are minor inconveniences to large benefits. I told you already, there are better ways to keep these problems in check, look at Germany, it is a better policed state and police, authorities are more3 effective there, the German population is more intransigent concerning outlaws. They do not need to make show out of every problem, they just deal with it and discourage people like gipsies t have their way there, as a result nobody hears about problems with gipsies there, they fear German police and they keep ususally clear from there. It is weaker, latin countries who have most of these problems, especially Italy and Spain, as back there authorities are often corrupt or unconcerned except whrn elctions come and they seem to lose ground and also in those countries there are many things who do not function properly. In France, gipsies take advantage of some benefits they can get there and also take advantage of Frech leniency towards them.
But the bigger picture is positive concerning free mouvement of people. As long disruptive elements are kept in check, by applying the laws in every country and by having effective police and judges, I see no problems. Of course, there will always be the chauvinistes, the racists and xenophobes, the people who have an aversion to any foreign national coming to their country, especially if that national is poorer...about those kind of worries I don't give a d.a.m.n.
"The truth is that nearly all Europeans (including the French) swam in an anti-Semitic culture for many centuries. "
and yet no Pogrom is recorded in France, while across the Rhein and further at east...
"Like everybody else, the French became more tolerant (after the 18th century) , oh glad that you acknowledge that, the Jews obtained a french citizenship from the revolution (the first time in europe), and Napoleon allowed them in the different administrations, schools, army
antisemistism in Vichy wasn't the main motor of the regime, but part of the problem whereas she was confronted with overwhelming asiles seekers since the Depression, economical refugies from the ruined countries, political refugies from the fashist countries, and Jews from Nazy Germany, and soon from further east, when the nazy troops were winning territories.France at the beginning of WW2 had more refugies than the US had from the whole depression and war time. It's why when France was requested to deport Jews, foreign Jews were the first to be sent out.
At the beginning Hitler had not the intention to kill them, but to use them as a cheap labour force, it's when the Nazis reached Ukraine, that the Jews final solution was decided, there were too many of them, and the concentration camps were full (Wannsee jauary 1942)
"The Vichy government openly collaborated with the Nazi occupiers to identify Jews for deportation"
"Le 11 juin 1942 a lieu à Berlin une réunion convoquée par Eichmann, au cours de laquelle il est décidé que le RSHA (SS-Gestapo) déporterait de France vers l'Est 100.000 juifs en 1942."
"France was one of the countries controlled by the Germans at the early stages of war, but it had a high level of democratic tradition of Liberte, Fraternity and Egalite. In France about 75000 Jews perished out of a population of 350,000, about 70% survived. Many factors contributed to the relatively high survival rate, the most important factor was the attitude of the silent majority, who made it difficult of the Germans to identify and catch the Jews. Even the local police cooperated only reluctantly with the Germans, Jews were provided with false identification papers, given shelter and moral support. Jews also participated massively in the resistance and at the beginning stages about 33% of the resistance fighters were Jewish"
In Spain, I knew that Franco wasn't keen to keep foreign Jews, though as most of them had the wil to join Portugal and to escape from there to latin America and to the US, he let them crossing, but from the lot he'd wanted that the weathiest stay in spain, for the reason that Spain was broke after the civil war, and needed any contribuation to the national budget
"look at Germany, it is a better policed state and police, authorities are more3 effective there"
NO, see my underneath link on Germany expelling Romas too,
see where the 9/11 terrorists plot was initiated, in Hamburg aeras, there many of these cells in Germany, which have international connections, a closer control of movements will correct the given situation
You don't hear much of Germany's problem with minorities because France is the main european country focused by the anglo-saxons medias. France is the european country where press correspondants live within the percentage 1000 vs 10 for the other European countries
Oh thanks for being taxed as chauvinist xenophobes, I wonder how we could label your country deliberatly ghettoising your minorities
The chauvinsitic stuff wasn't directed at you...I was stating things personal, speaking in generalities. I thought we established that you are not chauvinistic and that I showed you respect since that apology.
I'm aware of Germany's problems too, but I've been there and I didn't see this lasciviuosness and relaxing as I did see in France and police there seemed more effective.
I agree that Ro is ghettoising peoples. I was en thnic minority too in RO, and that is why I sometimes felt like an outsider, which prevented me since very young age from blind patriotism. I can criticcize 1000000 things about the country I was born. I'm not a blind patriot. Ro has many more problems than France, if it wouldn't, it would have the same hdi as France.
75.000 Jews who where FRENCH CITIZENS and not asylum seekers were murdered in NAZI death camps they where rounded up by the French authorities and put on trains to death camps what type of planet are you from.
Young man, you still seem to be quite confused about the meaning of Schengen. Let me tell it to you differently. When you are out of the Schengen zone (e.g. in the UK or Algeria) you must show your ID to the French border control. This applies to ABSOLUTELY all passengers holding any type of passport. Even US citizens like me (I have more than one passport) have the right to enter the Schengen zone like all EU citizens. Once in, we can move around inside the zone without any border controls anywhere. But if you and I do happen to go for a holiday on the BG Black Sea Coast, when we land there, we will be checked by a border control. When we re-enter Schengen, there will a border check again. This applies to ALL travellers. EU citizens are not exempted. Just like the lack of border controls inside the Schengen zone applies to ALL travellers regardless of their citizenship. Hope this helps. Maybe you should try to venture a bit more outside of your beloved France -:)
Please don't get me wrong. I LOVE France. I grew up speaking French. My best friends are French. I have always thought that France is a perfect blend of the best of both worlds - Deutsche ordnung + Mediterranean joie de vivre. But the ignorance/provincialism of many French (and most westerners for that matter) in world affairs and in the intercultural intricacies never ceases to amaze me.
It's called Planet Denial. No need to even respond to this blogger in denial.
ah, but you aren't a mere Bulgarian anymore, of course a american citizen that applies for a EU visa (I wonders if this administrative request is still a obligation for Americans)
Effectively the Schengen thing is a worry, in that it allows these free moves for who ever lands in one of the Schengen aera countries, hence the security problem if it happens that travellers also might be terrorists
oh the provincialism of the French, check in what country there's no french big corporation and or business, our enterprises rank in the top 10 of the globalist's
The article doesn't make it clear that the violence in Amiens on 13th of august was not perpetrated by Roma but by Magrebins and Africans that are entirely French citizens. Romas may have problems with street begging and petty thefts, but burning down schools and cars and rioting is not a Roma related issue. So let's not blame Roma for what others committed.
Secondly, I wonder who is going to protect these people, since their country of origin, Romania, is entangled in an internal political dispute between the president and prime minister and the last thing on their minds is to bother or wrestle with France for a couple of poor fellows that arise hardly any interest.
'The article doesn't make it clear that the violence in Amiens on 13th of august was not perpetrated by Roma but by Magrebins and Africans that are entirely French citizens.' [Dragos27]
I think the article is careful to distinguish the two issues. Here are the paragraph beginnings:
'THIS has been a busy summer for the French police…'
'Starting in late July, Roma (Gypsy) encampments on the outskirts of many French cities…'
'Meanwhile in Amiens, a sleepy city in France's north that suffers from high unemployment, violence exploded in the night of August 13th. Rioting youths…'
'At the centre of the government's responses to both issues is Manuel Valls...'
'It is unclear how successful Mr Valls's policies are going to be…'
'The treatment of the Roma is also an advertisement of the need for new thinking…'
Conclusion, Dragos27: the writer couldn't have been more careful to distinguish the outer suburb issue from the Roma issue.
What I think might be a really interesting theme to write about is the number of countries and neighborhoods within these countries that are "no-go areas" for the police. France may have a very high number in comparison to other EU countries but Germany and the Netherlands would also be on the list. The truth is that, throughout most EU countries, there are immigrant areas (whether from within the EU or not) where the police themselves fear for their lives. And just why on earth would such a situation be tolerated more often than not? Why on earth is the amount of crime and violence in these areas not viewed for exactly what they are and why isn't deporting these people (whether EU citizens or not) a viable option? NGOs like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, etc. etc. are holding all of us hostage and making our streets impassable. I don't think there is a country anywhere in the world which would not benefit from a Marie LePen! But, instead, France has Hollande! They deserve him and I hope they get even more misery and more no-go areas heaped upon them!
oh thanks for your empathy
The issue is not Roma or Gypsies, it is the imbecile (or engineered) EU enlargement which was MEANT to flood "real" Europe with low wage earners, so as to lower labor costs (a red herring, which is only peripheral to Europe's competitiveness woes) and improve profits (that it did).
Well, it so happens that those countries with low-paid workforces also have an abysmal standard of education, law enforcement and social security nets. Hence the Roma child molesters, the Albanian pimps and other gifts from the enlightened free-trade ideologues.
'The issue is not Roma or Gypsies, it is the imbecile (or engineered) EU enlargement which was MEANT to flood "real" Europe with low wage earners, so as to lower labor costs (a red herring, which is only peripheral to Europe's competitiveness woes) and improve profits (that it did).' [Dominique II]
Sadly, the world is not entirely constructed according to francocentric and neogaullist principles…, even that – not altogether pleasant – inward-looking, 'bugger thy neighbours!' neat little world that is called the Eurozone. What you are regretting, Dominique, is the cosy little arrangement engineered by French politicos whereby France would provide thought and direction while the German and other solvent states provided the motive power. Happily, the real world is now tapping on the window. Frankly, Dominique, for a gentleman whose political sympathies les left of centre, I find your attitude to less fortunate parts of our – our ! – Europe more than a little disturbing.
Wage costs should be function of the wage-earner's usefulness. Social provision is different. Too many French intellectuals like you Dominique fall into the trap of quite elementary category confusion. For this unfortunate situation, I blame the so-called 'Republican values' which – lacking both internal consistency and applicability to the 'real world' – lead to lazy habits among French thinkers. What we could call sloppy thought.
What on earth is wrong with 'improving profits'? You remind me of a certain kind of primary-schoolteacher who is very enthusiastically in favour of sport in school, just so long as it remains strenuously… er, non-competitive. 'Improving profits' equates with increasing tax 'take', increasing investment, increasing investment, as well as (yes!) paying out dividends. As a matter of fact – and for all your sermonising – neither France nor Germany has been reluctant to take advantage of lower wage-levels abroad. This, obviously, to the detriment of the wage-earner…
In Germany – where the wage-earner is more clear-sighted than many a French intellectual – it is a fundamental aspect of the nation's economic miracle that wage-earners accepted (democratically voted!) wage-cuts in order to ensure security of employment and/or the wellbeing of their company as its struggled through hard economic times. To suffer the delusions of category-confusion it helps to be French.
'Well, it so happens that those countries with low-paid workforces also have an abysmal standard of education, law enforcement and social security nets.' [Dominique II]
In my most humble opinion, France is far from being exemplary as regards educational standards, law-enforcement (gulp!), or indeed social security cover. Full stop.
'Hence the Roma child molesters, the Albanian pimps and other gifts from the enlightened free-trade ideologues.' [Dominique II]
Nice try, Dominique. (Or is your category-confusion genuine?) Just for the record – because it does not require explicit expression – there is no necessary, obvious, or any other link between 'free-trade ideologues' (whatever they may be!), on the one hand, and 'Roma child molesters' or 'Albanian pimps' on the other. Not that that's a problem for the average 'progressive' in your part of the world…, whose chief characteristic is ingrained conservatism. And myth belief.
oh the clever boy, who wanted that the EU extended to the East for making businesses? The Brits, sure, pas si fous, they didn't sign the Schengen agreements ! and the Germans, but Germany knows that the Roms don't feel at home in Germany, and that they only cross the country for getting in France. Next time some illegals will wait in Calais for going to UK, we'll let them go, so that you get a taste of the world too.
oh and stop telling us what to do in EU, it's not the French that direct the policies, but Germany, and since the ERM/EMU, silly boy
Plazidus in reply to Dominique II Aug 17th, 08:11
Brilliant post coming from someone who has obviously lived and worked in France, unlike that francophile clown and EU-slave Pumpernickel. Dominique also treats us to French ingrained racism (we can ignore Marine Gwitreg.)
You seem to have put your finger on both German and French euro-sleepwalking: the French imagination that the "real world" could somehow reflect the "French model", and the German dream that it could share a currency with such disparate peoples (including the French.)
Have you read the recent article in Economist about women in France flocking to Marine Le Pen?
Perhaps some of those women are lurking here ; )
Hear hear!
Scratch a "socialist" and you will usually find a deeply intolerant racist person who is totally unware of his/her own racism.
Only a few ethnic minority groups are worthy of their concern - Tibetans because they are so far away and exotic, native Americans because they are so far away, African-Americans because they are so far away (Also if the USA is involved it helps a lot. Native Indians in Latin American cannot get the same sympathy)
However if they had to live with these ethnic groups, these so called "socialists" who love to preen about themselves as so morally superior will turn out to have the most racist behavior towards these groups.
The Roma from Eastern Europe too were one of their favorite groups when they were far away but now borderless Europe has changed all that.
'France is one of a number of European Union countries which declined to grant Bulgarian and Romanian workers unrestricted access to their labour markets following the two countries' 2007 accession to the EU.
'Critics argue that the policy puts Roma migrants from the two countries in an invidious position since they can be deported because they cannot demonstrate that they can support themselves but at the same time, cannot seek work legally.
'One of the EU's founding principles is that citizens should be able to work in any member state and the transitional arrangements permitted when Bulgaria and Romania joined must be phased out by the end of 2013.'
For all her modish posing, France is solidly protectionist and incurably conservative. For crying out loud, when is 'la belle France' going to let her hair down, live a little and - who knows? - even show a little generosity of spirit?
so what? they need prerequisitly a labour contract before coming over, like in UK, in the US...
are you trying to tell me that the Roms that directly come to France without such a contract have the intention to seek some work by whatever enterprise? NO, they never want to work for a boss that isn't themselves
one of the founding EU principle... yet, of course for those that really want to work
oh and until 2013 some water will pass under the bridges, ... you may know that France and Germany ask for a derogation for closing their borders for exceptional reasons
spare me your sarcasm on la BelleFrance pseudo protectionism and conservative, der spiegel article is served at your mint sauce
show us your generosity first
your link doesn't mean nothing more but that the politicans are dncing a pasodoble for bluring la commission
"they need prerequisitly a labour contract before coming over, like in UK, in the US..."
The USA doesn't have an EU style union with Romania and Bulgaria.
France does.
Of course Roms don't feel like home in Germany or Eastern Europe...they feel at home in France or Spain or Italy...why is that? Is it because those countries are more in tune with the gipsies? There must be some kind of affinity between those countries and the gipsies. If not, they would' ve stayed in Germany. But Getman police and judiciary system are effective and they have no need for the latin circus and pathetism which pleases the masses as in Roman times. In Germany everybody does his job that's why theatricals there are kept on stages inside theatre halls not on the politic scene.
There are at least four truths in your comment.
ol right since you're telling BS like your truths teller
oh BTW The Germans expel Roms too
a comment from a Brit expat in France, ἐθνάρχης, on the thread "Have your Roma back " august 2010
When I moved to France, from the UK, I was also required to apply and receive a "Carte de Séjour" (residency permit). This is not any specific law to control the movement of Roma; any German, Belgian, Italian etc. is required to adhere to the law.
Now as a general comment...
France already had a fairly large population of "gens du voyage" (this is even the legally consecrated term for them, according to decrees issued in 1972); municipalities over a certain size are required to provide them with a space to park their vehicles, caravans and mobile homes, and to assume the upkeep and maintenance. The state reimburses the municipalities a proportion of the costs (up to 70%).
See http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte=LEGITEXT0000056296... for more information.
There exists in France a widespread opinion that the "manouches" or "romanichels" (often used by the French in a pejorative sense) are bands of thieves to be tolerated as long as they stay in the municipally administered sites. When they occupy fallow land or even (as I have seen with my own eyes) the space alongside the Boulevard périphérique or some of the other busy through-roads around the northern outskirts of Paris, they become a public nuisance.
I used to see the Romanian Gypsies every day in the RER (suburban railway of Paris) and Métro, and occasionally spoke with them in the few words of Romanian I know; they readily confirmed themselves as being Romanian. They would come through the wagons begging for money, often young girls of twelve to fourteen carrying babies, while older brothers keep watch on the platforms and at the connecting doors between wagons. Along the Champs Elysées, they would pester people sat at the smart pavement cafés. Before the "parcmètres" (parking meters) were converted to taking payment by card, the French were convinced that the Romanians were cutting the meters down, for the scrap metal value of the devices themselves and also the get at teh coins inside. Supposedly a whole village back in Romania was built using the funds obtained by one gang in a year...
Another of their businesses was to buy company reps' cars from perfectly legal and legitimate auctions and adapt them for family use. Company cars of this kind do not have a back seat. This gives more space for professional materials such as repair tools or sales samples and also makes them unsuitable for personal, family use, and so isn't seen as being a taxable perk for the employee. So the Gypsies would buy a car with no rear seat, fit a rear seat into it, and sell it on for a profit. Except that they would steal the rear seats from parked cars during the night.
So here you have an easily identifiable population that is in the country illegally and which is seen by a large proportion of the native population as being nothing more than a band of beggars and thieves. You have a hyperactive, image-obsessed populist president . When you put the two together, there will be expulsions. Sarkozy is far more charismatic than Charles Pasqua who, as Minister of the interior in 1986 organised the "Pasqua Charter Flights" to send illegal immigrants back to Mali and elsewhere. Along with Jean-Louis Debré he was the author of several laws that made illegal immigration a more serious offense and made the procedures for expulsion quicker and simpler for the authorities.
See http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lois_dites_Pasqua-Debr%C3%A9 for more details.
a video on what these Roms do with the money they pick in our countries
Tip to Dragos who brought it on the thread "Have your Romas back"
and another comment from Thomas Marny, idem, on the same thread
"Such surveys do not show what the reality is but how loud media and various activists are in the given country. If so many Roma citizens sit at home living from social welfare benefits and watch television where countless activists and state-paid human-rights representatives who are directly financially interested in Roma issue being "in solution" (not solved) tell them that they are discriminated, they may genuinely become persuaded about it. But, frankly, if everybody was discriminated like most of them, we all would die of hunger soon ;-)
And as for violent attacks against Roma community, there was only a single attack in last 10 years in the Czech Republic and all televisions repeatedly broadcasted about this single case every other day for about two years – it was really pathetic…
In fact, there is a similarity between the French and Czech situation - French argumentation is that the Roma communities are guest on the the French territory. But the same goes for the Czech territory where there were no Roma citizens after WW2. All of them moved there from other CEE countries during the communist era because they received highest benefits there. But unlike France (or Romania or Canada, etc.), Czech territory can be considered a single big agglomeration without any large rural areas, therefore absolutely unsuitable for living nomadic life… But I can imagine how other hypocritical European and North American countries would rage if Czechs had expelled them like France (and also Germany) are going to do now…
BTW, I'd advise French and Germans to expel them to Canada ;-) It would be fun to watch whether Canada would introduce visa duties to those bigger European countries or if Canadians play strong only against smaller countries with meek politicians who have not been able activate EU-wide counter-measures against Canada as yet – i.e. after more than a year since the Canadian hypocritical decision..."
Four truths.
Which ones?
First, and most important, mint sauce was an import – several hundreds of years ago – from the delicious cuisine of the Barbary Coast and similar areas. Please do not knock the Brit for his cosmopolitanism.
Unlike you, I make no claims to expert knowledge on the subject of the Roma. And I think that I am less likely than you to be the victim of my ignorance on the subject. Saint-Aignan, Amiens, the soulless housing estates, the Roma, practically every instance of civic disorder in France has one element in common: the police service of the Land of Liberty, Equality, and Lack of Opportunity is 'faux-macho' and disrespectful. As in all Mediterranean countries the tutoying 'flic' is as common as the cicada. The genus is incapable of individual, self-supporting existence, and condemned to hunt in a gang. When at rest, the individual entity stands threateningly, amid its clones, weight on one hip and pelvis thrust forward, held parallel with firearm. No wonder people throw chamber-pots and worse at them.
[The 'tutoying flic' = the policeman who makes insulting use of the second-person singular of the pronoun 'tu', 'te'. Unlike 'thee', 'tha', or 'thi' in the Yorkshire dialect this usage is familiar to the point of insulting. The offence is compounded in the case of people of non-European origin offering, as it does, a quick ride down memory lane to the time of slavery and the colonial era.]
What follows is taken from an article for 'European Voice' written by Valeriu Nicolae, a Romanian Roma.
'Ghettoes in Romania, Bulgaria are much worse than any illegal camp in western Europe. The number of people living in these ghettoes is increasing. So is the number of drug addicts, people infected with HIV/AIDS, criminals and functional illiterates. Work, begging, prostitution or petty criminality pays much better – sometimes 20 to 30 times better – in western Europe than in the places from which the Roma are travelling. Social services for migrating Roma are much better in illegal camps in France . . . Sentences for petty crimes and prisons conditions in eastern Europe make prisons in France, Italy and the UK look almost like a holiday destination. Paying €300 for repatriation and giving free plane tickets for repatriation is a huge waste of public money and a significant incentive for more migration. The average Roma family that migrates to France has five members; that family will receive €1,500 for going back to Romania. The cost for a bus ticket back to France is around €40 per person – €200 at most for the entire family. That means a net gain of €1,300– more than the average income for a year of a similar family in the ghetto….'
"What on earth is wrong with 'improving profits'?"
Were under earth did I say it was wrong? I merely credited the imbecile enlargement policy with its one single achievement.
Now, you probably belong to the monetarist faith which holds that only countries with equivalent economies should enter into a monetary union, and thus would gladly expel the oldest European country from the Eurozone. I happen to think only countries with similar human development should enter into a population union, which is the EU. Sure the EU should help retarded countries to catch up, but not by giving them free access with only token obligation to improve - trickle-down civilization does not work any better than trickle-down economy.
If you see no connection between free-trade sectarians (as opposed to intelligent trade management) and the flooding of some areas by shadowy characters, it's very simple: no walls to the coop, no shotgun for the farmer, bliss for the foxes (whether Balkanic capi di tutti capi or WSJ-carrying gents). "Free foxes in a free coop" being the wry definition of unregulated economy by less sanguine characters.
The one aspect I'd agree with you although you fail to mention it is the current restriction on work permits for Bulgarians and Rumanians. It only fosters their lawlessness. Once access is given, work should be allowed, or "integration" remains a catch-22 goal.
"Dominique also treats us to French ingrained racism"
I'll even add insult to injury by piling on French ingrained impatience with fools.
I more than welcome immigrants from any part of the world. What I can't stomach is the do-gooders claiming immunity for them when and if they break the law, as if they were mentally impaired - which they usually are not.
If treating immigrants exactly like all other residents, including citizens, is racism, then call me a racist. Make my day. Do explain to me why gang leaders who exploit Roman children and pimp Roman underage girls should stay immune from the law, simply because they pose as community leaders. THAT, Mr Bernique, is racism.
There are some truths in what Nicolae says but also some distorted things. It is normal for educated gipsies to use hyperbole when talking about their bretherns because it serves their purpose: callin the attention on the dire situation of Romas in large part of Europe.
I've been a few years ago to some of those ghettoes in Romania...it is true, many gipsies live in some sorts of ghettoes, it means very much like the way subsaharians live in rundown neighbourhoods on the outskirts of the cities in France. Many of them live in utter poverty and also many received housing from the city councils and they destroyed the houses. It is an exxageration thar gipsies take drugs and other bullshits. I might add that more and more gipsies little by little started to integrate by doing something produvtive...allas, to few gipsies, unfortunately.
The problem is after the fall of communism authorities in many Eastern countries didn't have on their mind the gipsy communities or any ether ethnic minorities for that matter that is why we have this inhumane situation. As other countries in W Europe, like France or Spain have shown, up until now, it is impossible to fully integrate the gipsies and make working bees out of all of them. Maybe a different approach will be developed in the future. For the moment, the best solution to mitigate and improve their situation and of course that of the majority population is to give free money, free lands, free vans or whatever and free social aids so as to keep most of them content and quiet. As those Eadtern Europe countries do not have those money yet and when they have somethey find other more pressing things to do, gipsies will still be a problem. And all these legends peope on this thread are peddling, of free money from the EU given to the Romania and others in order for them to integrate gipsies, that's a red herring. Please, any of you talking about the lump sums of money received by Ro from the Eu, make a complex inquiry and find out how many funds did Romania actually receivef from the Eu in reality, not on papaer as available money promised but impossible to get. You will see that Ro has givwn to the Eu more than it has taken. Up until now Romania had got from the Eu only cheaper imports and free movement of people without the right to work.
All that aside, many of those gipsiesin Frane are holding Romanian citizenship so it is primarily Romania's obligation to deal with them.
p'tain the boiled mutton with mint sauce is quite a souvenir for me,
sorry but the people preferred my sauce Bechamel then, of course that I learnt from a french friend, as my curriculum wasn't cooking but philosophy
unlike me you arn't directly concerned by the Romas problem
it's not of ignorance that you're suffuring but of brench bashing
"practically every instance of civic disorder in France has one element in common: the police service of the Land of Liberty, Equality, and Lack of Opportunity is 'faux-macho' and disrespectful."
p'tain as you didn't know that that's a tradition to make the Cops ridiculous in Frenche, remember "Mort aux vaches, the 1968 motto, aso much well developped in Brassens songs
the tutoying was de rigueur in the seventies, but not anymore, cince our Gendarmes recrues come from universities (hen their problem of obtemperation, that a basic Gendarnme didn't have before)
But you ignore that in the arab language, the "tu" or the "vous" doesn't exist, it's the same word,like in your superior language, so if a gendarme says "tu" to a suburban, he is talking his language, as arab langage is singling people rather the mass
Referring to that, means that you're still living in the Algeria war aftermaths, when colonial policemen were repatried.
BTW, how your Pakistani received your cops language? since I could find sources on the net, it's even worse than with our Maghrebin
The Romanian Romas would empahasaise their condition, very fashoniable these day, see, what Thomas Marny thinks of the polls, it's like our "anti-racism" associations, they will find a sin whereas there's none, ie our Maghrebin blogosphre from Maghreb, of course, not from Paris, whereas guiltiness is a mean to earn money. in Africa, they would just get "coups de batons"
Ok Ghetos in Bulgaia and in Romania aren't a exemple, but is it our fault? their governments got money to care of their people, I wonder why they didin't improve the Romas livings there, must be because of their lack of motivation !
Sure giving them money to repatry i idiot, they'll be bacl in the nex 6 months
hence a passport with ADN would be useful for them, but until now who's goona risk to pass for a segregationist in France, while in UK it's much easy, there's no such a free pass agreement within the EU
one would know why peopele are kept around Calais then
p'tain, if it only handles to me, I would let the people that want to reach UK go, and see if then the Brits can lecture us on how to handele uninvited people
Dominique, while not being of my board, I appreciate you as my brother
"The problem is after the fall of communism authorities in many Eastern countries didn't have on their mind the gipsy communities or any ether ethnic minorities for that matter that is why we have this inhumane situation. As other countries in W Europe, like France or Spain have shown, up until now"
BS our "Gens du Voyage", aka former Gypsies don't like at all that these Eastern unlawful people come over, they don't want to be assimilate with their behaviour, thefts, beggaring, prostitution
Don't make me cry, when Romania has given more to the EU than the western countriesz
your county is corrupted, only the elite of your sort can manage alife
glad that JeFF Bridges is a referrence of culture for you, ach Ja, but of scientology, are you one of these nuts?
until to now, we didn't bash other countries, but responded to French bashing, that you weren't the last to display
I know about French gipsies and Spanish gipsies...I've talked to some of them. My opinion is, the more backward the European country, the more backward are the minoritary gipsies also. Anyways, nowhere in Europe were the gipsies well integrated.
I understand you picking on France bashers. I'm sorry I kinda bashed France. But I am also very sensitive and fast at perceiving bashers of the more feeble and undefended. Cheers.
it's a bit late for a apology
I underxtand your frustation, but you're what you are A Romanian, you'll have to work out for that Romania become the county that it was before a great country, therefore, instead of bashing the French try to influence the Romanians for improving their situation.
I have no hate with any country, just that instead of taking us for the usual suspects, defined by the Bush hawks, they should look into their own path
We have nothing to be shameful, in regard of our policies, we are just trying to preserve ourselves
I fell no frustration, I am in a position as to be beyond all that...I have no complex of superiority or inferiority, I'm too cosmopolitan, having had too much contact with too many nations as to admire or despize any...I identify at least 2 countries as my home. But I still like to pick on arrogant and pompous so called Westerners :)) who seem to be lecturing people from more disadvantaged areas. You seemed to me like one of those westerners. I was wrong. Good luck to you.
"who seem to be lecturing people from more disadvantaged areas. You seemed to me like one of those westerners. I was wrong. Good luck to you."
no, I just reply on attacks, 90% of my interventions on anglo-american blogs, since the neocon crusade on us.
I have a Romanian philosopher freiend on my facebook
So, try to expend the best that your people can, and we'll adopt you
BTW a Romanian girl is fianced (if not married to a major french politician, Michèle Laroque and François Barouin, minister of the finance of Sarkozy government)!
'p'tain the boiled mutton with mint sauce is quite a souvenir for me' [comptesse de Gwitreg]
Roast or grilled lamb. I do NOT believe that anybody served you mutton boiled. I believe that mutton is served with caper sauce; but I have never eaten it. Mutton lends itself excellently to Rogan Josh and more rough and rural French fare.
'sorry but the people preferred my sauce Bechamel then, of course that I learnt from a french friend, as my curriculum wasn't cooking but philosophy' [Madame de Gwitty-Béchamel]
As for la Comtesse's sauce Béchamel – gosh, how on earth am I to avoid insulting Marianne? – let's say that your blog-espondent has scant respect for white sauce. Using flour to thicken your sauce… I'd abdicate my toque! It's the talk of the town, don't you know.
"Dominique, while not being of my board, I appreciate you as my brother"
Very kind of you, I'm much more tolerant of your side now that ours has won the Presidency!
Sorry but we had some "boiled" mutton with mint sauce in the Brit family where I stayed (in Richmond aera), generally on sunday lunch, the other days we used to eat sandwiches with english tapas, such peanut butter, crackers with cheddar...
The French still preferred roasted "Gigot d'agneau", grilled mutton cotlets with a "gratin" ala sauce Bechamel
"using flour to thicken your sauce"
hmm the art is how to thicken this sauce, with butter, in which you gradually add flour and milk, until it gets rightly thick, while your butter must not become "burnt"
and don't forget the noix de muscade
you pour the result on potatoes... whatever accompagnement, in hoven until the whole thing become "dorée"
you are under our scrutinity though, we'll see if Hollande's team can last
I'm feeling dreadfully superior now: ever heard of 'gratin dauphinois'? The only time I make a bechamel is for onion or leek sauce, delicious accompaniments for roast Welsh lamb, along with mint sauce, redcurrant jelly, roast potatoes, and a selection of fresh garden vegetables, not forgetting of course a tasty gravy enhanced with meat juices, stock, sherry.
And for 'afters' I'd suggest a Sherry Trifle.
Are you certain they were English? I've never heard of anyone English being able to afford Richmond.
I will be totally honest with you, Gwitty. English cooking is for me a closed book, a total mystery. That said, I suspect the worst if Brit keenness to 'eat out' is any indication.
This family was wealthy, it was a known architect, that built some of Cambridge university buildings
The family was apparented to the "Davis cup" relations
TE says: "...over 1,000 Roma have been displaced" (as a result of bulldozing their illegal 'encampments'.
Those encampments weren't a place for them Gypsies to be, to begin with. They couldn't be 'displaced' by the legal action of municipalities. They were displaced when they had left - voluntarily - their huts and palaces in Romania and came uninvited to France (and many other places).
Left politicians who dominate the EU admitted Romania to their bloated bureaucratic quasi-empire and introduced immigration with no limits... so the explosive Gypsy problem was obviously unavoidable.
Now it will be like with lice infestation: you can't remove it by conventional methods 'cause it breeds faster than you brush your hair. Shave your head and apply some really nasty concoctions... Le Pen, for instance.
No, that France has problems assimilating immigrants is a problem with France, not with immigrants. It needs a more open and prosperous economy that can provide decent opportunities for those who move there, not just born there, to advance. It also needs to be more accepting of immigrants and their culture. This is a problem that stretches back to before Dreyfus, and Le Pen is part of it.
I have a simple question for you: why is it OK for Tibetans to want their country for themselves and consider Hun Chinese "moving there to advance", in your words, invaders and oppressors, and why the same is wrong for the French?
As to Dreyfus, he belonged to the French culture alright, his five or six generations of ancestors were all born in France, and he himself was adapted to the degree of being captain in French army serving in its General Staff.
A lil bit different from Gypsies, whose "culture" of thievery, prostitution and living in "encampments" you demand France accepted.
Be realistic, please. Nobody, but nobody, can assimilate or integrate Gypsies. Would you like to have some as your neighbors?
And please do not blame France which is one of the most generous and welcoming countries in the World.
Oh I don't know maybe something about how the Tibetans are being crushed under the boot of Chinese government oppression and the Roma are immigrants?
If France needs to be afraid of immigrant oppression of the French people than it has bigger problems than I thought.
Yeah, France has much bigger problems than you thought, so try and think harder.
yet, why my thanks to Swedane was removed? I's telling of TE objective, singling France who doesn't apply the EU commisson diktats
TE moderators are moody. Sometimes obvious garbage with a very slim gilt of PC is left on the page; sometimes they become trigger happy and remove totally innocuous comments. I've got a message from moderator today: my comment about two or three weeks old was removed. Good for them, it had served its purpose long time ago....
Don't pay attention, it doesn't worth it.
Well who do we have here? The man who would cure all that ills'ya president Hollande! May this be a good lesson, never trust a socialist with the powers of government.
Hollande is finding the limits of the discourses, now he has to act, and still he is reluctant to wet himself, you know "pas de vagues" has been his strategy all along his political carreer
Of course he will let his lieutnents to get the "hits"
Vals is none that can't be evicted, wether Hollande endorses his manners, wether, Vals will rebel
in 2010 I brought this video of a Romanian singer
still it's fitting this article
Hahaha...delirious. But you know, this clip was made by Romanian rappers who were making fun of the gypsies...which shows us the underlying problem: in Romania gipsies are made fun of, through all kind of racist media, and that is happening at all levels, educated and uneducated. As long as this will keep going on, gipsies will go on being the way they are. It' s nice to make fun of them and all, but that is disastrous on the long run. These gipsies seem to be unwelcomed eveywhere. And by reading some of the comments here I feel likereading a 1940 newspaper. It seems like nowadays the French are al racists and isolationist. The funny thing is, they fret about 15 thousand gipsies when on their soil there are millions and millions of muslims with or without french citizenship, andthese guys don't pick pockets and beg, those guys will bomb the heck out of the minoritywhite French sons of Napoleon...in a not so far away period it's going to be the Eastern Europeans and heir gipsies too who will abandon Frankistan...and Le Pen will have lost his electoral base...we'll be speaking about Rashid and his jihad party persecuting the white gauls.
in case you don't know, the eastern Gypsies only come to France, Spain, and Italy, because we are the european countries that get the most tourists, and these Gypsies pillage the tourists, see what the americans say, they are complaining of being harrassed when they arrive from the airport to the Paris SNCF stations
what posted a American, Vivahorsemachette on "Disunited states of Europe Jul 24th, 20:45:
"While in Paris, everything the first day was a novelty. The comical uniforms and crazy hair of some attendants on the train almost made me feel I was in a play. The Roma that fiddled the violin on the street corner was charming. I gave him a half euro.
'This is Paris', I thought.
But day by day his cousins infesting the various gates to the trains became a nuisance. At last I felt like a native Parisian each time I ignored them and walked past their begging bowls. 'Let them get it from Hollande', I thought.
I had begun to think like a socialist. Because that's what all good socialists think. Problem? More government is the answer. But there's a problem with that too..."
and that's still the less annoying of their presence everywhere in Paris inner city (BTW, they never go into the suburbs, why? hey sure that our smart plebe there would welcome them though)
Otherwise some others would enter into your home and robb all what you have as liquidities, and gold jewels 5 a spanish friend from Alicante got visited while he was out for his job, when you know that Spanish that spare something invest his sparings into a solid value, gold. I was also robbed during the night in my business, they opened a window, sent a kid to do the job, my cash was robbed, not the checks, because they leave prints)
and some other would use our free health care for indigents to get whatever operations, not all necessary, teeth care, glasses... some other would try to get the RSA (minimum wage for indigents)... we are a indebted country, we can't afford to take care of the whole european poors !
The Gypsies that live in your country should have been framed and taken care of like we did for ours, besides your government received some funds from the EU for that, where the money has gone?
Also, in WW2 no French Roms were deported, this was the only country in occupied Europe !
The French aren't racists and isolationists but fed up that the EU authorities force them to accept the people that the other european countries don't want to look after themselves, and where they belong, we have enough problem with our true immigrants, and besides our unemployment rating can't allow us to absorb more people
The Muslims, for 90% of them are integrated THEY ARE FRENCH since 3 generations (the 10% in the medias are the average percentage of scum in each population, you don't hear much of the french national scum, because they aren't concentrated in cities but all over the territory, besides, it's not rebellion, it's more about crimes for diverse reasons), they have jobs, they studied at the university, some have become politicians...so don't bring this comparison with people who have no intention to integrate, but to steal all what they can from our society
You have no right to deride us on how we handle our different populations, your country in the first place isn't a model of good behaviour
You bark at the wrong tree. I'm not defending Romania, I'm just laughing at ridiculous things I read here. And for the record, when I' ve been to Paris I was attacked in the suburbs by french of darker skin. I waswith my girlfriend trying to take picturesque pictured of Saint Denis. I felt much more less secure in Paris than in Eastern Europe. Oh, remember the linchage a french of algerian origin did a few months ago. Things will only get worse. Not to mention the cyclical emeutes that take place all over France...I agree that gipsies are a nuisance but there are all these other nuisances
taking pictures in Saint Denis? how naive you were, you should have ask if they agreed first, and to look for the responsible of the aera. My son did a small movie in suburbs, and he was accompanied and protected by the big Brother, so the people there collaborated to the video
"Oh, remember the linchage a french of algerian origin did a few months ago."
sure, but he had already killed 3 french soldiers and a few inoffensive kids and their father in a Jewish school.
Tell me how many time this jihadism (war act from the radical islam) action took place in France?
London and Madrid blowing ups did thousand times more victims in one day than in 50 years by us since the end of the Algeria war
"Violence on the outskirts of French cities is not the product of insufficiently firm policing but of the misery of life there. "
wrong, the police has not the legal powers to investigate, when someone is arrested, he is freed in the minut by compleasnt lawers, that work on state subsidies "assistance judiciaire" that is remnently required from these people
If Hollande allows these unrests, next elections will certainly be won by Le Pen.
Vals is a right man, besides he was praised py TE last year as the most pro-liberal candidate of the "left"
I so much wish for Le Pen to be French president...France will be living in perpetual fireworks, from the bombs:))). French, Dutch and English (the French are the most ridiculous of all) don't realize the huge numbers of foreigners with citizenship they already have, most of them willing to meet 72 virgins at the very first chance they're given...Le Pen will arouse them and we'll have show on the tv for free.
Why do not admit that gypsis/ Roms or whatever are in most cases criminals who are unable to integrate not in France, not in Bulgaria not in Romania. They send their women into prostitution and their children begging and stealing. It is not up to France to solve this problem. I cannot stand this political correctness anymore. Call a spade a spade.
Thank you, man
Not being able to integrate in France... is this some kind of moral or criminal lapse?
pff, you aren't opening your borders, so don't lecture us
Thomas Jefferson once famously said "Tout homme a deux patries, la sienne et puis la France" (not so famously though, since finding the original quote in English is impossible: to the French it was a treasured token of friendship, to the Americans, something to sweep under the carpet).
However, he did say it, and this means he would have told you in no uncertain terms that failure to integrate in France points indeed to a deeply flawed personality. Even most English manage it!
Ha! Plazidus is right in some of his commentaries. There are still Frenchmen/women who still live in the past, When France was the Lighthouse of the World, Paris était la ville des lumières, France was a republic compared to most of the absolutist monarchies in Europe, everybody loved France,At the courts of Europe the kings and nobles were speaking French etc, etc. My dear, those days are long gone.Just as the Roman Empire is dead, so is la France reine du monde. England replaced France and now it's America but China is going to be the next one. Italians and British seem to have accepted better the fact that they lost their glory and knew how to move on. In France, there are still many people who believe France is special and universally loved. Well, believe me, it's not. Actually, even inside Eu there are many people who resent France, for the huge amount of free money they receive on agriculture, for the arrogance of its politicians who oppose easterners, oppose the Brits, treat arrogantly the Germans...also the French are not loved in US, since the Bush era, most of the spicy jokes in US are made on account of the French. Look it up. They express their abhorrence of the French in cartoons, movies, lampoons, talk shows, etc.Sarkosy couldn't do too much to make up with the americans, they will never forgive France for the lack of soutien France showed towards that clown Bush and his grotesque war on terror.
So, You have to understand that France is in a declining position and will end upo being a loser if people do not realise this declining and and keep dreaming of past times, of Thomas Jeffersons, Napoleons, Louis XVs and the like.
"So ask the travelled inhabitant of any nation, In what country on earth would you rather live?&—Certainly in my own, where are all my friends, my relations, and the earliest & sweetest affections and recollections of my life. Which would be your second choice? France." [TJ, Autobiography]
Your version appears to have been written by a Henri de Bornier.
Do you think I'm blind? I've worked in 30+ countries and am well aware of France's status in the world - not that abysmal, though.
Of course France, on its own, can never hope to be a world leading country again, and the US/UK Siamese sisters, with their exclusive creed of the golden calf, can never hope to be what France once was.
Americans hate the French? so what's new? There is a very Francophile fringe, but it always was a tiny elitist fringe. If the US had been truly democratic and followed its public opinion, it would have rushed to the help of the two Reichs. There never was in French media or minds anything approaching the permanent French-bashing which permeates American life, providing fuel to the occasional peak of daft frenzy when the White House finds it convenient.
As for China, it has all the ferocious egotism of young countries and will never be a world leader, even if it controls all markets and all livelihoods. Being a leader means working in everybody's interest, not making everybody work for you.
The world's only hope is an united Europe, not some kind of free for all tax-free shopping mall, and right now we're going downhill fast on that one. Ben Franklin warned the soon to be United States "either we hang together, or we hang separately"; European countries seem positively eager to enjoy the embrace of their own exclusive noose as soon as possible.
What a balanced, intelligent and positive comment. It kinda contradicts your previuos comments. It seems like you are both dr. Jeckyll and mr. Hide. Especially the last paragraph of yur comment is pretty heartening. Go on with this kind of comments and very few people will pick on you.
" Italians and British seem to have accepted better the fact that they lost their glory and knew how to move on"
NO, Italy still dreams of its roman empire, (Mussolini last attempt at recreating it), and some italian commentors on TE have still this dream in background, Britain still thinks it's the common wealth ruler
The French are never loved in Anglo-Saxon world, a old British quarrel since a french woman expelled them from our territory.
The French aren't loved, but admired sometimes, De gaulle said that France has no friends but interests, it's the same for each country, but we are alone to say it, while the US consider that we are either with them either against them. Though in Afghanistan, the US military are sharing their casern with the French, not with any other country troops, so that means that they consider us as reliable, while advocating the contrary for their popular auditon
and you're stoopid to adopt the neocon policies against the French, without digging in the old history that we share with the US and Britain
I know perfectly that the Eastern countries do not love the French too, mainly because of Bush arguments, Chirac was forced to accept them into the EU club, because Bush had decided it, within promoting them into NATO first, the pass for western Europe club
"Americans hate the French? so what's new? There is a very Francophile fringe, but it always was a tiny elitist fringe."
yes, the funny thing is that most of their conservative/republican candidate speak fluently french while accusing their sparring partners of being "so french", bizarrely within these polemics, the only candidate that doesn't speak French is Obama
Bush read directly Camus' book in french, Gingrich has a Louisiane University grade in french litterature, Romney passed two years in France in the seventies...
" If the US had been truly democratic and followed its public opinion, it would have rushed to the help of the two Reichs."
Yes, apart the Brit contribuation to the US population, Germans share the biggest percentage now, hmm soon Chinese and Latin Americans will contest this originality too
Yes, the french medias do not bash foreign countries, they are rather "indiferent", might be the reason why the anglo-saxon press is irritated, we don't admire them, nor detest them, we are focusing on our country
What you say on China could fit Germany leadership in EU too, it's merchandizing, not having a political project for the future
Yes and BRITS burnt her talking of Joan of arc in one of your comments
pff, do you have any balanced argument sometimes ?
The only argument you have is always is trying to be in your favour thankfully most people smell the BS you come out with
yours doesn't particularly show coherence
What you do my god i cant stop laughing at you what planet where you born on
You guys need to calm down.
No, France is not hated in the US for not following Bush's war since it is Bush's war that is now despised. You clearly havn't been to the US in a while.
France no longer makes money from the common agricultural policies, those funds have shifted East. Even when it did, those were trivial amounts of cash compared to national budgets, you need to calm down.
Like everywhere else, French politics focus on unemployment, on purchasing power, on income inequalities, on insecurity, and on a couple of foreign policy issues.
This whole theme of comparing France to its past and thinking that everything the French people do is to regain that position needs to stop. All European nations have a fraction of their former power and all of them act in their own intests, but for some reason whenever the French do something in their own interest they are "living in the past".
A true omniscient person has spoken. Infallibility incarnate...
Gwitreg isn't so bad...he actually has pertinent opinions. Of course, he is bound to defend les français, but he is willing to admit truths that are unconfortable. He takes the time to justify his ideas.
Excellent points. Thank you.
"France's interior minister is showing his toughness, but not always his good sense"
funny theseTE articles that try to influence the french policies
oh, that's a EU diktat from wealthy little states like Luxemburg, hey, la Reding anyone? is Luxemburg, the wealthiest country ready to host these poor Roms? since I checked there, there's no yard that allows Roms to settle.
Mr Junker, Could you tell your zealous commissionner to acknowledge that this is a oximoronic business to make the Roms coming to the west
You're wrong in a very small detail: it's not oxymoronic business to allow Gypsies into France - it is just moronic.
blah blah, you're playing with the words
Hey Les Francais,
Why in the world do to you pay the gypsies trips to visit Romania or Bulgaria or any other EU country when they are actually in love with France?
Don't know what to do with them? And have some money to throw away from the national budget?
How much money will you want to waste before you understand that you cannot prevent the gypsies from wandering? They have no country. Is just that they are currently in love with France. I don't know why - it might be the baguette or the strong French work ethics, I'm not sure.
your Romas aren't in love with France, but with what France can give them, as easy money and social cares
Next elections, we'll have a government that will close the borders, I doubt that Germany will care of them
Man, this exactly what they love!
Sorry for them (or at least I'm making an effort to stay polite), but they are not ours; no country wants them. I kind of agree with you, in the sense that I see them badly in the next decade - all countries will reject them (as they contribute nothing to society, except some rare individuals who - in deed - have proven they deserve respect and support; on the contrary).
yet the french Gypzies don't make a problem in France, they are part of our culture, they don't begg, nor prostitute or make any thefts, they have jobs, circus, itinerant storeholders, and are state subsidiedfor their mobilehome and studies
We can't take care of all the european Tzigznes
Those that come over from the East would like to become French for the same advantages
I know...life is so unfair...there are so many injustices, there is so much cruelty and unfairnesss in this world that....little do people in most of the world care about this particular problem of France. Keep dreaming about Le Pen coming and throwing away all your problems. All he'll do is to provoke some dangerous veiled guys with fat vests and scare away some businesses...oh, and irritating some millions of pure French by taking away their subsidies which will make them dangerous too. Oh, it would be so much fun. Lesc tzingares partiront tout seuls sans que Le Pen doive faire quelque chose en particulier.
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