Wednesday, November 09, 2005

Paris riots and the manufacture of consent

I am currently reading the "Chomsky Reader" by the famed dissident Noam Chomsky, and I came across a section in his chapter The Manufacture of Consent that reminded me of the Paris riots:

"Democratic systems are quite different. It is necessary to control not only what people do, but also what they think. Since the state lacks the capacity to ensure obedience by force, thought can lead to action and therefore the threat to order must be excised at the source. It is necessary to establish a framework for possible thought that is constrained with the principles of the state religion. These need not be asserted; it is better that hey be presupposed, as the unstated framework for thinkable thought. The critics reinforce this system by tacitly accepting these doctrines, and confining their critique to tactical questions that arise within them."

Isn't it possible, that France (democracy) and their secularization (state religion/ideal) has cut the Muslims from the discussion of their (French Muslim's) own country's social dialogue?