France riots

[Atrahasis]

It's shameful the way the French have arranged it, purposefully or not, so that 50% or more of the colored immigrants in that region of their country do not have employment. For a left-leaning country like France, you have to wonder where the social initiatives to correct this kind of thing have been. The only logical answer is that they have simply been negligent for far too long and have let this fester in an unreasonable way.

For example, you don't have this kind of thing in the UK or the US or Canada, probably because there is better integration of the colored peoples there, and moreover you have representation of them in the elected government. Be it a member of parliament, mayor, Lord/Senator, or even a premier of a province, there have been and are a lot of colored peoples participating in the political life of these countries.

In a nutshell, that means there is an avenue for grievances to be brought up and addressed in a civil manner before numbers can get grossly out of whack like 50% unemployment.

I realize that it's not only France that discriminates and shuts out the coloreds, but it's also a lot of those other developed European countries that do this. I wonder when they will wake up and realize that happy and content people tend not to create trouble, and that includes their Muslim populations? Moreover, that shutting these people out of the life of a country does not make them happy nor content?

You can't just give them food stamps or welfare, you have to give them something to do, which means jobs, which means you have to stop the discriminating, even to the extent of creating specific laws to stop it. The UK, US, and Canada are pretty much proof of that.

[Interested Party]

The UK that is currently recovering from days-long race riots in Birmingham that have claimed several lives?

The UK that just recently remembered the dead from the Suicide Bombers in London - all of whom were UK born and bred into this "better integrated" country but decided to wipe themselves out?

The socialist liberal Labour Party of the UK that is currently sucking up to Bush's neocon ass and doing its best to help his personal crusade out in Iraq?

Bad example there Seems to me the extremist elements Left OR Right will find an excuse to start trouble regardless of the society around them. Its understandable that people are frustrated and angry about the situation they are in - but just where do they think they are going to get from smashing and destroying property or setting fire to a bus with a disabled old woman in it? Tolerance and Understanding? No...they are going to earn the distrust and dislike of the very people who would sympathize with them and demand change, and put themselves on a blacklist for some time to come whilst giving the right-wing idiots the fuel they need to gain support with scaremongering.

And how will it end, with jobs and better schools?...what kind of message will that send out, that rioting and violence gets you what you want in life? It ends up being a vicious circle that will go round and round, never getting anywhere...you said it yourself, France is supposed to be liberal/left leaning and socialist...so how is it they seem to have gotten things so wrong next to the supposedly Neocon US...where people liken Bush to Hitler despite the fact i havent seen any gas chambers for those millions of mexicans he seems to have little problem with (sure we know its cheap labour for industry/corporations thing going on, but thats for another discussion) If the US itself is better integrated, would we really have similar riots taking place such as the violent L.A. ones over Rodney King, contrasting alongside the relatively peaceful marches of Dr Martin Luther King? Which was more sucessful in triggering change? Burning down whole city blocks and beating up innocent people?...or a million-man march mostly devoid of violence other than from the ignorant ones opposing it? That "integrated society" then-and-now seems to have just as many of the same problems that the non-integrated ones do!

Ghandi succeeded in rebellion with peaceful protest, the russian communists succeeded with sheer and bloody violence - both were sucessful in their goals despite totally different methods and ideology...yet they could have both just as easily failed at the same time. I dont believe there IS a simple yes/no right/wrong answer to these situations, simple fact is: Some integrated societies avoid these sort of troubles...some dont, some less enlightened societies avoid these sort of troubles...some dont.

This post dragged on rather longer than it was meant

[Atrahasis]

Feel free to express whatever you like, I find all reasonable viewpoints interesting.

Whatever defects the UK or the US or Canada for that matter may have in the area of race relations, it is still not as serious as the situation in France because in France you do not have even ONE black or Muslim MP (which I heard Christianne Amanpour reporting in a recent broadcast), which means they are completely out of the political process altogether, and that means they have no voice in the civil arena.

Not even the UK is that bad, because I'm pretty sure I've seen them have at least one Lord of Indian descent. In the US black leaders abound, so there's no need to get into that in detail. Canada of course I know much better, where non-white MP's abound and an Indian even became premier of British Columbia a while back.

But you make a good point about the London suicide bombings...if the blacks and Muslims in France are under so much worse conditions than in the UK, why hasn't France been hit by a wave of suicide bombings?

[MajorRacal]

You should perhaps note that over the years French protests have been violent affairs - the farmers blockading trucks running between Europe and the UK were set abalaze amid violent confrontations with the authorities and the drivers whose trucks and contents they destroyed. The same sort of thing with their fishermen. Essentially whenever a 'social liberty' has been threatened, there has been a vocally violent element come to the fore - perhaps it stems from the Revolution, another bloody and violent transition?

However it is perhaps interesting to observe that prior to these riots, there was widespread public condemnation of new labour laws brought into force and being planned by the French Government and a - "of French people polled, 72 percent said the strikes and demonstrations were justified. This high level of support is not in itself very surprising in a country where protest marches are seen by many as a normal means of expression.

But disapproval of government policies is broad-based. "The most worrying thing for Dominique de Villepin and his future political projects is that the pessimism is all-encompassing," Gaël Sliman, deputy director of the BVA, said in a report" - Oct 2005.

Now given the depressed state of the nation as a whole, the disatisfaction with the authorities and how they get things done, it appears to me unsuprising that a disaffected and more highly marginalised section of the society could be easily stoked into violence - it's happened repeatedly over time across the entire planet, whether that be France, UK, USA, the old Soviet bloc, China, Africa - everwhere. Violence is frequently a symptom of anger whenever the voice of the oppressed or forgotten isn't being heard. It is frequently a symptom of the sheer frustration that people feel when their concerns, worries or liberties are circumvented or over-ridden.

I know of no culture where racial., ethic and cultural integration is complete. There are always pockets of isolation, whether that be self imposed or a result of institutional ghettoisation is irrelevant. We are continually told we are all the same, yet the very structure of our lives, our communities, our behaviours, our languages tell us otherwise. We spend our lives talking in terms of difference - everything is categorised and subcategorised - and ultimately everything must fit into a neat little box and labelled. All around us corporations sift and sort the population into fragments - there are socio-economic differences, age differences, gender differences, and so on and so forth. We are told to embrace diversity - but that too is just recognition of difference.

Ultimately no nation can rest on its laurels, no culture is safe from this kind of unrest, all it takes is the right spark at the right time - and given how widespread public disatsifaction is with social inequity and political ineptitude across the globe, perhaps it is only a matter of time.

MajorRacal

[Atrahasis]

Personally, I think multiculturalism can only work if a society has the basic underpinnings for social and economic equality in place, basically to keep everyone fed and busy. In the absense of that, you have factionalism and tribalism taking over and disruptions become frequent. In Asian and African countries where neither the society nor the economy are particularly well-developed and that have mutiple ethnicities you have people blaming each other for their woes and pretty soon they take to ethnic violence.

The question is: How much like an underdeveloped country did France have to be, socially, in order for this to have happened? It's the beginnings of ethnic violence, not that far removed from Yugoslavia or some African country.

Protesting against an oppressive government or for higher wages or for better business conditions is one thing, but civil unrest that involves some kind of ethnic or racial slant is a sign of a different kind of problem altogether, and quite frankly when you have it happen in Europe it has traditionally been followed by a World War. The divisions between the peoples of Yugoslavia was fertile ground for World War I, and in Germany you had the entire anti-Jew deal as one of the excuses to mobilize the German people.

[MajorRacal]

Well as things stand in Europe, there is a LOT of racially motivated social unrest. In the UK, for example, there is a strong focus on the 'problem' of immigration, the 'flood of bogus asylum seekers' and now also the problems of accepting large number of former Eastern Bloc immigrants without adequate control or checks in place. There has been a significant drop in electoral participation by the public and over this time there has been an apparent rise in the popularity of extreme right wing political parties, which is being shrugged off as 'protest voting' against current regimes - a mark of the level of political head-burying I find particularly alarming. People are concerned that their own beliefs, values and customs are being eroded in favour of 'insurgent' cultures by out of control political correctness. People feel their lives and livelihoods are being threatened. We are being encouraged by the media to perceive threat from all corners of the globe, and in particular from the Muslim world. Recent and continuing world events have only helped escalate the problems and the level of perceived threat. In addition to this, the difficulties that occur when (recent) historically opposing ethnic groups come together in another country are rarely addressed, and there has been some rather caustic fallout from those interactions, as is evident in my own home town. With all of this high on the public psyche, perhaps we are drifting in the direction you've just hinted at, and perhaps not as slowly as we would care to imagine.

MajorRacal

[Raventree]

Well... According to modern French history..Riot's and Military Action brought down the 4th Republic in the late 50's...And caused a change in governmental structure in '68..the riots in the 80's that set France on a course towards de-nationalization (later reversed after even more riots in the early 90's)..it seem's that rioting in France is an instrument of change and almost normal in French politics...Wasteful, costly, but normal to the French...Riots in the US also bring about change, but usually of a more localized nature (Early 90's in LA shook up the LAPD making it more responsive towards it's poorer citizens)..but then again..how big is France?..the size of what state?..Texas?..Nebraska? Colorado?...maybe this makes sense in such a nation...

[S33K100]

The assylum problem in the UK is a flood, I can vouch from experience, my brother used to work in a law firm dealing primarily with assylum cases, he spoke with me about the facts of most of the cases passing his desk and the vast majority were so fake they initially made me laugh until I realised the extent of the problem. Those people have no right to come to my country and claim benefits whilst working illegally (it's illegal to work without a permit or naturalisation IIRC, or of course if you're an EU, EFTA or Swiss national). Somalians in particular have it very easy, most of their applications are just rubber stamped due to the fact that Somalia only exists de jure and is politically fractured.

Re: the France riots/

There are some parts of Paris where the vast majority of the population are Muslim, allegedly in these areas they have effectively recreated their religious society to the point that no bars or cinemas or other cultural facilites exist. Call me crazy but I don't think having areas of your country almost completely inhabited by extremist or fundamentalist (or whatever label you want) Muslims who want to eliminate your culture is a particularly good way to keep the peace.

I'm not saying the Muslims are responsible for the riots, though I'm sure 90% of the rioters probably are Muslims - they seem to be from the predominantly Muslim former French colonies in Africa. What I am saying is that I have no doubt their faith aggravated the situation.

The French government is notoriously secular oriented, especially in the area of religion. They are also intolerant of anyone who does not fully integrate with 'the Republic', this recent phenomenon is symptomatic of a greater problem with the Republic and the 'Revolution' ideology. Particularly notable is their oppression of my fellow countrymen in Corsica (I'm part Sicilian, both are southern Latin peoples) which has even led to the founding of a violent terrorist organisation seeking independence - the 'Fronte di Liberazione Naziunale di a Corsica'. ETA is also active as a terrorist organisation in the Basque areas of France and Brettony has it's Breton Revolutionary Army - another violent group. Many other areas of France seek independence or greater recognition.

Put simply France has had this problem for many years but it has never manifested itself so visibly because the oppressed before had white skin, they are for the most part Christians, they are indistinguishable from you or me and so receive no attention nor recognition of their genuine plight.

These immigrants who are causing far worse devastation than the 'terrorists' I mentioned before receive compassion from the media in our PC countries purely because we either cannot afford to piss of the Muslim community (I'm excluding America here of course) or as in the Labour government with their hilarious local election fraud (thank the laws of probability that one was uncovered) or they would rather not piss of the Muslim community because we are so 'tolerant' of everyone elses culture we will indulge it even when they are torching our buildings and destroying _our_ way of life.

To paraphrase Mr.(Ms.?) Garrison from South Park: tolerate means you put up with something, it doesn't mean you have to like it! I'm all for tolerance, I'm a fairly liberal individualist guy myself, but this doesn't mean I'm prepared to foster a culture hell-bent on the destruction of my people's culture. If Muslims were prepared to abandon their whole 'destroy the west' thing _collectively_ as a few individual Muslims already have then we could all get along fine. But when they are forcing the government of my country to pass laws making it illegal for me to say anything offensive about their religion I find my tolerance rapidly reaching a limit.

P.S. Apologies Atra for veering slightly off-topic now and then. I'm sure you'll disagree with 99% of my post aswell.

P.P.S. I hope I don't come off as a right-wing nutcase with my head up my arse, that position is reserved for my brother, he blames 'secular society' for the problems in France, I swear he's becoming more and more a fundie as each day passes.

[Atrahasis]

The idea that Muslims are hell-bent on the destruction of the West is a common misconception by people who just have never spent any time in the middle east or bothered to research anything about it in great detail, either the culture, religion, or language. I'm not picking on just you, S33K100, but this goes for basically Joe Average in whatever western country.

The truth is, because the vast majority of them are regular human beings, the thing that they most prefer is peace, security, and money to feed and house their wives and little ones...and this is despite whatever little snippets one may be able to pick out of the Quran, because the fact is that people can make religious text (and that goes for Christianity as well) say whatever it is they are supporting on a given day. If you throw in war or sectarian violence or terrorism in there that disrupts their businesses, livelihoods, and therefore their lives, to put it simply: They tend not to like it.

It's true that hatred for America and the West is standardized in a lot of those countries, but the truth is that if they come to live in a western country and become assimilated into the culture to a reasonable extent...like in Canada, US, and the UK....the exposure tends to change their minds. True, there may be exceptions, but think of what it means to have peace, a home, and security as opposed to poverty and war and you'd see that it's just plain folly to choose the latter. Sometimes I think western peoples take everything they have too much for granted and they just don't know what it means to live without.

Now, I won't deny that it's easy to hate Muslims. But these days through the extensive news coverage coming out of the Middle East, I believe that more and more people in the West are learning that people all around the world basically want the same thing, even Muslims, and that is NOT pain and war. Otherwise it's hard to explain the peaceful way that Muslims live in Canada, the US, and the UK.

Which brings us back to France....it's clear they were screwing up as a people and as a government for far too long.

[S33K100]

Note I mentioned in my post that individual Muslims are quite peacable, I have personally known and been friends with several since coming to university, and even before then I worked in an internet café for a few weeks that was run by a pair of Niegerian Muslim brothers. I have never been under the delusion that Islam or the average Muslim preaches destruction of the west.

But because - as you yourself said hatred of the west is 'standardised' in their countries - and it's not just the countries, it is their communal structure - the leaders of their communities are most often the ones who preach the hatred and intolerance. They are the ones preventing the peaceful integration and assimilation of Muslims into western culture when they immigrate to our countries, or at least living in peace with us when they stay in their own countries. The people want peace but those in power want war. Much like us in the west really.

Speaking about the UK for a moment, the majority of Muslim communities have leaderships that force an isolation of the community by rigidly enforcing the society they had back in whichever country they came from and thus rejecting any tolerance of western cultural pursuits like going to bars or watching (western) films, especially relationships between Muslims and people from outisde their culture is a very sore spot for these communities. The old men who run them are just as racist towards us as the worst BNP members are towards them.

A minor detour for a paragraph: Italy recently has had major crime troubles caused by 'clandestini', that is illegal immigrants from Albania and Tunisia who sneak over in boats, escape the detention centres where they would normally be held while their claims of asylum would be processed. Thousands of incidents have been reported by the Carabinieri of old women in their little country villas being murdered and the place looted, or of random people mugged in the streets for a watch or mobile phone, or a couple dozen Euros from their wallets/pockets. They are all or mostly Muslim obviously though that is not really relevant to their crimes. This situation has caused a popular backlash by the people against the illegals which I think is quite justified when you think that many in the northern big cities - especially Milano, are afraid to walk the streets at night! Walking the streets at night to meet friends and other townspeople is by the way a common occurence in Italy unlike many countries, or at least it used to be... I think their reaction is justified because these people are doing nothing but making people hate them through their actions, there is nothing wrong with living in Albania, allright you wont live as good a life as you would in 'the west' but you can get everything that is important in the end, you can survive, get a roof over your head and provide food for your family. But these clandestini are just thugs making a bad name for their people and religion.

[Atrahasis]

I think George Bush has pretty much proven that it's governments and old men that bring a country to war, through manipulation and spreading fear or hatred. In contrast, average people by far and large want to live in peace. For example, given the choice, I don't believe average joe American would want to send his son over to Iraq for no good reason. The same with average joe Muslim...it takes some real inspiration from some old guy preaching to make him want to devote himself to a holy war.

But the problem is, you can't solve this problem of rabble-rousing old men by killing the old men, because that just makes everybody angry.

It seems somewhat of a bind....the only logical thing to do is to try to get the newer generations of Muslims when they're young, meanwhile waiting for the old men to die off of natural causes. But the thing is that this can pretty much only be achieved by raising your own Muslims in your own country with the hopes that they will serve as bridges and models for others, which means the main mission should be to find ways to integrate them into your society.

Now, any western country that fails to do this probably deserves exactly what it gets, and these days France is already suffering the consequences of its own folly.

The "Western-assimilated Muslim" is an important thing to cultivate, because you can find examples of how effective these "cross-breeds" (for lack of a better term) are in being bridges between cultures, when you look at some Aisan cultures...for example, Westernized Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans who excel at something are looked up to by their mother cultures. Examples abound, like Michelle Wie who is American but is ethnically Korean and so Koreans are inspired by her.

Now, in asmuch as the "assimilated Muslim" model may be a powerful tool for reconciliation between the West and the Middle East, the exact opposite is also true: an "unassimilated Muslim" is a powerful model that exemplifies dissonance and injustice on the part of the West, which fuels the fires for things like hatred against the West.

Which all points out how important it is for a government to pay a lot of attention to social issues like this....or face the consequences, like France, which really makes you want to say "duh, what else were you expecting?" The riots are simply what they get for failing the primary mission of integrating the subculture in question.

[S33K100]

I agree that France is suffering for it's own folly, I think I've made that quite clear in my support of the 'white' terrorists in France but how do you suggest we cultivate these 'assimilated Muslims' that you propose? I have only met one or 2 people who I would label as such, and the majority of the Muslim community is currently indoctrinated against the idea of their children 'turning traitor' as it were and living a slightly westernised life. I would never suggest they give up their belief in Islam but we have to get them participating in our cultures if they are going to live amongst us. Just as any westerner has to watch themselves when they travel to one of those ridiculous Muslim theocracies in the middle-east.

The issue as I see it is that our culture has moved on from being based around our religion, probably due to the reformation and the resulting religious mixture present in continental Europe (and therefore North America) we are much more open to the idea of living a life centred around the community rather than the faith. This situation doesn't really exist in the middle east, they are still building their social models around a hideously restrictive and proselytising religion, we used to be like that in the middle ages, back then the Muslims were the tolerant ones - the Ottoman empire allowed all faiths to live in peace. But as we have become more open to other ideas, they have walled themselves in ideologically speaking.

[Atrahasis]

If education of immigrants is what is needed, then you obviously need education centers and lots of them, at government-supported fees. Education centers for Muslims in particular can also be taught by the assimilated Muslims who can serve as role models.

Imo, education centers in the West are sorely lacking compared to far east Easia for example, where you find privately-run academies and schools on just about every street corner, for everything from piano lessons, nursing, to language training. Moreover, for some things like langauge training, an adult who has a job can have his school fee largely sponsored by the government so he pays just a modest fee every month out of his own pocket. It's called "investing in human capital", an important quality of Asian countries, especially ones that lack a lot of natural resources. It also works out well for the school owners who can run nice businesses.

If any country wants to improve its human stock it needs to find ways to educate its people, and that means investing money and thought into it...how to make it worthwhile, affordable, and what kind of incentives to put in?

Imo, the problem with western countries though is that education is looked upon as geeky. Things like sports and music and living large just seem more glorious. No wonder Muslims reject western society, because the greater emphasis is on unconservative things.

[S33K100]

Well, music and fine living are important things, what is life without enjoyment? Pointless. Obviously things like rappers having their teeth plated platinum is obscene and just completely tasteless and pointless but a cultured life is a worthwhile life, education is a part of being a cultured person, but distractions such as music, the arts and (to a much lesser extent) television are also part of a cultured life. Work is about the only area of life which is not beneficial to the individual, 9 times out of 10 we subsume our instincts and desires in favour of servitude to another in order to provide the money necessary to fuel our desires. A person who has found a job they do because they truly enjoy it and it provides them as much joy as the distractions in life is a very rare and lucky individual.

The East Asian cultures that have become so succesful are not a model I would choose to follow, true they have achieved great things, but this has been done at the cost of society, individuals' desires are sublimated in order that the individual might benefit the 'greater good'. Countries like Japan and the P.R.C. are a toned down form of collectivism framed in a capitalist window-dressing (yes even the P.R.C.) Education can be dramatically improved without the need to focus on the will of the state. The individual comes first in his own mind, this is human nature but all aspects of modern society are out of sync with this idea, only the fabulously wealthy can truly live for themselves, unfortunately wealth is not a measure of taste or wisdom.

[Atrahasis]

If by "individual desires are sublimated for the greater good" you mean that a man has to work to support his wife and kids, then that's exactly what the Asians do well, but I don't see the link between this and the point about the emphasis on education and the improvement of human capital that I brought up earlier.

Greater education frees and empowers one to do greater things and make more money, becoming more free than somebody who has to serve fries all his life (not that there's anything wrong with that). That's why middle-aged men who have wives and kids take foreign language classes after work to improve themselves so they will be able to get better-paying and more exciting positions and opportunities for travel, for years and years. Also, little kids who know that computers will be a big part of their future take Photoshop and Excel classes after a full day of school. Even housewives and retirees 60 years or older take 2-hr morning foreign language classes to stay sharp and be able to communicate when on vacation. Even young single women who want a vocation sign up for nurse-training classes. So it's not just the piano prodigies who go to education centers like these to improve their already innate talent so that they can contribute to the art of society, but by far and large they are regular joes who want to better themselves, a lot like Gene's vision of the 24th century I imagine.

Now, that is the culture in far east Asia, and education is, I could say, "glorified", and it is an inherently conservative pursuit.

In contrast, compare the attitude re education in the West and what other non-conservative cultural pursuits they glorify instead (in a nutshell that would be sex drugs and rock and roll), and you'll realize that to some extent, they are on weak grounds to promote the one thing that can change their immigrant society for the better: education.

I personally think one reason why Muslim immigrants would choose to rely on their own religiously-run schools and education centers is because they are pretty sure that they value education more than the typical westerners do, and to an extent they have a point there. Private or even Christian schools typically have reputations for a higher level of academic achievement that joe-average public school. But unfortunately in the case of the Muslims, sometimes the religion gets mixed into their education a little more than it probably should be.

More thought has to be given to education, culture, and government support of these things in countries that have problems with their immigrant populations.