France is burning - not
According to the international media, a civil war has begun in France that threatens to reduce the Fifth Republic to rubble. But France is not burning, it is much too big for that and, unlike certain other countries, has robustly functioning forces of order.
My friends from South Africa called yesterday and asked, "Are you safe?" If you follow the international media, a civil war has begun in France that threatens to reduce the Fifth Republic to rubble. European governments are issuing travel warnings for France. The French majority society is often blamed for failing to grant North African immigrants equal opportunities. Almost none of this is true.
I would like to briefly describe a few contrary experiences of the last few days. We live 500 meters from the Champs-Elysées and have not noticed the slightest civil war. A closure of the Champs-Elysées is really nothing abnormal. During the Yellow Vests protests, I regularly made a Saturday pilgrimage to the Etoile and the Arc de Triomphe to watch the weekly spectacle. It wasn't dangerous, even at close range. Usually there were a few hundred rioters who had fun getting into skirmishes with the police. There were stores looted on Avenue Kléber - primarily a Nicola alcohol store - and a few bank branches vandalized. In fact, the large police presence on the Champs-Elysées consists mainly of the widespread protection of the Elysée Palace, the official residence of the president.
Today's rioters are mostly too lazy to move out of their ancestral ghettos. There they know their way around and feel safe in the protection of their own kind. That's where they riot, that's where they loot the stores that often belong to former migrants themselves, and that's where they torch their neighbors' cars.
The police only dare to enter such no-go areas in platoon strength and have traditionally been attacked for a long time if they so much as show their faces. I just remember the "barbecue" that criminals committed when they blocked a patrol car with a policewoman and a policeman, broke a window and threw a burning Molotov cocktail inside. Both policemen were seriously injured because they were prevented from getting out of the car.
Everything is different in the countryside anyway
I am currently staying in Bourgogne in a small town of 5,000 inhabitants. Here in the countryside, life is going on in its absolutely normal, quiet way. The acts of violence are, at most, pub talk. At the weekend, there was a 10-kilometer run with a few hundred mostly youthful participants. They weren't wearing balaclavas, but their sports gear, to which they had proudly pinned their participant numbers.
The media reported that in Dijon, 40 kilometers away, there were some skirmishes between police and rioters. There were several incidents of property damage, including the burning of a Divia bus in the Grésilles district. While the central government is trying to calm the anger, politicians from the Côte-d'Or (French department, editor's note) are reacting rather angrily.
Côte-d'Or MP Didier Martin (1st constituency, "Renaissance" party) made his comments on Twitter Friday morning after viewing images of the night's violence. He said that "a curfew is necessary to restore calm and security."
Benoît Bordat, MP for the 2nd constituency (Fédération progressiste party), "reiterates" his "full support for the police officers, gendarmes and firefighters who have been on the front line in recent days." He said, "Violence is in no way a response to the tragedy that has occurred. I condemn the irresponsible who instrumentalize these acts of violence. This is neither serious nor worthy of their office."
Who is actually rioting?
In my opinion, it's the usual mix. It consists of petty criminal migrant kids, the "lost youths," now already in their third or fourth generation, the casseurs - the black bloc that already abused the yellow vests and pension protests to act out its destructiveness - and various criminals who want to make a quick buck in the looting.
In my opinion, the "lost youths" represent a particularly deplorable group in this regard. In fact, the majority of immigrants to France are well integrated and suffer just as much as the rest of the French. It is also their stores and workplaces that are looted. It is also their cars that are torched. I saw a recording of a brave woman who stood in the way of the arsonists and shouted, "Not the school, not the school!"
Most often, these lost people come from broken homes of failed family clans from the Maghreb. For generations, these people have shown not the slightest interest in the many efforts of French society to help them integrate and build a middle-class life. They are particularly at war with school.
How can you explain to a 15-year-old that he has to work hard at school to get a decent job later on, earning 3,000 euros, when at 15 he can earn 5,000 euros through drug dealing without much effort and drive around in a swank car? In France, too, there is a strict protection of minors and a misconceived tolerance with the supposed migrant victims. So it usually remains with a: "You, you, you!" when they are caught.
Both - perpetrator and victim
Those who saw the behavior of the mother of the shot teenager at the protest demonstration have an inkling of the values that this woman was able to convey in raising her lost son. She presented herself on stage smiling and triumphant, more like a politician at a campaign event. She enjoyed the approval of her slogans. At the same time, her son, at 17, already had quite a substantial criminal record, with 15 criminal cases on his hands. Theft, assault, drug possession and trafficking, driving without insurance and without a license, hit-and-run ... Star footballer Kylian Mbappe referred to someone like this on Twitter as a "little angel."
When the motorcycle gendarmes wanted to put him, he was driving a Mercedes AMG without a driver's license and insurance much too fast and running a red light, endangering several people. He wanted to evade the control by hit and run. And where are the three others who were in the car with him? For me, the story of this teenager is a sad French version of the tragedy of the petty criminal George Floyd. Again, a video snippet is enough for the leftists to confirm their prejudices against the police.
Is France on fire?
Many French media are still practicing downplaying the shot "child," as they say, and justifying the riot mob as "socially disadvantaged." The majority society is supposed to be to blame. But those who loot stores, set fire to schools and public transport are not exercising social protest, but looting and pillaging. What do buses, a Lidl store or an Arab mini-supermarket have to do with protest against the French state?
It's the same in France as in Germany - there are embers of a long-simmering civil war in almost every major city. We are not dealing with the disadvantaged, but with criminals lurking at every opportunity. Oh no, France is not burning, it is far too big for that. France, unlike certain other countries, has robustly functioning law enforcement and a functioning army.
Personally, I haven't seen anything of the supposed civil war so far, and I think the horror reports in the media are exaggerated. It will probably come as it always does in France. The Macron government will remember its task and try to extinguish the embers, at least temporarily. If it does not succeed soon, the next French president may be Marine Le Pen.
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The author Manfred Haferburg was born in Querfurt in 1948. He studied nuclear energetics at the Technical University of Dresden and had a lightning career in Greifswald, the largest nuclear power plant in the GDR at the time. Because of his cheeky singing of Biermann songs as well as some ill-considered remarks at carnivals, he was declared a hostile element of the GDR and consequently spent some time under the care of the Stasi in Hohenschönhausen (a much feared Stasi prison, Skybird). After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he worked for an international organization on the safety culture of nuclear power plants worldwide and has seen more nuclear power plants from the inside than almost anyone else. In the KUUUK publishing house he published his novel "Wohn-Haft", based on facts, with a foreword by Wolf Biermann.
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