Guns Guns Guns, Now Paris!

[Rudy Tamasz]

I disagree with that analysis. The USA is a case in point. The overwhelming majority of Americans are descended from migrants who have only been there four centuries. Each wave of migration has been bitterly opposed by the wave before, whether it be Protestants opposing Catholic migration, Sephardic Jews opposing Ashkenazi Jewish migration or latterly opposition to Middle Eastern, East Asian and Hispanic migrants. Each brought completely different cultures, each deemed to be a threat to the fabric of American society in some way or other. Yet democracy in the US and economic development has been enriched by the diversity there, not weakened.

The French have got a long way to go, taking steps to actually acknowledge that racism exists would be good.

All of the groups you've mentioned ended up merging into an all-American middle class, which was and still is the backbone of the country. The cultural differences mattered less than the common values (law obedience, work ethic, respect for property rights, freedom of speech etc.). Everybody was covered by the principles set by the Founding Fathers and people at large accepted those. Same thing happened in France with the principles of liberty, fraternity and equality. Now it faces the problem of its own citizens, which denounce those basic principles in favor of their reinvented or even carefully constructed cultural identities. I wonder how much the attitudes and practices of these self-proclaimed rejects will actually enrich the diverse culture of France.