Provided that the car that’s being torched is not yours, it almost looks like fun. One thing that everybody forgets (or suppresses) in a situation like this is just how enjoyable rioting can be. Lord, the things one might do if there were enough of you to do them, and the forces of the law were unable to stop you or catch you. Break the windows of snooty neighbours, burn the school down, overturn trash cans, strike romantically surly attitudes. This is one reason why, when stuff like this starts in one place, it can soon spread. After a while it begins to make everybody, including the families and girlfriends of the rioters, fed up, the authorities begin locking people up and the numbers fall. We in Britain, after all, have been here before, more than 20 years ago.
But amusing though it is to hurl bottles at the flics, entertainment is not usually the main factor behind these kinds of riots. If it were, they would be happening as much in the bourgeois parts of France as in the blighted banlieues outside the main cities. And here we have to begin to sift through the various theories to see if they make sense. Is it a problem of immigration? Of failed integrationism? Of racism? Of unassimilable Islam? Or is it mostly the fault of Nicolas Sarkozy, the ambitious Interior Minister?
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