Le Journal

Dans le quartier d’Encagnane, l’Atelier Jasmin lutte pour survivre et poursuivre son œuvre de réinsertion. Au cœur de son travail, la couture et le développement de sa marque Les filles … Cet article À Aix, l’Atelier Jasmin tient à un fil entre couture et réinsertion est apparu en premier sur Made in Marseille.

This Martin Luther King Day comes at a grim moment for racial and cultural harmony not just in the United States, but across much of the West. In America, mass immigration and Left-wing racial politics have have stoked an ugly and vicious backlash on the Right, parts of which now openly speaks in terms of white racial identity and solidarity. From Portland to New York, immigration, integration, and belonging form fraught political fault lines. Similar problems dominate politics across the Atlantic, with no easy or obvious solution in sight. This shift is the result of deep, and perhaps inexorable, changes that contemporary Western leaders celebrated in the name of “diversity”. Western societies have indeed become more diverse, but the process hasn’t been the product purely of Western openness, but also of structural forces. To wit, modern communications and mass immigration have shrunken distances, making Western countries less like their past as exclusionary metropolises of racially based sea empires, and more like the multiethnic Eurasian land empires like Rome, Russia, Iran, and China. Thus, the history of those empires has important lessons — and warnings — for us. Above all, the Eurasian empires were civilisational states, dependent for their success upon the strength of their inherited civilisations, and on respect for these civilisations by their multiethnic populations. By these standards, Western countries today are in increasingly poor shape. Civilisational decline is not so dangerous in ethnically homogenous societies. Like many formerly great peoples before them, the ethnic English of the future could squat contentedly on the steps of the half-ruined monuments of their ancestors, scratching for fleas while telling themselves stories of their great past victories, great past works of literature that they no longer read, and great buildings that they no longer have the craftsmanship to build. This is, however, unlikely to impress new residents of their island. Suggested readingLooksmaxxing is the new transBy Nikos Mohammadi In a world in which new residents are a given, the historical distinction between oceanic empires and land empires becomes crucial. Western-European colonists traveled thousands of miles across the sea and encountered completely different cultures with whom they had had no previous contact, and which were generally at a markedly lower level of technological development. In the Americas, on top of this came the immense new commercial opportunities of plantation crops and industrialised slavery based on race. The result was institutionalised racist systems for social management. There were of course beliefs in imperial missions civilisatrices, but accompanied by an implicit or explicit assumption that the process of civilising the natives would take a very long time and probably always remain incomplete. The great land empires — Roman, Chinese, Muslim, and Russian, among others — couldn’t be like this. They had lived next to the peoples they conquered for hundreds or thousands of years. They had similar levels of technological development. Sometimes, the subjects were tacitly recognised by the conquerors to have in certain respects a higher level of “civilisation” than themselves: Greeks over Romans, Iranians over Arabs, Baltic Germans over Russians. For long periods, moreover, the subject peoples had been the former rulers: several of the great Chinese dynasties were from “barbarian” peoples; several of the great Iranian dynasties were Turkic; the Russian principalities lived for almost 300 years under the “Tatar yoke”. In these circumstances, hierarchies based on racial origin and proportion were hard to sustain — certainly if the empires wished to expand and survive. Dynastic intermarriage was a regular thing. To secure imperial rule over conquered territories required the successful co-opting of large parts of their elites. These elites then merged into the existing imperial elites. Hence the…