Race Riots in France

[Luna Santin]

It's interesting to me how quite a few media outlets seem loathe to identify the protestors as primarily youth of the Arab and African minorities. The BBC frontpage article was changed to include that fact in the tagline, but previously made almost no mention of it. The CNN frontpage article doesn't make any mention of that until over halfway through -- not to mention their choice of word to describe people burning hundreds of cars per day and damaging countless buildings across the region: "vandals." The Yahoo! article makes no mention of it at all. Ditto the AP, until a recent change.

In the other corner, Fox naturally mentions it first thing. It's bothersome how this would so predictably happen.

Similarly, a few outlets haven't mentioned the incident with the two teens that apparently led this whole mess to finally boil over. They offer no alternate cause, and apparently expect us to believe that hundreds or thousands of people will bring about the chaos and destruction of rioting for ten days, even improvising bomb factories near Paris, all on a whim. Sure.

Reminds me of another question I was asking. Are they "Sunni terrorist/rebels" or blandly unidentified "insurgents," that are running around killing civilians in Iraq? Why this hesitance to identify the players as they are?

[Lord Bitememan]

Osterbaum, don't forget, riots like this could have very, very negative consequences too. A large segment of the French population already felt that the muslim population of their society posed a security problem, and that segment largely voted for Le Pen in the last election, sending him into the second round. I can't imagine that having a major series of riots in largely muslim neighborhoods (confirming concerns of a security threat) and the fact that the government took 10 days to quell the violence (a demonstration of manifest incompetance in dealing with that problem) is exactly going to hurt his, or National Front's candidate, in the next election. This could be very, very bad for France, and have exactly the opposite of a good outcome.

[Xal]

I feel a disturbance in the force... as though George W. Bush suddenly began channeling Tim the Enchanter...

[Arlia Janet]

Xal, this is the discussion forum. Random things and pointless jabs at people are really frowned upon here.

I find this interesting because I've learned a lot about how poorly these immigrants are treated. If you are from a suburb with a bad reputation, you will have a very hard time getting a job or into a good school. I'm from south Chicago. If that were true for Chicago, I'd be unemployed too.

The big thing is that I had no idea things were this bad. I remember France trying to outlaw head scarves a while ago, but the situation is much bleaker than the French would have you think. I believe this problem is a consequence of France trying to sweep the problems these communities face under the rug instead of losing a little bit of face and having an open dialogue about it. As of now, 1,300 vehicles have been torched and a lot of people have been injured. It seems like Chirac still wants to sweep the problems under the rug by vowing to simply arresting and convicting everyone. Once that's done and the violence stops, Chirac will probably continue to ignore their problems.

[Lockeownzj00]

Yeah--France's attitude, indeed the attitude in many of these situations is, "the harder you are, the faster the situation will solve itself." Unfortunately, grown men use this logic and it can escalate to anything, from drug wars to real wars.

Reminds me of Pink Floyd.

"Are there any queers in the theatre tonight
Get 'em up against the wall
That one looks Jewish
And that one's a coon
Who let all this riff raff into the room
There's one smoking a joint and
Another with spots
If I had my way I'd have all of you shot"

[Xal]

Very well, I'll drop the jokes. (the idea being that suddenly you have republicans looking at france saying "I warned you, I warned you, but did you listen to me, oh, no, you knew better..." Sarcasm's hard to get across on the internet, and vague sarcasm's worse. My apologies.)

Interesting piece I once read by Colin Powell: Diplomacy can be defined as the use of the shadow of force. The problem is that as soon as someone recognizes that it is only the threat of force, not the force itself, use of that force becomes necessary... and then you get people yelling at you for using force.

I'll be interested to see how the French react to this one. Their leadership has to know that using any kind of serious force will be (1) decried as Bushist by their constituents and (2) decried as hypocrisy by Bushists. This could be fun to watch.

[Lockeownzj00]

DaBiggman, back your claims up, eh? I think it would be fairly easy to compile an essay on how history has proven time and time again that the "hardline," stubborn and unfeeling approach often fails--and we're not talking, "we won the war = it didn't fail." If win the war has a byproduct of, half of x people are dead, it wasn't a success.

I'm not going to stray a lot, a PM-type thing would be dandy, I just think it's a very dangerous ambiguous claim to make, and part of the reason so many people support actions of today: they have this (what I believe to be) incorrect "common sense" knowledge that this way's "always worked."

My entire point is, they're only pissing the people off more--and the candidate, whose entire standpoint is being harsh towards crimes, can't seem like a hypocrite, because he's a potentially electable politician, and he has to adhere to moral objectivism: that is, "I can't change my position, ever." And so, he comes down hard "just like he said he would" and...and? Nothing. It's just making the rioters feel more indignant and the sympathisers more pissed off, leaving only one more group of "haters--" and if it continues, the indignant+sympathisers will outnumber the "haters" (politicians and those who oppose the riots).

[Archbio]

the idea being that suddenly you have republicans looking at france saying "I warned you, I warned you, but did you listen to me, oh, no, you knew better..."

I really don't see that would be warned of what.

I'll be interested to see how the French react to this one. Their leadership has to know that using any kind of serious force will be (1) decried as Bushist by their constituents and (2) decried as hypocrisy by Bushists. This could be fun to watch.

Are you somehow implying that "Bushists" have the monopoly on the concept of using force to solve problems, and that politics in France are somehow viewed by the French in a bushist/not-bushist spectrum?

These are odd statements to make, no doubt. Are you sure you're not lumping together everybody that opposed Bush as for the Iraq war and the French nation?

As for the events themselves, well, I tend to think that the groundwork for the crisis has been put down by the very loose immigration policy and the very weak integration policy. Having milions of sans-papiers, who've been living miserably for generations in social housing without having any actual French identity kind of makes this kind of explosion possible without any spontaneous hostility towards French society and institutions (as will no doubt be speculated later on).

As for the whole "scarf thing", Wikipedia is very informative there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_...ols_in_schools

[Thought]

Lockeownzj00, there is no such thing as an "easy essay" in history. If history is easy, then you haven't done your homework. But to an extent it depends on what you'd call success. Emperor Justinian violently suppressed the Nika riots, which in part were about his own control over the city and state, yet the Roman/Byzantine Empire lasted until 1453. Indeed, under Justinian the Roman Empire had a resurgence of political and military power. Thus, seemingly a success. Or take the Roman tradition of breaking up troublesome populations to forcible destroy their culture. Quite successful actually. Indeed, the Romans started having trouble when they allowed groups to stay together. Indeed, Rome conquered the Mediterranean world largely through hard-line, unfeeling force. Europeans violently forced the Muslims out of Spain and it became one of the more Catholic nations by the time the New World was discovered.

Pol Pot mercilessly killed off the educated classes of Cambodian society, and they are still recovering. Stalin stayed in power by killing off his opponents.

That is the problem, violence is often quite effective. Not because it kills, but because it demoralizes. That, really, is the key to defeating an enemy.

It is only with the modern world that violence has become largely ineffective. In 1439 the French could have massacred the rioters with little repercussion. But now, with the printing press, telephones, satellites, and the internet? The entire world is a backseat driver and nearly everyone sees a different way of solving any given problem. If the people driving make a decision that doesn't turn out perfectly, then, as Xal indicated, people start saying "I warned ya, didn't I warn ye? But would you listen, oh nooo..." This is true of any situation. You’re at peace with Germany, despite military buildups and the Schlieffen plan and what do they do? Invade France. Go to war with them and what happens? Entire generations are lost in trench warfare. No matter what you do, when something goes wrong someone, somewhere, will have known better. And something will go wrong.

Just a violent,

Thought

[Lockeownzj00]

Thought, perhaps this is precisely why I didn't bring it up here. I'm not trying to eb over confident, but for every example of this, I think there are many counter-examples--and I could list them, but this isn't my topic and I don't think the starter wants it to evolve, necessarily. If he/she does, then that's fine, but that's specifically why I ain't addressing this.

I'm also very aware that it's a modern phenomenon, but I won't pretend that I don't like it. I'm glad people started "wising up" to this sort of thing, so we can't let public massacres happen as blithely as they did before--now, not there ain't still genocide in the world, of course not, just that we are (mostly) too interconnected for the news and for the opinions not to spread.

I think the Inquisition was stupid and I think this is, too. No, I'm not *really* comparing the two, just the line of thought involved--"Hmm, some of these people are annoying us. Let's round em all up and kill em/convict em/subsequently pretend they don't exist." This candidates position on crime is one that's supposed to make you feel safer but not make you very much so.