French officials call Project Gutenberg archive, 15 million ebooks, Grateful Dead recordings and Prelinger Archive "terrorism," demands removal from Internet Archive

Sure is a lot of eagerness for collective punishment in this thread. Though if the people anywhere are going to rise up in protest of something their government’s done, it’ll be France. In this country it takes the govt trying to run the whole country off a cliff to get large numbers of people marching, and even then the media tries to ignore or downplay it as much as possible.

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If the French government really sees classic children’s stories and Grateful Dead videos as a major threat to their national security, perhaps they’re just overdue for a surrender and looking to stir up trouble so they’ll have someone to surrender to.

Seems a misguided choice though, as the Internet Archive doesn’t have the resources to occupy and run a conquered France. Perhaps they could get a volunteer intern to do it part-time though.

A laudable position, but the original point of the EEC and later EU was trade, not people. OK, the real goal was to make war—especially between Germany and France—a thing of the past, but the tool for doing that was trade. And that meant homogenising the various classifications, regulations and so on. Which can look like micromanagement.

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You know, I never really understood why Americans (and only Americans) seem to think the French surrender so easily.

The war will go on till the enemy is finished. The French do not know when that hour will come; they seldom speak of it; they do not amuse themselves with dreams of triumphs or terms. Their business is war, and they do their business.
Rudyard Kipling

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The problem is that IS is using the internet archive to stash their propaganda. So the EU wants that removed, but shutting down the whole site will throw out everything good as well.

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Oh, it’s really just a running joke.

We’re taught in school that France once had a revolution kind of like the American Revolution except they guillotined people instead of throwing tea in a harbor, but then later, despite having one of the most powerful militaries in the world, they surrendered within 2 weeks while everyone else1 fought on for five years. That’s about all we’re ever taught about France. Just those two facts, one of which was a seemingly quick surrender. So that’s where the reputation comes from.

Joke may have worked a bit better during the Cold War, since France was perceived as being a little too buddy-buddy with the Soviet Union, and there was some question as to whether NATO could rely on them in the event of WWIII, but that wasn’t taught in school, it was just part of the zeitgeist.

1) Everyone else meaning what we considered the major powers at the time, of course a lot of others got conquered, but that’s not important to our education system.

It makes a pretty funny juxtaposition with another factoid about WW2, in that one of the more common words to come after “French” is “Resistance”

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It has a lot more to do with fatcats wanting fewer regulations so they can improve their profits, and senseless racism and nationalism. The pro-Brexit people who won the original referendum were proven to have lied enormously about the problems England had because of the EU - some of them even publicly admitted their campaign was a tissue of lies. Why they’re still allowed to walk the streets is a real mystery.

yeah, if you dig deeply in “Community texts”, you can find things like " The Sharp Word Against The One Who Does Not Make Takfir Of The Apostate". The actual text seems as dull as dishwater, so it would too be painful to assess its radicalism.

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Anyone who thinks the French surrender quickly hasn’t discussed the topic with many Algerians.

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