This Politico report from three weeks ago keeps nudging me to mention it, because it indicates political feelings on the other side of the Atlantic can run almost as high as they do here in the United States:
French left-wing parties have spiraled into a bitter fight over whether white people should be asked to shut up – or be banned outright – during meetings about minority issues.
The controversy erupted after revelations that a left-wing student union, called UNEF, organizes meetings that are off-limits to white members.
Anne Hidalgo, Paris mayor and Socialist presidential hopeful, stepped in Wednesday after a candidate from the same party, Audrey Pulvar, failed to condemn such meetings.
“The field of politics is not a therapy session, it’s the domain of the universal, where we seek unity, and defend our secularist values,” Hidalgo said on BFMTV.
Pulvar, a Black former news anchor running under the Socialist banner in the upcoming regional elections, said on Sunday that white people should not be banned from discussion groups on minority issues, but that “they can however be asked to keep quiet and be silent spectators.”
Asked whether she would have said the same thing, Hidalgo said “obviously not.”
The clash over non-white discussion groups has reignited a debate in France about the growing influence of U.S.-style identity politics, and how it challenges the country’s existing political traditions.
Much like societies which suppress an entire gender’s voices, I think the left will find that suppressing white voices on minority issues, while no doubt giving non-whites a sense of control and authority, also loses them the diversity of views the white community brings to whichever issues matter to them.
Moreover, the suppression of a large portion of the potential participants means those voices of a more radical persuasion now have a more pronounced platform from which to make their case. It’s one thing to be a single radical voice against a million far more reasonable voices, but when it’s one voice against one hundred other such voices, then the advocacy has a better chance of succeeding – regardless of its worth or lack thereof.
And if there is a community of voices that is being silenced or ignored, and it earned it through the natural errors of humanity, historical or contemporary, then if those one hundred opposition voices that are not being silenced happen to be singing in harmony with the silenced & ignored, well, now they, too, are ripe to be ignored as well. Distrust is a fume of the devil, alluring with a false logic that drives people mad.
Leaving only the radical voice to be believed. And people often greatly hunger to believe; not to intellectually evaluate and analyze, but to believe. To believe in something different from a distrusted group, right or wrong.
Something around which the historically wronged community can rally.
This is a fundamentally illiberal position. Liberalism philosophically values debate. Not positions, but their clash. Silencing voices for reasons of anger and hatred is not acceptable in the search for progress, improvement, and justice. It leads to second-rate solutions – or worse.
I don’t know a thing about the European Left, but it sounds like they are discovering the foolishness of illiberalism.
