France's Toll of Destruction

Not a single word in the press anymore about the ongoing vandalism in France’s lost neighbourhoods. Yesterday the French government officially declared the riots over. Police figures are at exactly 98 cars torched on Wednesday night. This, the police say, is “a normal average.” Consequently the 20th consecutive night of violence was declared the last one.

Last night probably another hundred cars were set ablaze – as will be the case tonight, tomorrow night, and the following ones. Before large-scale rioting started on 27 October the police had already registered 30,000 car-becues this year – an average of, indeed, 100 a day. What a boost this must be to the French automobile industry. In the same period there were 3,800 attacks on police officers – a “normal” non-riot average of almost 13 a day.

During the past three weeks of rioting an additional 10,000 cars were torched; 130 police officers got wounded; some 100 factories and industrial buildings were vandalized and/or set ablaze; the same thing happened to some 100 schools, kindergartens, sports centers and (other) government buildings, as well as to at least 13 Christian cemetaries, chapels and churches, plus at least 4 Jewish centers and synagogues. There was also one attempt to set fire to a mosque. Two people were murdered: 56-year old Jean-Claude Irvoas was beaten to death in front of his wife and child, and 61-year old Jacques Le Chenadec was kicked to death when he tried to extinguish a burning dustbin in front of the apartment block where he lived.

Today in the Belgian newspaper De Tijd Nicole le Guennec, a French sociologist, says that car torching has been a common phenomenon in France for the past fifteen years. If this is true and if 100 is the average toll of destruction each night, a staggering 547,500 cars have been destroyed in France during that period. Probably more, because when one car is set alight and the fire destroys surrounding cars as well, the statistics count it as only one car fire. The worst night is traditionally New Year’s eve. Last New Year’s eve 330 cars were destroyed, a low figure compared to previous New Years when around 400 cars were set alight.

In contemporary multicultural France such staggering figures of lawlessness are considered to be a sign of “normality” and are hardly reported in the mainstream media. Neither is the following little piece of information. This week Professor Dominique Reynié of Sorbonne University in Paris, told the Brussels weekly Knack that the French state was obliged to borrow money last week to pay the wages of its civil servants. “The money has run out. One must concede: this is no example of a strong state.”

Perhaps what we are witnessing in Europe, but what the politicians and the media dare not say aloud, is the implosion of the (welfare) state. The Soviet Union suddenly collapsed in 1989, when owing to the inability of communism to create wealth, the state went bankrupt, was unable to maintain its army and hold its empire together. In France, the same thing might be happening. The socialist welfare state is no longer able to maintain law and order and is abandoning entire neighbourhoods to anarchy.

Is there a way out? If one is to believe the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut there is not. In an interview in the Parisian conservative newspaper Le Figaro last Tuesday (November 15), he said that it is not the French Republic that is failing. “The school of the Republic died a long time ago. It’s the post-Republic model of super-sympathetic educative community immersed in social activism that’s sinking. But alas, it’s an indestructible model, since it feeds on its own fiascos. It reacts to every failure with intensification. And here we go again: through scorn for truth, tomorrow the French school will thus drown the diversity of the black slave trade in the ocean of anti-Western political correctness. We’ll teach colonization not as a terrible, ambiguous historical phenomenon, but as a crime against humanity. Thus we’ll respond to the challenge of integration by hastening national disintegration.”

It is the same with the social-democratic welfare model. It feeds on its own fiascos and will continue to do so until it collapses – implodes – under its own weight. Consequently it is an indestructible model. The only way out is for the implosion to come soon. If it does, then national disintegration may perhaps still be avoided. If it does not, the social fabric of the nation will be damaged beyond repair.

 

An English translation of the Finkielkraut interview has been provided by Mark K. Jensen, Associate Professor of French at Pacific Lutheran University (Tacoma, WA). Below is an excerpt:

What political and intellectual lessons do you draw from the riots?

Alain Finkielkraut: I am terrified by this violence. Terrified, but not astonished. There were warning signs: […] There were also books sounding the alarm like the one by Emmanuel Brenner, Les Territoires perdus de la République [The Lost Territories of the Republic], or the June 2004 report by the ministry of national education on the signs and demonstrations of religious affiliation in some school establishments in difficult neighborhoods. There we learned, notably, that the teaching of history was accused by some pupils and those who are influencing them of giving a deformed, partisan, Judeo-Christian view of the world. Examples abound, from the refusal to study the building of the cathedrals or to listen to talk of the existence of pre-Islamic religions, to the inevitable turbulence provoked by discussion of the Algerian war or the Middle East.

[…] The first targets of those who were violent were their neighbors. And those neighbors are the ones who are demanding that the public order of the Republic be restored. […] Here’s a charming rap couplet: “France is a slut, don’t forget to fuck her till she drops like a bitch, you gotta deal with her, guy! Me, I piss on Napoleon and General de Gaulle.”

But do the excesses of the musical subculture really have a causal link with the acts of violence?

AF: If those who set fire to public services, throw pétanque balls from building towers on police, or assault firefighters had the same skin color as the Rostock rioters [the Rostock rioters were young neo-nazis – P.B.] in the reunified Germany of the 1990s, moral indignation would prevail everywhere.

Come on, moral indignation is prevailing in some places!

AF: No, what is prevailing is understanding, dissolution of the feeling of the unjustifiable in favor of the search for causes. In the Rostock hypothesis, politicians, intellectuals, journalists, officials of associations, social science researchers – they’d all be shouting with a single voice: “Fascism is not acceptable!” But as these ball- and Molotov cocktail-throwers are French of African or North African descent, explanation stifles indignation or turns it against the government and the nation’s lack of hospitality.

Instead of being outraged by the scandal of schools being burned, people pontificate about the despair of the arsonists. Instead of listening to what they’re saying – “Fuck your mother!”, “Fuck the police!”, “Fuck the State!” – we listen to them, that is, we convert their appeals to hatred as appeals for help and their vandalization of school buildings as demands for education. To this interpretation, which is all just for show, we urgently need to oppose a literal reading of events.

[…] And what we need to reestablish is another system of values, another relation to time.  But that capacity is not within the power of politicians. […] The abysmal vulgarity of talk shows, the brutality of videogames, the daily dumbing down and hilarious viciousness of the “Guignols de l’info” [a French TV news feature that represents public figures as puppets] – all that is beyond the reach of politicians. And if they took a stand against it, editorialists would at once denounce it is as a totalitarian infringement on freedom of expression.

But they are suffering from record unemployment rates!

AF: […] The present violence is not a reaction to the injustice of the Republic, but rather a gigantic pogrom against the Republic. […] And what is really unbearable is to see the authors of these exploits given the glorious title of “children of the Republic.”

[…] Wanting to calm hatred by saying that France is in fact worthy of hatred and inscribing this self-disgust in what we teach is necessarily leading us to things that are even worse. These revolting revolts are pushing to a crisis the contemporary tendency to make human beings primarily holders of rights rather than duties. And if schools themselves encourage them, everything is lost. […] And here we go again: through scorn for truth, tomorrow the French school will thus drown the diversity of the black slave trade in the ocean of anti-Western political correctness. We’ll teach colonization not as a terrible, ambiguous historical phenomenon, but as a crime against humanity. Thus we’ll respond to the challenge of integration by hastening national disintegration.

French arsonists and their subversive ideology..

We cant be under the delusion and illusion that we all belong in the same Abrahamic trio and so we can be buddy with the islamofascists..
Let us read this news on Canadian terroists plot,
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060703.wxyouth03/BN...

Wont you want your children to be safe from islamist influence. The other French youths protesting hiring and firing policy of the officials were marred by the same islamists who sneaked in and again caused untold miseries for the Government.

If there is a mobocracy active, like in India or Nepal, it is hard to control.
Better to nip them in the bud..

Liberty, equality and fraternity abused!!

That French ideals and idealism of their Revolution has empowered the evil islamists well settled there is obvious! During car burings they openly quoted these ideals to mock and denigrate at the French officials who were too tolerant and too self-restrained.

That fraternity may produce hybrid and cross-bred children from parents of mixed sense of loyalty and allegiance, is a somewhat alarming trend. Children would be more traumatized as divorce is likely to multiply from incompatible couples. Solution: Dont allow inter-cultural marriages!

How many burning cars per day should we expect?

At first the 98 cars burning per night sounded alarming to me. Then I stopped to ask, "How many should I expect?" I mean, I've seen a good number of car fires along the road in my lifetime. None of them seemed to be have been set by criminals, they were just cars that started burning when something went wrong.

Pretty consistently I see 2 car fires every 10 years or so. That's 2 cars burning per 3650 days.

And I don't see much land area every day. Sure, I travel a good distance, but I can't see too far to either side. I probably see only 10km^2/day.

And France is a big place that's pretty densely populated. It's about the size of TX, around 1000 km x 1000 km. That about a million square kilometers.

Putting that all together you come up with 82 burning cars per day. Far from indicating that France is falling apart, 98 burning cars per day seems to be quite a reasonable number.

Deformed histories

There we learned, notably, that the teaching of history was accused by some pupils and those who are influencing them of giving a deformed, partisan, Judeo-Christian view of the world.

Blimey, I'm glad this French philosopher chappie didn't hear what we were taught at school in England about the French. Partisan doesn't even begin to describe it! "God for England, Harry and St George!" as Mr Shakespeare memorably said. Still, we did learn that the British were among the first to make laws against the slave trade, although less emphasis was put on the fact that the wealth of eighteenth century England was largely founded on it.

Still, this was all a long time ago, and I'm sure things are much correcter now.

Bob Doney

PS I'm not convinced that having quite so many philosophers is an unmixed blessing for France.

The "end" of slavery

Thanks for the link. Looking back on the British imperium there was lots of good stuff amidst the bad stuff. You never know, Eurabian historians two centuries from now may even look back on the American imperium and find some good in it!!

Bob Doney

Extraction from the link above

What destroyed slavery in the non-Western world was Western imperialism.

Nothing could be more jolting and discordant with the vision of today's intellectuals than the fact that it was businessmen, devout religious leaders and Western imperialists who together destroyed slavery around the world.

-for those who do not have the time to read the entire thing.

Our Future

One must seriously contemplate whether France and similar countries are going to face a similar depressing and horrendous fate as places prone to ethnic and religious conflicts such as Lebanon. It is essential not to give up hope in order to prevent further destruction, yet it is time to face reality.