More Problems in France
It happened again. I realize that whenever I suggest that the Jewish community should reconsider its reflexively pro-immigration stand from anywhere and everywhere I am called a “crypto-fascist” and “evil,” but…at the risk of staining my otherwise stellar reputation with the social-left, I still think we do need to reexamine our reflexively pro-immigration stand from anywhere and everywhere.
Being called a “crypto-fascist” sucks. But you know what sucks more?
This.
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Liberté, égalité, fraternité.
Forty years ago a British politician called Enoch (Khanokh) Powell made a speech about immigration. He also felt that being called a ‘crypto-fascist’ sucked but put it more elegantly being a professor of classics:-
The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils. In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted in human nature. One is that by the very order of things such evils are not demonstrable until they have occurred: at each stage in their onset there is room for doubt and for dispute whether they be real or imaginary. By the same token, they attract little attention in comparison with current troubles, which are both indisputable and pressing: whence the besetting temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future. Above all, people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles: “If only,” they love to think, “if only people wouldn’t talk about it, it probably wouldn’t happen.”
Perhaps this habit goes back to the primitive belief that the word and the thing, the name and the object, are identical. At all events, the discussion of future grave but, with effort now, avoidable evils is the most unpopular and at the same time the most necessary occupation for the politician.
Those who knowingly shirk it deserve, and not infrequently receive, the curses of those who come after.
Reb Leibish,
That is a great insight. Do you think this is something particularly difficult for democracies?
I live in Israel where many French Jews are now coming. My friend who made aliyah from Paris said it the best: “I desperately want my family to leave France–there is no future for Jews in France”. Can’t add to that.
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