Big Featured Discussions | July 14, 2010 | 14 comments

Sarkozy has been accused of colonial nostalgia over today's Bastille Day parade. What do you think is the best way for a country to honor a complicated past?

source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/13/france-sarkozy-bastille-africa-colonialism

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joshuaheller
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    France,  Imperialism,  Colonialism
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14 comments // Sarkozy has been accused of colonial nostalgia over today's Bastille Day parade. What do you think is the best way for a country to honor a complicated past?

  • bailey78
    • 0
      bailey78  

    • Drink a lot of beer and eat a lot of Bar-B-Que. works for me. A nice family fight of some kind is also great at these events.

    • 1 year ago
  • randallr01
  • flyingkick
  • Saladin
    • +1
      Saladin  

    • I didn't read the article, but I do know that the French are still might touchy about Algeria.

      Remember, Vichy France was not a puppet state to the Nazis, it was a COLLUSIVE state, no one forced them to do anything.

      You can be damn certain that some of those assholes are outright fascists.

    • 1 year ago
  • pukemnukem
    • 0
      pukemnukem  
    • Saladin:

      Well the French Foreign Legion is still plenty pissed. They basically got sent all over the world to get killed (especially in Vietnam where the French government basically abandoned them) and then Du Gaulle completely sold out the legion by giving away their homeland in Algeria. Oh...and along with basically any Pied Noirs and locals that couldn't get to France before being slaughtered in the streets.

      And the Legion still gets sent all over to places that the French would never send their regular military forces. Six years for citizenship. C'est la vie....

    • 1 year ago
  • UrbanGypsy
    • 0
      UrbanGypsy  

    • Bastille Day should be about France and honoring its history and its heroes, not about concentrating on its faults. There will always be people who will find something to criticize in their country's past.

      Bastille should be a day when each individual Frenchman decides what he or she will find to honor about French history. If that means the country's colonial past, Napoleon's dominance of Europe, or the country's revolution against the Monarchy, then so be it.

    • 1 year ago
  • RaceBannon
    • 0
      RaceBannon  
    • UrbanGypsy:

      maybe to say it should be about learning from their past and evolving. France is in an interesting place in the face of globalization and a changing ethnic demographic the french government has stubbornly tried to preserve the "french" world. Don't get me wrong I love speaking the language, the smart women who don't take any crap from anyone, engaging in the customs when I visit my folks, and my dads vespa but I have to say france needs to evolve away from nationalism. Sooner or later countries like France and the US will have accept that we're moving closer to a nationless world whether we like it or not.

    • 1 year ago
  • EmperorThan
  • EmperorThan
  • Armageddon_Now
  • Einsam_Data_Old
  • RaceBannon
  • joshuaheller
  • ScottyT
    • -1
      ScottyT  

    • Does guillotining lots of people in La Place de la Concorde seem a little more nostalgic of French history to Mr. Sarkozy?

    • 1 year ago
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