Why Paris is burning Posted by: McQ
on Friday, November 04, 2005
In 2002 Theodore Dalrymple wrote an essay for City Journal entitled "The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris". In it he describes for all the world, to include the French, the explosive problem which was building up in their neglected ghettos (known as cités). It's an extremely well written and prescient article which is a must read for those trying to understand why, "suddenly", France has these problems. As you'll discover, there's nothing sudden about them at all, and Dalrymple's treatment will unflinchingly point to the cause who's effect we're now witnessing. It's a must read.
Where does the increase in crime come from? The geographical answer: from the public housing projects that encircle and increasingly besiege every French city or town of any size, Paris especially. In these housing projects lives an immigrant population numbering several million, from North and West Africa mostly, along with their French-born descendants and a smattering of the least successful members of the French working class. From these projects, the excellence of the French public transport system ensures that the most fashionable arrondissements are within easy reach of the most inveterate thief and vandal.
And:
A kind of anti-society has grown up in them—a population that derives the meaning of its life from the hatred it bears for the other, “official,” society in France. This alienation, this gulf of mistrust—greater than any I have encountered anywhere else in the world, including in the black townships of South Africa during the apartheid years—is written on the faces of the young men, most of them permanently unemployed, who hang out in the pocked and potholed open spaces between their logements. When you approach to speak to them, their immobile faces betray not a flicker of recognition of your shared humanity; they make no gesture to smooth social intercourse. If you are not one of them, you are against them.
Their hatred of official France manifests itself in many ways that scar everything around them. Young men risk life and limb to adorn the most inaccessible surfaces of concrete with graffiti—BAISE LA POLICE, fuck the police, being the favorite theme. The iconography of the cités is that of uncompromising hatred and aggression: a burned-out and destroyed community-meeting place in the Les Tarterets project, for example, has a picture of a science-fiction humanoid, his fist clenched as if to spring at the person who looks at him, while to his right is an admiring portrait of a huge slavering pit bull, a dog by temperament and training capable of tearing out a man’s throat—the only breed of dog I saw in the cités, paraded with menacing swagger by their owners.
Worse alienation than he's seen "including in the black townships of South Africa during the apartheid". Pretty strong stuff.
More:
Of course, they also expect him to be treated as well as anyone else, and in this expectation they reveal the bad faith, or at least ambivalence, of their stance toward the society around them. They are certainly not poor, at least by the standards of all previously existing societies: they are not hungry; they have cell phones, cars, and many other appurtenances of modernity; they are dressed fashionably—according to their own fashion—with a uniform disdain of bourgeois propriety and with gold chains round their necks. They believe they have rights, and they know they will receive medical treatment, however they behave. They enjoy a far higher standard of living (or consumption) than they would in the countries of their parents’ or grandparents’ origin, even if they labored there 14 hours a day to the maximum of their capacity.
But this is not a cause of gratitude—on the contrary: they feel it as an insult or a wound, even as they take it for granted as their due. But like all human beings, they want the respect and approval of others, even—or rather especially—of the people who carelessly toss them the crumbs of Western prosperity. Emasculating dependence is never a happy state, and no dependence is more absolute, more total, than that of most of the inhabitants of the cités. They therefore come to believe in the malevolence of those who maintain them in their limbo: and they want to keep alive the belief in this perfect malevolence, for it gives meaning—the only possible meaning—to their stunted lives. It is better to be opposed by an enemy than to be adrift in meaninglessness, for the simulacrum of an enemy lends purpose to actions whose nihilism would otherwise be self-evident.
The price of ambivalance and arrogance. The disaster of believing that if one provides all of the physical needs they can ignore the rest.
"The price of ambivalance and arrogance. The disaster of believing that if one provides all of the physical needs they can ignore the rest."
I will point out that the French variety of socialism, with its VERY high unemployment among the immigrants and rigid deprecation of religion, neither provides the physical needs especially well and even attempts to cause "the rest" to evolve as a open wound in the psyche as one matures, as much as one can under socialism.
They must send in troops and do it soon, or the next time will be worse.
The disaster of believing that if one provides all of the physical needs they can ignore the rest.
I was also struck by that sentence. It made me think about the mentality of the European elites.
Sometimes I get depressed about the direction of our own government, and my relative powerlessness as I see infringements of freedom such as McCain-Feingold.
But then I sometimes think of what it would have been like if we were more like Europe. I was born to a dirt poor rural family, so likely my station in life would have been much more difficult to change, and I would have been even more frustrated with being ruled by the self-important European style elites.
Those people are the clear successors to the kings, dukes, etc. of medieval times. They believe they have a right to rule, and to determine what’s best for others. The culture of Europe has apparently long encouraged the elites to feel that way.
These new elites have a new set of rationalizations for their right to rule. We’re past the divine right of kings, and fealty, and related concepts. Now it’s the historical inevitability of socialism and communitarianism, and the need for those who understand that to lead the rest into the promised land.
Always missing from that worldview is the concept of the individual. Those elites genuinely think that supplying minimal living conditions is enough, because after all, what would those ignorant peasants do with anything more? They might start getting ideas about their own destiny! Can’t have that. It would conflict with the glorious journey towards the perfect socialist world in which there is no war, no hunger, no strife, not even hurt feelings, and in which the wise elites relieve the rest of the peasants, uh, sorry, citizens from any need to think.
And just as with the medieval kings, they are so convinced of their right to rule that only violence will displace them. The difference is that the old kings were accustomed to violence. These elites are not. They don’t understand it, they don’t know how to practice it. They expect their serfs to continue their serfdom of their own free will, as long as the symbols of elections and such are maintained.
Can they relearn violence to maintain power? Or will they be swept away by the next generation of those who also feel the need and right to rule, but have no compunction about using violence and no concern for citizens except to subjugate them? Every generation contains its potential Hitlers and Husseins. But they can only come to power in the right combination of circumstances.
I wonder how close to those circumstances is today’s Europe.
"The French knew of this possibility well before September 11: in 1994, their special forces boarded a hijacked aircraft that landed in Marseilles and killed the hijackers—an unusual step for the French, who have traditionally preferred to negotiate with, or give in to, terrorists. But they had intelligence suggesting that, after refueling, the hijackers planned to fly the plane into the Eiffel Tower. In this case, no negotiation was possible."
