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[BBC News] Violent clashes, looting and buildings ablaze in France as more than 1,200 arrested after protests
Again the ressentiment of the banlieues has spilled out into the rest of France (again), normally so distant, so deliberately and proudly ignorant, in that distinctly French way.
Some observations:
The Anglo press seems to have no qualms calling this largely violent and destructive rioting. There’s the BBC headline above, but even CNN leads with the subtitle ‘riots spread across major cities’ and the imagery of the burning Limoges town hall, a beautiful example of classical architecture that has now fallen victim to the decisions of 1960s, only via a longer and more expensive form of demolition. Other websites are similarly descriptive, a far cry from mostly peaceful protests. The New York Times says “France reels from largest riots in years”. Perhaps this is the clarity of distance speaking, perhaps the end of Woke I, perhaps liberals get more upset about Paris burning than Minneapolis. I suspect a combination of all three.
In general, Anglo elites, certainly liberal ones, have more exposure to the urban underclass than French elites do. The French sent them all to the suburbs to be forgotten so that the XVI could be preserved in perpetuity for themselves. Yes, there are a few homeless, some African touts, a couple of bad neighborhoods around big railroad stations, but by and large much of inner Paris is - riots aside - actually nicer, safer and better maintained than it was ten or twenty years ago. By contrast, in Britain or America elite housing and business districts in the urban core routinely abut absolute shitholes full of the worst scum these societies have to offer. Yes there are suburbs far away from the chaos, but those exist in every country and true bourgeois professionals consider them crass anyway. You can live in the West Village, possibly the most expensive neighborhood per square foot in America, and still be regularly accosted by scary homeless schizophrenic drug addicted people, who were also seemingly still in control of about half of Washington Square Park earlier this year the last time I went home. In San Francisco the Tenderloin is in the middle of the one of city’s central commercial districts, tech executives (some of whom live in Palo Alto but plenty of whom do actually have houses in San Francisco proper) have homeless people break into cars outside their $4m homes to defecate on the seat and rummage through their storage. In London, section 8 equivalent housing sits next to $20m mansions, too. Lib elites, for all their faults, actually confront more of their poor decisions in Anglo countries than in France, where the standard approach seems to be to just pretend the problem doesn’t exist.
That is not to say, at all, that they make any better decisions. But SF liberal elites actually have to “and that’s a good thing”, which while delusional, involves a modicum more reflection than the head-in-the-sand policies of those who have and do run the fifth republic. There is a form of exposed ridiculousness in America because someone actually has to explain, with a straight face, why enforcing the law on broken tail lights is racist. In France, the equivalent policy would be that the police in the banlieues would just quietly decide they didn’t have the resources to enforce it.
I actually think a lot of these demographics we see in this rioting accurately reflect the composition of under-25 year olds in major French cities. France bans all statistics on this kind of thing (see above), but demographic researchers have often suggested that the population of non-European first, second, third etc generation migrants in France is broadly quite similar to the equivalents in countries where governments do collect actual data, like the UK and Germany. Slightly higher, yes, but not substantially so. So if perhaps 21% of the UK is non-European, maybe the assumption was that it was 25% in France. I think it’s more like 35% in France, and I think among under 25s it’s probably more like 50%.
One can’t deny that at least a noticeable minority of these rioters appear to be ethnic French. One thing one increasingly notices in a lot of European cities with native minorities, and London is a good example, is that the indigenous working class who remain largely assimilate with the migrant, typically Muslim, community, not the other way around. This makes intuitive sense, the white is deracinated and atomized, the Ummah is a after all a multicultural enterprise, and various South Asian and Arab Muslim parents are usually relatively racist against the other major ethnic group in these neighborhoods and so would far rather a daughter or son marry a white convert than, say, a British Somali. Anecdotally, I see small but growing numbers of white British Muslim, including many in South Asian dress, around parts of east London like Stratford now (yes, there are ginger Arabs, but I know an Anglo-Celtic phenotype when I see one). One of our office security guards is one of them, from Dagenham (one of the remaining enclaves of the former cockney London working class). He has converted to Islam, grown a beard, showed me pictures on his Instagram of his wedding and wife, who I think is Syrian. In the coming years and decades - and this is in part what Submission is about - many more of the remaining native populations will choose to assimilate themselves to this stronger, more forceful, more self-assured and ultimately more vital culture.
There has been a lot of Raspail-posting on Twitter about these events, “they will burn your beautiful oak door” etc. I think what Raspail was correct about versus the ‘clash of civilizations’ types (they were right about some things, it must be said, but the particularly Islamic character of what is coming in Western Europe is not yet fully clear) is that a lot of this destruction is just a combination of entropy and lack of care or desire to care, rather than a particularly ideological hatred. Yes, there are educated 27 year old liberal hijabis at the Sorbonne well-versed in critical theory who can justify the burning of a 19th century city hall on the basis of anti-colonial resistance and the Franco-imperialist pacification of Algeria, but the rioting on the ground is primarily driven by rage, greed, and a fundamental lack of care or concern for the civilization, or the remnants of the civilization, in which these people live. This is something those indigenous French rioters, who have assimilated into another civilization (whether they have converted formally or merely abandoned their own identity for the void), also reject.
We often forget that in the great historic conversions to Islam, it was overwhelmingly the converted natives who burned their temples and shrines and idols, who slaughtered their recalcitrant priests. We must expect more of that.
I am not convinced that this is primarily the work of ethnic non-French. The livestreams I watched had plenty of ethnic French people in them. But I am definitely open to the possibility that it is majority ethnic non-French.
The idea that ethnic French need Algerians to teach them how to riot also strikes me as unconvincing, given France's history.
I, like you, noticed that there isn't much "riots are the language of the unheard" messaging in mainstream media about these riots. The conspiracy theorist in me wants to say that this is because France is seen as a fragile linchpin of the whole US-led neoliberal order. But I don't think that's really the explanation. Too complicated, and wouldn't explain why even The Guardian isn't wholly on board. I think it's more likely that the ideas around African Americans and their history are just uniquely potent, which explains the mainstream's submissive reactions to BLM violence.
A few years ago I would have been against something like the France riots, but now I find myself sympathetic and wishing that Americans would start rioting as well. Politics as usual is showing itself to be incompetent to handle the problems of economic stagnation, corruption, enshittification, and the potential problem of AI job loss. Middle class Americans have been trained to believe that if they are poor, it is entirely their fault. This ideology was a good adaptation to the conditions of early America, but not a good adaptation to today's more zero-sum situation. In our current situation, a better adaptation for those outside the ranks of the elites might be to blame everything on the rich and to scare the living shit out of them until they give up their resources.
Does capitalism work better in the long term than socialism? Does it lift all boats higher than socialism does? In the conditions of 20th century economics, yes, undoubtedly. In the conditions that we are now entering, however, I am not so sure. In any case, I don't care much. To the degree that I have any socialist tendencies, they are selfish -- I'm not primarily concerned with what economic system is more moral or is better for the majority of people. If capitalism lifts all boats higher 30 years from now but leaves me poor for the next 30 years, I will support something other than capitalism. If I become rich, it is quite possible that I will start to support the current system.
The culture war angle about the riots is interesting when it comes to the most mouth-frothing types on places like X. I find myself in the position of disliking both sides. One side is making mouth noises I like about taking down the elites, but are also, realistically speaking, probably much too bought into the lefty memeplex, including the anti-white stuff, for my liking. And obviously there is a significant Islamist component. As a social liberal, I view the Islamic memeplex as being primitive barbarity. Do I have any illusions that if the rioters gained power it would actually be good for people at me? No, I view them as a potentially useful tool, not as a beneficial new ruling class.
The other side says things like "the Limoges town hall is worth more than thousands of rioters". And personally, I don't really care that much about the lives of the rioters, but I also don't give a single shit about the Limoges town hall. If burning it scares the elite, then I support burning it. Would I feel the same way about rioters burning, say, my building? Or would I feel the same way if they burned down thousands of city halls rather than just a few? No. But like I already said, my support is selfish, it's not some grand moral statement about what political/economic system is more just. I just hope that acts of this nature do not cause ordinary people to lose their lives. I'm fine with some degree of burning, but am not comfortable with killing people of my own socioeconomic class or below, and am squeamish even about the idea of killing the rich. Obviously the actual riots have burned hundreds of small shops and the like, which I do not support.
The American and French fiscal problems are not because the rich are hoarding too many resources. Primarily they're being caused by the fact that spending is out of control because every interest group needs a cut to secure their votes in a democracy, and it's politically intractable to cut back entitlements to the base once they've been offered.
To the extent that every elite billionaire got fully expropriated at the full paper value of their assets, and without considering any of the obvious second-order effects that this would cause, neither France nor America could fund their current level of spending for even a year longer; much like the NBA players who end up going broke, you can always spend more money no matter how much you make.
If AI really does unlock infinite labour and productivity, then sure, I'll be alongside you in the socialist protest lines for whatever good it'd do. Clearly we're very far from that point in the current state of the world though, and rampant welfarism is what's actually breaking the backs of pretty much every modern democracy.
I think this is the ultimate issue of democracy. The goal is to loot the treasury for your political allies. This works okay as long as the money doesn’t run out. Unfortunately, we’re now in the era where we no longer have enough productive labor to prop up the gibs. And so you have the fun of watching as political parties try to decide whether to cut off the gibs and save the country, or continue the gibs lest the entitled burn down the country.
Members of a demographic that has dictated politics for their entire natural life due to its sheer size most likely to believe strict majoritarianism is the most just/stable/holy system of government ever devised.
In other news, the wetness of water now in dispute.
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