If I were a member of the alienated army that shared Guy Fawkes night with the French on November 5th, as part of their general celebration and indulgence, wouldn’t cars present an opportunity to joyride? How clear that these hotheads, raised in a political culture of entitlement and spectacle, now turn against their patron and paymaster. Schools, buses, hospitals and cars are destroyed to preserve their imprisonment and immobility. As masters of their estates, the rioters cock their legs and piss molotovs to provide the reek of burnt plastic that serves as their territorial marker.
The puzzled onlooker will wonder why it took a damp November rather than a hot July or August. Everyone gets more attention during the busy autumn when some of the French population deigns to work for a living. Now the lighthouses of punditry highlight hubris expunged from the once proud Gallic rooster and the smart riots of the European intifada. Some may fly the flag of Eurabia as their singular explanation for this tinderbox.
Yet the answers lie in crappy suburbs where the height of social mobility is raking money as a drugs and dole prole. The state is an absent employer, white, French and a danger to profits. Where economics provides motive to keep out the state as a threat to the monopoly of drugs and Islam, politics and terror will probably follow.
Because when you get done joyriding, if you haven’t wrecked the car thoroughly enough, someone might be able to use it to deliver groceries or something. Nope, it has to be burned – preferably quickly, before the police get here – or the rioters might fail to make a dent in the French infrastructure.
I’d say it’s obvious that though there are legitimate complaints, the rioters have long since worked through their initial rage and are now rioting for the sake of rioting (the real equivalent of a video game for lots of them I think).
I’ll say it again, having lots of unattached young men with nothing to do and no social contacts apart from other young men just like them is a recipe for disaster in any country.
Right, for the minority burning cars, houses, women and buildings, the State is today an absent employer.
But for the “peaceful” majority (French propaganda), it is a ransom payer thanks to uncontrolled LEGAL businesses, stealing VAT for instance, and presumed poor families (negative income tax and allowances), and it will employ more and more Afro-French people. Before the riots, for the first time, a large recruitment of 20.000 civil servants had been completed, that is offering life-employment after interviews instead of the so French egalitarian competitive exam (they are still making up the legal disguise for this parody of social justice). During the riots, Chirac has decided to increase the quotas, a ransom in fact; I wish naïve businessmen also understood that the so called repressive Sarkosy enthusiastically makes presents to the Muslims (lands and money for mosqs, recruitment of police officers and right of vote for foreigners)
http://www.interieur.gouv.fr/rubriques/c/c1_le_ministre/c13_discours/2005_10_26_discours_discrimination_positive
Our politicians’s enthusiasm comes from the hidden figures of French births; they only are allowed to know that 40% of the babies born in France are presumably Muslim and that a majority of babies are non-white and non accidental. So they’re not cuddling oppressed minorities these days but the expected future majority, and I believe it will be vain because these primitive people won’t elect non-Muslim traitors; contrary to us, they still have their survival instinct.
Positive discrimination will soon paralyse our already little productive public services, including the police. Big companies are also ransomed through forced discriminative employment (unbelievable contracts signed with the French state) but seem to be refunded, in the short term, by state indulgence regarding social charges and taxes, and of course delocalisation from this mental pre-Muslim asylum.
This is why what my ransomed country can only decay. Those who think they’ve seen France in decay haven’t seen much yet. I hope my irritation doesn’t also impoverish my English.
Please don’t talk any more about French architecture and all these Bobo (bourgeois bohème) sordid justifications for ransoming. Help us find where our money’s gone, help us name all our enemies, whatever their passports, and let us win that war.
Philip, dead-on target. It is not all about Islam, as some of the more exciteable folk who comment here claim, although Islamic radicalism will fill a dangerously large vacuum left by the French state and its socialist delusions.
Nobody, least of all the Gendarmerie Nationale, seems to be questioning the extraordinary large numbers of vehicles being set ablaze on a nightly basis. I guess that a lot of people in Paris, Amiens etc. must be using the opportunity to get a new car, much as happened when we had the riots in Bradford a few years ago.
About Islam: the most insightful comment I’ve seen anywhere was on another blog (I forget which) to the effect that Islam has become the new communism, for disaffected urban youth looking for a cause.
Islam has become the new communism, for disaffected urban youth looking for a cause.
Not only for “disaffected urban youth” but also for the disaffected affluent “intellectuals” (like Harold Pinter, Galloway, etc.).
I agree, this might not have happened if the French State hadn’t effectively surrendered control over some of its territories.
As such, the “crappy neighbourhoods” argument holds true. If a State surrenders control over its land, these things happen.
However, this is distinct from the traditional, “sociological” “crappy neighbourhoods” argument — which I absolutely do not buy into. There are tens of thousands of such neighbourhoods across the globe and people there don’t go destroying towns every night.
As for RoP involvement, all I know is that I heard plenty of “allahu akbars” being shouted by the rioters. More ancillary at this stage, but definitely a sign of things to come.