To be deeply disappointed in John Cleese

[drspouse]

I have no idea if this is typical but he just tweeted that London isn't an English city any more
What is it then pray tell? What's not English about it??

Bertrand. None. But there were several European countries during the Ottoman Empire that were muslim by invasion and bloodshed. Islam has always considered Spain to be theirs and they are having considerable successful in regaining it. It is their Al-Andalus and they were in Spain and Portugal for 9 centuries, eventually chucked out in the 17th century, if memory serves.

I do believe if you look back in history a great many countries in the ME were originally religions other than Islam ( you have to remember Islam dates only from the 7th century) so they became Muslim mainly spread by the sword and migration/travel, the religion spread across the ME and via the silk route, it also spread north up through the Balkans and through Iberia too. Co-existence has happened but certainly recently there seems to have been an uptick in persecution and sectarianism which has led to numbers of other religions dropping. So in a sense migration has always been a factor.

Isabella- once again, when you say English culture what do you mean. What do you want to do that is frowned upon? What do you have a fondness for that makes people call you a zenophobe? I know I’ve asked similar questions before and you’ve said they were fatuous. But I genuinely don’t see why.

“Islam has always considered Spain to be theirs and they are having considerable successful in regaining it”
I thought the Muslim population of Spain was about 5%.

@BertrandRussell - you thought correctly. Slightly more than 4% as of 2016.

Why let accuracy and fact get in the way though, eh?

@Bertrand

Are you English? I ask because I genuinely don’t understand why you ask me what English culture is. Perhaps I misunderstood you when I called it fatuous. Are you asking because you want my feeing on it, or because you don’t think we have one - a cultural identity of our own, that is?

I can't give you girls tutorials. Check out what is happening in southern Spain and of course Catalonia. Who is driving the separatist movement in the latter? The % is much higher, because those only with residents' permits are not included.

But surely it never has been. There’s been pretty steady immigration from mainland Europe/Africa ever since the first people arrived in England. After all, all of our families originally came from Africa (being part of the group of approx 200 people who made it through the Gates of Grief migration to populate the rest of the world) and until about 10,000 yrs ago the UK’s inhabitants still had black skin. England’s name even refers to Germany (England = Land of the Angles; Angles were the people immigrating from the angle shaped bit of Germany). French was the official language of England for 200 yrs.

@Mycatwontstopstaring

By that reasoning no one is from anywhere in particular then. No one has ever been of a particular nation or culture, nowhere is distinctive or different, and we’re all just basically the same.

Mycat If you are suggesting that there never has been an English identity and culture, then you have to also say that the French, Germans, Italians, Dutch, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Kenyans, etc have never had identifiable cultures either.

No one is talking about 10k years ago. If you know your Modern History, you will know that the Huguenots came to Britain and assimilated, the same with the Jewish. The culture they came to express was English. They marked their own faith and traditions in the home, but they adopted the ways of the English people around them. They fell in with the parent culture.

Ditto those refugees who sought asylum in Britain after WW2. They didn't go out of their way to be and remain different, agitate for special attention and treatment - which is what is happening now.

Mycats post is straight out of Marxism 101. Inculcation successful.

“Are you asking because you want my feeing on it, or because you don’t think we have one - a cultural identity of our own, that is?”
I don’t know. You keep saying that expressing a fondness for English culture means you get labelled a xenophobe. I want to know what this means. What do you feel you can’t say or do?

I don’t really know what English culture is. Tea drinking and Morris dancing? Stiff upper lip? Sunday roast and football? Irony and self-deprecation? Shakespeare and Austen and Dickens? Punk and Britpop and grime?

I’m English and I’m not sure what it is. Genuinely. But maybe that’s because I’m also a Londonder born and bred.

@BertrandRussell

It is a fatuous question then! No matter.

Is there anywhere in the world where ‘indigenous’ and ‘immigrant” populations mix easily, with no tension or angst?

The UK goes for multiculturalism - with, it seems, the result that many native Brits feel overwhelmed, outnumbered, alienated in their “own” cities, which don’t feel “British” anymore. Because the language, the appearance of people, the smells, the sounds etc aren’t British.

In France, integration is the aim. Immigrants are expected to adopt the values, customs, beliefs of the republic. There is absolutely no equivalent of the Notting Hill carnival here. But the result is that immigrants are pushed outwards and down, racism is open and endemic (the Front National polling equal and beyond Macron) and the response of the government is to push integration further. There is a move to make “school” compulsory for 3yrs and up. Everyone knows that it’s to force Muslim families to send their children to school earlier, to expose them to French values and customs, rather than keeping them at home until they are six. It’s hard to see how things can’t explode sooner or later.

Can you just answer the fatuous question? I don’t think I am alone in not knowing the answer to it......

Bog - "Immigrants are expected to adopt the values, customs, beliefs of the republic".

The immigrants to France are from the ME-NA countries. France is a secular country, founded on good principles, but their backstory is essentially Communist which is brotherhood to all. The immigrants do not want secularism, they do not want integration and France does not know how to deal with that. It's a big problem. The women will not even adapt, just a little, and not cover their heads in public. It's total intransigence, shows unwillingness to cooperate and France will fall. There have been outrageous terrorist attacks in Paris already.

and France will fall.

This is my fear: I can’t see how it can’t, except to go the other way - the FN way.

There doesn’t even seem to be a space where this can be discussed in any meaningful or bridge-building way, there is no appetite on either side for this. I find that on one side there are deeply held, horrible racist views, and on the other a total unwillingness to adopt any of the values of the country that people have chosen to live in.

The French population is 8% Muslim. Fall to whom?

The French state is utterly sick. In a moral sense, it's fallen already. Macron's repressions are firing a revolution.

@BertrandRussell - don't go quoting figures again....us "girls" might end up needing a new tutorial!

I’m much more scared of the extreme right than any other group.........

There doesn’t even seem to be a space where this can be discussed in any meaningful or bridge-building way, there is no appetite on either side for this.

We have nothing to bring to the fight though. It’s happened at a strange time for us. We’ve been living off the moral gains of WWII for a very long time. And previous generations didn’t have this problem. They were confident in their values, proud of their heritage, proud of our institutions and traditions. We were also a Christian nation. Now those generations are disappearing into history and we’re confused as to what and who we are. We don’t have the wherewithal to confront a strident, confident ideology. We denigrate ourselves at every opportunity, hesitate to affirm the superiority of Western values, use the British Empire as a stick to beat ourselves with, we scorn our heritage and institutions and we’ve lost our faith. So what do we have to bring to the table?

The French population is 8% Muslim.

That’s a guess: the French government don’t collect any statistics on religious or racial demographics. Various institutions do, but it’s a best guess.

And the uneven distribution of minority communities means that even if the total is only 8-10%, it feels like a lot more than that in certain places at certain times. Weekday morning at IKEA in a big french city? It feels like every woman except myself is wearing a headscarf, or more, and speaking Arabic. The people surrounding me don’t look like me, don’t dress like me, don’t sound like me. I felt out of place in somewhere that I expected to be the norm, and I didn’t like it. It’s less of a surprise to go to the Arabic markets and feel out of place, I guess that’s to do with expectations. I think a lot of negative reactions to other cultures are like this: people not expecting to be anything other than the norm in their «own place» then feeling that all of a sudden, they aren’t the norm any more.

I fully acknowledge the irony that I am very much an immigrant to France! But because I’m white and middle class, I pass muster.

So what do we have to bring to the table? We could use intelligence, rationality and pragmatism, and rebuild our own institutions on that basis. Our heritage is all around us. Personally I will never accept the faith of Christianity, nor it being made part of our heritage and culture in the present at all, even ignoring its use of propping up a birth-based hierarchy. It''s dead. It was never rational, it was as divisive and aggressive as Islam is now and never did much for women. Let that one go. I prefer to celebrate the natural and actual rebirth all around us than create male-based mystery hierarchies.

On the matter of Empire and superiority of our own values, we could re-affirm them for ourselves while not particularly seeking to impose them in the Middle East. Go work with Europe, and help the Middle East to rebuild something similar of its own.