The 2007 Paris Riot Season
Riots in the fall is becoming something of a tradition in Paris. The emphasis this year seems to be on shotguns and injuring police officers. Setting fire to cars, which was so fashionable in previous riots, has apparently become passe, though they did burn a police station. Current estimates of injured police officers run around 70-80.
Some background: A generation ago, France imported massive numbers of low-skilled laborers from North Africa. The children of those immigrants are now young adults. They were not integrated into French society, and their unemployment rate is very high. Around Paris, these young adults live in a series of massive bleak housing projects that ring the city. A large percentage of them are effectively wards of the state, living entirely on generous welfare programs that leave these second-generation immigrants fed but directionless.
Socialist dogma declares that wealth-transfer payments can ensure tranquility, but human nature disagrees. These young adults, particularly the young men, want something more than to be fed and coddled like overgrown infants. They want meaning in their lives. They want purpose. And many of them found that purpose in hostility towards the government that infantilizes them.
The banlieues (suburbs) in which they live have become so lawless that they are effectively not under the control of the French government. In some of these neighborhoods, police cannot patrol there effectively, even in force.
And now they riot. This is, I believe, the third year of the riots, though the first year they may have also held an extra round in the spring. This year, as I said, the goal seems to be injuring or killing as many police officers as possible, and the weapons of choice seem to be shotguns and maybe rifles.
It’s hard to get details on these riots, because the mainstream press has worked hard to suppress and confuse the story. In previous riots, the press would refer to the rioters only as “youths”, completely ignoring the story’s complex racial and religious angles. It was really funny for the first two years, but now it’s just a cliche, and some press outlets are conceding that many of the rioters may be of Arab and North African descent.
The story behind these riots is complicated, and the media’s ideological blinders don’t help in understanding it. The story is partly about religious, racial, and cultural differences between the French majority and this minority. It may also be a grim lesson about how importing large numbers of poor unskilled laborers may provide some short-term economic benefits to big business, but it also carries serious long-term costs that we all must pay.
Finally, this story may be about the beginning of the end of Socialism. It has long been predicted that Socialism would collapse like a Ponzi scheme, where some generation must eventually decide that it is unwilling to pay exorbitant taxes to the older generations in exchange for the promise that younger generations will pay even more. Mathematically, every Ponzi scheme must eventually run out of victims, because at its heart the scheme produces nothing of value; it just moves money around to placate the existing victims while hoping that new victims will come along to put new money into the system.
But these riots suggest that Socialism may fall long before the economic collapse. What seems even more dangerous is absence of genuine culture that socialism demands. A core belief of Socialism is that our minds are blank slates onto which our environments can write anything at all. A related belief is that intellectuals leading the government are smart enough to write on that slate in such a way as to bring about nationwide peace and harmony.
These riots, along with many other stories coming out of Europe, demonstrate that both beliefs are false. The slate is not blank, and more importantly the intellectuals aren’t nearly as smart as they thought they were. Political Correctness is the best they could do for a culture substitute, and it has proven woefully inadequate. It does not satisfy man’s need for meaning.
That is why Paris burns tonight. That is why Britain’s youth are joining terrorist cells faster than its government can staff its anti-terrorism forces. That is why a primitive version of a primitive religion is sweeping through the minds of Europe’s youth, easily overpowering government platitudes about tolerance and diversity.
A war rages in Europe between the cultural void that is Political Correctness and the primal human instincts that seek to replace it with something better, even if that something is violent Islam, or simply violence for its own sake. It’s a war between fools, because either ideology would destroy Europe as we know it. Socialism would bankrupt it, while the rioters would burn it down. The Socialists have wealth and infrastructure, while the rioters have youth and demography. Personally, I suspect that both sides will win—Europe will go bankrupt as it burns down—until some third ideology sweeps them both away. And that third ideology is likely to be nationalism.