Both far left and far right leapt immediately to their cliched talking points when the rioting started in France: the far left citing "wilful government neglect" of the poor rioters, and the far right pointing the finger at those dirty, filthy immigrants.
They're both wrong, says The Economist:
France takes a hard look at itself after a week of violence The far left puts the violence down to wilful government neglect. France’s banlieues concentrate poverty, ill-staffed schools and gang rule in remote city fringes: a grim realisation of life on society’s periphery.
Yet billions of public money has gone into renovating high-rise estates. Metro lines and tramways have been extended to city outskirts, apprenticeships expanded, primary-class sizes halved. Nanterre, where the 17-year-old, Nahel, was shot, is on a direct underground line to central Paris. There, by the Pablo Picasso estate where he grew up, on a street lined with the grey charred carcasses of torched and overturned cars, lies a post office and a public library; over the road, a sports ground and leafy park.
The far right blames the rioting on immigration and, said Marine Le Pen, a “problem of police authority”. The rioters, so a statement by two right-wing police unions unflinchingly claimed, were nothing less than “savage hordes”. No matter that Nahel was a French citizen, who grew up in France. Nor that less than one in ten of those arrested for violence or looting was foreign. Nor that their average age was 17.
So what then is the issue? Unlike those aiming to make political capital, The Economist's reporters stepped out from behind their keyboards and asked those who are rioting:
The people who live on the estates of Nanterre repeatedly bring up one complaint: not about jobs nor poverty, nor the mayor, nor Mr Macron, but the excessive use of force by the police, and the sense that residents are singled out for police checks.
You could say they've done a pretty poor job of communicating their complaints. But there's their issue, they say: excessive police force. So let's not fall prey to the too-easy cliches, huh, as I've seen several folk do.
The problem, of course, is how to end the rioting. If its cause is excessive police force, then further rioting will hardly be prevented only by that force's escalation.
2 comments:
The cause is ultimately a lack of assimilation, and that's probably more true for the 2nd generation than for their parents, something I don't think we've ever seen before in waves of immigration to (especially) America, and even the smaller waves of Arabic and African peoples to France and such.
In those cases the immigrants adapted as best they could, but it was their children who became immersed in their Western homes, often to the point of mocking their elders "old ways" and their pining for their old homes.
But not now, and not just in France but across the Western world, we're seeing 2nd generation that not only is not assimilated but filled with utter contempt for the societies in which they live.
Having said that it should be noted that at least in one respect they're French - and paradoxically that's in the way they're rioting, which fits in well with French history. Same with their police and the crushing of opposition that has been a hallmark of massive centralised State power in the nation.
Now if they could only get the rest of the "fitting-in" done.
Of course there are those with a different opinion, like this Islamic guy living in the Middle East, supplying some home truths to France:
I say you, are in a crisis. You went to the Muslim countires and you imported the garbage the Muslim countries wanted to put in prison or isolate away from society. You went and you imported them. Why? For cheap labour. But these Islamist extremists? They don't want to work. They want free welfare. They want to marry French woman: blonde hair, blue eyes! They don't have time to work. So look at Poland. They don't complain from Islamic extremism: not a single terrorist attack in Poland. The moment they sense there's a problem they crack down on it. Polish policy, Beautiful! The French? No.
I think Tom's largely correct on this one. It's not immigration per se, or being poor per se that's the problem. It's the failure of immigrants and their offspring, who typically always start up poorer assimilating and climbing the prosperity ladder. For that I think we have the welfare state, an increasing sense of entitlement, and identity politics (blaming your state on alleged racism) more than anything else. I'm very sceptical it's too much police force either.
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