Sometimes when the foreign press publishes interviews with Americans, it reveals more about them then it does about us. With the U.S. in the midst of a bitter midterm election campaign, this interview from France with two residents of the South by Rue 89 correspondent Damien Spleeters has the Americans warning the Frenchman that a War of Succession may soon be in their future.
For Rue 89, Damien Spleeters writes in part:
With Mo and Addie, I spoke of the South and its identity, forged by the War of Secession, the American Civil War of 1861-1865. “The South,” as it is simply called here.
In general, this refers to the southeastern states of the USA: Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia, Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas.
“Since independence,” begins Mo, “it’s the only war ever fought inside the country. It left a deep scar. You still have people here with the old flag of the South – because the South had its own flag, the rebel flag.”
“Imagine that France, for example, were to secede. The Union would assimilate it by force. There would no longer be truly separate countries; there would just be the European Union as a country in its own right.
“This is something like how it could turn out for you. And language is unlikely to prevent this process. In the U.S. at first, there were the languages of all the migrants, and then English was imposed.
“I think the European Union is engaged in the same process as the United States. It’s just a matter of time. You’d be surprised.
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