There’s a specific French politician move that deserves its own category in the history of audacity. The move is: standing in front of cameras, in a country built substantially on Algerian oil and labor, defended by Senegalese soldiers, supplied by Ivorian cocoa, Nigerien uranium, and Malian gold, a country whose postwar reconstruction was funded in part by the CFA franc system that still extracts from 14 African countries today... And saying, with genuine conviction, that the problem with France is that it has given too much. That it has been too generous. That the people arriving from its former colonies are taking advantage of "French goodness." The specific relationship between what France took and what France now owes is not part of this politician’s presentation. It is never part of the presentation. Because the presentation only works if the history is invisible. And making the history invisible is, at this point, also a French specialty.