AND ANOTHER THING
A two-fingered salute to Jacques Delors and his Nuremberg Laws
PAUL JOHNSON
One learns as a historian to recognise the wearily predictable human habit of oscillating from one erroneous extreme to another: from puritanism in one generation to licence in the next, from etatisme to lais- sez-faire and so on. In the 19th century, intellectuals, followed in turn by everyone else, grotesquely exaggerated the impor- tance of racial factors, a view memorably summed up by Disraeli: 'Race — all is race.' That fallacy culminated in the Holo- caust, and we have since swung violently in the opposite direction.
The conventional wisdom now is to deny that racial characteristics have any signifi- cance at all: to draw attention to such 'fan- tasies' is to be 'racist'. This new form of extremism, in the guise of Political Correct- ness, has already led in America to various forms of censorship and, even worse, self- censorship, and threatens one of the great Republic's most cherished blessings, free- dom of speech. American friends assure me that many passages, or entire articles, which appear in The Spectator could not now be printed in an American publication.
Jacques Delors, the gruesome Gauleiter of Brussels, has now added a new dimen- sion to this pestilential ideology by assert- ing that any political views which can vaguely be described as nationalist are racist. Opposition to federalism is racist. Resistance to Maastricht is racist. Chal- lenging the diktats of the European Com- mission is racist. By this definition, virtually the entire population of Britain, apart from the weedy Paddy Ashdown and the unspeakable Tristan Garel-Jones, is racist. So, I might add, is most of the population of Italy, Spain, Germany and, not least, France. Indeed, when it comes to national- istic self-assertion, there is no one quite so obstreperous as Monsieur Delors himself. It is, of course, typical of a Frenchman that, when engaged in beating someone to death with a bludgeon, he should complain vocif- erously of being peppered by a pea-shoot- er. That is la grande nation all over.
Delors' particular form of racism, or one of them, is linguistic. If he were objectively keen on federalism, as opposed to pushing it as a concealed form of French one- upmanship, he would press for the adop- tion of English as the European language, as this makes obvious, logical sense. Instead he does the opposite. When he holds a press conference in Brussels, attended by journalists whose common Ian- guage is English, he not only insists on con- ducting it in French but forbids the use of simultaneous translation into English. When a Danish journalist protested against this stress on French and asked him why he was so tiresome, he replied sharply, `Because, madame, le frangais, c'est le lan- gage de la diplomatie,' adding under his breath, 'et de la civilisation.'
Of course Delors, who has been badly educated in a characteristically brilliant French way, speaks poor English, so he has a personal axe to grind. But Delors' form of linguistic racism is shared by the entire French ruling class. That is why they have passed through the French parliament a new law which bans the use of English terms and insists, in a wide range of official documents and situations, on the use of fabricated and unpopular French equiva- lents. The racist nature of this statute is made clear in many ways but particularly by the manner in which French government spokesmen, in defending it, have used the term 'Anglo-Saxon', which ranks high in the demonology of French xenophobia. Behind the new law is not merely French concern for their precious argot but hatred and envy of the Anglo-Saxon race. No good deed ever goes unpunished and the French will never forgive us for liberating them in 1944. They wanted to do it themselves, poor dears, but most of them were too busy collaborating with the Nazis.
Racist laws on the use of language have a long history. A typical one was the English Statute of Pleading in 1362. Enacted in the `Here's the escape plan: pretend to be mad, then it's back to Blighty!' first flush of English nationalism, at the height of the Hundred Years War, it laid down in the most emphatic manner that French, hitherto the language of the courts, was no longer valid, and that all cases, in all jurisdictions, 'shall be pleaded, shewn, defended, answered, debated and judged in the English tongue'. Like the new French anti-English law, this statute had an ele- ment of absurdity about it, since, while making English official, it none the less stipulated that the cases be 'entered and enrolled in Latin', and was itself written in French. However, it reinforced an irre- sistible trend and hence was a highly effec- tive statute — unlike the French law, which runs against the wishes of the people, espe- cially the younger generation: it is they, not parliament, who decide the future of the language.
An example of a racist-linguistic statute on the lines of the present French one or the Nuremberg Laws for that matter was passed in Ireland four years after the Statute of Pleadings. The Statutes of Kilkenny (1366) were an attempt to arrest what it called the 'degeneracy' of the English settlers in Ireland by forbidding them to associate with those of 'mere' Irish origin. This form of 14th-century apartheid not only banned Gaelic of Brehon law, but laid down that the settlers were in no cir- cumstances to parley with the Irish, marry them, sell them horses or armour, partake in Irish sports such as 'hurling or quoits', or entertain in their homes Irish 'minstrels, story-tellers or rhymers'. Well, it didn't work, any more than the new French law will work. The only bit which succeeded was the insistence on English speech and surnames, and this would have happened anyway — the law merely reinforced success.
Whatever the state and the bureaucrats may say, there are certain kinds of popular democracy which are beyond the power of the elites to stifle. One is the democracy of speech. The demotic will always replace the hieratic in the end. Another is the democ- racy of the purse. The public, not the pow- ers that be, decides what it wants to wear, eat and use. And the third is the democracy of self-identification. The peoples of Europe will settle themselves whether they want to discard their nationalities and embrace federalism. And if they decide to remain 'racist', there is nothing Delors and his acolytes can do about it.
Previous page
