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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'm not sure what golden age you think American cities had that compares favorably to today. If you're following my Pittsburgh series, one of the themes is that there are no golden ages. For all the problems American cities have these days, they don't compare to the problems they had in the first half of the 20th century, which you probably don't even think about because they have largely been solved. Have you ever smelled burning coal before? I have, and while it isn't entirely unpleasant when one house in a rural area is burning it, it's quite another when, say, everybody in Pittsburgh, or New York, or London is burning it all winter, not to mention railroad and industrial air pollution. Garbage collection wasn't the most efficient, and it was common for people to dump rubbish in alleys or over hillsides. Large portions of cities weren't paved until well into the 20th century, and the roads turned to mud whenever it rained, and dust when it didn't. It wasn't until midcentury that most cities had modern sewage treatment facilities and sewers, which were largely open at the beginning of the century, discharged into the nearest watercourse. Even into the 1950s, poorer sections of cities didn't have full plumbing facilities in every household. In some houses the only running water was in the basement. At the beginning of the century, there was often a shared spigot in a common yard area, that was a permanent mud pit.
Most Northeastern and Midwestern cities peaked in population in 1950. This wasn't so much "denisty" as modern armchair urbanists like to see it as it was overcrowding. Due to the effects of the Depression and War, there hadn't been any large-scale construction since the 1920s. For the generation who fought in the War, staying in the city meant living with your parents, or in a small, worn-out apartment. These problems had been evident in cities across the globe for decades, but progressive reforms ran head-on into a political class that wouldn't sacrifice economic growth. Le Corbusier's dream of bulldozing Paris and replacing it with The Radiant City wasn't just a personal affectation but a reflection of enlightened reform thinking of the time. This is why my paternal grandparents moved to the suburbs in 1940, and on my mother's side 1955. To that generation, there was nothing cool or nostalgic about urban life. There was no reason to be concerned about walkable cities when everyone had a car, and for corporations, there was no reason to be downtown if your entire office staff lived in the suburbs.
The result was that at at time when America was experiencing an unprecedented level of prosperity, major cities were experiencing an urban crisis that saw middle class residents decamping for the suburbs at an alarming rate, employers threatening to do the same, and tax revenues heading into a death spiral. Even New York, one of the few cities to gain population during the postwar period, suffered declining property values as new residents were poorer than those displaced. The urban renewal projects that are much-maligned today did not happen because city leaders collectively went insane, or because they all hated minorities (the deleterious effects to minority populations weren't apparent until well into the renewal era); they happened because governments at all levels were desperate to stanch the bleeding, and the only way they saw out of the crisis was to demolish everything that made the cities unattractive and outdated and replace them with what was attractive and modern.
We know now, of course, that these efforts were doomed to failure. Lots of projects were never completed after preliminary results looked grim, but even fully-realized projects never had the effects that were expected. The ensuing decades saw increasing crime and disinvestment, where abandoning properties in what should have been prime real estate was more cost-effective than rehabilitating them. New York almost went bankrupt in the 1970s, and most other cities outside the Sun Belt weren't doing much better. The crack epidemic and the rise of gang violence took things to unprecedented levels, and the crime wave that began in the 1960s has only subsided relatively recently.
The places that abut downtowns you are so appalled by have always existed, and it's only recently that these districts aren't like that. When everyone had to walk to work, downtown areas were the only desirable places to live, despite the disadvantages inherent to living in areas that were often industrial in nature. If you owned a foundry or a textile mill you preferred to live next to it, and so did your employees. Just outside of this downtown core was an area occupied by those who could not afford to live downtown. Since cities weren't as economically segregated in those days, this meant the poorest of the poor, usually blacks and immigrants, who were crammed into shoddily built tenements and in some cases lived in what were essentially shantytowns. When the railroad and later streetcars made commuting possible, the middle classes leapfrogged these slum areas and moved to areas further out, while the wealthy had what were effectively country estates. As better and better transportation became available, people moved even farther away, and what were once fashionable suburbs became occupied by those of decreasing means, but the areas closest in were never fashionable and became increasingly desperate as time went on.
In some cities, these were the target of renewal efforts, as with Pittsburgh's Lower Hill District, or Mill Creek Valley in St. Louis. In some cases the neighborhoods continued to deteriorate but were later revived, as in Cincinatti's Over-the-Rhine, Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square, and Boston's North End. And in some cases they simply never gentrified, like in the Tenderloin and Skid Row. You can complain about these areas now, but things were unbelievably worse 50 years ago. So please answer this question for me: When exactly do you think things were so great in American cities?
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