WHY IS FRANCE BURNING? The rebellion of a lost generation

[Tinoire]

http://www.markdroberts.com/images/Direland-5.jpg

((reprinted in full with personal permission from [link:direland.typepad.com/about.html|Doug Ireland] whose many other fine writings can be found on his website: http://direland.typepad.com/ & was one of the first journalists to wish PI good luck saying there was a need for what we're doing. Doug is also a STRONG advocate for Gay Rights and pays very focused attention to issues around the world affecting Human Rights for Gays, highly recommended - THANK YOU DOUG! ))

[h4]WHY IS FRANCE BURNING? The rebellion of a lost generation[/h4]

Saturday night was the 10th day of the spreading youth riots that have much of France in flames -- and it was the worst night ever since the first riot erupted in a suburban Paris ghetto of low-income housing, with 1295 vehicles -- from private cars to public buses -- burned last night, a huge jump from the 897 set afire the previous evening. And, for the first time, the violence born in the suburban ghettos last night invaded the center of Paris -- some 40 vehicles were set alight in Le Marais (the pricey home to the most famous gay ghetto in Paris), around the Place de la Republique nearby, and in the bourgeois 17th arrondissement, within walking distance from the dilapidated ghetto of the Goutte d'Or in the 18th arrondissement.

http://direland.typepad.com/direland...rban_riots.jpg
(... a fireman tries to extinguish a burning car in the surban ghetto of Les Mureaux northwest of Paris, yesterday.)

As someone who lived in France for nearly a decade, and who has visited those suburban ghettos, where the violence started, on reporting trips any number of times, I have not been surprised by this tsunami of inchoate youth rebellion that is engulfing France. It is the result of thirty years of government neglect: of the failure of the French political classes -- of both right and left -- to make any serious effort to integrate its Muslim and black populations into the larger French economy and culture; and of the deep-seated, searing, soul-destroying racism that the unemployed and profoundly alienated young of the ghettos face every day of their lives, both from the police, and when trying to find a job or decent housing.

http://direland.typepad.com/direland...ench_riots.jpg
(... two buses burned by the rioters).

To understand the origins of this profound crisis for France, it is important to step back and remember that the ghettos where festering resentment has now burst into flames were created as a matter of industrial policy by the French state.

If France's population of immigrant origin -- mostly Arab, some black -- is today quite large (more than 10% of the total population), it is because there was a government and industrial policy during the post-World War II boom years of reconstruction and economic expansion which the French call "les trentes glorieuses" -- the 30 glorious years -- to recruit from France's foreign colonies laborers and factory and menial workers for jobs which there were no Frenchmen to fill. These immigrant workers, primarily from North Africa, were desperately needed to allow the French economy to expand due to the shortage of male manpower caused by two World Wars, which killed many Frenchmen, and slashed the native French birth-rates too. Moreover, these immigrant workers (especially Moroccans, particularly favored in the auto industry) were favored by industrial employers as passive and unlikely to strike (in sharp contrast to the highly political Continental French working class and its militant, largely Communist-led unions) and cheaper to hire. In some industries, for this reason, literacy was a disqualification -- because an Arab worker who could read could educate himself about politics and become more susceptible to organization into a union. This government-and-industry-sponsored influx of Arab workers (many of whom then saved up to bring their families to France from North Africa) was reinforced following Algerian independence by the arrival of the Harkis.

http://direland.typepad.com/direland...rs_renault.jpg
(... Arab workers at a French Renault factory.)

The Harkis ( whose story is movingly told by Dalila Kerchouche in her [link:www.lexpress.fr/info/france/dossier/harkis/dossier.asp|Destins de Harkis], at right) http://direland.typepad.com/direland..._de_harkis.jpg

were the native Algerians who fought for and worked with France during the post-war anti-colonial struggles for independence --and who for their trouble were horribly treated by France. Some 100,000 Harkis were killed by the Algerian FLN (National Liberation Front) after the French shamelessly abandoned them to a lethal fate when the French occupying army evacuated itself and the French colonists from Algeria.
http://direland.typepad.com/direland...hroat_slit.jpg
(Above ..., a Harki with his throat slit by the FLN.)

Moreover, those Harki families who were saved, often at the initiative of individual military commanders who refused to obey orders not to evacuate them, once in France were parked in unspeakable, filthy, crowded concentration camps for many long years and never benefited from any government aid -- a nice reward for their sacrifices for France, of which they were, after all, legally citizens. Their ghettoized children and grandchildren, naturally, harbor certain resentments -- the Harki tragedy is still an open wound for the Franco-Arab community.

France's other immigrant workers were warehoused in huge, high-rise low-income housing ghettos -- known as "cités" (Americans would say "the projects") -- specially built for them, and deliberately placed out of sight in the suburbs around most of France's major urban agglomerations, so that their darker-skinned inhabitants wouldn't pollute the center cities of Paris, Lyon, Toulouse, Lille, Nice and the others of white France's urban centers, today encircled by flames. Often there was only just enough public transport provided to take these uneducated working class Arabs and blacks directly to their jobs in the burgeoning factories of the "peripherique" -- the suburban peripheries that encircled Paris and its smaller sisters -- but little or none linking the ghettos to the urban centers.

Now 30, 40, and 50 years old, these high-rise human warehouses in the isolated suburbs are today run-down, dilapidated, sinister places, with broken elevators that remain unrepaired, heating systems left dysfunctional in winter, dirt and dog-shit in the hallways, broken windows, and few commercial amenities -- shopping for basic necessities is often quite limited and difficult, while entertainment and recreational facilities for youth are truncated and totally inadequate when they're not non-existent. Both apartments and schools are over-crowded (birth control is taboo in the Muslim culture the immigrants brought with them and transmitted to their children, and even for their male grandchildren of today --who've adopted hip-hop culture and created their own French-language rap music of extraordinary vitality (which often embodies stinging social and political content) -- condoms are a no-no because of Arab machismo, contributing to rising AIDS rates in the ghettos.

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(Above..., ghetto housing in Aulny sous Bois.)

The first week in December will mark the 22nd anniversary of the Marche des Beurs (Beur means Arab in French slang). I was present to see the cortege of 100,000 arrive in Paris -- it was the Franco-Arab equivalent of Dr. Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Justice. The Marche des Beurs was organized from Lyon's horrific, enormous suburban high-rise ghetto, Les Minguettes (right), http://direland.typepad.com/direland...minguettes.jpg
with the help of a charismatic left-wing French Catholic worker-priest, Father Christian Delorme, and its central theme was the demand to be recognized as French "comme les autres" --- like everyone else....a demand, in sum, for complete integration. But for the mass of Franco-Arabs, little has changed since 1983 -- and the integrationist movement of "jeunes beurs" created around that march petered out in frustration and despair as the dream of integration failed. In recent years, its place has been taken by Islamist fundamentalists operating through local mosques -- the mediatic symbol of this retreat into a separatist, communitarian-religious politics is the slick demagogue Tariq Ramadan
http://direland.typepad.com/direland..._ramadan_1.jpg
Tariq Ramadan

, a philosophy professor who uses one cosmetically democratic discourse when he's speaking on French TV, and a fiery, hard-line fundamentalist discourse in the Arab-language cassettes of his speeches that sell like hotcakes to Franco-Arab ghetto youth. (Ramadan's double language has been meticulously documented and exposed, and his deep ties to the extremist religious primitives of the Muslim Brotherhood (founded by his grandfather) detailed, by Arab-speaking journalist Caroline Fourest in her book published last fall by Editions Grasset, [link:www.amazon.fr/exec/obidos/ASIN/2246667917/402-7752659-9344148|"Frere Tariq: discours, methode et strategie de Tariq Ramadan,"] extracts from which have been published in the[link:www.lexpress.fr/info/societe/dossier/mosquees/dossier.asp?ida=429895| weekly l'Express]. ) But the current rebellion has little to do with Islamic fundamentalism. It is the anguished scream of a lost generation in search of an identity, children caught between two cultures and belonging to neither -- a rebellion of kids who, born in France and often speaking little Arabic, don't know the country where their parents were born, but who feel excuded, marginalized and invisible in the country in which they live.

In 1990, Francois Mitterrand (below) -- the Socialist President then -- described what life was like for jobless ghetto youths warehoused in the overcrowded "cités":

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Francois Mitterrand

"What hope does a young person have who's been born in a quartier without a soul, who lives in an unspeakably ugly high-rise, surrounded by more ugliness, imprisoned by gray walls in a gray wasteland and condemned to a gray life, with all around a society that prefers to look away until it's time to get mad, time to FORBID."

Well, Mitterrand's perceptive and moving words remained just that -- words -- for his urban policy was an underfunded, unfocussed failure that only put a few band-aids on a metastasizing cancer -- and 15 years after Mitterrand's diagnosis, the hopelessness and alienation of these ghetto youths and their "gray lives" has only become deeper and more rancid still.

The response to the last ten days of violent youth rebellion by the conservative government has been inept and tone-deaf. For the first four days of the rebellion, Chirac (below)

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Chirac

and his Prime Minister, [link:direland.typepad.com/direland/2005/05/villepin_the_wi.html}Dominique de Villepin] (below)

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Dominique de Villepin

decided to let the hyper-ambitious, megalomaniacal Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, lead the government's response to the youths' violence and arson. Chirac and Villepin detest Sarkozy, who has been openly campaigning to replace Chirac as president in 2007 (Villepin was made P.M. in the hopes that he could block Sarkozy for the right's presidential nomination), The President and his P.M. thought that "Sarko," as he's commonly referred to in France -- who won his widespread popularity as a hardline, law-and-order demagogue on the issue of domestic insecurity -- would be unable to stop the violence, and thus damage his presidential campaign.

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Nicolas Sarkozy

But Sarkozy only poured verbal kerosene on the flames, dismissing the ghetto youth in the most insulting and racist terms and calling for a policy of repression. "Sarko" made headlines with his declarations that he would "karcherise" the ghettos of "la racaille"-- words the U.S. press, with glaring inadequaxcy, has translated to mean "clean" the ghettos of "scum." But these two words have an infinitely harsher and insulting flavor in French. "Karcher" is the well-known brand name of a system of cleaning surfaces by super-high-pressure sand-blasting or water-blasting that very violently peels away the outer skin of encrusted dirt -- like pigeon-shit -- even at the risk of damaging what's underneath. To apply this term to young human beings and proffer it as a strategy is a verbally fascist insult and, as a policy proposed by an Interior Minister, is about as close as one can get to hollering "ethnic cleansing" without actually saying so. It implies raw police power and force used very aggressively, with little regard for human rights.[/b] I wonder how many Anglo-American correspondents get the inflammatory, terribly vicious flavor of the word in French? The translation of "karcherise" by "clean" just misses completely the provocative, incendiary violence of what Sarko was really saying. And "racaille" is infinitely more pejorative than "scum" to French-speakers -- it has the flavor of characterizing an entire group of people as subhuman, inherently evil and criminal, worthless, and is, in other words, one of the most serious and dehumanizing insults one could launch at the rebellious ghetto youth. Kerosene, indeed.

((:ADORE: Thank you Doug! Was wanting to find time to write about the linguistic aspects- THANK YOU!!!!!))

As the rebellion has spread beyond the Paris suburbs as far south as Marseilles and Nice and as far north as Lille, Sarkozy has been thundering that the spreading violence is centrally "organized." But on the telephone this morning from Paris, the dean of French investigative reporters -- Claude Angeli, editor of [link:www.canardenchaine.com/|Le Canard Enchaine], one of the most perspicacious political analysts I know (below, with his wife, author Stephanie Mesnier) http://direland.typepad.com/direland...ude_angeli.gif

-- told me, "That's not true -- this isn't being organized by the Islamist fundamentalists, as Sarkozy is implying to scare people. Sure, kids in neighborhoods are using their cellphones and text messages to warn each other where the cops are coming so they can move and pick other targets for their arson. But the rebellion is spreading across the country because the youth have a sense of solidarity with each other that comes from watching television -- they imitate what they're seeing, they have experienced themselves the same racist police abuse that helped spark the riots, and they sense themselves targeted by Sarkozy's inflammatory rhetoric. The rebellion is spreading spontaneously -- driven especially by racist police conduct that is the daily lot of these youths. It's incredible the level of police racism -- these young are arrested or controlled by the police, shaken down, pushed around, and have their papers checked simply because they have dark sins, and the police are verbally brutal, calling them 'bougnoules' {a racist insult, something like the American "towel-heads", only worse}, 'dirty Arabs' and more. The police bark, 'Lower your eyes! Lower your eyes!' as if they had no right even to look a policeman in the face. It's utterly dehumanizing. No wonder these kids feel so divorced from authority."

[link:www.liberation.fr/page.php?Article=336245|A team report in today's French daily, Liberation] (where I was once a columnist), interviews ghetto youths, and asks them to explain the reasons for their anger. And, the paper reports, "All, or almost all, cite 'Sarko'....a 22-year old student says, 'Sarkozy owes us his excuses for what he said. When I see what's happened, I come back to the same image: Sarkozy when he went to Argenteuil, raising his head and thundering, Madame, we're going to clean all that up. Result? Sarko sent every body over the top, he showed a total disrespect toward everybody' in the ghetto." A 13-year-old tells the Liberation reporters: "'It's us who are going to put Sarkozy through the Karcher...Will I be out making trouble tonight?' He smiles and says, 'that's classified information.'"

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(arson in the Paris suburb of Aubervilliers)

Another 28-year-old youth: "Who's setting the fires? They're kids between 14 and 22, we don't really know who they are because they put on masks, don't talk, and and don't brag about it the next day...but instead of fucking everything up where they live, it would be better if they held a demo, or went and fucked up the people and the stores in Paris. We've got a minister, Sarko, who says 'You're all the same.' Me, I say Non, we all say Non -- but in reply we still get, 'You're all the same.' That response from the government creates something in common between all of us, a kind of solidarity. These kids want to get attention, to let people know they exist. So, they say to themselves, 'If we get nasty and create panic, they won't forget us, they'll know we're in a neighborhood where we need help."

http://direland.typepad.com/direland...ing_speech.jpg

Yesterday, when Sarkozy (above) -- who is Minister of Religion as well as Interior Minister -- wanted to make an appearance at the Catholic Bishops' conference in Paris, they refused to let him speak -- and instead, the Bishops issued a ringing statement denouncing "those who would call for repression and instill fear" instead of responding to the economic, social, and racial causes of the riots. This was an unusually sharp rebuke directed squarely at Sarkozy.

Under the headline [link:www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-706693,36-706879@51-704172,0.html|"Budget Cuts Exasperate Suburban Mayors,"] Le Monde reports today on how Chirac and his conservatives have compounded 30 years of neglect of the ghettos by slashing even deeper into social programs: 20% annual cuts in subsidies for neighborhood groups that work with youths since 2003, cuts in youth job-training programs and tax credits for hiring ghetto youth, cuts in education and programs to fight illiteracy, cuts in neighborhood police who get to know ghetto kids and work with them (when Sarkozy went to Toulouse

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after the first riots there, he told the neighborhood police: "You're job is not to be playing soccer with these kids, your job is to arrest them!" With fewer and fewer neighborhood cops to do preventive work that defuses youth alienation and violence, the alternative is to wait for more explosions of violence and then send in the CRS (Compagnies Republicaines de Securite, hard-line paramilitary riot police noted for rightwing political and racial prejudices). Budget cuts for social programs plus more repression is a prescription for more violence.

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That's why [link:www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3232,36-706898@51-704172,0.html|Le Monde's editorial today] warned that a continuation of this blind policy creates a big risk of provoking in the elections two years hence a repeat of 2002, when the neo-fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen made it into the presidential runoff.

And a majority of the country, empoisoned even more by racism after the violence of the last ten days, seems willing to accept more and more repression: a poll released last night on France 2 public TV shows that 57% of the French support Nicolas Sarkozy's hard-line approach to the ghetto youths' rebellion, now spreading right across France. Despite the mushrooming rebellion, Sarko (no doubt thinking of the polls) wrote an op-ed in today's Le Monde entitled, "Our Strategy Is Working." Well, the barely-concealed racism of Sarko's demagogy may be working with the white electorate -- but it won't stop the violence, it will only increase it. And the violence will only further increase the racism among the French whose skins are white. So it is inevitable that what the French refer to as the "social fracture" will only get worse.

UPDATE MONDAY MORNING, NOVEMBER 7: Far from losing steam, the rebellion is growing and spreading to cities in the south previously untouched. Sunday night in France saw 1408 vehicles burned, some 250 more than the previous night (according to [link:www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3226,36-707110@51-704172,0.html|a dispatch from Agence France Presse]), while 34 policemen were injured by shotgun fire and stones when they were attacked by 200 rioters in Grigny, a suburb south of Paris. In the southern city of Toulouse, police fired tear gas grenades to push back club-wielding rioters. Violent attacks were also reported in Orleans, Rennes and Nantes.

http://direland.typepad.com/direland..._france_b.html



For wikipedia entry on Le Canar Enchaine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Cana...a%C3%AEn%C3%A9

Great picture of an article they carried mocking that reptile Sarkozy
here: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...nard_wikipedia. jpg (remove the space before the .jpg)

[moe]

I heard some older folks being interviewed today and they felt that the destruction was terrifying but, in the same sentence, they also said that somebody has to do something to change things for the better. One woman thought they should take it in to the city; she said something like they already live in the ash-heap of France, let others see how it feels.

Anyway, evidently now Villepin is promising all sorts of big reforms, but I think he meant just to end the rioting...yeah, lotsa hope to be had from a curfew! There are human rights groups raising concerns about the imprisoning and sentences these groups will now face, too. The government shut down a bunch of blogs which were doing some organizing, and more than a thousand people have now been arrested and thrown into jail or holding camps.

I can't get over that jobless rate; the unemployment is bad all over France, but 40% for these young people...who can blame them for being desperate?

And I love that pic of wild Sarko with his Uzis or whatever those are...you just know he's dying to shoot 'em all dead in the streets!

[Iverson]

I would like to come back to this after my thigh-high stack of papers is graded. For now, a comment:

While I don't claim to know much about France, I believe that there is a history of social protest among young people. DeGaulle backed down from something (hey, I said I didn't know much) in 1968 as a consequence of student uprisings.

This leads to the tricky part. Will the average French citizen see these riots as social protest, or will they be seen as rampant crime? I suspect that those getting their cars torched will not sympathize with those who set the fires, while powerful figures like Sarkozy remain insulated from the pernicious effects of their own words and actions.

Cheers.

[Desertrose]

I will need some time to digest all of this but what immediately hits me is the anger I feel on behalf of all these people who only wanted a better life and are so cruelly used by good ol' capitalism.....

I want to let this sink in a bit and will post more.....

Heart breaking. The truth needs to get out ....and those who benefit from these people need to have it in their face as well.
D :rose:

[Paineinthearse]

It is so refreshing to read a well researched and well-written piece. Something on which to ground ourselves for future action, unlike other forums where there is so much whining!

[DB_Cooper]

concisely yet comprehensively.

[DB_Cooper]

never exceeded 30% and the average unemployment rate between 1930-39 was 18.5%.

And I love that pic of wild Sarko with his Uzis or whatever those are...

Not Uzis, but I can't identify what sort of machine pistol those are. They appear to be modeled after the HK MP5K, minus the forward pistol grip, but I'm really unsure what make and model they are.

If I'm not mistaken that's Sarko's head superimposed on the body of Morpheus from "The Matrix".

And I liked it too.

[RichM]

Though the specifics are unique to France, the recent French rioting should be easy to understand for today's Americans, British, Australians & Germans. In all these countries, the overall direction of policy has for decades been determined exclusively by elite needs, while the needs of most of the population have been increasingly ignored. Certain ethnic & racial groups naturally wind up bearing the brunt of this -- mostly blacks and/or Muslims, depending on the varying historical specifics of each country. Meanwhile, official politics in each country, while portrayed as some sort of broad "public debate," is actually a matter of small-bore bickering among elite factions, far removed from the concerns of ordinary citizens.

In none of these countries are there any "good guys." You have instead hilariously-named establishment parties like "Labor" in the UK, or the "Liberals" in Australia, working in perfect synch with the fascist Republicans in the US. In every case, the so-called "opposition" is just as bad -- the US Democrats, the worthless UK Tories, or Australian Labor. The September German election featured the SPD coalition against the Christian Democrat coalition -- with no real differences in program; only the surface rhetoric was different. Both coalitions are now happily entering into a "Grand Coalition" together, where both agree on the need to ignore the expressed basic desires of the electorate. In France, the so-called "Socialists" have nothing to do with socialism, & are roughly as worthless as the US Democrats.

In every one of these countries, the government is increasingly despised by the people, yet there is no visible solution forthcoming from official electoral politics. The people are unhappy because their basic socioeconomic needs are being constantly ignored. The governments want to slash social spending, and undertake measures that only benefit the already-privileged. The French defeat of the proposed EU constitution last spring demonstrated what the French electorate really feels about that kind of program. This ran in parallel with the poor showing by Blair's party in the UK elections in May, & with the miserable showing by the German CDU/CSU coalition, & with Bush's narrow reelection here, all of whom only won because there was no serious alternative.

In France, the rioting is now predictably becoming an issue in & of itself, so the elite response will naturally be to emphasize "law and order" solutions, while only lip-service at best will be given to the unmet social needs that led to the rioting in the first place. If Americans had the guts to go into the streets and riot, that is surely what would happen here as well. (We won't likely see that, unfortunately, because Americans are trained & domesticated poodles, the characteristic of courage having been virtually eliminated from the species.)

The WSWS has published a good series of analyses of recent developments in France, which reflect the same basic story conveyed by the above-cited article.

http://www.wsws.org/sections/categor...eu-franc.shtml

The last sentence in the most recent of these pieces includes this tidbit:

[font color="red"]...a Paris street market vendor interviewed by the Washington Post was probably not unique in his opinion. Michel Narbonne, 59, told the Post, “It’s no wonder these kids are protesting when their future looks like a dead end. They are frustrated, like the majority of French people. These kids are doing what most French people have wanted to do for the past 10 years.”

[Michael Collins]

I'm amazed that the French riots have carried forward with that countries reputation and history of ruthless suppression from the central authority.

Louis the XIV would not be pleased.

This piece requires careful review, which will come after I recover from actually participating in a winning election yesterday. However, there are clear problems with "Europe" and that concept.

This is great stuff Tinoire. Thanks so much.

As the soon to be ex-gropenator of CA would say, I'll be back.

[seemslikeadream]

This is exactly why I am here. I know I will always find great stuff like Ireland's blog, I've already bookmarked it and passed it on to others that told me they've done so also.


[font color=teal size=2]THANK YOU DOUG![/font]

[Lydia Leftcoast]

the women in my water aerobics class studied in France and has a second home there.

She said that when she was a student in Paris, during the height of the worldwide student movements at the end of the 1960s, the cops used to harrass young people, any young people they felt like, taking them into the police station for questioning just because. After some other foreign students whom she knew to be non-political were deported after being picked up (with no clear indication of what they were supposed to have done), she made a habit of actively avoiding the French police and slipping away if they approached any crowd or gathering she was in.

Therefore, it did not surprise her to read newspaper accounts of police harrassing youth of Middle Eastern and North African descent.

Other people who had spent extended periods in France remarked sarcastically that France had perfected the art of practicing segregation without having to pass any Jim Crow laws. Another woman noted that Ireland is making the same mistake with its non-European immigrants, putting them in institutional-looking suburban highrises, although one hopes that the negative example of France will prompt them to rethink that policy.

[Lori Price CLG]

As to rioting against unfair (or, in the case of the US) *illegitimate* authority, one can only hope riots morph into revolution. :)

I did read a few emails from folks who suggested that the violence perpetrated was from the Reichwing and the CIA - to embarrass Chirac for his lack of enthusiasm for the Iraq war. When it was reported that the rioters torched a day-care center and hospital, I thought (Oh. CIA.)

Nonetheless, if this is a genuine result of the oppressed classes in France, I say: power to them!

Lori Price

[EnfantTerrible]

own history are reverberating in France right now. What remains to be seen is whether this situation, being used as an opportunity for political gain, was the creation of political manipulation(CIA, FrancoNeocon?). The environment from which it springs is certainly the product of social and political failure decades old.

A fantastic article. Thanks for posting this, Tinoire, and thanks Doug Ireland for writing it. I have a lot to learn about the present political situation in France. I've been too preoccupied with our own, but this has been a great primer and given me a context in which to view these developments.

[Iverson]

The author refers to cause and effect here:
It is the result of thirty years of government neglect: of the failure of the French political classes -- of both right and left -- to make any serious effort to integrate its Muslim and black populations into the larger French economy and culture; and of the deep-seated, searing, soul-destroying racism that the unemployed and profoundly alienated young of the ghettos face every day of their lives, both from the police, and when trying to find a job or decent housing.

This explanation is plausible, but if true, it will be a tough sell to the people who need most to hear it, much as with the incidence of ingrained racism in the US. At least two reasons come to mind.
1. The French notion of "liberté, égalité, fraternité" is so much a part of the society that the laws currently do not permit compiling statistics based on ethnicity. This is an obstacle to showing the populace that some groups operate at a disadvantage. My source is the radio yesterday, probably CBC news.
2. People naturally resist seeing the worst in themselves.

On the other hand, it is easy to quantify burning cars and individual demagogues. This is where people's attentions will go, and solutions, even ineffectual ones, that address those will suffice for most. In this, I'm afraid that the author works against his thesis by including the humorous, but cartoonish, altered photo of Sarkozy holding two guns. It is effective at drawing attention to the demagogues but also at drawing thought away from the much more difficult and abstract notion of widespread social inequality.

[EnfantTerrible]

But I don't find the picture of Sarko to be working against the thesis. A bit of satire can be effective and to my mind, it's the cyber-equivilant of a political toon. I also appreciate a piece that's got a point of view... our own media is hamstrung by it's supposed "Fair and Balanced" reporting which tends to give credence to injustices by reporting it without perspective. I'm thinking particularly about the coverage of voting irregularities which have been by and large dismissed in this country by a media who didn't want to seem critical of the Right and is ashamed of it's moniker "Liberal media" (true or no). Fair and Balanced often leads to self-censorship and the issue which needs to come to light operates unhindered under the cover of "fairness". Should Fascism or any injustice be given this priveledge and by extension validation?

[Amfortas]

n/t

[Tinoire]

France may well burn again...