Anarchy in Paris!

Sarkozy vs. Villepin is a sad choice for the French Right.

i'm curious what french word sarkozy actually used - it gets translated as either "scum" or "rabble"

France has the same kind of history, really: how many people do we celebrate for at some point trying to bust open the social order of Paris? The U.S./France racial tensions always seem to operate on pretty similar models, but the French seem to lack the one great safety valve Americans have -- our whole bizarre rugged-individualist notion, which keeps people thinking they can get whatever they want for themselves, and keeps them from ever really associating with any bad lots they've been stuck with in life.

What's sad is that after years of neglect and racism, many of the inhabitants have grown up without a job and are near un-employable (especially in a country with such high unemployment), have grown up with such racism that they have openly and outright rejected anything smacking of 'mainstream' France including converting in large numbers to salafist Islam, and that all they have left to express is rage, burning and degrading their own communities since they feel no hope whatsoever and they may be right to feel that way.

The more someone has invested in the system being rioted against, the more likely they are to tsk any civil unrest that threatens them; and right now the US probably has more people contented or dependant enough on the system to not be interested in risking civil unrest.

You can argue that it galvanizes society and changes the culture and whatnot, but the large majority of those who participate in uprisings don't get much of any concrete nature out of them, or if they do, they end worse off.

Less violent demonstrations (particulalry in the 30's, I'm thinking) seem to have had a better effect.

Well see that's what I'm saying fascinates me about the U.S.: something in our national character manages to convince a disproportionate number of people that they're either benefiting from the system or will benefit from it, thanks to their rugged individualistic greatness. The old European class heirarchy does, yes, run against that, or make that kind of dreaming more difficult, and so far as I can tell the walls between different levels of society wind up much more pronounced, much less easy to rationalize as fluid. (The particular French attachment to maintaining a secular French culture is another issue; in some ways it's a wonderful thing, but in others it sits at the root of loads and loads of xenophobia and even anti-Semitism issues that the French have historically had.)

And M., I think the unproductiveness is part of what I'm getting at. Our reasons for taking pride in certain acts of unrest tend to have to do with our ability to make them ideological, to argue that they weren't solely born of frustration but more pointed -- and most of all to trace some way in which they "worked" to solve the problem, in some manner more efficient and macho and powerful than polite non-destructive demonstration. And this is interesting, because the most telling kind of unrest tends to be this kind -- the kind that's not really pointed or ideological, but just actual frustrated unrest. It can never really accomplish anything positive, and that allows us to write it off as problematic badness and tsk tsk -- largely because the problems behind it evade any sort of pointed obvious solution.

The right's tactic of theoretically holding all to high standards is (a) spot-on, morally speaking; (b) completely useless in terms of actually accomplishing anything; and (c) impossible to apply in any real-world way. (E.g., it's "high standards" tough-on-crime approaches that wind up subjecting poor communities to rigorous police control that nobody else is asked to cope with -- and while, most of the time, the people in those communities are happy as hell for that kind of protection, it also very easily spills over into situations where the animal-control metaphor becomes explicit and dangerous. I mean, it's no surprise that events like this, in any country, are usually predicated by some allegation of police responsibility for some young person's death.)

I disagree actually. Most of the xenophobia and anti-semitism in France stems from an old, rooted, (ethnic, if you will) Catholic culture that hates everybody else like the Know-Nothings hated immigrants back in the 1840s.

The right's tactic of theoretically holding all to high standards is (a) spot-on, morally speaking

Perhaps, but only when addressed to individuals. If you lecture a young man about the terror many women feel over the prosect of rape and convince him to be better than the kind of, to borrow a Sarkozyism, scum that commits that crime, you have done something praiseworthy. If you call all men potential rapists, you're not only being inexact, unfair, and inflammatory but you're probably not going to affect any real progress either.

Many people also generally believe now that their lives and "safety" are more important than anything. Civil unrest doesn't play well in that scenario.

not hoping to have a riot

Don't worry RJG you won't have a riot, unless you plan to spend time in those wonderful suburbs where all this is happening, and I really can't see what anyone would go and do over there.

Sorry, that was horribly flippant and probably misspelled.

I don't actually believe it'd be much of a commercial success right now.

Actually there's something quite frightening with what's going on ... hardly anybody living in Paris itself or in the nice suburbs seems to give much attention to the riots. In the tube, in the streets, in cafés, you don't actually hear anybody talking about it (and I mean, we French are supposed to always enjoy having these kind of discussions where nobody agrees and everybody gets to talk about how bad the government is handling the situation etc). It's almost like the riots are happening in another country, and not in France, 15mns away from Paris.

I figured it was only a matter of time before something like this happened. Some young people.. I remember being on the RER with them & the sense of frustration, anger, etc. was constantly in the air..

I really don't know what to say, and I live 30 fucking minutes from where all this is happening.

I guess it's the same for any ghetto in the world, people who don't live in them pretend that they don't exist..

...You see, France has this huge population of Muslims growing like a viper in its bosom, and not enough intestinal fortitude to do anything about it. The French government has long ignored (even fostered) the growth of this population, and its international face has, especially since the onset of the war on Terror and the War for Iraqi Liberation, appeared for all the world to smile on the Muslim world (except for that nasty business about wearing headscarves, but that's all smoothed over now.)

Unlike in America, where suburbs are upscale places where people move to get away from dirty, dangerous, crime-ridden cities, in many parts of the world (France included), it is the cities that contain the smart set, while the poor, the drug-addicted, the unemployed--and especially the immigrants--struggle through life. (Of course, what the two nations have in common is that the troubles are in the government housing projects; we've just built them in different places.)

To ride into Paris with the RER, unless there's a strike (and there is one right now on one of rhe RER lines, because one of the guys who worked on it was attacked ... actually, unless everything is mixed up in my mind, the whole train was assaulted, all the passengers robbed etc), takes about 10mn from the nearest of those banlieues. I guess you're right about that ghetto part. Those places further don't *exist* because there is absolutely no way you could walk through them.

From the Washington Post:
Rage of French Youth Is a Fight for Recognition
Mohammed Rezzoug, caretaker of the municipal gymnasium and soccer field, knows far more about the youths hurling firebombs and torching cars on the streets of this Paris suburb than do the police officers and French intelligence agents struggling to nail the culprits.

He can identify most of the perpetrators. So can almost everyone else in the neighborhoods that have been attacked.

"It's not a political revolution or a Muslim revolution," said Rezzoug. "There's a lot of rage. Through this burning, they're saying, 'I exist, I'm here.'"

An interesting article. Also, yesterday's Washington Post travel section had a piece on Paris talking about how all the hip & cool people had moved from the left bank and were in the 11th now and gave this list of places to go and things to see. Er, call me crazy but wasn't Oberkampf already kinda played out five years ago? It also called Belleville and Menilmontant ghettos.. and I'm like WTF are you talking about! That's exactly where you should be going!

also did they actually use the word ghettos?

The 11th -- bordered to the south by the grim 12th arrondissement, to the west by the Marais and the garment district of Sentier, and to the north and east by the hilly ethnic ghettos of Belleville and Menilmontant -- is a $7 cab ride from the Latin Quarter, or you can take the Metro to the Bastille station.

The writer is one of those rich American expats who has a blissfully comfortable life in the St Germain des Pres, maybe? Oops, my bad, I forgot to note that they were called "hilly ethnic ghettos" in fact. Hey, some people call it home!

haha hot news: the left bank has priced out the bohos, (c) 1957.

Fucking hell!

As for the kids saying they won't stop till 2 police are dead, that's just the stupidest comment they've said. But seeing how things are going, they ought to get their way in a day or two, since the police were actually shot at in the night. They were also bombarded with pétanque balls (for those who don't know, it's a ball the size of a tennis one, made of metal... quite hard) from the floors of a building.

The riots have spread to cities outside of Paris, in the province. It seems cars were burnt in cities like Orléans, Saint-Etienne and a number of others (can't seem to remember all of 'em). Cars were also burnt inside Paris during the WE, in the 17th and 3rd arrondissements.

Isn't this the exact moment that figureheads are for, to say the right words at the right time to bring this situation to some kind of resolution? Isn't this why people get elected, to have poise and imagination in moments like this?

Now years of telling immigrants that there is only one kind of French is blowing up in their faces and the initial reaction of people like Sarkozy shows that the next generation of rulers is as out of touch as the current one.

PARIS (Reuters) - With every night of violent rioting that scars France's rundown suburbs, more and more French say their distinctive model of integration, based on the revolutionary ideal of equality for all, has failed.

But President Jacques Chirac and his conservative allies are unlikely to join the critics, as that would mean accepting the approach France considers superior is no better than integration policies abroad.

[..]

Crises abroad such as the London bombings by Islamist militants, or the sight of poor, black Americans stranded in flooded New Orleans, are often occasions for smug comment in France on the dangers of admitting that ethnic minorities exist.

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."

Suddenly "big brothers" -- devout bearded men from the mosques who wear long traditional robes -- are positioning themselves between the authorities and the rioters in Clichy-sous-Bois, calling for order in the name of Allah. As thousands of voices shout "Allahu Akbar" from the windows of high-rise apartment buildings, shivers run down the spines of television viewers in their seemingly safe living rooms.

http://direland.typepad.com/direland/2005/11/why_is_france_b.html

The result, Brooks says, is a battle for the hearts and minds of Muslim youth "between Osama bin Laden and Tupac Shakur."

Jody Rosen name drops Disiz La Peste! J'KIFFE
(Urgent & key "J'pète les plombs," in the first verse of which he tries to buy breakfast at MacDo and is told it's too late because it's almost noon.. and then goes POSTAL.. very funny.)

J'lui dis : " Ecoute mec, rien à foutre que nos quartiers soient en guerre. Attends, j'vais t'payer après t'iras niquer ta mère ! "

His first album is insane but it only came out on tape in Senegal and now I can't find one..

I should've stayed in school & done my dissertation on the banlieues and hip hop culture.. but that would involve writing a dissertation.

David Brooks - GANGSTA!

Errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr, because they are Conservatives. John Kerry is a Conservative by the standards of most countries in (Western) Europe. Chirac a Socialist?!??! Gaullism has a Statist element to it but it's very far from being Socialist!

"He has stood for lower tax rates, the removal of price controls, strong punishment for crime and terrorism; and business privatization."

Tho, admittedly, being French, it's not quite that straightforward:

"He has also argued for more socially responsible economic policies, and was elected in 1995 after campaigning on a platform of healing the "social rift" (fracture sociale). His economic policies have at various times included both laissez-faire and dirigiste elements."