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The hell is going on in France?
Malach
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So, I just read a NY Times article about riots in France which started after two kids died in a collision with a cop car while they were riding on a motor bike.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/28/world/europe/28riot.html?ex=1353906000&en=90be21051a64d345&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
Apparently 86 cops have been hurt, four lost an eye, and kids are shooting shotguns at police.
And my question is for anyone who is French or European or just has a better idea of what's going on...
The fuck is going on in France?
My reaction to reading this was just, man what the fuck? This doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever. Somebody be my wide angle lens so I can understand this. Linking to Wikipedia is an acceptable answer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/28/world/europe/28riot.html?ex=1353906000&en=90be21051a64d345&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
Apparently 86 cops have been hurt, four lost an eye, and kids are shooting shotguns at police.
And my question is for anyone who is French or European or just has a better idea of what's going on...
The fuck is going on in France?
My reaction to reading this was just, man what the fuck? This doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever. Somebody be my wide angle lens so I can understand this. Linking to Wikipedia is an acceptable answer.
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Melanin count -- it's a powerful divider.
The film La Haine does a pretty good job of portraying the tensions in France's banlieu regions, according to my old French teachers, although this looks like it's been cranked up a notch.
also, ghettos
I think the crux of the problem is that the immigrants do not feel like they are considered equal to French civilians. And to be honest, I think they're right.
As others have said, it's about much more than this one little incident.
Also, that sig is ridiculously huge.
LA rioted because of - what? Rodney King? I mean, it wasn't a high point of police restraint or anything, but really LA was just looking for an excuse to go nuts. I imagine it's the same in the Parisian suburbs.
A huge part of the French immigrants are hostile to anything outside their immediate community. It's pretty ignorant blaming the government in this case.
Come on, man.
Well that's why I was so confused when I read this. My immediate reaction was that, theyre being idiots looking for an excuse to cause trouble, but knowing that these issues exist in France I knew there had to be some deeper cause here that I had to be missing. That being said, the disconnect between the apparent light to the fuse and the explosion seems so far that I don't see how you can begin to think it makes sense to react this way. On the other hand, I'm not in their situation where likely everything has a bent against you.
Still, it seems theres nobody older then their early 20s involved, which just says to me actual adults aren't part of this.
The french(at least the young generation) are quiet nice young people just like everywhere else. Their current government policy is lacking any idea of intergration for immigrants of african/arab decent, but at the same time I've seen one too many kids throwing stones at a bus driver without ANY apparent reason. I'm not saying the current French policy is not a load of shit, but there is no excuse for riots in similar cases. At least the police WAS at fault with Rodney.
Disclaimer: Have lived in Rosny sous Bois.
There's poor social and economic conditions in France surrounding the North African immigrant population and the government is doing very little to redress it. In the face of this, there is social deterioration in the form of a riot. The best way to prevent riots isn't to police more heavily, it's to attempt to redress the social gaps which create the out of place conditions of the immigrants, via schooling, government policies, urban planning, economic incentives, etc. etc.
An insane Moroccan man barged in to a police station with a knife and immediately attacked an officer. Another officer tried to save her, but was attacked instead. The first officer managed to grab her gun and shoot the attacker. Both officers lost a lot of blood and were sent to the hospital.
Everyone agreed that the attacker was insane, yet there were riots over this. Only in rare cases these riots are caused by something worth rioting over, it's just an accumulation of things that drive people over the edge. It's a sad state of affairs, but there's always a reason behind them.
The US's conservative stance towards immigration and assimilation could take some lessons from what's happening over there, but the dominant response I've heard from conservatives is basically schadenfreude at France's woes, a general disparagement towards the concept of "multiculturalism" (even though the dearth of multiculturalism is the basic problem in France), and a general sense that "immigrants are a problem".
You can only push people so far, or marginalize them so much before they start pushing back. I'm not saying that the riot is justified by any means, but you have to consider the viewpoint of the people rioting. They are basically treated like second-class citizens, and they are, understandably, tired of it.
Next they'll be saying it rains in Seattle.
Shogun Streams Vidya
Fair enough. That does lead one to wonder what the propaganda is/was then.
Long and short: Muslim immigrants have as much trouble adjusting to European life as Europeans have had adjusting to Muslim immigrants. The same story is happening in every EU country. I don't think blaming one side or the other is terribly helpful.
Colonialism is a bitch -- it means you end up owing people citizenship even if it's inconvenient and difficult.
Pokemans D/P: 1289 4685 0522
They have an unbroken chain of civil unrest every few years since 1789. They hadn't burnt any cars since '05, so they're due.
Okay. Do you know why this shit doesn't really happen in the US all that often? It's because immigrants here can easily get a stake in the country's well being. When you have a stake in where you're living, you tend to avoid rioting. Things like the LA riots occurred because the community felt that they no longer had a stake.
That's the fucking point. One of the major keys to the stability of US society (and when you look at things, we're pretty fucking stable) is the "melting pot". Once you're an American, you're an American, regardless of where you started out in life. This helps you identify with the country. And it helps with the feelings of disenfranchisement. And when we've encouraged disenfranchisement in our history, it's never turned out well.
That's what the issue is - if the French actually started accepting that like it or not, these immigrants are now French, they'd go a long way in solving the problem.
When laws were passed in France that basically targeted Muslims (i.e. the banning of religious headgear), one tends to think that one side might just have a tad more culpability.
I think being treated like second class citizens is probably reason enough to be pissed off. While I don't necessarily agree with their methods, the message is pretty clear.
Either way, the similarity of the catalyst is shocking.
However this time the kids are using shotguns and gasoline bombs. It is almost as if they were somewhat prepared for this.
Shogun Streams Vidya
The gasoline bombs have been pretty common for a while.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article607860.ece
And unless the French economy revs up to a high degree the situation is going to go from bad to worse.
I think you are focusing way too much on this one incident. Like I said, this is just the spark that started the fire.
Two kids being killed, whether or not they were thieves, is a pretty big fuckup.