Anarchy in Paris!

(many xposts)

I wasn't speaking about police actions (or trying to imply the French police weren't serious & very tough), I was commenting on the public attitude toward them.. I think here in the US a much larger percentage of the general public would be pretty gung-ho about a police crackdown. (This scares me.)

This is not going to clear up any time soon.

Ed is spot-on. The spirit of the recent riots seems quite close to that of 68, ie retaliating against the very nature of Gaullist society with all its hierarchies and coldness. While de Gaulle might be long dead, Gaullism remains and is painfully inappropriate to the modern world. Are the CRS (are they still called that?) still as violent as they were back then? If so, this is unbelievable and the force needs a complete culture change.

Integration into French society is not a policy the Government is keen on, with nearly five million people of migrant descent kept in housing projects where currently rioting is taking place.

The education system is modelled on the ideas of the French revolution . . . and some of its pedagogy is still the same. Everybody has to conform to one image of the French.

So conforming to the republican idea of what France, with one mould -that is, the law and education is for everybody, and everybody has got to conform to it - is in fact, not taking into account the reality of the multicultural society that France has got now.

Don't think the '68 rioters doused any wheelchair-bound ladies in petrol before setting them on fire, though.

-- salexander / sofia (silva11...), November 8th, 2005.

of course, this kind of insurrection is so typically french that the rioters have surely 'conformed' perfectly well to societal norms. fwiw, i think that this 'kind of thing' would/could easily happen in britain if we had high unemployment and a more violent police force (such as they have in france).

i think the french are right-on with the secularist path, and reintroducing religion into public schools would be a disaster -- as it will he here, in ten or fifteen years time.

this -- "the law and education is for everybody, and everybody has got to conform to it - is in fact, not taking into account the reality of the multicultural society that France has got now" -- makes no sense whatever. in what functioning country can the law not be 'for everybody'? an incredibly unequal one. (not that france lives up to its professed equality, but at least it's an objective.)

i don't see how 'the reality of a multicultural society' necessitates changing the law so that, on the basis of skin colour, you are different as citizens.

Also, I don't think "secularism" can justify the banishing of head scarves - these aren't just religious but integral to certain people's identities. (Plus I think it's incredibly sexist to force young girls to choose between their religious beliefs - whether they are imposed by their families or not - and education).

i'm not anti-headscarf as such, possibly the govt shd have let it slide because it's become this ridiculous 'issue' and means the govt gets accused of racism. the threat of schoolchildren being taught religious dogma in schools is far greater in britain, also.

It is true that the government has allowed it to become an "issue," but it should have never come to that. How is it interfering with anyone else's education to wear something which you personally believe in? It's not trying to convert other students or teachers or impose beliefs on them.

Head-scarves also aren't inherently sexist. I have issues with it as well, but respect those who choose to wear them. (Some Muslim women find them empowering to prevent being objectified).

That's what I said: there's no choice, the law says you can't bring religion into schools, end of. It's much simpler than what we're going to have in Britain where because people of all religions won't awake from the middle ages, they can't school together because they can't accept each other's pitiful rituals before class, the upshot being segregated schooling where children are taught anti-scientific (or homophobic, sexist, bigoted) bollocks. as you know, most of this religious 'requirement' stuff is as much a interpretative procedure as anything involving the constitution.

headscarves are minor, and to be honest i think the french whd have let it lie; but i admire their idealism there.

Oh that's right, forgot you have a fondness for the French! (That's a joke BTW, not dissing). Anyway um back to anarchy in Paris.

France was slow to react to the spreading violence set off by the accidental deaths of two youths on Oct. 27, in part because the initial nights of unrest did not seem particularly unusual in a country where an average of more than 80 cars a day were set on fire this year even before the violence. -NYTimes

!

They aren't even religious, Muslim women don't have to wear them

The government's answer is only repression: the power of the police and the army is glorified. It sounds like provocation. The words used by Villepin and Sarkozy remain the very bad time of History, it is really chocking. They do not understand at all what's happening. I do not know how the calm can come back in these conditions.

100 young people are already in jail: when they will come back in their neighborhood, they will be consider as heroes.

one of cole's convincing points is his demolition of steyn's reflexive posture of laying this at radical islam's feet, by saying (effectively) that the "racaille" are as muslim as the '91 LA rioters were christian. we have not heard (afaik, despite spotty media coverage) "allahu akbar" when another citroen gets torched.

however, one of the things that a few rightwingers have been saying that is convincing is that combo of france's left-statism and right-nativism have created this mess: ie huge amounts of gdp are tied up in servicing the (native) unemployed and retired and the agrarian countryside (+ that divine short work week, etc) while immigrants (sometimes 3 gen.s ago!) are still bottled up in these projects with no entry points to the regular economy. many commentators left & right have noted the racist geography of paris's built environment.

...which further discredits the islamism blame game, considering how "integrated" london's 7/7 bombers were. cole's argt that the rioters are part of a ghetto-creole no-longer-not-but-not-yet-maybe-never-will-be-French culture very impt i think.

Yes, it's hard for the melting pot to work when the population in question is often just plain physically isolated by geography and architecture with little/no contact with mainstream society. But the US melting pot model doesn't demand that everyone assimilate a 100% their identity into being American, either.

"Nihilistic vortex of a violence that's meaningless, pointless, and that grows drunk on the spectacle of itself from city to city, reflected by televisions that are themselves obsessed."