To people wondering why news and people focus on terrorist attacks in Paris and not in other countries, this is the reason: attacking Paris, is attacking the Western civilization. ISIS has claimed that they have attacked Paris because it is the capital of all their sins. Paris has been, in history, the ones who exported the current Western way of life.
France, and in particular Paris, has played an important role as a center of high culture since the 17th century, first in Europe, and from the 19th century on, worldwide:
- Paris is where we enjoy the major Western cuisine and alcoholic beverages, where we gather all together in a restaurant and spend quality time together.
- Paris is where we all gather in a café and spend hours talking about any kinds of subjects. Freely, men, women, gay or straight, where intellectual exchanges happen (and has always happened in the past) in the cafés, drinking coffee, smoking...
- Paris is where, during Louis XIV's reign, his minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert brought French luxury industries, like textile and porcelain, under royal control and the architecture, furniture, fashion and etiquette of the royal court (particularly at the Château de Versailles) became the preeminent model of noble culture in Europe during the latter half of the seventeenth century.
- Paris is where we enjoy fashion, art, cinema, theater, music, luxury, gastronomy, and beauty, and that is the precise reason why we have the most important structures of cultural expositions and we are the number 1 city in tourism since AGES.
- Paris belongs to France, which is a secular country where freedom of thought and of religion is preserved, by virtue of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The Republic is based on the principle of “laïcité”, that is of freedom of religion (including of agnosticism and atheism) enforced by the Jules Ferry laws and the 1905 law on the separation of the State and the Church, enacted at the beginning of the Third Republic (1871–1940)
- France has never had those US (or others) racial laws about marriage : a white person could (and actually happened to) marry a black (or others) one even in the XIXth (which was illegal in the USA up to the 1960s)
- France has had no racial discrimination about vote from 1848 (many black voters from the integration at the republic of the French islands in 1948, at least twenty years before the USA
- France abolished slavery in the late 1700s, and then a second time in 1848, without any civil war
- France has been giving French citizenship easily to any baby born on his territory for decades (like the USA but unlike Germany), and that's why data pretending that Germany has more immigrants than us are false, as "our" immigrants have been French for eras...
- Nobody in France ever understood a sentence like "JFK has a weakness : he loves women" "Err... and so ?" "We mean : he sleeps with other women as his wife" "Err... and so ?" (words from a TV-sitcom about the 1960s French police chatting with CIA agents, but so true)
- Gay intercourse has been free in France from 1789 (only in the 1960s or sometimes 1990s in UK, USA, Germany... )
- France doesn't recognize traditional religious trails (unlike the UK) as we consider that a person is a person, and not a Muslim / Christian / immigrant / wtf person
- In the 1930s, France remained the only great democratic country of continental Europe (unlike Italy, Spain, Poland, Hungary, Germany... ) till Nazi occupation
- During WW2, France lost less Jewish people than any Nazi-occupied country (unlike Poland, where Jewish people coming back from Nazi camps were killed after 1945)
But overall, what you must not forget, is that Paris is really the mirror of the Western civilization.
So yes, it is a big deal because this is not only an attack to Paris, it is an attack to the entire Western civilization, to its values, to its representation.
I am Parisian. Je suis Parisien, et Paris, je t'aime à la folie depuis des années, et tu le sais.
这个日本人在法国居住过, 现居日本.
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