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The ongoing French riots bring into sharp relief the fantasy that if we just don't talk about race or religion, the issue will disappear. To be clear, I still prefer the French approach because if you don't measure something you can't really do much about it. The main beneficiary of France suddenly going the US/UK route of meticulously collecting racial and religious statistics wouldn't be the far-right but rather the far-left. Racial and possibly religious quotas would soon follow with official state-sanctioned discrimination as the end result.
Yet the rioters clearly view themselves as apart from French society. Even genteel liberal journalists concede as much.
What are the long-term effects going to be? Perhaps I am cynical but I suspect nothing much. France had these kinds of riots in 2005 and they changed nothing.
I remembering reading a lot about Islam and immigration in the 2010-2012 time period, during which many UK conservative personalities were praising the French approach of "aggressive assimiliationism" as opposed to the supposedly feeble multiculturalist approach preferred by the UK. It seems to me that there's no functional difference. The UK had its own riots in 2011. One could plausibly make the case that the BLM riots in the US during 2014 and then 2020 fall under the same rubric.
Whatever the system, these periodic events happen in diverse societies and then they are forgotten until the next outbreak. The system isn't strong enough to overcome racial and religious differences completely but it's also much stronger than many right-wing doomers seem to think. After the kerfuffle everyone moves on. There's no reason to think it will be different this time.
I genuinely think the best solution is to just start shootin’. Muslim youths in France respect force, just like their prophet used and just like their rap idols extol in their music. If you just start shooting them, even just with rubber bullets (but lots), or even better with paintballs that smell horrible when they break, they will stop rioting.
The key missing topic in the discussions on the French riots is that these guys really want and enjoy to light things on fire and loot. I would too, if I hated the people in the country and could get away with it. There is fundamentally no way to counter that except with punishment, ie violent. The punishment has to come with no social approval — prison, while bad, comes with social approval among their culture. But pelting them with rubber bullets, going into their neighborhood and smashing their cars, going into their neighborhood with a helicopter filled with a gallons of durian juice to drop on their apartments… they very quickly realize that the benefit is no longer worth the cost. You essentially have to humiliate and subject them. Just like any of us would feel living in Singapore or Hong Kong, that we would be swiftly punished for malefaction.
I have a dog and one of the things most interesting to me is how reinforcement and punishment is so clearly on display in its most primal way. You have to think like a dog with her. I can’t chase her when she steals something, because she likes to be chased. Yelling is ineffectual, because she likes yelling (barking). Even slapping her paws would do little, because the way dogs play with each other is more aggressive than that. If I’m dealing with a creature that likes aggressive play, being chased, and risk, the punishment has to be very much not pleasant. So a good one is crate time, but if you can’t do that you can give a painful physical punishment — I don’t do the latter because I love my dog, but I think it’s fitting for people blowing up libraries and so on.
I think the idea the “French people will move on” is wrong. This is a blow to the morale of the French people. They have received a serious injury to their identity. Living among people who can destroy your car and shop whenever they want is demoralizing and in some invisible way probably leads to an 80k monetary injury per every affected Parisian resident. It decreases sum total happiness and induces a feeling of helplessness. So it’s really serious. It’s not the same as if it were 10000 unrelated instances of minor theft.
The first riots in the banlieues were in 1981. In subsequent decades these regions were ethnically cleansed of their native and Jewish populations, as was widely documented in major movies, on TV and in the papers. Nothing about this is new. There have been some major stories. The French did nothing for 40 years, they're not going to start now.
Didn’t LePenne come in second in the most recent elections? With a serious chance as well? Seems like this just boosted her odds
Have you looked Le Pen's plans for the banlieues? They might surprise you with their relative modesty.
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