Ralf Goergens

This is a bit of a rambling post, ranging from rioting deaths to global trade talks and so on, but then again, all these issues happen to be connected in a karmic, shit-happens, what-goes-around -comes-around kind of way, so the well-disposed reader is asked to indulge me (and yes, I am aware of the fact that putting ‘shit and ‘well-disposed’ into the same paragraph constitutes a rather abrupt change in style).

According to official numbers, only one person has died due to the French riots, while more than fifty people were killed during the 1992 riots in Los Angeles. Some have made the point, and that it is a good one, that deaths are underreported, because the areas where they take place are no-go zones for the police. Then again, the same goes for riots like that in L.A. or in Watts in the 60s. In other words, those higher death-tolls are also underreporting the casualties.

One important difference is in the age of the rioters. In Los Angeles it were mostly adults, while the French rioters tend to be less than fifteen years old. The lack of firearms in France is another: In the United States, armed civilians would quickly have put an end to the firebombing attacks (at least those outside heavily Muslim areas, overwhelmingly the riots and incidents of arson happen inside said Muslim areas), at the cost of some loss of life on the side of the attackers (not that I would be sad about that).

In the long run, the consequences of the riots will hit Muslims especially hard. The black rioters in Watts burned out all the stores in that part of the city – afterwards they had to drive or walk a long way just to shop for groceries. When the Korean shop keepers moved in, they had to charge high prices, because of the high of cost of security measures, and also the considerable insurance premiums. The resulting high prices were hard on a community that couldn’t really afford them.

Now it seems that the rioters will spare Muslim-run shops, but those owners will have to pay higher insurance premiums, at the very least. And even if they feel immune against their co-religionists’ rioting, they will have to beef up on security in order to get any insurance coverage at all. What with suppliers likely being leery of entering the banlieux, their costs, too, will go through he roof. They will either charge accordingly higher prices, or go bankrupt if they won’t dare to do so – their customers aren’t exactly docile, and radical Muslims are especially prone to raise accusations of of price-gouging. When it is all said and done, Muslims will have to pay much higher prices, or go shopping in areas where they aren’t exactly welcome.

This could turn out to be a golden opportunity for defusing the situation in the not too long term, if the situation can be handled the right way. Life in the Muslim ghettos will become unsustainable for most inhabitants, and they will be eager to leave, if the French will let them, i.e. offer affordable housing elsewhere (no concentrated appartment-blocks, it goes without saying). The Islamists and hard core criminals would be deprived of an ready-made pool of recruits, and a more dispersed Muslim population (hopefully) will become much less aggrieved and prone to future outbreaks.

Then again, all that can only work if France finally reforms its economy, thereby creating economic opportunity for entrepreneurial Muslims, and jobs for the others. Unfortunately, the current French leadership seems determined to do just the opposite: In order to preserve the EU farm subsidies French farmers are collecting right now, the French government is set to sabotage the next round of global trade liberalization. They don’t care about the damage this would do to the global economy, or the French one, for that matter. If they go through with it, the EU, and especially France, will be increasingly cut out of future trade deals, shaving off precious percentage points from an already low growth rate. So just to favor the most coddled 3 % of their compatriots, Chirac, de Villepin at al will shaft the Third World and their own country, and also condemn their Muslim population to permanent unemployment and marginalization. Once they realize that they have nothing left to lose, rioting exceeding current levels will become a permanent fixture of French everyday life.

There’s yet another, and traditionally French, solution:

Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira!
Les aristocrates à la lanterne.
Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira!
Les aristocrates on les pendra.
Si on n' les pend pas
On les rompra
Si on n' les rompt pas
On les brûl'ra.
Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira...

This option isn’t all that likely, though.

From:  The xenophobic part of my mind

To:  European Muslims

I usually try to take a fair and balanced line in my posts, whatever the concrete issue may be, but the fact is that deep down inside I am quite xenophobic, just like everybody else, if they are honest.

This post started out as a reply for a comment to this post, but I had refrained from posting it, for I felt that it turned out far too one-sided and, well, xenophobic. But I think that it isn’t all that appropriate, given the current rioting in France. I do think that Muslims can be successfully integrated into Western society, but that can only happen when certain issues are properly addressed. Multiculturalism isn’t the solution, it is very much part the problem. At the same time we can rightfully demand from Muslims that they should be aware of the fears and resentments they raise in the populations they are trying to join, and behave accordingly. You want to join the club? Fine, but you have to follow the rules, and the onus is on you to prove that you deserve to be a member, and that the suspicions against you are unjustified. Some Americans seem to have an idealized idea about how the melting pot works – there was and is considerable pressure on new immigrants to fit in, and rightfully so. The same should go for people immigrating to Europe, and there is nothing wrong with social and economic pressure if it is applied fairly and equalibly, rather than being the expression of prejudice and racism.

The text below is written in this spirit, so please keep this in mind whenever you feel like letting out a howl of outrage, or want to tut-tut at my simplistic attitude.

Enjoy:

I, too, have almost daily interactions with Muslims, and nearly all of them are pleasant and honorable people, same as everybody else. I also believe that we need to differentiate between Muslim sects.

Fact is, though, that if you leave the individual level it becomes trickier. Muslims, moderate or not, by and large believe that their faith is the superior one, and that they should enjoy preferential treatment. And why should they feel differently? They are, by their own lights, only demanding that different people should be treated differently. So if they have the superior faith, they should be treated like superior people – makes perfect sense to them. Maybe your and mine direct experiences with Muslims have been mostly positive because we haven’t, in our interactions and talks with Muslims, touched upon their fundamental beliefs, which are very likely less pleasing, and would be highly painful for us, if set into practice.

The same would go for many devout believers of other faiths, absent the rule of law. I don’t want to offend anyone, but by and large fervent Christians are only harmless nowadays because they lack the power and numbers to be dangerous, and there are so many competing denominations that keep each other in check. They didn’t leave everybody else alone because they wanted to, but because we others *made* them leave us alone.

Read more

Helen at the EU Referendum blog had already linked to this article: Riots like those in France are very unlikely to happen in Germany (apart from some copycats), for quite peculiar reasons:

…while some blame the government’s recent hardline law-and-order policies, others see the root of the problem in broken promises by the French government to its immigrant communities: The French integration model insists that all citizens are equal before the state, but some say cultural minorities are being left without a voice.

In Germany, on the other hand, immigrants have so far lacked any sense of entitlement. Unlike France, Britain or the Netherlands, Berlin has only recently opened up citizenship and loosened naturalization laws.

Some say this might be one of the reasons why similar riots have not taken place in Germany so far. The country is home to Europe’s second-largest Muslim population — an estimated 3.7 million — after France and has a two-million-strong Turkish minority.

…

“Turks still see themselves to a large extent as Turks and not Germans. Only once they start seeing themselves as (citizens), they start making demands on the society in which they live.”

If you don’t make any promises to people, they can’t accuse you of breaking them – it’s as easy as that. Germany has never been a country open to immigrants. Muslims moving always were told that they were guests, and expected to work here for some years, and then to leave again. The mostly Turkish migrant workers themselves fully intended to return sooner or later,
and therefore never even tried to integrate themselves, or demanded full citizenship for themselves. Returning turned out to be a lot harder than planned. Most tried to go back, but found out that they simply no longer fitted in after a decade or two in Germany, so they reluctantly decided to stay in Germany, which is a much better country to retire in than Turkey. Even so they mostly continue to regard themselves as Turks rather than Germans, and try to instill the same feeling in their children. Since nationalism is a much more important factor with them than Islam, they are more like Mexican immigrants in the United States, than Algerian immigrants in France. Cultural differences are greater, and so is their urge to make their children feel loyal to the ‘old country’ than with Mexicans in America, so it will take longer to assimilate them, but I am confident that we can do it over time.

Their living conditions are also very different from those of French Muslims:

Koopmans added that violence among immigrants in Germany is actually more common than in France, but still tends to be related to conflicts in their countries of origins. He named aggression between Turks and Kurds and between different ethnic groups from the former Yugoslavia as examples.

“In France, you find almost no political violence that is related to homeland violence,” Koopmans said, adding that he expects the situation in Germany to change as more immigrants start to feel like citizens of Germany.

…

“We don’t have these closed clusters of immigrants,” said Klaus J. Bade, who directs the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies at Osnabrück University.

Immigrant-dominated neighborhoods such as Berlin’s Kreuzberg and Neukölln are undoubtedly social hot spots, but Bade pointed out that they were still far from being ghettos.

“I don’t see any parallel societies developing there,” Bade said. “These are relatively mixed areas.”

I had written about the dismal French suburbs, and their dysfunctional architecture in this post.

There are questions in the comment section why the Muslims aren’t moving out of these quarters, if they don’t like it there, and if architecture really is a problem in that it makes people aggressive.

First of all, living in these quarters isn’t just optional for the vast majority of their inhabitants. Few French landlords will rent houses or flats out to Muslims, and that is that. The same discrimination happens in the workplace, and given the stagnant jobmarket and high unemplyoment, this, too, is very hard to overcome for individual Muslims. Anti-discrimination laws change very little, for they are easy enough to circumvent.

Secondly, I didn’t mean to say that most people living in these banlieus would turn ‘bad’, but the lack of privacy and generally dysfunctional architecture will increase the general level of aggression. The importance of privacy for the formation of a society where enough people act decently to make a halfway normal way of living possible cannot be overstated. Privacy is especially important during the formative years – children unable to shut out the world now and then by closing the door of a room of their own will, like it or not, develop a strong ‘territorial imperative’ and be generally be quite prickly. All to often, they’ll act out their territorial imperative as members of street gangs fighting over turf. They won’t be in the majority, but too many for the law-abiding majority to fight on their own, if the police won’t do it.

If you doubt the importance of privacy, you are taking too much for granted. Imagine living in conditions, where you can’t speak a word inside your own appartement without neighbors hearing every word, where you are unable to shut the door against the people sharing the appartment with you, and where hundreds of eyes, a lot of which belong to malevolent people, observe every move you make inside your own neighborhood. Add the frustration of being unable to ever escape these infuriating and demeaning conditions, not to mention being in constant danger, and you’ll have a pretty good idea how it feels to live in a French banlieu.

And then there is the French police: They won’t dare to enter dangerous areas, but will act very aggressively and provocatively whenever they have the upper hand. In other words, they act just like another street gang, which doesn’t increase the Muslims’ respect for the French state and its laws, and also makes them dangerous to approach even for law-abiding Muslims.

Update Via Instapundit: Please also see this blog post comparing the banlieux with the set of A Clockwork Orange.

Update II I’m taking a bit of a beating in the comments section, about my assertion that the architecture of the French suburbs has something to do with the high level of aggression and the riots there, so I’ll hide behind this article at the American Spectator for a moment to catch my breath:

As noted elsewhere the rioters are second-and third generation immigrants who, for a variety of reasons, have failed to assimilate into French culture. France’s North African immigrants arrived during its post-war industrialization when cheap labor was essential. They were (and remain) settled in ex-urban wastelands in the same kind of LeCorbusier “projects” that were a haven for criminals and drug dealers in America’s inner cities. Then, once the French factories closed and the jobs went overseas, the immigrants were given enough welfare to ensure that they would be forever dependent on an uncaring and inhuman French bureaucracy.

It is important to note that the rioters are not poor. Compared to the natives in their countries of origin they are doing rather well. But as for taking significant steps up the socio-economic ladder, their prospects are slim. Who, after all, is going to hire an unskilled worker from the projects if, due to extreme labor protection laws, he is all but impossible to get rid of, regardless of performance?…

I never claimed mono-causality. Lex pointed out in a comment that comparable housing projects didn’t turn bad until the right to live there became an entitlement. Well, living in the French projects is pretty much mandatory for the people living there, they can’t get rid of troublemakers, and new ones are dumped in all the time. Add to that non-existent policing, so that those areas become a haven for criminal gangs, and the negative factors the architecture provides, and you will end up with a higher statistical probability that kids growing up there become violent.

I hope that I’m getting my point across this time around. I’m not trying to make excuses for anyone here.

I said in the original post above that the architecture would help to create a higher level of aggression, given that you can’t escape living there due to pervasive discrimination – that is not an excuse for the individual aggressive person or criminal, for it is everybody’s individual responsibility to control such urges.

Likewise, when I make a prediction that such and such conditions will increase the level of aggression and criminality, compared to certain other conditions, I’m not making excuses for anyone. I wouldn’t dream of claiming that these conditions are mitigating factors for each individual criminal. Commenter xj says

I’d agree that it makes no sense to blame buildings for crimes. Blame criminals.

Agreed, but like it or not, there will be more of them under these conditions.

I also had written that not everybody would turn ‘bad’, which they indeed haven’t done. But once you reach a certain threshold of general criminality, you won’t be able to turn things to the better without outside intervention.

And James: The Soylent Green reference is very much appreciated, but I’m not into pop psychology, thank you very much. :)

One of the factors that make the French banlieues such bad places to live quite obviously is the architecture of the building, and the structure of those quarters. The buildings are brutal, mass produced slabs of concrete, meant to serve as silos for their human contents. The leading inpiration for this kind of architecture came from Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, called ‘ Le Corbusier’:

Le Corbusier is without doubt the most influential, most admired, and most maligned architect of the twentieth century. Through his writing and his buildings, he is the main player in the Modernist story, his visions of homes and cities as innovative as they are influential. Many of his ideas on urban living became the blueprint for post-war reconstruction, and the many failures of his would-be imitators led to Le Corbusier being blamed for the problems of western cities in the 1960s and 1970s.
Like Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe, and other architects of his generation, Le Corbusier had little architectural training. But he did have a strong conviction that the twentieth century would be an age of progress: an age when engineering and technological advances, and new ways of living, would change the world for good. …

…
A House Is A Machine For Living In
By 1918, Corbusier’s ideas on how architecture should meet the demands of the machine age led him to develop, in collaboration with the artist Amédée Ozenfant, a new theory: Purism. Purist rules would lead the architect always to refine and simplify design, dispensing with ornamentation. Architecture would be as efficient as a factory assembly line. Soon, Le Corbusier was developing standardised housing ‘types’ like the ‘Immeuble-villa’ (made real with the Pavilion de l’Esprit Nouveau of 1925), and the Maison Citrohan (a play on words suggesting the building industry should adopt the methods of the mass production automobile industry), which he hoped would solve the chronic housing problems of industrialised countries.

…

Urbanisme
The first of his grand urban plans was the Ville Contemporaine of 1922. This proposed city of three million would be divided into functional zones: twenty-four glass towers in the centre would form the commercial district, separated from the industrial and residential districts by expansive green belts. In 1925, Corbusier’s ambitious Plan Voisin for Paris envisioned the destruction of virtually the entire north bank of the Seine to incorporate a mini version of the Ville Contemporaine. Understandably, it remained only a plan.

See also this.

While his ideas never were set into practice quite as envisioned, Le Corbusier influenced whole generations of French architects, who went on to errect houses, in the suburbs of major cities, that indeed were nothing but machines to live in, and machines that serve their intended purpose very badly, at that. The layout and geometry of the individual apartments frequently is eccentric to the point of weirdness, and the lack of of right angles downright maddening. Building like this will inflict all kinds of psychological deformities and neuroses on their inhabitants, and the layout of the banlieus compounds the damage – nothing that could serve as a kind of community center, no services, not even any kind of distraction, like cinemas ect.

The lack of privacy in these quarters – paper-thin walls, and no protection from the looks of countless people outside your appartment, also prevents the development of anything that could be called a middle-calls mentality. In fact, lack of privacy enhances the ‘territorial imperative’ so that the formation of gangs fighting over turf follows almost automatically.

One of the first steps to finally integrate Muslim minorities into French society will have to be the razing of this style of building, and the restructuring of the suburbs.

Update: Please also see my new post above, as an answer to some questions in the comments.