Robert Ménard is the mayor of the French town of Béziers. Fed up with the national government’s attitude towards the “refugees” that are now overrunning France and the rest of Europe, Mr. Ménard decided to personally evict those who had taken up illegal residence in his town.
What’s interesting about this video is the fact that as he made his rounds, the mayor had to be accompanied by an interpreter to put his words into English so that the culture-enriching squatters could understand what he was saying.
Many thanks to Oz-Rita for the translation, and to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:
Transcript:
| 00:00 | ”You are not welcome” English translation of this text follows: | |
| 00:16 | HLM = Habitation a loyer modere, Public State-Sponsored Housing | |
| 00:32 | You occupy these premises? | |
| 00:36 | Monsieur, you are not | |
| 00:40 | welcome in this town. | |
| 00:44 | You entered by | |
| 00:48 | breaking in the doors. | |
| 00:52 | You steal the water and the electricity. | |
| 01:05 | You have no permission to occupy these premises. | |
| 01:13 | In my town you | |
| 01:17 | are not welcome, I repeat it for you. | |
| 01:21 | One is welcome if | |
| 01:25 | one behaves correctly. | |
| 01:33 | If you want to be welcome, go to towns | |
| 01:37 | that are willing to welcome you; I am not willing to do it | |
| 01:41 | under the conditions in which you place before me accomplished facts. | |
| 01:45 | He asks: ‘Where are the other towns?’ | |
| 01:49 | Go wherever you want – Monsieur, one does not enter | |
| 01:53 | by breaking in doors. Okay, so one minute, please. | |
| 01:57 | I can stay here one or two months (not clear), | |
| 02:02 | then I go. Wait, yes I understood, | |
| 02:06 | one does not enter by breaking down | |
| 02:10 | doors. One does not enter by not paying for the electricity | |
| 02:14 | and the water. People here pay for water and | |
| 02:18 | electricity and they don’t break doors to enter. | |
| 02:26 | I will hold back the police. | |
| 02:30 | So you leave. | |
| 02:34 | Are you “Syrian”? Yes, I am. | |
| 02:38 | You are with people who are using you. | |
| 02:42 | The people who bring you here do it because either | |
| 02:46 | they are people smugglers who make you pay to bring you here, | |
| 02:50 | or they are people who use you for political reasons. | |
| 02:54 | I respect refugees, but refugees who respect | |
| 02:58 | my country. | |
| 03:02 | If you don’t leave, the police | |
| 03:06 | will make you leave. | |
| 03:15 | You understand quite well: I tell you one is welcome in a town | |
| 03:19 | when one respects the place where one arrives. | |
| 03:23 | In this case you don’t respect anything. | |
| 03:31 | I don’t respect people who do not respect | |
| 03:35 | my town. And so you have to leave. | |
| 03:39 | One cannot accept that people behave like this. | |
| 03:43 | I have compassion for the misfortune of people, but not under these conditions. | |
| 03:47 | These are people who, on one side, are exploited by people | |
| 03:51 | who brought them here. They are all from the same town; you can see these are networks | |
| 03:55 | which bring them here, and I am not naive enough to think | |
| 03:59 | that these networks do this out of Christian charity. | |
| 04:03 | As for the people of the associations who receive them here, | |
| 04:08 | the responsible politicians which we saw here, they exploit them | |
| 04:12 | politically. They don’t give a damn about these people. | |
| 04:16 | They never cared about them, whereas in our town, we worried about them for a year. | |
| 04:20 | Now we will involve the authorities | |
| 04:24 | We have a subprefect, a prefect and we will ask them: What are you doing? | |
| 04:28 | And the law? Where is our French law? How do you manage to cause it to be disrespected? | |
| 04:32 | We are fed up with a law which is applied strictly | |
| 04:36 | in certain cases, and here one forgets it. There is a double standard of law. | |
| 04:40 | There are people who are allowed to engage in | |
| 04:44 | unacceptable behaviour, and others who are not. I don’t want this. | |
| 04:48 | The Biterrois [region surrounding Béziers] now waits for the state to assume its responsibilities. |
For a complete listing of previous enrichment news, see The Cultural Enrichment Archives.
It’s a start but it’s going to take thousands more like that Mayor before we manage to to our countries back – and not so bloody reasonably either, at the end of the day there’s only one thing those predatory scum really understand.
Let’s hope it’s catching before the muscle flexing begins.
“What’s interesting about this video is the fact that as he made his rounds, the mayor had to be accompanied by an interpreter to put his words into English so that the culture-enriching squatters could understand what he was saying.”
Not surprising at all. English is helpful with the internet and other communications.
Some time ago I was looking through a Slovak website (in English) and found a posting (likewise in English) by someone who claimed to be Pakistani. Lesson learned: they could communicate as long as it was in English.
Indeed, one might ask, “Would the migrations be possible without the English language?”
Once a non-English speaker learns the language then all the other European languages are open to learning. English is one of the most difficult to master, and is just after all, a conglomeration of other languages like German, French, old Norse, etc.
English is grammatically simpler than the more inflicted European languages (French, German, Italian …). I suppose one of the difficulties is that the connection between spelling and pronunciation can be baffling (through, though, bough, rough, cough, etc.). And the blending of Germanic and Romance languages might make it difficult to get a handle on vocabulary, though once you do, you can figure out a lot of French words too (in print, anyway). Maybe English has lots of idiomatic oddities that seem odd only to new learners. English word order is quite close to Norwegian and Swedish, which also are not heavily inflected.
Scandinavian languages are significantly less inflected than English.
English is superior to the Romance languages in that is much more consistent in word order. Gendered nouns are a disaster. Word agreement based on gender is also a disaster. Verb conjugations are a disaster.
In French specifically their articles, pronouns, and prepositions are a mess. Then you have all the silent letters which are written, but not pronounced, and all you have to distinguish meaning are some barely separable vowel inflections. It’s obvious to me why there is English all over France, but very little French has entered the English-speaking world.
The other glorious thing about English is that it is a very, very robust language. To expand, I mean that someone can write or speak far from perfect English while still conveying their message accurately. This is what you want in a communications medium.
Finally, English is excellent at developing new terms or integrating the appropriate loan words into its lexicon. Again, this adaptability and flexibility is a huge plus vis-à-vis competing language systems.
Radegunda, I was once told (but have no way of proving his hypothesis) by an Aussie of Italian descent, that English is the most ‘expressive’ of languages. In other words, English is able to convey the precise meaning of the conversation, as compared to say Italian or other languages, and that is why English is universal and why the powers to be wish to not be it so.
Couldn’t help noticing the “UC Berkeley” shirt on the first guy.