I’m curious about something. A few years ago, there were some riots in immigrant sections of Paris. This caused certain segments of the blogosphere to declare that “France is burning” because those immigrants were by and large Muslims. For about a year I kept hearing that phrase: “France is burning” and this was part of the proof that we all needed to fear the vicious hordes of Muslims who would soon overrun Europe and wipe out Western Civilization.
I’m curious. Last I looked, those riots ended 3-4 years ago. So, is France still burning? I’d just like to know.
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According to Time Magazine, yes, France is still burning:
For much of the world, they became iconic of France’s worst social ills: the burned-out carcasses of thousands of cars set ablaze during nearly three weeks of nationwide rioting in 2005. But as yet another orgy of automobile arson on Wednesday demonstrated, the torching of cars in France has not only become an everyday event; it’s also now a regular form of expression for disenfranchised suburban youths wanting to make sure the rest of the country doesn’t forget they exist. And their fiery presence is never felt so strongly as it is each New Year’s Eve — the day of France’s unofficial festival of car-burning.
According to figures from the French Interior Ministry, 1,147 cars went up in smoke on New Year’s Eve — a 30% rise on the 879 autos torched the same night in 2007.
As far as I can tell, the problem isn’t ‘vicious hordes of Muslims’, it’s the European attitude towards crime. Much of Europe resembles the South Bronx during the ’80′s – streets are garbage and covered with graffiti (graffiti is all over the city) – cops refuse to enter ‘no-go’ neighborhoods, there is no cooperation between the people who live in these neighborhoods and the police, crime flourishes and criminals are let off with a slap on the wrist.
oops – that should be ‘streets are garbage strewn’
Dean:
The news media has quit reporting on the burnings, but they are still continuing.
The “party line” is that it is economic pressure on “youths” in France, but the vast majority of the burning is done in Muslim parts of the nation. Of course this is impossible to say and no reporter could get a story published saying that. But that’s the truth.
There is certainly room to discuss the CAUSES of this phenomenon, and I’m sure there is plenty of blame to go around. But those of us who predicted that the burnings would become commonplace, and therefore not be news have been correct.
Much like murder rate in this country, it is a daily crisis that is mostly ignored because nobody seems able to do anything about it, and news editors don’t consider it news when it’s the same story day after day after day.
And they are right. After a certain period of living in perpetual crisis, it’s not a crisis anymore, it’s just daily life. “Move along people, nothing to see here…”
Most of them probably are Muslims, yes; most of them are also from specific countries, which no one would also dare report I should think.
We have apparently a specific habit of burning cars on New Year’s. OK. Detroit had a similar problem with houses being ritualistically burned on Devil’s Night (the day before Halloween) for some years. That’s not “Michigan Burning” however, that’s a problem with vandals “celebrating” an event with arson. (And by the way, should reporters mention the religious background of most Devil’s Night participants? We can guess what it would be, so why not? Also, given Detroit’s racial composition, should we make an issue of race out of Devil’s Night?)
So the question still stands. We have a report that apparently ghettoized youth of specific race and religion apparently have picked up an attrocious way to celebrate New Year’s. Is that all? Or are there further ways in which France is burning as an entire nation and soon to collapse under the massive hordes destroying Western Civilization, beyond setting fire to a thousand or so cars on New Year’s?
Dean:
In France they burn cars practically EVERY DAY. Where did you get the idea it was just on New Years? In France certain neighborhoods are OUT OF LIMITS for the police to patrol for fear of reprisal. EVERY DAY. In all of 2008, OFFICIAL figures from France are roughly 40,000 cars burned during the year. That’s more than 100 PER DAY.
Are you seriously comparing a bunch of kids on Halloween burning a car or two with DAILY car burnings in France (and other countries too)? On New Years they burn HUNDREDS of cars in one night (over 1,000 this last New Years day).
The only numbers given were for New Year’s. Can we see numbers for other than New Year’s, please?
By the way, the murder rate in the United States has been going down for decades. But surprisingly, we still have murder here. So the question stands. Perhaps we can put it in two parts:
(A) Just how often does this happen, really, and
(B) is there any justification for declaring the entire country aflame and going down the tubes beyond this one particular type of vandalism?
Is there something unfair about these questions?
I am reminded here of a particular rant shared here on Dean’s World not long ago, wherein Talk Radio “Genius” Michael Savage went on a tirade about how there is no more England because on New Year’s, 999 (the United Kingdom’s equivalent if America’s 911) received phone calls for emergency assistance “every seven seconds.” Which added up to a few thousand calls during New Year’s ranging from pure drunken idiocy like asking what time it was, to standard run of the mill emergency calls for domestic disturbance, drunkenness, brawls, and things like heart attacks and fires which happen every night. I merely observed that in a nation of 65 million people, I’d think calls for assistance to the police, fire, and paramedic services coming in only once every 7 seconds would be considered a really easy night in most major cities in the United States, let alone an entire country the size of England (or the UK, I’m not sure Savage even knows the difference).
If France Is Burning, can we get some numbers, please? So far we have New Year’s. Got any others? Here are some objective ones to start with:
Population of France: Population of 64 million, according to the CIA World Factbook (one of the most consistently useful references on the web, IMO).
Number of cars in France: 469 per 1,000 people, acording to Nationmaster (a source I am not familiar with but looks at first glance to be reasonable).
Simple calculation: 64,000,000 X .469 = 30,016,000.
Based on numbers given so far, we have 1,147 of those 30 million cars torched last New Year’s, or approximately 0.0038% of all cars in France torched last New Year’s. (That’s less than 1/10th of 1%, for those of you who don’t remember your High School math).
Presumably, some car fires happen at the hands of something other than “youths” but I find it interesting that even if we assume that it’s all rioting “youths,” and if we assume the rate is fully half of that ever other night of the year, that would still be about 7 tenths of 1%, and your chances of your sporty little Audi being torched on your vacation to the French Caribbean is still not particularly high, although I’d definitely keep valuables out of the car in certain neighborhoods.
Anyway I somehow doubt that as many as 500 cars a night are burning in France due to the marauding “youths,” or we’d be hearing a statistic that high bandied about quite a bit.
So, assuming no one’s got better numbers, apparently France isn’t aflame. France has a problem with car arson. A serious one, on the order of many serious crimes like muggings, murder, theft, vandalism, etc. But a nation aflame? Um, no.
Unless there’s some other stuff in Ye Olde Gaul that’s currently turning into cinders besides cars? I’m just asking.
Dean, according to the article linked above, over 40,000 cars were torched in France during the entire year of 2007:
Sarkozy’s seemingly lax solution to tackling France’s car-burning bonanza hardly reflects the gravity and scope of the problem. Nearly 43,000 cars were torched in France over the whole of 2007 — an average of almost 118 per day. Alliot-Marie stressed that the rise in the number of burnt cars on New Year’s Eve 2008 came at the end of a year in which the total number of autos set alight in the first 11 months had decreased 15%, compared with the same period in 2007. But while annual figures may fluctuate, they’ve generally swelled since the late 1970s, when French suburban youths first started burning cars as a way to get the attention of society, the media and politicians.
Later the practice became an ambush tactic to draw law and fire authorities to the scene — where they’d then be attacked by gangs.
That’s exactly what happened in the South Bronx. When gangs are deliberately attacking firemen, it’s a sure sign that the society is sick.
According to this article, “the French burn more than ten times the number of cars than the Americans, and whereas many cars over there are burnt for the insurance money, in France it’s much more often a question of burning for burnings sake.
The rules? To be a Torcher, you should preferably be under 18 years of age and have parents who do not insist that you be home before four in the morning. Coming from a poor area helps. You are also required not to like society as a whole, and an avowed disrespect for other people’s property is mandatory…When this craze began over ten years ago it was splashed all over the press and TV, every day, for months. But it was soon realised that the coverage only encouraged rival bands from different towns to score more hits and get their town on the TV News and in the papers. So they simply stopped reporting on it, with the support of the Government, and hoped things would die down. But they haven’t.”
So, to answer your question, yes, France is still burning. Since they’re burning cars in order to attack the police, ambulance workers and firemen, this is serious crime.
OK, 40,000 cars in 2007. Just to stay with my math, that’s 0.13%, or 13 cars per 10,000 torched in 2007. Which, actually, is rather high; while in any given year your odds of having this happen to you are quite low, that’s a bit over a tenth of a percent which means odds are good that if you’re French, you know someone who knows someone this happened to, not unlike a mugging or a serious car accident.
It’s not a nation aflame except through hyperbole, but clearly it’s a problem for law enforcement–and indeed, it may well point to a culture that’s just too tolerant of this sort of behavior. New York City in the 1970s seems to have been emblematic of that, I think the comparison to the Bronx from that era is very appropriate.
I also think the Devil’s Night comparison is probably pretty good, actually. Detroit typically at one point was having about 10 times the normal number of house fires due not just to lax law enforcement but to people not taking this seriously enough (the movie 8 Mile, about slum Detroit and nearby suburbs, was eerily accurate on many points, including showing kids torching a house just for the fun of it, just to “be bad.”)
I’m not buying the motif that the nation of France is about to go up in smoke, but clearly this is a form of crime that’s socially corrosive. I think they need to do what New York did when they cracked down hard on street crime in general, or at least something like Detroit did to kill Devil’s Night (basically, rallying entire communities to fight the arsonists and city leadership focused on the issue like a laser).
France appears to me content to ghettoize anyone who isn’t French and otherwise just ignore the problem.
or at least something like Detroit did to kill Devil’s Night (basically, rallying entire communities to fight the arsonists and city leadership focused on the issue like a laser)
Europeans believe that community organizations that fight crime and work with the police are a bizarre, American kind of thing. They don’t do that.
Europeans expect the state to handle their problems. That’s why the European right and left tend to be more extreme then the American version – Euros expect politics and the state to fix everything, and when one party’s platform isn’t working, they’ll tend to seek an opposite, often voting for extremists as a form of protest.
Have you seen a French car lately?
Talk about evidence of a society in decline…
I’d be burning the damn things too!
Dean:
40,000 cars in 2008! Not 2007. In fact the numbers have been GROWING, not shrinking.
I expect if you had gangs of rampaging youths stealing and burning cars in your neighborhood every night you might find it a more compelling issue Dean.
The most salient question is not whether they are still burning all those cars in France.
Ask instead how much it costs to buy comprhehensive auto insurance in France.
Also, who’d be stupid enough to own a car in a relatively small European country in which the public transportation system is better and cheaper than any form of private transportation.
Besides, who really gives a shit about somebody’s car burning in France?
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I think the only countries in Europe in which I would want to establish residence are Germany and Russia.
Germany is one of the most well-ordered places in the world. Understand the multitude of rules governing public behavior, and you have no trouble at all. The garbage is picked up. The forests are protected. The language is easy for English speakers to pick up. They don’t invite in hoards of african or south asian Moslems to take up residence, so there’s little of the kinds of trouble that come with that unwise choice the French made. (The French have a history of unwise choices.)
Russia is big like this country and Canada. Come up with any human rights bullshit, somebody kidnaps you, you disappear until they find your body in some woods in Chechnya. People are more concerned with drinking and having a good time, than worrying about how well the garbage is picked up, or whether paint is flaking off the hallway walls of the ‘Khrushevoi’ where you live in an apartment. But it’s more or less an open society, and if you go for slavic women like I do, you’re in heaven there.
And the only Moslems around Russia are the ones they occasionally bump off in order to maintain law and order in Chechnya.
Besides, Moslems, like the Jews, seem to have some sort of weird symbiosis with martyrdom. Something weird in general about these semitic religions. Including Xrianity.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Arnold,
Please.
It’s not Xrianity, ( as in christrianity), it’s Xtianity (as in christianity).
Sorry, for the editor corrections.
Vive la france.
Screw France. Vive le McK.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Arnold,
no, in Germany they just import and ghettoize Turks so you’re right it’s totally different.
Zach,
So the Turks probably get even with the Germans by opening up shishkebab shops all across der Vaterland.
Anyway, I’m not sure ghettoization works very effectively anymore, in the internet, email and twitter age.
On the other hand, it’s natural for a prevailing culture to try to ghettoize anybody living amongst them who just doesn’t quite fit in because of significant cultural, religious or racial differences. And don’t tell me we haven’t done it here in the USA with african Americans, the indian tribes, and some millions of wetbacks who waded ashore after a midnight crossing of the Rio Grande.
Hell, I’ve gotten the same thing here in western Dane County WI. They all know I grew up mainly in Chicago IL and intermittently in West Hollywood CA. Which makes me a stranger to most of the old farm families. Except that I don’t give a damn because I’m insensitive.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Arnold,
I don’t recall you commenting in awhile (I could be wrong, it’s just my recollection) then in the past day I see you hitting multiple threads with a big ‘ole “Fuuuuuuuck Yoooooooouuuuu!”
That’s awesome in my book, sir.
KD,
You’re right. Been busy. But here I am again. I don’t FY everything or everybody. Just those/they who richly deserve it. Come to think of it. I remember the late Lenny Bruce telling a nighclub audience one that if you really dislike somebody strongly, your comment should be “Unfuck you!” Why wish somebody the pleasure of good sex onto the worthless or despicable?
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
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