Paris again, again, again and again…
As the streets of Paris rumble, I find myself in-between several emotions. There is sadness, for the loss of life, and order; There is disappointment, with the overall quality of life among “immigrants” (more often native-born French citizens of Third World descent) in Europe, and France in particular; There is anger, with the circumstances which have led, and will mostly likely continue to lead, to the kinds of racially motivated outbursts of rage and frustration in European ghettoes, and the utter lack of intellectual facility for many commentators to see beyond the fires, skin colors, and the veil of “Islam” as the “cause”; And then there is a lack of surprise, as it can easily be said that it was only a matter of time before the events of 2005 were repeated, as the French have made no substantial efforts (let alone strides) to ameliorate the racial tensions that cause these kinds of uprisings.
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I am going to say that this is not a matter of religion, not in its origin. It is a matter of race and class. In France, as in most of Western Europe, there is an underclass of black African and Maghrebi workers and their unemployed and poorly educated children and grandchildren. These young people, in the words of a cousin (who was arrested for rioting in 2005), “have no future in France, absolutely”. The French economy, and business culture, for one thing, is not structured around aiding young people; it is structured around preserving the place of those already in the workforce or those recently retired from it. It is a system that operates in spite of the young and un- and underemployed. More importantly, French attitudes towards race and religion are generally exclusionist, even if they operate on the pretense of equality among the races, as they demand that the “immigrant” abandon his heritage in its entirety in favor of the French one, a demand not easily met by Arabs, Maghrebis, or Muslims. These are people who come from a civilization that was, for many centuries (and continues to be), kind of a big deal in the history of humanity. No self-respecting Arab, Maghrebi, or Muslim could accept the French ultimatum; indeed no self-respecting human being could do so. And in fact, it is a demand made almost exclusively of Maghrebis and black Africans in France, and one that has been made of them since they first came into contact with the French, when the French conquered their forefathers centuries ago.
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Dec 1st, 2007 at 5:01 am
[…] Paris again, again, again and again…These young people, in the words of a cousin (who was arrested for rioting in 2005), “have no future in France, absolutely”. The French economy, and business culture, for one thing, is not structured around aiding young people; … […]