Big John

They went at it again last night, the young men versus the authorities. Ten nights they have come out of the housing blocks with the darkness and begun to burn automobiles and structures. Now the nightly rampage has spread from Normandy to  Marseilles .

Nearly a thousand cars were torched last night, if one is to believe the reports, and the total for the week must be three or four times that many. That there are not more dead, other than the two youths whose demise sparked this insurrection, is only a function of the fact that the young are armed mostly with Bic lighters and stones.

But an ambulance responding to a call for help was stopped by young men, and stones were hurled as the paramedics, and the emergency vehicle was set alight. I don’t know what happened to the individual for whom the call was made.

The whole thing brought back memories of the riots in Detroit of my youth, and further back, of the response of the Casbah to the bloody blandishments of the fiery revolutionaries Ahmed Ben Bella and Houari Boumedienne in Algiers .

The troubles first began in the soviet-style blocks of cramped apartments east of Paris . As best I can determine, the little ville of Clichy-sous-Bois was the spark that set things alight.

A woman called police to report that young men were stripping cars for parts in the street across from her home. The police, who had not maintained a presence in the neighborhood for years, had to take notice. When they appeared, the young men scattered. Three found refuge in an electric sub-station, at the base of a power pylon. Two of them were fried by the electricity.

As the word spread, Clichy began to boil with cries of “Allah Akbar!” God is great!

The gendarmes were outnumbered, and were forced to conduct an ignominious retreat. Security officials responded as they did in Algiers , years ago. They sent in the Special Forces with armored vehicles.

For ten nights it has continued, and it has expanded across the nation, north to south, burning on the tinder of years of neglect. The French government of late has recognized the growing problem in these suburbs; it has banned the scarf for young women in the schools, attempting to impose the secular heritage of la belle France on society, starting in the schools.

After the struggle in New Orleans that followed the flood, this is hardly a phenomenon restricted to a uniquely arrogant society. In fact, it reminds me a great deal of that night on 12th Street in Detroit in 1967. It was hot, and the unlicensed after-hours bars were crowded. “Blind Pigs,” they were called.

The Detroit police were determined to shut them down, and they did. But the simmering anger caused the young men to go out in the streets, and they overwhelmed the police. The officials eventually had to respond with the National Guard, and the regular Army.

Detroit in 1967 was just the preview for the rioting that spread across the country after the assassination of Dr. King. It seemed as though every city center had a burned-out core, and only now, thirty-five years later, is Washington, DC, being rebuilt.

The white population of Detroit decamped to the suburbs. In France , a similar white-flight has occurred. As the number of immigrants from North Africa increases in a particular locality, the former inhabitants depart for “calmer places.” Detroit proper, almost overnight, went from an uneasy parity of the races to an overwhelmingly African American city in just a dozen months.

They say that in France, in the ghettos, it is possible for an immigrant or his children, to spend a whole life without ever encountering the need to speak French, or participate in the cultural life of the nation. The result is alienation, and the spread of radical religious dogma.

The radicals, in turn, have managed to chase away businesses that sell alcohol and pork, and closed movie theaters and other places of immoral conduct.

The French have awakened late to the fact that they have allowed, through neglect, a system similar to that of the Ottoman Empire to develop. The areas where Muslims form a majority of the population have reorganized themselves on the basis of the “millet” system, under which each religious community (millet) enjoyed the right to organize its social, cultural and educational life without interference from the Emperor.

Local leaders say they just want to be left alone, and that the gendarmes should withdraw and permit the local emirs to sort things out.

I am trying to remember how the rebellion of the late 1960s was put down in America ‘s cities. I think there were a plethora of new social programs from Washington, and the abandonment of the cities. Power was granted to those who remained, and even if it was only the power to rule in the wreckage, it served to defuse the situation.

When last the French used overwhelming force to put down an insurrection, they secured the Casbah in Algiers for almost a year. And then they were forced to leave.

There is an important distinction that is made between America and Europe . We can assimilate. The children of the immigrants often make fine Marines.

It is intriguing that the same phenomenon was true in France , long ago. For hundreds of years the bold Gauls of the northern provinces of the Roman Empire made some of the best Legionnaires. To the east, the Germanic peoples who filtered south across the border became dependable and solid warriors. New and vigorous blood for the Emperor’s legions.

But in the 11th century of the Imperial age there came a series of hard winters, in which the numbers of the Germans had a certain imperative all their own. The Roman system, bogged down by a tax system that left the state unsupportable, simply blew away in the force of the wind from the North.

At the time of the 1967 Detroit riots, I worked in the parking lot of a department store in my home town in the suburbs. The Master of the lot was an enormous African American named John Minter, a man of infinite irony and great intellect. Naturally, he was called Big John.

He taught me the tools of the trade, how to unlock vehicles with the keys left in the ignition, and how to judge what might be trouble in the look of a customer.

He carried a pistol for personal protection, and with the force of his imposing presence, got the store to sponsor him on a bus trip to a civil rights march to see Doctor King.

An autodidact of far-ranging curiosity, he took me under his wing that summer. He taught me something of the mysteries of the city, and of the races. He was absent for a few day during the height of the Riots. When he came back to work, he told me that he took up position on the porch of his home with a 12-gauge shotgun, and told the young men on the street to move along, and find something else to pillage.

I don’t know if there are any John Minters in France . I think they could use some, because they no longer have a place to retreat.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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