France: Updates and Discussion
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It is. but the fundamental problems, the divisions in French society, have not been resolved - far from it.
Doubt he was schooled to say that though.
Gotta fix the ongoing immigration issue first. Europe can't simply take in the entire African population.
It's not really an immigration issue, because contrarily to what some far-right groups are peddling, there was no religious slant to those riots. We didn't hear any "allahu ackbar" from the looters. The demographics of the rioters also match the demographics of the areas where riots happen; so people from an immigration background are not over-represented.
The main problems IMO are:
The main problems IMO are:
- The penal system. French jails are overcrowded and do not do anything to rehabilitate convicts. Because of reactionary politics radically opposed to the idea that prisoners should get trained in a job and taught to appreciate what society offers, they're instead just places where petty criminals become hardened criminals and are recruited into gangs. We need more jails and more oversight on the prisoners, we need to separate the hardened criminals from the petty criminals, we need to focus more on rehabilitation and to control who the prisoners get to communicate with.
- The police. Again due to reactionary politics, police officers have been rendered less professional and more violent. This started with Sarkozy, when he was Minister of the Interior, abolishing local police forces ("police de proximité"), justifying it with stupid slogans like "policemen are not there to play soccer with the youths". This cut an important social tie between police forces and inhabitants. Then he further reduced police numbers altogether, compensating with higher working hours (but without budgeting those additional hours). Finally, he abolished the one year training program that policemen went through after recruiting. So as a result: police got alienated from the inhabitants, got longer hours and a harder job with no compensation, and got less training.
Then Darmanin (current MoI) recently made things even worse by removing a lot of restraints on the use of force, allowing police officers to be more trigger happy. - The lack of sociabilization. Dominant ideology is to cut all sort of national identity, as if it were bad, to replace it with hyper-individualism and communitarianism. Rioters destroy their own neighborhoods because they don't care about their own neighbors. Anything that helps strengthen the social fabric has been constantly attacked by both the right-wing (who want to promote hyper-individualism) and the left-wing (who want to promote communitarianism); and the so-called social networks have made that even worse.
My home is at the epicentre of France’s riots – it’s not what you see on TV
I do not approve of or justify the violence that directly and negatively impacts the lives of my family and my community. But we must ask: Why did these urban revolts happen? What are the social forces driving such massive and collective eruptions of violence?
indianexpress.com
My home is at the epicentre of France’s riots – it’s not what you see on TV
I do not approve of or justify the violence that directly and negatively impacts the lives of my family and my community. But we must ask: Why did these urban revolts happen? What are the social forces driving such massive and collective eruptions of violence?
indianexpress.com
My home is at the epicentre of France’s riots – it’s not what you see on TV
I do not approve of or justify the violence that directly and negatively impacts the lives of my family and my community. But we must ask: Why did these urban revolts happen? What are the social forces driving such massive and collective eruptions of violence?
Written by Jules Naudet
Updated: July 8, 2023 12:13 IST
Police detain young people during the fifth night of protests, in the Champs Elysees area, in Paris, France, July 2, 2023. (Reuters photo)
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Narendra Modi’s visit to France as the guest of honour for the July 14 Bastille Day celebrations is reminiscent of the 2020 Namaste Trump tour to India. As the populist president was visiting India, the violence simultaneously taking place in Northeast Delhi resulted in at least 53 deaths. Ahead of Modi’s visit, Paris, its suburbs and many other cities in the country were shaken by riots that were sparked by the brutal killing of a 17-year-old, Nahel M, by a police officer, following a traffic stop.
I live 300 metres from where Nahel was killed on June 27. Our neighbourhood is located at the intersection of the business district of La Défense (where the richest companies in the country have their headquarters) and residential areas (dominated by housing projects characterised by dire urban poverty). The alleged murder thus took place at the precise geographical intersection of the two poles of our capitalist societies: One end is fueled by the limitless appropriation of capital and the other is where people are condemned to dead-end jobs, if not to “hustling” for survival.
The national outrage the killing provoked was caused by the fact that a passerby had filmed the police officer’s actions. A few years ago, Emmanuel Macron’s government attempted to forbid such filming of police action. Had this provision of the Global Security Act — banning the filming of police officers — been passed, the images of Nahel’s killing would have been censored and the outrage would have probably been less intense.
But the tragic death is also tightly linked to the fact that in 2017, the socialist government had decided to facilitate the use of firearms by police officers in the name of self-defence. This has, since then, resulted in a significant increase in the number of police shootings and deaths (they have more than doubled in a few years). The Minister of the Interior tends to minimise the importance of these figures.
Once the outrage provoked by Nahel’s death started to spread through the country, my neighbourhood became the central focus of all national live-news channels. International channels later joined the chorus. Two of the rooms of my daughter’s school were burnt. Most of the local shops have been vandalised and some even burned down, as were a few cars and garbage bins. Like many other parents in the neighbourhood, I was deeply saddened to see the merry-go-round on which my daughters had so much fun burst into flames.
On July 1, the day Nahel was buried, news channels incessantly forecast images of violence, arson, lootings and fights between the police and protesters. Around 4 pm, I decided to switch off my TV and I went to the streets to realise that the reality was not one of a permanent state of violence and chaos, of underprivileged suburbs suddenly resembling the Ukraine battleground. Rather, there were fleeting episodes of violence that would last for a few seconds or a few minutes. Passersby were stunned more than scared and many stopped to film the hypnotising scenes of the slightly surreal, live spectacle. Some mothers would nonchalantly cross police lines with kids in strollers. It took time for people to realise that the peaceful routine of their neighbourhood was disrupted. But the sporadic aspect of the violence convinced them to move on with their daily chores.
At 9.30 pm, I was taking my daily evening walk in the park and did not feel threatened in any way. Many of my neighbours were also there, walking their dogs. We could vaguely hear a few fireworks in the distance but there was no “front”. Just a nomadic, elusive violence that never seemed to target anything but objects, buildings and the police.
This puzzling serenity of my neighbours stands in stark contrast with the frenzied reactions on social and regular media. The government, the centre-left, the right and the far-right all blamed the youth for their “irresponsibility”. France has a long history of urban violence and its politicians have mastered the reactions to such a scenario: “Why did they burn schools? Why attack education, which is the greatest symbol of equality, a sanctuary of knowledge? They’re burning public facilities, they’re hurting themselves, they’re destroying millions of euros of infrastructure that directly benefit their neighbourhood” and so on.
Those on the far-right were jubilant. For them, the images monopolising TV screens were the fulfilment of their prophecy: France is in a civil war between “patriots” and “African and Muslim invaders”. The foretold dystopia was finally coming to life. Or at least it was on TV. Such urban violence offers them the occasion to preach racism and hate against those they deem “barbaric” and “dangerous”. TV debates show a growing division within France between those who prioritise law and order, and those who perceive mistreatment towards minorities as the symptom of systemic racism.
The latter position is often dismissed as too naïve. Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls had condensed that contempt for social scientists. He said that seeking sociological explanations necessarily ends up justifying and excusing people’s actions. Today, politicians from all sides are, once again, bringing down the veil of ignorance — as they do each time violence flares up in the banlieues (suburbs). This chorus insists that there is no structural problem in France and the protesters are simply criminals who will be prosecuted and jailed. No other discourse but the denunciation of violence is considered acceptable.
I do not approve of or justify the violence that directly and negatively impacts the lives of my family and my community. The prosecution of rioters is indeed an important step, one that draws upon our judicial institutions and its specific categories of understanding. But this will in no way answer the key questions at hand. Why did these urban revolts happen? What are the social forces driving such massive and collective eruptions of violence?
There are many complex social forces at play behind this violence. For one, the riots we witnessed are rooted in France’s colonial past. Most of the rioters are indeed descendants of Algerian and immigrant workers that were recruited by Peugeot, Citroën and Renault to come and work in their then-booming French factories. The car companies would actually send HR staff to downtrodden villages where villagers would stand in line and wait to have their teeth and hands checked to see if they were robust enough to do manual work all their life. Many of them were nicknamed the “Zero-One Zero-One” as they didn’t know their precise birth date and were by default assigned January 1. These workers were the first to be fired when the massive industrial relocation started in the 1980s, leading to the closure of many plants. Uneducated and unemployed, ignorant of the codes and the ways of their host country, living in urban areas where economic resources are scarce, their families naturally fell into a poverty trap. Rather than structurally addressing them, successive governments preferred to contain these social issues in excluded territories and continue to repeat that the French Republic is colourblind. Unrest, frustration and anger kept building up, with no one to represent these communities in key political arenas.
Refusing to consider the expertise of social scientists to make sense of these social tsunamis is like ignoring the expertise of climatologists in the face of global warming. Under the pressure of soaring inequalities, the social climate is warming up. The longer we keep refusing to give social scientists the necessary means to unpack the mechanisms at play in our societies in order to propose viable pathways for change, the longer we think that containment and repression are the only viable political answers, there will be regular backlash. In deeply unequal societies, riots are as mechanical a phenomenon as typhoons are in the context of global warming. But when a cyclone occurs, do we blame the drops of water for the wrath of the sky?
God knows how many it takes to change a light bulb.
A very interesting analysis of French history in 1940: "If France wins the war against Germany, it would be a civilization's catastrophe!"
French leaders wanted failure to save the richs from socialism
Source (in french, sorry) :
1940: the politico-military french failure
French leaders wanted failure to save the richs from socialism
Source (in french, sorry) :
1940: the politico-military french failure
what made me laugh was, in the video of al jazeera, the French defender of secularism 'surrounded' by a Muslim feminist (oxymoron? ) claiming that the law banning the abaya in schools is an attempt to stigmatise Islam (whereas she claims that the abaya is not a Muslim symbol, but merely a (Arab) cultural marker), as well as a desire on the part of patriarchal white men to control her female body (lol), and by an Anglo-Saxon specialist in 'Equality-Diversity-Inclusion', steeped in multiculturalist ideology, who claims that the French 1905 law on secularism is part of the 'culture wars'.
This is the law known as the "law of separation of ChurchES and State":
Article 1: "The Republic guarantees freedom of conscience. It guarantees the free exercise of religious worship [...]".
Article 2: "The Republic does not recognise, salute or subsidise any religion. [...] "
@jetray , this applies to all religions, so no, this does not stigmatise a religious minority.
in 2003, President Jacques Chirac decided that a law should explicitly ban all visible religious symbols in state schools, in the name of secularism.
the frenchman interviewed by al jazeera explains that France is a political construct, not an ethnic nor a religious construction. Also that the French Republic is the result of a fight against religions (primarily the Catholic one, at the origins of the republic), and that school is the "church of the République". And that the fact that the law of the people being more important than the law of God, is at the core of the French identity. (i would have said "the core of the French Republic identity")
Only one single minority, always the same.
No problem with christians
Nor Jewishs,
Nor budhists,
Nor Hindouisms,
Nor....
Only one : muslims. Why? because islam is not only a religion. Ir's more and more a political regime. And we don't want this special regime.
They are just copying the west's play book on human rights and will hammer any one who questions them as abusing minority rights. Al jazeera has become torch bearer of the Islamic world like bbc or cnn does for west.
Our president will be in India for republic day
Maybe, the Rafale-M and 3 Scorpene deal gets signed.
My wishlist would be to go for a Gov to gov deal for over 100 Rafale via make in India. Let's see...
Unlikely, but keep your fingers crossed. Biden's apparently busy.